Freddashay!
Can you believe it? The Sims is going to turn 25 in February! I can't let my beloved teenage time-waster celebrate another multiple of 5 without a new album to commemorate the event. I'd hoped to come up with a better title, but I decided to just let this one stand. Rather than release it on itch.io, I decided to just put it up here. So, hey! Free music! If you enjoy it, consider clicking the button! :)
Tracks.
| 1. Stocker at Ian's | |
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| 2. Strange Life | |
| 3. Can U Dig It | |
| 4. Kiss Sim Me (Rosenthal's Canon in C) |
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| 5. Fit Girl Summer | |
| 6. A Pleasant View | |
| 7. A Walk in the Park | |
| 8. Samantha & Mercedes | |
| 9. College Welcoming Committee | |
| 10. Wall with Dado | |
11. Pondcentric  |
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| 12. Reticulating Splines |
Outtakes.
Testing Cheats Enabled
Sounded too much like Japan without sounding like Mt. Komorebi.
Uncanny Plumbot
Sounded more like dancing robots than The Sims.
I Wish My Dad Was a Dinosaur
Too short for the project, used to be the B side for Can U Dig It on Bandcamp.
Did you enjoy the music? Shoot me some cash!
Freddashay! (formerly "Myshuno 2" or the "Untitled Sims 25th Anniversary Album") follows Myshuno! as an anniversary tribute album for The Sims. I had originally planned to release this under some other title on Itch.io, but various things convinced me to stop work and just release it as is, here on the website. First, most obviously, was the 2024 presidential election and the immediate feeling of abandonment that every transgender person in America felt. I couldn't foresee a circumstance where I would be able to focus long enough to be creative ever again, so I announced that I would cancel the project. Second, weeks before the election and having nothing to do with it at all, I was struggling to come up with any new ideas for the record. I was looking to write 1 more Mutato Muzika-style piece based on The Sims 2 and 2 more Sims 1 Build Mode piano improvs, but I just couldn't figure out what to do. The last straw was "Uncanny Plumbot". I decided that I had run the well dry and was now pretending to have ideas. Cancelling the project seemed unfair to my Neocities followers, several of whom said they were looking forward to hearing the end result. It was also unfair to all the work I'd already done for the project and would mean that I would have to keep my career favourite song, "Pondcentric", all to myself.
I really do believe "Pondcentric" is my best work. I know I'll write another better song in the future, but for right now, "Pondcentric" is the apex of my composing ability. It's the song I had always wanted to write: an ensemble piece with a full string orchestra in the background, which all sounds more like genuine acoustic instruments than I ever thought I'd be able to make happen. It would never have worked in the Second Age, where I was using my Fantom X as my whole studio, because the violin and clarinet sounds are, frankly, total shite; I may as well use a Casio. However, with Spitfire Audio, the E-MU abandonware, and a mystery violin soundfont that's higher quality than I'd ever heard before outside a $400 VSTi plugin, I was able to actually make an ensemble and have it sound like I wanted it to.
Really, the whole album is like that; I've done more with orchestras this year than I ever have since I started writing music in 2004 (incidentally, I'm not Mozart—the music I wrote back then was really bad). Plus, this is the first time I was using the Super Mario 64 Castle strings in an album. Back in March, I started using Polyphone to make soundfonts and my first serious attempt at making a good one involved the sample rip from the Digidesign SampleCell II factory library that I found on the Internet Archive. Since strings are my jam, I decided to start with that and what I ended up with was a broadcast-quality string ensemble in about a day and a half! Are you a composer or are just interested in Nintendo 64 and GameCube music? Here! Try it for yourself!
I also did the Brass, some synthesisers, and was working on the guitars when some real-life stuff happened and I accidentally abandoned the project. I've "accidentally abandoned" a lot of projects. I should get back into this one, it's pretty easy.
For reference, "College Welcoming Committee", "Fit Girl Summer", "Reticulating Splines", and "Kiss Sim Me" all use my SCII strings soundfont, though in different levels of prominence. The only song where they play a leading role is "Fit Girl Summer", where the sostenuto articulation starts the song before transitioning into the marcato articulation. An aside... "marcato" IS NOT "staccato"!! Every samplist ever has gotten this wrong and it's getting pretty damn annoying. Marcato is the standard articulation you use to play strings: a strong attack that's just shy of staccato, and then you draw the bow out until you run out of space, and that's your sustain group that you loop to have a nice, strong driving strings patch. Staccato is a short stab, like touching and going in an aeroplane. You know how cellists bounce their bows up and down on the strings to create a short, driving sound? That's staccato. I'm not exaggerating when I say that E-MU's samplists were the ONLY ones to get the terms straight. When E-MU says "Marcato Strings", they mean "marcato". When ANYONE else says it, they mean staccato. Of course, this is an esoteric thing that really only a strings player would know about, and I spent 16 years of my life playing violin, so... yeah.
"Stocker at Ian's" used to be part of a larger EP called Radical Saturday that I'd released on Bandcamp in 2020. The basis for that EP was The Sims anyway; specifically a 1980s-themed custom expansion pack I'd been planning for The Sims 3. Boy, I just hate it when my ideas outpace my skills. Anyway, by complete accident, "Stocker at Ian's" ended up sounding an awful lot like the handheld version of The Urbz: Sims in the City, like Glasstown or King Tower or something. As such, I named the song after Ian Stocker, the game's composer. Fun fact: the song's rhythm guitar only plays 2 unique notes in the entire piece, C and B-flat. If the soprano saxophone sounds a little familiar, Asuka Ohta used it in "Maple Treeway" on Mario Kart Wii (therefore also Mario Kart 7 and 8); actually the Fantom X series saw a lot of use on other Wii games, including Super Mario Galaxy (PR-I:067 Survivoz still gives me chills; I should make a soundfont out of it one of these days).
"Strange Life" and "A Walk in the Park" are the oldest songs on this album. "Strange Life" is based on The Sims 2 for Nintendo DS, namely "Strange Day" and "Strange Night"; hence, "Strange Life". My life was trending strangely at that time, so yeah. Like "Stocker at Ian's", they're Fantom X songs; "Strange" is a sort of R&B type piece that's as near to loop sequencing I cared to do on the Fantom X. "Park" is a Sims 1 Build Mode style piano improv. The reason why "Park" managed to escape being released on Myshuno! is, it was in the wrong folder. It was in the root directory of my improv folder while it SHOULD have been in the "simprov" subfolder. As a result, when I was auditing my old piano chunes for inclusion on Myshuno!, "Park" skipped my notice.
"Samantha & Mercedes" started out as a song called "Inversions", named after the fact I based the song on inversions of a C-major triad. It was inspired, oddly enough, by Lilo & Stitch, which I got to see for the first time in years back in 2015. I saw it when it came out, but I never rented it or owned it on DVD; and my roommate at the time brought it home from work, so I decided to watch it. Back in grade school, I probably would have come up with some kind of, like Mario/Lilo crossover fanfic, but today I decided to apply that same energy to music, and ended up with "Inversions". It would get retitled to "Dee Goes Home" when I repurposed it for my '90s TV Character Drama that Does Not Exist and I selected it for the main character's theme. These days, it goes by "Samantha & Mercedes", named after the 2 girls from The Sims Steering Committee Prototype who have been on my mind quite a lot lately.
Anyway, if you're considering buying a pre-owned Roland Fantom X series, you can think of "Park" and "SamMerc" as a piano demo, since I used USER:001 UltimatGrand with only a bit of a change to the reverb filter. I still say that the Fantom X piano is far and away superior to any of the simulated Steinways or Bosendorfers-in-a-Box that you can get these days. Why? Well, just listen to it! It's just about PERFECT.
"Can U Dig It" was inspired by a rumour that was circulating while the Bob's Burgers Movie was in production: that Mark Mothersbaugh would be called in to write the music. Ultimately, it ended up being the regular composers for the show, but I decided to ask, "what would a Bob's Burgers Movie theme written by Mark actually sound like?" I decided to use "The Sims 2 Theme" as a starting point and envision a Mutato-style opening credits song. I decided to care very little about the fact it sounded artificial, since I was using 2004 technology as my frame of reference (and main instrument—the Fantom X series was released in 2004). Also, I flubbed a note in the trumpet section about part the way through the song, which immediately betrayed the fact that I was using a keyboard. However, Mark also flubbed a note in "The Sims 2 Theme" in the same instrument track, so I decided I was in good company and left it. Yeah, it's synthetic. Who cares? The whole album is synthetic. That doesn't mean it's worthless, thank you very much. I had to work just as hard as any other composer to write the song, only I saved time and money keeping it in MIDI rather than engaging an orchestra. In general, I don't agree with the decision to use live orchestras in game music; it doesn't help the game any, it just lends an indelible residue of corporate feudalism to it, underscoring the fact that it's just a cog in the machine, no different than the MCU films. There were plenty of games released from 1985 onwards that used synthetic music that sounded so good, we still put songs from them into playlists. Got off on a bit of a tangent just there. Anyway, "Can U Dig It" (filename, POTATOES.SVQ, because Devo, right? 5 spuds floating down the road of life looking for bin sweet bin) was the A-side to a digital single I released on some long-lost Bandcamp Friday, Can U Dig It? b/w I Wish My Dad Was a Dinosaur, another Mutato-style song. It was too short for the main project, but I decided to include "Dinosaur" here as an outtake.
"Kiss Sim Me" uses any number of Sims 2 expansion packs a model. It kinda takes a composer to realise this, but everyone at Mutato Muzika has a different style; where "Can U Dig It" is Mark's style, "Kiss" is more consistent with John Enroth, who wrote most of the music from The Sims 2 expansion pack series. Of course, it helps that I have basically the same sounds in my studio that Mutato have in theirs, or near-enough imitations. I used Johann Pachelbel's canon in D as the basis for "Kiss", which, next to "Jingle Bells", is my least favourite song in the history of music. But, it does what I need it to do— create emotional resonance— while still fitting in with the '50s pop ballad chord progression I selected. I hate that crash cymbal, I really do. I have better cymbals, but I didn't use any of them, I'm not sure why.
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"College Welcoming Committee" was the first song I wrote for the project. It was named after a set of skins I made for The Sims Classic, which I also called "College Welcoming Committee": a blue crop-top with khaki Daisy Dukes. This was the outfit that all the ex-varsity cheerleaders-turned-school pep squad wore at new student orientation day when I went to college in 2011, except their shirts were green. The song is supposed to sound like The Sims 3, because of the more expansive direction Steve Jablonsky went with it than Mutato Muzika's score to The Sims 2. It has a single rock-oriented instrument: the drumkit—in with the full orchestra, suggesting young people's first taste of independence in amongst the wider world they'll be thrust into at the end of it. What? I'm an artist. It's my job to write stuff like that!
I had the WORST time coming up with a title for "Reticulating Splines". I'm still not sure I like it, but that's what it is for all time. The rockabilly instruments were sort of afterthoughts in order to make the Real Life Fast Travel-type dynamic score work. The orchestral bit was completely written for about a month before I decided to add the guitars. With the drums, I decided "you know what? Fuck it, I'm using the Linn." Unlike in "Uncanny Plumbot" later on, the LM-1 works quite nicely here, and I'm not real sure why. I guess it doesn't matter. But I used a bit of optimisation that most people wouldn't think about these days with our high-tech 64-bit VSTi plugins and 256-note simultaneous polyphony: in the '80s, when the LM-1 was being used by everyone from Adam Ant to ZZ Top, the LM-1 was not capable of high-hat variation. You used a single potentiometre to control the high-hat choke, so it wasn't possible to go along with closed HH and then suddenly have an open HH for a single beat. What usually happened was, the producer would program the drum pattern without the high-hat and the drummer or someone else in the band would play the acoustic high hat. That happens here. I will admit to not knowing about this limitation and writing several songs with the LM-1 samples that feature both closed and open high-hats where they shouldn't. Oh well. I've learnt me lesson.
And finally, since we can't have this link in too many places...