A collection of some of the MIDI compositions I sequenced back in the 1990's, predominantly using Roland hardware

Making Waves on the Digital Sea (MP3 Version)

Mystery

Freedom Engine (8 port)

Virtual Music

Class of Pop

Orchestral variation of a piece I composed for a Take-1 computer animated series I was developing back in the late 1980s...a more conflict driven storyline set in Star Trek: The Next Generation's future.  I originally composed the theme on a Casio HT-700 using a very 80's-ish auto-accompaniment backing and an intentionally synthetic sound as that was what I was really into at the time.  I remember being initially disappointed that Next Generation's theme was based upon the Motion Picture and not something more electronic like most shows in the 80's.

Star Voyagers 3000 Theme (Orchestral version)

One of my early MIDI compositions, originally arranged for the Roland MT-32 sound module...but this is a straight to digital audio conversion from a software version of a Roland GS synth

Early Sequences

Yaz-Like

I originally composed this piece as the title song for SEGA: Art ALIVE!, a drawing program on a SEGA Genesis game cartridge.  Though I originally played the melody on a Kawai K-1, I sequenced the piece driving sounds on the Roland MT-32 sound module using Voyetra Sequencer Plus Gold.  I relied upon a programmer to approximate the instrumentation on SEGA Genesis' FM sound chip.

Unbeknownst to me, the programmer decided to loop the track whenever the player was actively drawing pixels on screen...not exactly what I had envisioned.

Nearly three decades after Art ALIVE! shipped, this sequence remains the only piece of music I have ever been paid to compose.  This is a straight to digital audio conversion from a software version of a Roland GS synth.

Art ALIVE! Original Soundtrack

Art ALIVE! (Main Title)

When I moved into the dorms during my Freshman year at USC, I had only just gotten a 386dx25 PC with Roland MPU-IPC-T MIDI interface, so sequencing was still a new concept to me.  A film school classmate so my gear and brought over a Roland D110 sound module which basically had the sound engine of the Roland D20 keyboard that I had really wanted to buy back when I got convinced to settle for the much cheaper Kawai K1.  Had I bought the D20, its onboard sequencer would have been my first exposure to full-on MIDI sequencing, but my only real familiarity with it came from step programming my Yamaha RX-8 drum machine.

Anyway, this was the piece I came up with while tinkering with the D110.  Unfortunately, I never recorded how it sounded on that device and couldn't quite approximate all of its sounds with my Kawai K1, Roland MT-32, or Yamaha RX-8.  This software synth version sounds closer to the D110...at least from what I can remember.

Synth Me

During the summer of 1992, I worked on X-Men for the SEGA Genesis, but I must have learned of Western Technologies involvement while I was in the middle of my sophomore year at USC.  Though I had never read comics or seen any animated series that featured Marvel's mutants, I felt inspired to write this piece of music for my Roland MT-32.

One of the things I loved about the MT-32 was that many PC games used the module as their sound engine...and composers often created unique patches for the device that were way better than the internal presets.  The sound bank I upload for this piece combines some of my favorite patches from several Sierra games and Wing Commander...the latter's sound effects are what you hear at the very end.

For more depth as the piece builds to its climax, I layered in orchestral patches from my Kawai K-1...but in this recording I've since replaced those sounds with the orchestral patches from my expanded Roland JV-2080...and I've replaced the rhythm section with sounds from my BOSS DR-880.

X-Me

This is another "short" piece I threw together while messing around with MT-32 sound effect patches I grabbed from various games, in this case from Sierra's Codename: Iceman (a game I don't really remember all that well...must not have played very much of it).  For this version, I punched up the rhythm with sounds from my BOSS DR-880, a drum machine released nearly two decades after MT-32.

One thing I never quite mastered with the MT-32 was how to prioritize voices to maximize its polyphony.  On the surface, this sound module can play 32 notes simultaneously, but it can actually only play 32 partials...single patches could use as many as four partials, dropping polyphony quickly to just 8 notes.  And the better quality sounds always seemed to use four partials.

Sound Mix

LA-based game developer, technically an artist

akira3d