Gemini's Music

When I was about three or four years old I obtained a toy, electronic piano: a bright-yellow V-Tech "Music Major" to be precise. I probably spent hours using the thing as it had all kinds of functions for learning to play the most basic of tunes, though the keys were really tiny, only covered a couple octaves, and you could only push one key at a time. Pushing multiple keys down at once tended to make things glitch out. :P

However, I never stopped using the thing until much later in life when I got a real digital keyboard. Before that time, around when I started getting into developing games using Megazeux during my teenage years, I learned about MOD files and music trackers. MOD is an old file format used in the creation of music, typically limited to four channels of digital samples played back at varying frequencies, with varying volume levels and commands to indicate what to do to the sounds during playback. I eventually started tracking with Scream Tracker 3 and moved on to Impulse Tracker when I discovered just how much more powerful it was, not to mention easier to use.

Impulse Tracker's file format, IT, has kinda been butchered over the years, with unofficial "features" and changes being made to it which result in playback differences in some IT files depending on which software you play it back in, which is why after all these years, I still use the original DOS Impulse Tracker program, and partly why I've stuck with using Allegro for making games, since the D.U.M.B. music libraries used with it to play back IT files is also based on the original Impulse Tracker format. The big advantage to making music in this way is that IT files are MUCH smaller than MP3/OGG files, and for the sake of video games, they're easier to run in a loop since you can set specific looping points. The downside is they require more CPU power to process, but with today's high-end multi-core processors, the power needed is negligible.

As for my music itself, I'm always learning new tricks as I go along and every so often I figure out something that profoundly affects the quality of my music. I refer to these as my Experience Levels, and thus each tune I've made fits in with a certain experience level based on when I made it. Basically, it pans out something like this:

So yeah, it's been a long road of self-learning, extended by all the other stuff I've been working on from then to now. If anyone ever wondered why it can take me so long to do things, far longer than I anticipate, part of the reason is all the different skills I'm improving and working with all at once. To this end, while I have a TON of unfinished music tunes, I have completed quite a number of them as well, and now that I have a good way of transposing my IT music into MP3 format, I shall share them with all of you!

There are some tunes I won't be releasing though, at least not at first, such as most of my REALLY early music, since I don't want to kill your ears, as well as my more recent stuff, which will debut in my games first and be released here later. That said, I will have a handful of my really early tunes available specifically for comparison purposes on the pages which follow.

For easier listening, I've converted each tune to MP3 format, since the original IT files may or may not play back properly (if at all) depending on your software, whereas MP3s play back the same on all systems. I've created two lists: A strictly alphabetical list and a list that's first sorted by experience level, with the highest-level stuff at the top.

However, I have some additional tunes that aren't in either of these lists. The first is a selection of Remix Comparisons. Since I've created multiple versions of some of my tunes over the years, applying new tricks and skills as I learn them, I felt it would be interesting to showcase how my skills have evolved through these tunes. These older versions can only be found on the Remix Comparisons page, since there's no other reason why you would want to listen to them except to compare. I've also got a section set up specifically for music that's in released games, either my own music entirely for my own games, or my own remixes of music from other games which are not my own. Again, these tunes are not in the main alphabetical/levelled lists.

If you have any comments about my music or would like to request permission to use my music in your own projects, please send me an eMail at gemini@pixelships.com.