Released 25 December 2023

Recorded April 2022-November 2023

Orchestral, easy listening

7 tracks (1h 2m 34s)

Instruments by track

Track listing

1. Real Life Fast Travel
2. The South Beltway Project
3. Moving Day
4. The Denzel
5. Table for Three
6. Lines and Fences
7. All Circuits Busy

Videogame music sure has changed since I was a kid. Instead of a single looping song, now we have music that gets added to dynamically, depending on what the player is doing. Mark Mothersbaugh said it best; the composer has to write a song that won't get boring after the player's been hearing it for the past 25 minutes, and can make it easy to determine that something about the game has changed when a new instrument gets added. After writing so much Doom music lately, I decided to give that idea a go; write music that can both loop forever and change when necessary. For this project, I invented a non-existent sandbox game for PC; it might be a life simulator, it might be a city simulator, it might just be a lot of brain games, no one really knows (least of all me). I took substantial inspiration from The Sims 3 and SimCity 4 for this project, since my head is buried in one of those games most of the time, without being overtly Sims or SimCity-like. After all, this isn't Myshuno, Part II. There are only 7 tracks, but each one is fairly long in order to accomodate all the instruments. They start out simple, with just a small chamber orchestra or a piano, then as they loop, more and more instruments get added to it until you almost can't hear the first couple of tracks anymore.

If certain songs sound a bit like Stargate SG-1 or Thomas the Tank Engine, that'll be the E-MU Proteus/2 oboe, which shows up on most of the tracks. I prefer it to any of the other oboe patches I have because it doesn't sound harsh or squeaky. It's amazing just how many samplists will record a sloppily-played oboe and call it good enough; the same with the clarinet. The Proteus/2 confusingly goes from an expertly-played oboe to a sloppy clarinet in the space of a single patch; if you want a good laugh, play "Hava Nagila" with the Proteus/2 clarinet. Fortunately, E-MU Systems got their shit together when they were recording clarinets for the Proteus 2000... although, they're not very good for freylekhs. Oh well, you can't have everything.

"The Denzel", named of course after The Cheat's grody old sponge covered in Band-Aids, was the project's first track. Back then, there wasn't a "project" to speak of, and I was still trying to find VSTs for FL Studio. I'd already done a complete album with mostly LABS patches (Eight Solid State), but I didn't even have any soundfonts back then. Woody Piano Shack on YouTube had turned me onto Dexed, a very convincing Yamaha DX7 VSTi emulation (without having to spend money I didn't have on the available Arturia one), so the DX7 cello section ended up in the song. Still, it wasn't really ever designed to sound like acoustic instruments were playing it. I didn't need the BBC Symphony Orchestra oboe section for the final loop, but I was running out of options, so, there we are.

Talking of assembling my studio, I have 2 MIDI controllers that I use to actually write music; my first-gen iRig Keys that I got in 2015 to play around with the Fairlight CMI app on my old iPhone, and my Roland Fantom X6, relegated to the role of MIDI controller after being used as my entire studio for the better part of 15 years. You can usually tell which keyboard I used to write a song by the presence of a complicated piano solo. The title track, "Real Life Fast Travel" is that kind of song. It was also the first song I wrote that used the E-MU Emulator X3 (eternal thanks to YanAnselmo on the Internet Archive for that); basically everything on that track was from the Proteus 2000 composer set or the Modern Symphony Orchestra, except the piano which was from VSCO2 (not the photo manipulation app, the VSTi orchestra). Oh, yes, the oboes as well—BBC Symphony Orchestra again.

Another thing this album showcases is how top-notch I've been able to make my studio sound without spending any money. Sure, I had to buy my keyboards and my computer, I also had to buy a license to FL Studio, but the VSTi's (Virtual Studio Technology instruments) have all been free. Like, if you were able to find a MIDI keyboard controller on the ground somewhere and plug it into your computer, you'd be able to duplicate the sound of my studio on your own computer without having to spend anything. That's the thing that the big, expensive, award-winning composers don't want to acknowledge; Hans Zimmer, Alan Silvestri, Michael Giacchino, Brian Tyler; even Koji Kondo, Ryo Nagamatsu, and Mark Mothersbaugh; all them—Logic Pro and the Kontakt Factory Library are not the end-all/be-all of music composition in the 21.2nd century. Amateur composers can—they can, and they should assemble a broadcast-quality studio for less than $200. It's possible, I'm living proof of that. I may not have EGOT status, I may not even have made more than $150 writing new music, but I can still sound like a big expensive studio. A big part of that is E-MU Systems getting totally scuttled by Creative; I was able to find the Emulator X3—the whole-ass industry-leading $1000 DAW, Emulator X3—on the Internet Archive and all the sample libraries ever released for it for free. Hundreds of megabytes'-worth of orchestral instruments, synthesisers, and drum kits that cost nothing more than the price of the internet connection and the energy to run the computer (fortunately, my computer is very energy-efficient, so only a few cents). Another big thing is Spitfire Audio LABS. This is a set of instruments that are of insanely high quality, that Spitfire Audio just leaves around for free. They've already got people buying their $10,000 orchestral VSTi's, so what's a couple thousand quid in chamber strings patches and analogue landscapes?

This is turning into me talking about my studio more than about the record. Let's talk about song titles, shall we? I used to take my song titles way too seriously back in the First Age. I wanted to control how people approached my music and pre-determine what they were thinking. But, that ended up generating minor-key piano solos with titles like "The Failure of Democracy" and "Death of a Reasonable Person". Ouch. No one wants to listen to that. When I came back from college for the last time, I had experienced a sort of songwriting renaissance, and I realised the title should leave the listener completely in the dark. Otherwise, they're going to read the back of the CD jewel case and it'll be like they listened to the whole record by osmosis. Real Life Fast Travel's titles all suggest lengthy songs, but you can't tell what kind of song "Lines & Fences" is going to be by sight alone. What "Lines & Fences" was I referring to? At the time, the Writers Guild, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, and nearly every other trade union in Hollywood was on strike, so the lines and fences are Pickets. Picket lines and picket fences. You don't want to cross either one. As mentioned, "The Denzel" is an obscure Homestar Runner reference. "The South Beltway Project", since it sounded like traffic and business, was named after an ambitious, expensive, and disruptive construction project in my hometown that lasted through the whole of 2022. "All Circuits Busy" was another song for the MT-32 telephone hold music project, and so was named after a phrase used in telephony, though not as much anymore. I can't actually remember where "Table for Three" came from, but I remember it seemed appropriate at the time. And, "Moving Day" was because I had The Sims in mind.