This year seems to be in competition with the year 2004 in which the alionsonny project has started, regarding the number of songs published. Yes, one song after the other is published and the shere number of different styles makes some people doubt, that this is all still done by one single person. But I just can tell you folks out there to stay calm: It is still just me and I have no kind of team here which releases songs week by week. It just doesn't go very well currently in my dayjob and so I use the time I get from this to do creative things. And each and everybody who observed what I did over the years will know, that one of my main characteristic is, that I love to do different styles of music. Well, I admit that this year I am really mashing it up. But this is some thing you, dear listeners, can just profit of, right?
This time I moved again in the direction of trancetechno. Originally, believe it or not, this project was a reggaesong. But then a few arpeggiators were added and, woops, it was a technotrack. The speechsamples, by the way, are taken from the movie "Frankenstein" featuring Boris Karloff from 1931. So, here it is:
Again it is done and it was really a trip creating this song. To create the two previous tracks of the soundtrack was quite easy compared to this. This track really involved some additional work to get the atmosphere of how that evil place it is transfered into music. Well, I think I got it nailed.
Sit down, close your eyes and imagine a place where you would never go alone at night, at least you would have a gun loaded with silver bullets, a big pack of crucifixes *LOL* and some garlic with you. This is a cursed cemetary where the restless spirits of those folks roam, who are not very happy with being dead and gone. As quite a lot of those folks were warriors when alive, they have been burried with their weapons. So, be aware of the fact that they are not only undead and dangerous but armed with mighty axes and swords. There's even tales of black mages burried here. No nice place to go... but now you are here and you can't run away...
After you cleaned that place, you are of cause thirsty and looking for a good time. So the next track will take us to the "Old Harbor Pub" where the sailors get drunk... stay tuned.. I am working at it ;-)
It is done! One more track for my soundtrack album. By the way, this is the official logo for the fictional computergame "Alion".
The second track of the soundtrack album is, as announced, the song that should be played while exploring a forest and is therefore titled "Exploring Alion Forest". While listening to this song, imagine to walk in a forest with huge trees, sunbeams dropping through the treetops, birds, a deer bouncing by. Imagine the smell of a forest in summertime. You get the picture? ;-)
So here it is "Exploring Alion Forest", the second track of "Alion - Original Soundtrack":
The next track I am allready working at, will be a lot less nice & lovely, because of it's topic/location. It will be the song which is playing while the hero explores a dangerous, cursed graveyard, where the undead roam... not a nice place to be ;-)
Some of you maybe know that I got the opportunity to create soundtrack music for video games recently and it is great fun for me to work at such stuff, as it is really a different thing than the usual way of making music. I had to learn about totally different aspects than those one must keep track of when producing music for people just to listen to.
Unfortunately I did not get any opportunity to create soundtrack music for my favorite genre of computergames such as Gothic,
Never Winter Nights, The Elder Scrolls or some thing like that. Those games with Kings, Dragons, Heroes in shiny armor and all that stuff. I love those action roleplaying games. The lack of opportunities in that genre is most probably because I did very synthetic and rather science fiction fitting music in the past and the production companies of such roleplaying games prefer orchestral, epicstyle soundtracks.
To solve that problem, I thought about how
1. I could gain knowledge about how to do that kind of music 2. I could show the folks in charge that I CAN do this.
Because I would REALLY love to produce soundtracks for that kind of games. A simple idea was born over a good glass of red wine... as quite often ;-) Why not produce a soundtrack for a fictional game that does only exist in my mind? That idea has even some advantages over getting into that business by creating a soundtrack for a real game produced by some company: I can let my ideas float free and I am not bound to any of the usual, sometimes very limitting, requests by the company which produces the game. Total artistic and creative freedom. I can really run my genuine own concept. That's great!
Of cause I would love to produce the game for my soundtrack too, but there's too much stuff involved in this and I think nobody can develop a state of the art 3D action adventure game just by himself. So, until I found a own game development studio, I must stick to the soundtrack, even though I allready have a story for the game.
But this soundtrack idea is enough. Everyone who ever played such a game will know, that is not done by creating a fancy theme song. Each and every location which can be visited in the game needs its own (at least one) song. There's songs for fighting, victory, defeat... all kind of that. I constrained my project to a soundtrack album of 13 songs. That's really enough to keep me composing and arranging for quite a time.
The first thing I needed of cause was that theme song which should be played every time the game is started. And... I have finnished one during the past week. This is the song linked at the start of this posting. I would very much like to make a game trailer like video for it and maybe I even do one once I find some time and more ideas for it than I have right now. But for now I am busy composing and arranging a song that should be played while the hero is exploring a forest.
I will release this sountrack as a complete album the day it is finnished. But still 12 songs to go. The projects working title is "Alion - The Original Soundtrack".
Wish me luck and energy for this project. I will most probably need it ;)
Yes, again it took quite some time, but this time it was not my fault, but because of the way my latest video was produced. I used 3D Raytracing Animation for the first time in this video and those parts had to be rendered upfront. 50 pictures/frames took one hour to render. If you keep in mind that each second of video takes up 30 pictures/frames, you can easily understand why this took some time. Well, and I must admit tht I had to stop rendering after a while some times, because I saw something was not ok and start rendering from the beginning. Well that's the way things go... But now the video is finned and online for you to watch. As every time I uploaded it to all well known videosites, but the best quality is again on Vimeo.com. And here it is, the video for the song "Entomologia":
Well, it took a while this time to cut the video material and I was, I must admit this, a bit lazy dong it. But the video was ready since four days. Since Vimeo decided to use a new encoder (I think so) it didn't like my preferred video format /-codec. They want H264 video and AAC sound by now. But since my (a bit outdated) Sony Vegas Software cannot do this (I tried EVERYTHING) I can not offer this format. And, honestly, I like my good old XVid video and MP3 sound. What's so bad at this? Well, somehow it worked yesterday late in the evening to get the video up and running. And here it is:
I have fixed the last obvious flaws at the Homepage and some things that looked not so good were also fixed. It all looks much more like cut from one piece now. The layout problems when using the Internet Exploder seem to be fixed too. The site looks allmost the same on Mozilla and IE now. This is it I think, regarding the work at alionsonny.com. Now it is time to do something different.
What else? Somehow LastFM managed to fix the bug in the video uploads that prevented me from uploading my videos there. In the past two days I uploaded all released videos so far to LastFM. The quality is somewhat suboptimal because of the ugly compression but that's not my fault. Anyway: My videos are now available on my LastFM page also.
Some time ago I created an account at the musicsite Aimestreet.com. Somehow I forgot it, but recently rediscovered it. So I took the opportunity to upload my four albums there. So they are available on my Aimestreet page also. Please don't give my songs a recommendation there. A recommendation is to tell other folks on Aimestreet that they should listen to the song too because it is great. However, I want to keep my songs as free downloads available for everyone. But if you give my songs recommendations, they are no longer free after a certain ammount of recommendations. The price of a song at Aimestreet rises with the number of recommendations it gets. So the only way to keep my music free there is, that it gets NO recommendations. thanks in advance for NOT recommending!
Ok, that's it. Nothing more to tell yet. I'll be back once something important happens ;-)
