Phoenix Speedmusic Session 1- The Birds are SInging (Now on idgames!)

Hello everyone :) So, recently I have been watching some Youtube videos of people writing a song in an hour (maybe you have seen some of them, they are being made by some fairly popular music youtubers), and it got me thinking, we have speedmapping sessions here on Doomworld (several of them), but not speed composing ones! So I decided to start one, and of course it sticks to the ever popular bird theme a la Eagle and Pigeon :) Of course this first session is more of a proposal and a proof of concept, but if it turns out to be popular enough (which would be kind of surprising to be honest) then I may make more.

As for the rules, they are very similar to eagle/pigeon:

*You will have ~2 hours to write a song with your daw of choice/whatever you can use at the time, whatever that might be

*you will get 3 themes to use when writing your song, you have to use at least 1

*The music needs to be Boom compatible which shouldn't really be an issue since PrBoom+ seems to support most if not all of the most common formats. Though, I would prefer TRACKED formats (mod, xm, it, mid etc.) for size reasons

*When you are done with the song make sure to submit it by posting it on this thread with some basic information like the song name, themes used, composition time, etc.

i *maybe* might give a day or so after the session ends for people to submit minor changes to their tracks (like changing eq settings or finding a better sample for an instrument or something like that). Then the tracks will of course be put into a WAD that you can use for say a music replacement or a playlist to listen to while doing stuff or stuff you can use in your maps, or whatever you can think of to do with them :D

I just created a Discord for this session as well https://discord.gg/xNnHHGZ 

The session itself will be Saturday, May 5th at 1:00PM CST (US central standard time) to 3:00PM CST. Be there or be square (and adventurous :] ).

edit: Alfonzo thought I was talking about a different CST than I actually was so I clarified it

Edit: the wad has been made and it is now on idgames and ready for download! Link: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/music/phoenix1

The Discord should be properly set up now, feel free to join, suggest possible channels to add, etc whenever you feel like it :)

Should be interesting to see what "speed composing" sounds like.

Good initiative, I'll try to make myself available. Two hours for a composition is generous when compared with level design, I think, though that's only a guess granted the number of times I've tried to work inside much tighter constraints. Jimmy's 30in30 MIDI series was made mostly off the back of repeat 2.5 hour sessions comprising five compositions.

59 minutes ago, Suitepee said:

Should be interesting to see what "speed composing" sounds like.

You should know, John: you listened to exactly 50 such tracks 4 months ago!

Oh shit, I cannot be there... I really love the idea though, I need something to bring me back to MIDI making!

I'll be there.

2 hours ago, Suitepee said:

Should be interesting to see what "speed composing" sounds like.

It's funny you would ask that ;) I was recently inspired a couple of hours ago by Aubrey Hodges new music thread and made my own darkish sounding song just now :) It's not particularly complex (or original for that matter) but it's something

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tuXfyqULCiLK7EVHD2IbQLTgA0PCMeXs/view?usp=drivesdk

12 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

I'll be there.

That's great :D You were actually one of the people I was thinking of when i came up with the idea. I was like "hmmmm, I wonder if we will get a Jimmy midi", looks like my thoughts have been answered

@Alfonzo well when I came up with the rules I just figured 2 hours would be a good amount, especially since the point in my head is it is supposed to be "like eagle or pigeon but for music instead of maps". In future sessions I make shake things up a little bit with some special restrictions like for time or file format or genre or something, there are a lot of things you can do with music tbh.

Oh, I actually think it's an ideal amount of time. Most people can find space in their schedule for a two-hour block and not be distracted from it, and it doesn't skimp too heavily on creative runway. Once you start hitting the ~three hour range I think you tend to see half of the participants either dropping out or not signing up to begin with. It's a good balance.

two hours for a cute little loop is easily doable, i'm in :)

i think there are times when song composition can be more complex than map composition

you can spend weeks banging your head against complexities in either discipline!

I think I might be able to participate. No promises though! :)

Good luck creating midis with a timelimit folks, which is an interesting idea to follow...

@therektafireThe compiled file will be used for other wads or not? Because it would be good if anyone can...

2 minutes ago, leodoom85 said:

Good luck creating midis with a timelimit folks, which is an interesting idea to follow...

 

@therektafireThe compiled file will be used for other wads or not? Because it would be good if anyone can...

Yes, you will be allowed to use the submitted songs in your wads, like texture packs like cc4 tex.

I'll give this a go, but I don't expect much since the fastest I've managed to do a complete track so far is 4 hours, I'm pretty slow :P

16 hours ago, Alfonzo said:

You should know, John: you listened to exactly 50 such tracks 4 months ago!

I had thought those tracks to be unfinished though? Well I liked some of the beats from those Alfonzone midi's regardless.

In which case it should be interesting to see what a COMMUNITY "speed composing" session sounds like.

Remember, 3 days til the first session :) Make sure to do lots of practice and get good sleep and stuff so you are ready

Blame my friend for having their birthday celebrations on the weekend before their birthday instead of the weekend after - I won't be able to participate now. Good luck everyone!

Only one more day to go :) Also I need to give a little PSA: don't use multisample instruments in .IT modules where each sample is mapped to separate notes, or at least be very careful with them, it seems like prboom uses an old crappy version of some modplayer (whether it be libmodplug or libopenmpt or whatever) that doesn't seem to respond well to them, the extra channels created for these instruments will hang and stay around and NNA commands won't cut them which will make your song sound like crap :(

giggle

get in here

Ok everyone it is noise making time :) Here are the themes, they aren't the craziest or most unique or w/e but I wanted stuff basically anyone could do regardless of music theory knowledge or technical ability... well that and I literally just came up with them this morning at like 1 am :D Remember, you can use any of the 3 themes but you *have* to use at least 1

1. The song is over 140 BPM

2. The song only uses synthesizer instruments/samples, no acoustic stuff/"real" instruments like guitar piano etc

3. The song uses only chords (multiple notes being played at once on the same instrument, arpeggios don't count ;D). Except for percussion, you don't have to make percussion chords (though I guess you can if you want...)

Ancient Sovereigns (4:31)

Wound up only using the first theme so I didn't exactly push many boundaries with this. Oh, well. Turned out sounding cool, I think.

Here is my song, it is a short goa/psy trance style song, it could have been a little longer but I had to take a few minutes to create a couple of samples fir the bass and pad sound because I literally always wait to the last minute to do stuff... also sample 4 is from someone else's song and I credited them in the instrument name

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gPmGS0XL9D3-H3pt1ENVVfVIs1qjnlWK/view?usp=drivesdk

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/patreon-posts/C5ZnHBNoAYd18RGbtxRwZer_6RiMwl7xbGdFC6vryLfkz0HbmMoszbNRbIcHXJI2.mp3

used about 1h 45m and attempted all the themes lol

good work everyone

K, time for submitting is over, BUT i will give a day or so to make minor tweaks or fixes to your already submitted songs, then they will all go into a wad and be uploaded to idgames :)

Oh also I'm pretty happy to say that despite there not being that many submissions this time around on account of some people not being able to make it since they had other more important things to do, there was a decent amount of interest (at least more than i expected) so I definitely feel pretty good about hosting another session next month :)

Ok guys, the wad has been successfully added to idgames :D Here is the link

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/music/phoenix1