small steps

A real bundle of fun this time, this contains rock, dance, chillout, short "classical" pieces, oriental, covers. Ten quid the lot, mate! These were all remixed using the Yamaha RM1X, June 2001.

aether - started life in 1998. Has since shrunk in terms of the number of notes used, grown in the variety of sounds used. I may well be doing a remix or two of this in the future. Certainly this kind of gently washy background music is something I would like to develop, possibly some Tangent pieces could be the basis of this. Aether has become a bit fragmented over the years, so that now there is a change of overal sound almost every bar. This kind of endless variety, together with the overuse of the same material ("if I hear that piano riff once more I'll emigrate") is something to be worked. Oh, and all the material is upwards arpeggios. I don't know why I'm mentioning all this negative stuff, you're supposed to listen and simply go ooh and aah and ohyouareclever,john...

bob's canon - a rewrite of a Tangent piece by my fellow composer Bob Van Belle from Belgium, from 1999, I suspect. This is purely a cyberspace friendship but we get on well even if we aren't jabbering away endlessly to each other. We last found ourselves together hitting the same bug with a new program, and reported it jointly to the author - result, one happy programmer, one working program, two happy users! I think Bob is a far more interesting composer than moi, and his Canon (sorry, I've mislaid the original) was out of the top drawer. I only had to revoice it and extend it.

cloud 21 - a Koan piece, about the most interesting I've ever done in that program.

dennex - the rock equivalent of my infamous dance piece, ZeroStep. Touches of any funk band and then a small touch of Frank Zappa, whom I always admired even when he sang songs about penises. We all have bad days. Started 1998.

epode - a short, very romantic string piece done in Tangent.

if these walls had ears - sample backing to Michele Welborn's song.

maybe - a midi arrangement of Pete Groves' song for the Out Of The Wood group.

melanc - a short sad piece done in Tangent.

more than dreams - the best two tunes I have done in Tangent are "Epode" and More Than Dreams". MTD is a tricky one, I will need to revoice it sometime.

ninth master - Oriental exotica. I have used the GM version here because the mix on the RM1X simply wasn't as good.

seventh slave - lots of the ethno bank of voices, belly-dancing and snake-charming scenarios. Travel film, anyone?

small steps - in my Tangent top ten because I managed to win a Tangent contest with it. The question was to guess the weight of the tangent and then to name a famous algorithmic composition program written by Paul Whalley. I got that one right, I said Paul Tangent wrote Whalley, hic.

These remixes are only what I can achieve at present. The midi files could be used again in the future to make even more exciting remixes.

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