It fills me with so much joy to be able to present to you ‘From Mars’, a Heavy Rain remix. It was posted to OC ReMix today. This song means a lot to me because when I made it, I was making a song that I wanted to hear and writing what I enjoyed playing. You may be thinking, “But Brandon, don’t you do that with EVERY song you make?” My answer is this: While I do love and listen to all of my songs because they are songs that I wanted to make and hear, they aren’t necessarily the genre, style, or composition that I am passionate about. For example, my techno song “She’s a Squirter” from The Wettening EP or any of the orchestrations are things that I really love and have a lot of fun making and listening to, but they were more or less made in a way that would appeal to OC ReMix, especially the orchestration that I had to later change due to being rejected there.

‘From Mars’, you could say, is a very pure musical vision of mine that did not need to be edited in any way and was actually accepted at OCR without judgment.

This is a small victory, sure, but it makes me feel more confident in the future that I can make the songs I am fully passionate about rather than trying to make something that follows some formula. I can still make techno and multi-genre mixes because I enjoy writing and performing them, and the challenge involved with that. I think I might be more comfortable to simply do what I want now, and what I feel like writing.. And hopefully my artistic vision is accepted and enjoyed by others. Maybe I’ll make more chiptune-dubstep-metal in the future. I really liked mashing up those genres.

This is something I’ve wanted to write about for about a week. There are a lot of people who think you need to smother a song with tons of layers and individual instruments. A lot of the time, this leads to your music becoming crowded and having less impact. At least until you gain the skills to effortlessly combine a rock band, full orchestra, and synth elements all in one song. I am just now getting to the point where I would attempt this after making music for over 12 years. I had a specific example that I wanted to display, though the change between both versions of the song is almost completely unnoticeable.

This is a song, entitled “Anthem”, that Iced Earth released back in 2011 on the album ‘Dystopia’. There is a bonus track of a “Strings Mix” version of this song on the same album. When I initially listened to this song, I thought that it was quite strong, somewhat raw and a fist-pumping straight forward song. Band-oriented — you’ll hear guitars, bass, drums, and vocals. This is a perfectly legitimate and acceptable formation to record with. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. If you are recording music on your own at home or in a studio, like many of us do, write what you want to write. If that means no synth elements, no orchestration — hey, even no vocals — that’s perfectly fine. Continue reading –  (more…)

Hi. When I created this website / blog, I had always intended to write blog posts and I never did. Probably because I had livejournal and nobody read it, I had Myspace and nobody read that. Keeping a “journal” of sorts is something that I have always thought was a great thing to do, especially with my numerous musical projects and bands that I would personally like to keep a history of. The Internet may be a fun place because of social networking sites, online gaming, and know-it-all Google, but it’s made more interesting by personal blog posts about anything under the sun, written by common people like you and me. Anyway, I am being stalked and taunted by a deer and it is really starting to get to me. I have deer-related paranoia and it is clawing away at my sanity.

I fully expect you to listen to that while reading… (more…)

After a seemingly endless drought of music posted to OC ReMix — which actually was only 4 months but I am toooootally impatient — I am happy to present Hogging Molly, a Crash Bandicoot collaboration between Rexy and myself. You may remember that we had previously collaborated on a little song called Hogtied. Strangely enough, we also have another collaboration that will be posted to OC ReMix eventually called Liquid Metal, which is available on The Wettening EP and only features her on vocals. I have enjoyed working with Rexy because she makes really good arrangements, and fixing those up and adding my own stuff is soooo much easier than just writing a song from scratch, muahaha…. As for Liquid Metal, I didn’t even expect her to be able to record those vocals but she did. So…

Rexy’s very talented at writing music, and we’ve become pretty good friends over the last year or however long it has been. This will almost certainly mean more collaborations in the future that I hope you all will enjoy. I can say right now that we have a Teen Agent remix in progress, which has been written, and I am currently editing the midi data and selecting instruments, and boring things like that. She is also writing a Breath of Death VII remix at my request! So needless to say, things are going pretty well and some amazing music is coming.

On a sadder note, I do have a ton of remixes waiting to be posted at OC ReMix, and I haven’t uploaded a legitimate song to Youtube in what feels like a month. I don’t know if I have lost the spark that kept me going to the point where I pretty much made about 70 remixes, or maybe I’m just discouraged because I’ve made too much and nobody will hear it. I have been trying to think of ways to produce a few things… personal things maybe. I might even have to dive into making a new acoustic album as the true follow-up to ‘Always Remember’.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading. :D

The Wettening EP is now available to download at this location. It features 7 songs that were previously available in the “Grand Robot Master ReMix Battle” and “Wily Castle ReMix Gauntlet” both hosted at OC ReMix by DarkeSword. A couple of the songs have had substantial changes / fixes made to them so that they could be as good as possible for this EP release. I hope you all enjoy it, and thank you so much!