These are instrumental recordings written, recorded, mixed, edited, and all instruments performed by me. Some of the pieces were written for use in game projects and some feature some MIDI instrumentation.

I recorded this piece for a Digital Audio Production course in the winter of 2010. I wrote and recorded 'Anvil' in 5 or 6 hours, and spent a multiple days mixing and mastering. Since I rarely have had time in the past to properly mix and master my recordings, this was a welcome opportunity to learn a thing or two about making a recording sound somewhat professional. Almost everything was a first or second take, including the improvised solos. The drums are a MIDI recording of me on my electronic drum set that I patched through EZDrummer's Drumkit From Hell for those nice sampled drum sounds!
As inspiration for the piece, I took a sound clip of an anvil strike and began writing riffs that centered around an idea of a forged weapon's journey. From its flame-forged birth to the mortal wounding of its wielder in glorious battle, the sections of this song were written with the idea of conveying a certain moment in the lifespan of this weapon.

This is the theme/gameplay music that I wrote and recorded for our game project Journey to Atgaderum. As usual, the time restraints were great and my efforts were focused on the design and programming of the game and that left me with but a single day to write and record some original music. However, I love what I came out with and the development team did too so it was time well spent. The piece begins with a soft and docile intro that evolves into the Atgaderum theme motif (as expressed by the harmonized flutes). This theme then breaks out into a more rockin' adaptation as the song moves to more of a rock instrumentation. This guitar, drums, and bass section needs a lot of loving in the mixing and mastering department, but I hadn't the time to dally with perfecting it during rapid development. I am still trying to find my original recording project in hopes of being able to re-record those parts and make it sound a whole lot better some day.

Next is the menu music that I wrote for Journey to Atgaderum. This short piece is entirely MIDI and features a small ensemble instrumentation of strings, piano, horn and flute.

During the summer of 2008, I worked laboriously with a group of fellow Game Design and Development students on a game under an incubator business started by a few of our professors. This game is called Timeslip, a 3D spaceship racing game that was programmed in the C# XNA environment. Much like Atgaderum and other game projects I have been in, one of my tasks for Timeslip was to code the audio engine, as well as create audio assets and write some game music (well, I took a little bit of liberty in making music for it!). I wanted to make it sound like space, so I used a Korg synthisizer to find some trippy space sounds and wrote the song around this spacey motif. The recording is fairly rough, un-mastered, and all first-takes which is most evident in the drum part where the cymbal pads on my electronic drumset were abruptly choking themselves, resulting in some undesired sounds.

This first piece is still one of my favorites to listen to. It was my second attempt at making MIDI music and was written in 2005. I like this one a lot because the different voicings and counterpoint that are present showed a lot of musicianship that I didn't realize I had at that age. The only complaints I have now is that I had not yet figured out how to use velocity or volume automation to make the solos more expressive (and less harsh on the ears on those sustained notes!).

My first foray into the MIDI world of music in 2004, this woodwind and piano piece starts off with the melody before handing it off to the flute with MIDI bass and drum accompaniment. I had a version where I recorded my real guitars during the rockin' part rather than the cheezy MIDI guitars, but I fear it might have been lost forever.

The aptly named "Melodic Riff" and "Rockin' Riff" clips are super-quick recordings I did as preliminary examples of music pieces for a game project I worked on my sophomore year. Once again, these are full of first takes and broken cymbal pads choking up left and right.
Rounding out the recordings is this 'metal demo' which is also in the MIDI section playlist. It features MIDI drums over my guitar and bass tracks. This was a demo I made in 2004, just before I got my first drumset, to see if these MIDI drums could actually work in my recordings.

I am still rummaging through my hard drives trying to find some of my other recordings, and I will also be recording more stuff hopefully over the summer so more personal recordings are on the way!