Ruins updated

I was only planning on making a few adjustments to this, but when I ended up making some major additions to the final portion of the song.
Videogameish, South American temple-ish, lots of strings, pan pipes, and percussion.

Ruins

Through the Clouds

A little melody I played with on the guitar and liked. As I worked on it, a nice innocence vs. menace feel started to appear. Unfinished.

Through the Clouds

Riffs

So, here are some random riffs of mine, both for the guitar and ukulele, so far unconnected to any larger piece of music.

A Little Mischief

I've since added a little more to "Bleak," but I don't have a midi of that draft to post.

Bleak

Many of my riffs and songs began when I put my fingers over random frets and seeing what kind of chord it made. I thought this one had a nice East Asian flavor. I play this one as close to the bridge as possible to get that tinny sound.

Pagoda

The title of the next one is obviously a play on "Dust in the Wind," from which I got the picking pattern.

Lint in the Breeze

Here's another little riff that began as a random chord that I liked.

Pyramid

This last one is an ukulele riff. The title is a combination of Flea, the model of ukulele I play, and blue, since this is played in a blues scale.

Flue

That's it for now. Most of my subsequent updates will probably be single riffs like this, since they're easier to come up with than complete songs.

Loss, The March of Time

I'm not usually one to get my emotions out through creativity. Art and music are things I do for happiness and enjoyment, not to express my depression, anger, or neuroses (not that I necessarily have depression, anger, and neuroses). However, about a year ago, I had my heart broken, and I attempted to do just that. Here is the result. It didn't make me feel any better. The self-pity is palpable in these notes.
The main "dun-dun" melody of this song, and the one following, is highly influenced by this, a background song from Super Castlevania IV.

Loss

A few weeks later, I reworked the main theme into a new song. This one is much more trudging and ominous, and less mournful. It's a product of creativity, rather than sadness. It's also one that I really need to record, because it probably sounds fairly boring in midi. Too bad I don't have a microphone anymore.
I play this song a lot, and it's growing naturally. If I play it enough, the last part of the song will eventually let me know what needs to come next. It's a very active work in progress. This version is actually unfinished; there are subsequent riffs that I have not added to it yet.

The March of Time

I feel that both of these songs have their moments, but I'm more creatively involved with the second one.

Autumn

I have an odd little instrument from a thrift store. It looks kind of like an autoharp, but without the auto part. Its range is very limited and it's probably out of tune, but I like picking out little melodies on it. Here is one of those melodies adapted for the guitar, but set to different midi instruments.

Autumn

Dance with Darkness

If a melody comes too easily to you, beware. You might be subconsciously copying it from another song.
I came up with the main theme of this song one afternoon. I liked it, and created what I think are some nice riffs based on it, but it seemed...familiar. I mulled it over, and several days later, I realized why. The first two phrases of the melody are basically the Law and Order theme music. Crap. I liked this song, too. Oh well, maybe no one will notice.

Dance with Darkness

Unsure Dawn

Like "The Stars," this is another song in which I played with the chords and the string picking patten for quite a while before it solidified into a song.
Ever so slightly influenced by Tubular Bells, but it's not obvious. I'm not crazy about the title, so if I take this further that'll probably change.

Unsure Dawn

The Stars

Sometimes I play around with certain melodies, chords, and note patterns for quite a while before a song emerges out of it. This song is an example of that. I played the opening guitar riff, or riffs similar to it, for well over a year before a song solidified out of it.
As I wrote this song and listened to it, I got feelings and images of a man looking out of a spacecraft window out at the heavens. Wonder and unease at the vastness of the universe, profound isolation, weightlessness.
That's what I get out of this song, anyway.
The instrument that comes into the mix at 1:00 is supposed to have vibrato, but for whatever reason PowerTab (the program I use to make these songs) doesn't want it to.

The Stars

Shadow Over the Land

This is my attempt at a sort of spaghetti western soundtrack song. Very unfinished.

Shadow Over the Land

The Dark Child

This song is an experiment in harmonies and note pairings. The previous sentence might be redundant. A very dark, low song.

The Dark Child

Cage of Thought and Flesh

What a profound title, eh? Hah.
A bombastic brass intro followed by some metallic guitar riffage. Inspired somewhat by Pantera's Cowboys from Hell.
This is my favorite of my more heavy metalish songs. It's still one I'd like to finish.

Cage of Thought and Flesh

Ruins

This is the most blatantly videogamish song I've written. It's based on a background song from the Japanese Super Nintendo game Seiken Densetsu 3. I'd post a link to that song for comparison, but my web browser is being a bit cantankerous at the moment, so that'll have to wait.

This is a complete song, done almost in one sitting. I consider this song one of the most successful things I've ever made in any medium. It's one of the few songs of mine that I listen to on a regular basis.

Ruins

Crossroads

This was inspired by the music playing during the end credits of the movie "Spanglish." I have both a midi and an enhanced version, and I'd recommend listening to both of them, since there's a fairly marked difference between them.
At the tail end of the midi, you can hear the first line of another melody, which I never finished.

Crossroads midi

Crossroads remix

Richter

As in richter scale. A quick, low, rolling guitar riff.

Richter

Sludge

You'll forgive me if I say that I like this song a lot. Writing it was a very fun experiment in note relationships, atonality, and combining both major and minor harmonies. The only thing I don't like are the speed metal riffs I tacked onto the end. The first of those riffs is very generic, and the second is a ripoff of a riff from "Sinner" by Judas Priest.
I have both a midi and an enhanced version of this song, but I'm not even going to bother posting the midi, because the enhanced version is better.

Edit: This is in the wrong file type to be able to be played online, so I'll change it soon.

Sludge

Crunchy Classical

I wrote this somewhat silly song after getting into some Hendrix and Malmsteen for the first time.

Crunchy Classical

Dance of the Dawn

I went through a phase of being enthusiastic about exotic scales a few years ago. This odd little song is based on a Chinese scale, I believe. The melody of this song is five measures long, which I suppose is strange.
I recorded this on a thirteen dollar acoustic guitar that I got at a thrift store. It was a crappy little guitar, and if you have an ear for that sort of thing you'll be able to detect that it isn't tuned very well either.
This song was saved as a wave file, rather than an mp3, so it is disproportionately large and takes a while to load.

Dance of the Dawn

Gee, That's Swell

This is my only foray into surf music, making the title an obvious pun. Obviously inspired by the famous Miserlou by Dick Dale.

Gee, That's Swell

Launch

Several years ago, I had a vague but ambitious plan of writing an album-length series of songs, called "The Crystal Moon" or something similar. Basically, a space-opera instrumental concept album. Of course, neither my songwriting skills nor my attention span were equal to the task, and all that was written was this piece of music, meant to be evocative of some sort of spacecraft being launched towards heaven at dawn. Quite a bit of tapping ensues.
This was one of my friend Steven Ambarian's favorite songs of mine, and he made an enhanced remix of it. Garage Band, the program used to make these remixes, does not recognize pitch bends, however, so there are a few false notes in the remix.

Launch midi

Launch remix

No One to Hear Its Secrets

Though I only started playing musical instruments when I was fifteen, I've always been a fairly musical person. Some of these songs I've posted are little melodies that I've been humming since I was a little kid.
This weird, mysterious little melody is one of these. I think it was inspired by some background music in a "Fraggle Rock" episode!

No One to Hear Its Secrets