March 2020 Update! – What am I up to?

People ask me all the time – “What are you up to?”

I usually respond, “nothing much” or “same old stuff," to save them from a long conversation :)

Really, it’s been a crazy 2020 so far.  Above is a video with some music and WIPs from a bunch of projects I’m involved in.  Everything from Pico-8 composition, jazz piano, sound design and Wwise implementation.

I’ll be taking this week off, back on March 9th.  I hope to have a new Pico-8 Tutorial ready for the next week.

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Jazz Piano, Songs Without Words (0:00) – Music by Fred Hersch.  I’ve been practicing these pieces over the last month or so.  I posted all the lead sheets last week. The solo piano transcriptions are all hand written, so it will take time to input them into notation software. Stay tuned! 

Slipways SFX (0:35) – Jakub “the wizard” Wasilewski is working on Slipways.  Slipways is slowly transforming from a Pico-8 game, to a much larger game in Unity.  And I’m working on the sound and music!  In the video, you can hear some of the UI, building and planet SFX.

Canari Games Pico-8 Jingle (1:05) – You might know Johan, who is working on a really cool platformer gam e called Lunak.  He asked me to recreate his Canari Logo jingle in Pico-8.  In the video you can compare the original with the Pico-8 version.

J.U.M.P Music (1:14) – Paul is working on this cute puzzle, jumping game.  I produced this using my Pico-8 Sampler (I sampled every note and instrument possible in Pico-8, and made it playable in Ableton).  We’re also working on making the music adaptive so that it speeds up as you progress through the game.

Renoiser (1:47) – is a Pico-8 cart by Magnus Runesson.  It’s a tool for copying songs, SFX and instruments between cartridges. I’ve already used it a bunch and it’s super handy. I also wrote the title music, which you can hear in the video. 

New Myriad3 Project (2:15) – my jazz trio is back playing and rehearsing regularly.  One of the projects we’re working on involves arranging the first 2-seconds of music from the tracks of our favourite jazz trio albums. Kind of like, sample-based-live-performance?  It’s probably best heard in the video.  WARNING: it’s pretty weird (and hilarious). 

Alchemy Pico-8 Remake (3:03) – Alexsander Akers is working on a Pico-8 remake of an old PopCap game called Alchemy.  In the video you can compare some of the original music with my Pico-8 arrangements. 

Ableton & Wwise Implementation (3:45) – This is from a kid’s game I’m working on.  They wanted some Banjo music.  Since I don’t play the Banjo, I spliced together some samples, made a short composition out of it, and added layers.  This was all then imported into Wwise, where the musical layers are adaptive.

Pico-8 Tutorials – I’ve released FOUR Pico-8 tutorials since Jan 27th.  Including three feedback tutorials and a tutorial on how to write triplets in Pico-8.  I’ve added them to the Pico-8 Music Tutorial List.

Jazz Counterpoint Article Update – I posted a 1200-word update on my article on improvising melody & bass at the piano.  The new section is on integrating bass lines with physical relationships. I expand on this idea of “turning knobs” as a means to understand the interconnectedness of relationships at the piano and control the difficulty of exercises.  More updates soon!