Full length descriptions of my work.
Click on an album name to jump to that point in the page
– Hippo Fart – Restructure – Moldies – Oldies –
Hippo Fart
Unreleased
Hippo Fart, like Moldies, is the “B-side” to another album. My side work when I wasn’t making Restructure. Hippo Fart has the widest time period of any of my albums, from 2017 to 2020. Each track individually is alright, with a real good one as the last track, but I personally think Hippo Fart is best enjoyed by listening to it as an entire album. There will eventually be a link to a video where you can do this.
Restructure
November 2020
Restructure is the title of the album that contains my main work during the years of 2018 and 2019. In my opinion this is when I got past the awkward I-have-no-idea-what-im-doing phase into actually making good music. So I find every piece on the album to be worth a listen, and for the last piece to be worth multiple. At this time I was still using the application “Auxy” to compose and create my music. And around this time, Auxy had a period where new synth instruments were made available to non subscription users. Then they got rid of all the OG sounds and had only a few new sounds. For this reason the album feels very cohesive.
My previous works on the albums of “Oldies” and the B-side “Moldies” all seem to fit the same form. Intro, Groove 1, Break, Groove 2, Groove 1+2, End. This trend is something I was unaware of and only recently realized. Restructure is where I break this trend and explore new and more vague forms.
Restructure also features a few pieces created with the help of my co-composer, MattC. Specifically Rooster feet and Counterplay. He gets a cut of the money for these pieces. They both are quite unique.
I noticed an interesting phenomenon occur at this time. My compositions seem to come in pairs. So this album, Restructure, is ordered to reflect these ‘song sibling’ relationships. They are not ordered in terms of creation date, and to be honest, I doubt any of my albums will be ordered in that way.
1. 9-Bit Electric
The first piece on my album also turns out to be one of the oldest on the album. I experimented with shifting the time and achieved a smooth transition by use of poly rhythm. On Auxy this was rather difficult because of the limitations on changing the tempo. As in, it’s impossible to change the tempo. Overall a nice quaint piece with a great intro.
2. Rooster Feet
This is the first collab piece with MattC (Matt) on the album. He came up with the main riff. This piece actually went through many many iterations as we figured out exactly how weird we wanted it to be.
3. Counterplay
This is the second collab piece with Matt. We worked on this piece very closely for a long while. He came up with the beginning and sent the project to me. I worked on it for a bit, sent it back, he worked on it, sent it back, I worked on it, etc. Somewhere along the line I forgot I had sent it back to him so I worked on it again while he worked on it. That cycle we both came up with a lot of ideas and then the two project files had become very different. The main differences begin at about 48 seconds in. I really enjoy this piece mainly because it’s so different from the kind of music I had been making up to this point. I will also add that the main bass line is technically from the song “clean” by “big data.” My publishing administrator contacted them and got approval for its use.
4. Stardisc
Stardisc is the second piece I really sat down and flushed out a normal chord progression for. This piece is also the youngest on the album. I had only completed it mid 2020 but I decided to put it in this album, Restructure, because I used Auxy to make it. For about 90% of the piece I was the mastermind but I got help from Matt and a great musician studying to become a music educator and conductor at a prestigious music college. I would also like to say that for the intro, I used the lydian mode. It produced an interesting sound as the 1 chord is major and the 2 chord is also major. Quickly after the intro however, I transition to the Aeolian (minor) mode, and the piece stays there.
5. Jealous Yesigator
I really enjoy this piece. It along with its song sibling, Lazy Tiger. They were the first pieces I made after Auxy added the new sounds to its available tones. It’s just a fun little tune with a clear direction and an interesting riff that goes right from the start. There’s a modulation near the beginning. Now with modulations, most go up because it adds a little boost of energy. I appreciate going down in modulations. I think because it adds a little bit of a challenge to try and keep the energy going. I feel I was able to accomplish that in this piece. Oh yeah, and the title is complete gobbledygook. The generated title was jealous alligator but somewhere along the lines it got changed to yesigator. Not sure how, but I liked it enough to keep it.
6. Lazy Tiger
The sibling song to Jealous Yesigator, another great tune with a short intro that sets the main riff. This piece feels more sad to me but I can’t put my finger on why. If you’ve seen my other pages on my previous albums, you’ll notice this piece loosely follows my structure of intro, groove, break, groove 2, end. Of course that’s because this piece is very old. But this is one of the last pieces of my main work that follows that form. This album in fact is where my music broke that old structure I used, and it is part of why the album is called “restructure.”
7. Poppy Party
I actually made this piece out of . . . spite? Discontent? I kind of said to myself, “man, pop sucks. I bet I could make a pop-type song and I bet it would be waaaay better than any crap on the radio.” So I made this. And then I added a bunch of bit-crush or redux to it. So I came up with a melody and a simple chord progression that never actually progresses. It actually turned in to a pretty good piece. Aaaand of course to tie it all together I even have a riser.
8. Nerv
This is the sibling song to poppy party. My favorite part of the whole piece is actually the drums. They turned out fantastic with the bit crush. For the most part this is a great piece, but my least liked part is actually the end with the riser. I couldn’t figure out a good way to end the piece other than just making it loud. So this piece is also “pop like.” But less so in my opinion compared to Poppy party.
9. Green
I really enjoy the aesthetic of this piece. If I’m remembering correctly the beginning of this piece uses quartal chords and stacks of 5ths. Somewhere along the creation process this piece went from incredibly dark to a brighter, happier chord progression. While that wasn’t necessarily my original intent with the piece, I enjoy how it turned out. This piece is actually a sibling song with the next piece on the album.
10. Wunderer Almost
I really enjoy this piece. MattC came up with the bass tone, called it super bass. So props to him cause it sounds great. I think the melodic line is rather retro sounding and bouncy. The transition to the darker section of the piece is well executed as well. I think around this piece I realized I really like making faster paced pieces with a sort of dark or minor feel to them. And I’ve since realized this is because of the various influences on my music. I will create a page that describes these influences eventually.
11. Cougar Boi
I love cougar boi. From the speed to the compositional technique to the chord progression to the tone. The way I composed this was I came up with a four bar melody and then took each of the 4 measures and expanded on them into 4 more measures. So the main bulk of ideas came from the riff on measures 4-7. This idea of using only a small amount of ideas to create an entire piece is fantastic. It’s called the recycling of material. I highly recommend every composer do this. It can lengthen a piece or song by an incredible amount. You just take an idea you have already made or played, and change it or develop it.
12. Ru
In my opinion this piece is the the most meaningful piece I had created up to this point. I created the gist of it one day when I was feeling particularly sad and lonely. I sat down at the piano and came up with the main ideas and put them into Auxy soon after. The result is one that still moves me to this day. It was the closest I had gotten to writing in music the feelings I was experiencing. It is Art. And I love that about the piece. My favorite moment in the whole thing is the piano solo at around 2 minutes in. I revisited the piece later to continue the story it tells. The project was started sometime during 2018 but wasn’t completely finished until 2020 as I developed the piece on and off for two years. So as it is the crowning piece of the album I have it last.
Moldies
September 2020
Moldies is a sort of B-Side to my first released album of Oldies. Both “Oldies” and “Moldies” were made at the same time, but I decided to put the generally worse pieces in a separate collection and that collection became this, the second album I ever released, “Moldies.”
1. Car Alarm
This piece was actually very fulfilling. I had always wanted to use a car alarm in a piece, mostly because I thought it would be funny. And so one day I decided to try making a car alarm. Low and behold it wasn’t that hard and I was off making this beauty.
2. The King
This piece is rather interesting. But I think interesting is all it is. There isn’t any good flow or direction in my opinion. But that jarring change is part of what makes it different.
3. Trapish
Given this name it was an attempt to make something reminiscent of Trap or a Rap backing track. It has no real melody and is certainly not my best work. If you’d like to use this piece as a backing track or something just contact me via Telegram ( t.me/GavOnyx ).
4. Aetheral Star
Out of all the pieces on this album I consider this to be one of the best. It certainly has a simple melody and countermelody. And it follows the general form of the pieces on Oldies – establishing a groove, breaking that groove with a less intense one, and eventually combining both.
5. Regen
I would consider this piece to be the most “heartfelt” or saddest out of all those I had made so far. The creation process involved placing semi random notes to create an interesting melodic line resembling the splashing of rain. Eventually out of this semi chaos a distinguishable melody takes over and the piece ends.
6. Felled Star
The beginning of this piece was hilarious to make and was inspired by a friend dragging a note across the screen up and down a bunch. It employs a similar sweeping effect to the snare hits as in the piece “Railwave” from “Oldies.” And like with my other pieces the established groove is broken and a new groove is established. I rather enjoy the break in this piece. And of course then the two grooves are combined in to one. The combination in this piece turned out rather well. The piece ends with the original faced paced wave of notes but it slows over time. I would like to point out that this feat was rather difficult because of the limitations on the software I was using.
7. And He Stood
This piece is probably the most ‘dance-able’ (at least in the beginning) With a hard kick and then a hard bass on the beats. This pounding is accentuation of the beats is the most notable aspect of the piece. Near the 2 min 30 second mark the piece experiences a short break in the groove with a rather nice little doody (technical term I assure you).
8. Dimly Lit
This piece employs the infamous doorbell song as it’s intro and the melody heavily borrows from it. The groove breaks and the bass plays something that should be very recognizable: a rendition of the main theme from “Blue Lion” on “Oldies.” In fact it uses the same bass tone. Although technically the this piece was composed before Blue Lion. It was just so good I had to reuse and expand on it.
9. Beat The Clock
This piece was used as a submission to the Auxy challenge ‘beat the clock.’ It turned out to be a nice tune actually, and very different from my other stuff. And this piece inspired the last piece on the released album,
10. Softsih Cheese
This piece was an attempt at making a slower jazz type tune. I used the sweeping sound from “Railwave” and “Felled Star” to create a sound like brushing a snare drum. This piece employs the standard form of jazz combos. The header (the actual melody), solos from various instruments, and the header to play the tune out.
Oldies
August 2020
Oldies is the title of the album containing some of my first pieces of music I ever made. I used an app called “Auxy” to compose and produce every piece on the album.
While these pieces are not ground breaking or fantastic, they do have some amount of charm to them. At this point in my life I had only had musical training at the high school level. These pieces were composed around 2016 or 2017.
I chose the order of songs for the album mostly on a whim.
1. Aggressive Shrubbery
The opening piece to the album. I quite enjoy it actually. The piece starts solo with a synth as drums join it. The part that makes this piece interesting is that the rhythm being played by the first synth is shifted by a beat at after the break in the ostinato. Other than that the only thing I play around with is modulating the ostinato every repeat in the last half of the piece.
2. Blue Lion
The seconds piece was revolutionary when I first made it. It was unlike anything else I had made. Timeline wise, this was one of the last pieces I made for the album. Blue Lion was inspired by the Voltron remake. The initial rhythm of the drums was supposed to be very close to the drums heard on the intro theme to that TV series. Out of all my old stuff, I enjoy this one the most.
3. Boipness
This piece is one of the longer ones on this album. I honestly don’t have much to say about it. It’s just a fun little tune with an interesting form to it.
4. Daisy Maw
This begins with a harsh synth sound with the main groove coming in soon after the drums enter. The most notable thing about this piece is the rhythmic nature of the bass.
4.5. Demo Project (Hidden Song)
On Auxy there was a demo project included to showcase some of the things auxy could do. I edited it and added a free form melody. It doesn’t exist on spotify nor other music stores because I haven’t determined if it infringes any copyright. I’m 99 percent sure it doesn’t. You can find this on my telegram channel t.me/AuxyMusic or by contacting me on telegram.
5. Doop Door
This piece starts out with a simple melodic idea that comes about later in the piece. In general this piece has a darker tone to it than any of the other pieces so far. This piece would probably be considered techno because of the way it’s composed.
6. Electro Dinner
A nice tune with a nice rhythmic melody to it. The first piece I made with use of panning. This piece also has a “drop” in it at around the 2/3rds mark and ends rather abruptly.
7. Power Walking
This piece is on the faster side and like most of my pieces in this album establishes a groove, breaks the groove with some chords, and then returns to the groove with some of the elements of the break incorporated into it.
8. Railwave
This piece uses only three instruments; a fantastic synth sound, drums, and a background synth. When I made this piece I actually really enjoyed it. There’s a sweep effect for the snare sound that is a little overbearing at times but I’ve since lost the file to this piece and can’t change it. This piece uses recurring themes and modulation to keep it going. It’s also the second longest piece on this album
9. Smoth Train
This piece has quite a bit of charm to it. The interesting initial rhythm in the drums mixes surprising well with the initial melody. It soon evolves into quoting a nursery rhyme using the bass before launching into probably the best groove of all the pieces on the album. Then the initial melody and rhythm from the beginning come back with some semi-ethereal type chords. Then the bass joins with a quicker line, then a counter melody comes in. The original melody falls away and the piece ends with this counter melody playing.
10. Toms Couch
The main theme for this piece actually uses the lick. In the beginning it starts with chords, bass, and drums. Eventually multiple melodic lines come in and play together. I enjoy this piece because there are so many different things going on and it’s balanced in a way where one can shift focus on the various parts with relative ease.
11. Turtle Time
This piece is inspired at the beginning by a theme from Narnia. After the groove is established an interesting melody takes over and a loud drum enters. Eventually there’s a break in the music ushered in by the bass and drums. The groove returns in full force and the piece ends soon after. An interesting piece but not the best in my opinion.
– Hippo Fart – Restructure – Moldies – Oldies –