     Song I wrote in the sort of indie-pop vein.  I wrote the main piano part a while ago (on an actual piano, what??)and remembered it after being introduced to Twenty One Pilots (thanks Katie.) Everything except the bass is sequenced in Mixcraft 6.
     This is kind of a rough draft, as I'd like to record actual piano and drums to give it a more natural feel. Also, I'll probably record vocals once I write some lyrics (the vocal melodies are played on the flute thing). Currently I'm limited to some random babbling of phrases that sound decent, so hopefully I can get SOMETHING written at some point.

Place To Go (Instrumental)

I downloaded a bit-crusher plugin for mixcraft, so I felt inspired to create some simple game music in the vein of old nintendo games like pokemon or the legend of zelda. It's intended to be listened to in a loop for that reason. Hopefully I'll be able to create a game for it at some point (yay AP computer science). Alternatively, if any of y'all are programmers and want music for your game and like this, I could make you something similar.

As with just about everything I upload, this was recorded on acoustica mixcraft 6. I used a simple square-wave for the bassline and the melody, and the brush kit setting for the drums. All three were fed through the CMT Bitcrusher plug-in.

Hope you enjoy. If you have any comments, I'd love to hear them, as I've never made anything like this before. 

Proto-Game Music

I'm in College now, so this has been my way to relax for the past week (Physics is hard). I originally intended to make a hip-hop-esque beat that I could get someone to rap over, but as usual I made the arrangement a little on the dense side. I might still try to do that, but this works as a demo. Chances are it'll just stay in this form til the end of time, but we'll see I guess. I'd appreciate any critiques.


I Wish I Knew

I wrote this for my English Class this past semester. The lyrics deal with the anxiety that I had trouble shaking off in orchestra auditions in high school, and I wrote the music around that theme.  It's also the first thing I've uploaded that I made on Ableton, and I think it's a step up in quality from my other stuff because of that. In Ableton, you can just make a drum loop in two minutes, and it's professional quality right of the bat, which is great.

It was definitely conceived in a hip hop light, but I found it to be a bit sterile with just midi tracks and vocals in Ableton, so I added some found sound type stuff at the beginning, and overdubbed guitar at the end. As is usual for me, this took it into more rock territory, but I'm a lot happier with the overall dynamic feel of the track now. It's a bit short, so if I end up messing with it more, I'll probably make it more drawn out. Lastly, I tried to do a spoken word/rap thing for this, which is new for me. Overall, I don't think it's bad, but it's not particularly good either, so in the future, I'd either try to work on my technique more, or just stick to singing. Let me know what you think!

Wave

Heeya By OuTKast

This song was another conscious effort to simplify after having spent months working on 'Era'. The first few months of 2018 were really hard for me, and for a while, there wasn't really anything that made me happy, and that was scary. Everything in my life seemed to have fallen apart at the same time, so I didn't feel like I had anywhere to go. Eventually, I ended up taking a microdose and reading 'The Alchemist' by Paulo Coelho, which was huge. Suddenly, I was able to see the world as a beautiful place full of opportunities again, and I had a path forward. The title refers to the woods behind the house I lived in during 2017-2018, which reminded me of the woods in Calvin & Hobbes. When I was at my lowest, I was able to retreat there to feel some comfort and nostalgia.

Calvin & Hobbes

This song deals with what it's like to go through a rough period in life, and the regret of not having taken a risk. I spent the better part of a year endlessly trying to make this song perfect, but the more I worked on it, the higher more frustrating that became, and eventually I had to just put it down. Ultimately, I feel like I got pretty close to the the vision I initially had, so I'm happy, even though there's a lot I'm not 100% happy with.

Era (Brave)

I wrote and recorded this song in about a 5 hour period, which is remarkably short for me.  I always find myself spending months obsessively tweaking arrangements and redoing overdubs, so this was a conscious effort to get away from that and just create something. In contrast, the the song is about feeling unable to tell someone how you feel, and feeling paralyzed in the face of taking a risk. 'The Upswing' refers to an obsession that I had at the time with personal trajectories at the expense of feeling happy in the moment.

The Upswing

This is a song about sexuality and Adderall.

Amphetamine

A song my good friend Max and I wrote and recorded back in 2017. Beware the Specter (Spectre?) Guy.

Lucas Tax