In the fall of 2005, I was planning a full-length album of video game covers, tentatively titled “The Distance Between Start and Select”. Being as obsessed with “epic” as I was (and still am, haha), I wanted to dedicate songs to entire games, trying to incorporate all of the themes that I enjoyed. One such game that more or less got that treatment was “Marble Madness“, a wonderfully tricky puzzle game where you had to roll a ball through obstacles on an isometric grid. It came out on a few systems but I had the Nintendo version growing up. Naturally there was a lot of nostalgic value in the music for me, and upon revisiting it later I was surprised at how heavy the music was. One part of the track I put together I gave a Tool treatment, which I think sounded pretty cool.
This track started as three individual ones for the various levels of the game, respectively, in TablEdit. TablEdit is Guitar Tablature Software that happens to be great for doing multitrack MIDI arrangements. It was my number one resource for writing out music and initial ideas for a very long time. I still use it from time to time as it’s an extremely fast way to write music, using the computer keyboard entirely to input your notes. Kudos if you can figure out which part of the song this is!
It might be important to note that back in 2005 my music was quite different from how it is now. It’s funny to listen to this now and point out all the silly things that I would never do now (listen to those super athletic tom fills in the beginning! haha) Still, I think it’s easy to see where the evolution came from. I’ll get more into my roots and the evolution in other posts. As well as the super underrated Garageband.
I think I’ll let the music say the rest. The track is called “Fun With Marbles” because I had a lot of fun writing and making it! And because it wrongfully leads people to believe it’s about that old schoolyard game.
MP3: Fun With Marbles
Vault: The Rentertainer
Fresh out of a short but intense Dream Theater phase (a band which I no longer have any particular interest in) in 2004, I set out to write my most challenging piece of music yet up until that point. What started out as a collection of unrelated ideas strewn about my hard drive turned into a 12-headed monster that eventually reared its ugly head, complete with an allusion to the popular ragtime piece “The Entertainer” (scary!). I’m still fond of some of the ideas in this piece but I laid the track out haphazardly, and as a result it sounds like a showcase of riffs and has no noticeable direction — it picks up rather early in and never lets up, for the next seven minutes or so, going from riff to riff, all largely in the key of (Drop) D.
I tried numerous times since I wrote it to find a proper place for it. It was a MIDI file, and then a “tracked” tune with Garageband instruments, and finally I tried to make it a chiptune. I also tried to fit it onto one of my many attempts at reproducing my first album (The Chronicles of Jammage the Jam Mage, which I still haven’t released yet and will talk about more later on). Three years or so ago I thought it would be cool to take this song that has so many ideas in it, and split it into a couple of tracks, an EP called “The Labyrinth of the Skulltaker”. As of now I have no idea what I’ll do with it. I may try to whittle it down into something more presentable. Though the thought of doing an EP of heavy, instrument based music is still very appealing to me.
In the meantime, here’s the song in question, in all of its questionable glory!