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Composing without Instruments 🦌🎨

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The MuseScore Timeloop 🦌🎨

I relate too much to this one post so I did a thingy.

arranging something at like 4AM in MuseScore is always great because you get to open the file up later and revel in either the mess you made or the somehow amazing piece you put together

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✝ Travis Touchdown ✝

Travis Touchdown is a Catholic.

During this once again long stay away from tumblr, I had among other things the joy to try out the Switch Port of No More Heroes (2007) considering I was naturally drawn to its core vibe as a zealot Devil May Cry fan.

Throughout the experience of extreme violence offered by the game, how flabbergasted was I when I learned that CANONICALLY Travis Touchdown is a Catholic - if you played the game you'd get why that's so stupefying.

A picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe can be found next to his bed. I noticed it while changing Travis' clothes.

That was afterwards confirmed during an interview with Suda51.

A great reminder that we are all sinners, and us sinners should seek God.

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Not "nerd" -- "node."

Follow-up to the last artwork I reblogged I suppose. ^^

Huge shout-out to Romain Ughetto, amazing French cover artist I used for the last artwork too.

the more i learn about you the less i know

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Did you say "nerd" ?

I love Metal Gear Solid 2 so much, Raiden is the perfect protagonist ; he's both our own self-insert who fantasizes about being a legend like Solid Snake and also a man with such a unique and chilling backstory that none of us can truly relate to him. He's both our very reflection and the sight of something so alien and foreign.

He's litteraly me fr fr. Huge fan of the eyeliner blending with the eye bags, personal headcanon is that Raiden is a caffeine addict, so relatable.

Et ça fait clic, clic clic pan pan pan.

Song which makes me daydream about his relationship with Rose and honestly it's such a vibe with that one fanart in particular, notably the words of wisdom written on it. You've got to serve.

Follow-up post with an absolutely beautiful artwork which perfectly captures the two of them : Right here ^^ CW : Monochrome Gore

raiden we have to slay

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black season infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

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🦌🎵⭐Pilote 🦌🎵⭐

So, my very first album. Aviation was always something I held dear to my heart for personal reasons so I wanted to theme my first tracks around it. The name Pilote came around because it's the name given to a standalone attempt (a single episode most of the time) for a show to see how effective it is on the market - thought it was fitting since I am also kind of doing a blind attempt here.

And well a plane is nothing without its pilot.

Here are the dedicated posts for each track :

The sky is fair

Battle against frigid winds

TB-30 Epsilon

Vol de nuit

Intruder 1 on radar

Remove before flight

And it grew both day and night

Thank you so much, for anyone reading this. I love you. - Until next time. 🦌

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And it grew both day and night 🦌🎵⭐

The final song. There it is, the dreaded 3/8 time signature track...

Its short duration and sinister tone reminded me of the introduction of Devil May Cry 5, hence the title which appears at the beginning of the game to quote William Blake (I also had to make a reference to my interest in poetry after all !). Having a DMC1 end quote start the album and a DMC5 starting quote conclude it felt right.

Chills.

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Remove before flight 🦌🎵⭐

Sixth song, that's official I love saxophones now. This track has a tempo change at 0:41 which oddly enough is usually quite a rare sight in music.

Remove before flight is a safety warning often seen on removable aircraft and spacecraft components, typically in the form of a red ribbon, to indicate that a device, such as a protective cover or a pin to prevent the movement of mechanical parts, is only used when the aircraft is on the ground (parked or taxiing). - Thank you once again Wikipedia !

Three iconic words for an iconic plane... As you could probably expect I did have a keychain with one of those ribbons attached.

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Intruder 1 on radar 🦌🎵⭐

Fifth song (originally the fourth one - I switched them because I liked it better that way, that's it).

That one is directly linked to what I previously posted on this blog about the Metal Gear Solid soundfont . Indeed, as the title suggests I was inspired by the track Intruder 1 from the first MGS game. The N64 style violins are what helped the most.

It was not really easy to find a way to sneak in (pun intended) "Intruder 1" into the title but I like what I ended up with despite the lack of subtelty.

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Vol de nuit 🦌🎵⭐

Fourth song (which switched places with the fifth one) - the first in which I actually dared to use a different time signature.

It's by composing it that I realized how much I enjoy saxophones, both writing for them and listening to them...

This title (Night Flight in english) means also a lot to me and I recently learned that it was also the name of one of Saint-Exupéry's works (The Little Prince !).

This song might or might not have started as what was supposed to be a fan track inspired by The Great and Powerful Trixie herself, fortunately I decided to not name it after her.

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TB-30 Epsilon 🦌🎵⭐

Third song, which (if you read the first post I made about my album ^^) was actually the very first one I composed with MuseScore.

Like I previously said, I was mostly experimenting with this one, but I am not too displeased with the final result.

I named it after a plane I have a personal connection with (I won't elaborate x3).

I remember vividly playing hours upon hours of Minish Cap while composing it - now both this track and that game are very inteconnected in my mind (each time I listen to it, I get a vibe from the Minish Woods...). Very cute Zelda title, a shame I stopped playing after I found one puzzle I thought was extremely dumb.

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Battle against frigid winds 🦌🎵⭐

Second song ! Probably the most ambitious one, and for a good reason ; it's the only track I had composed somewhere else before reworking it through MuseScore4.

Indeed, around 2019-2020 a friend of mine was working on a voxel game project and I volunteered to make the music. Without any better tool at my disposal I used the mobile app Maestro which I remember was tedious to properly employ but I'm still infinitely greatful to have been a victim of its terrible UI because without it maybe I wouldn't be here still making music for fun today.

I remember making 3 songs with that app :

One for the overworld (which, despite it being by default my actual very first song, I unfortunately lost through my phone changes - there's probably a mp3 file of it floating out there on the discord server of that one voxel game project if it still exists) which was taking a suspiciously high amount of inspiration from the 11th Doctor theme (can you blame tho).

One for what was supposed to be the icey region of the game, which eventually became Battle against frigid winds - I think its old name was not too far from "Frozen Continent" or something like that.

And one for what was supposed to be the pet shop of the game (or a menu to consult what were your current pets, I'm not entirely sure) that I also lost to time.

I decided to keep the idea that this track refered to an unforgiving, cold and harsh environment with the title while still adding in the whole "plane theme" (which I will explain once I'll write my final post about the album - Pilote) of the album to it.

I have a little tradition of using Tolkien calendars for each year. When 2024 began, last year's calendar was stil not far from my desk and I think this front cover was my main way of picturing this song.

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The sky is fair 🦌🎵⭐

First song ! Finally. First and only Chiptune track of my 7 songs album.

In the order of composed tracks, it's actually the third, but I recently decided to place it at the start of the album because :

The actual first song is weird and quirky since I was still experimenting with MuseScore4 (I'll explain that later in detail once I'll write a post on said song).

The original inspiration for this song came to me at a train station when I was imagining old school YouTube intros with theme songs and stuff. So at the end of the day using this song as the album's introduction fits, especially considering how its Chiptune nature wouldn't mesh well with the rest of the tracks if placed elsewhere. Fun fact about me and Chiptune, during what was basically a "culture in the digital age" seminary in college, we randomly talked about the evolution of electronic music and the professor commented that some people still did music like "old school video games" today, such music is called Chiptune. When he said that I was telling excitedly to the person next to me "hey I do that stuff" but the poor guy was too killed off by how boring the class was to hear what I had to say.

The sky is fair is titled after that one quote from Dante in Devil May Cry 1 at the end. I very much love that game and that is why the cover art for the album represents the plane DMC1 concludes on. No other title in the selection seemed more fit to be the very first one than this song.

"Like the sky, I feel like my heart is becoming clear..."

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"Don't come any closer you Devil, you may look like my mother but you're nowhere close to her. You have no soul, you have the face but you'll never have her Fire."

Stunning artwork for an equally beautiful game. Dante prolonging his father's legacy, while Trish makes a mockery of his mother's. Despite the traumatic nature of Mallet Island, Dante stays a man who has been raised by a mother well aware of the mission Sparda brought upon the human world when he first woke up to justice - and therefore, everything that he has been told by his father, by his true mother, remains both all that he has left and all he needs to accomplish up above the cold deep distant waters surrounding this unforgiving, unsacred castle, all alone.

The last mission isn't called "Mother's Guide" for nothing...

I love the first game, a lot. To add a little note regarding my own "music", I think DMC1 shaped in some way the identity of my "album". At least, I'll see that for myself if I ever come to actually "publish" it...

What I can say for sure is that my current playthrough of it on the Dante Must Die difficulty is intense to say the least.

I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT:DDD

finally finished the DMC1 fan art I’ve been working on last week X) 

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The best fairy type Pokémon 🦌

The jolly season kept me out of tumblr for a while : unsurprisingly us reindeers are quite busy during this time of the year.

That being said, yeah, in hindsight I think I should post on here only when I really feel like it : time and time again I get overboard and I'm in the mood for writing multiple posts on the same day while on other occasions I consider taking month long breaks from thinking about what I could post about because sometimes the process of making things as well as life itself reveal themselves as one thing : uneventful. The same goes for music making in particular ; I have yet to conclude my very last piece and I don't really know what kind of visual identity I wish to give to this "album" (if you can even call it that) - such is the state of things since like September. The question of where I would post it all also comes in...

Anyways, what a gorgeous Sylveon.

I also love Sawsbuck (crazy right) but I hold a strong love for Sylveon in particular as I frequentely considered having one as a fursona. The result of this on my half-disavowed and deleted DeviantArt account was something more akin to an OC with a lore and a personality of his own that I thought interesting rather than something relatable to me in the fashion of an actual fursona. Then the reindeer came around a bit later.

But with an antlered Sylveon, I get to see the best of both worlds.

In hopes that my own personal inspiration will also come to bloom in its spring as much as this Sylveon of the Eastertide blooms, this post serves as the final missing piece of the 3 seasons of Vivaldi that are mentionned on this blog. All of the 3 seasons of the year, yep, with nothing more to add.

Spring in your step

Design from @maple-and-pie

[stiaral]

Latin America and crooners 🦌🎵

No posts last week, I got very busy with presentations and other college stuff :w

One of those presentations was in Spanish class and focused on a piece of music we had to choose. Not really knowing where to look, I ended up trying to search for some Hispanic crooner Jazz. Why ? Because to my ears nothing reminds me of Latin America more than this genre, all thanks to my Brazilian grandpa's love for Sinatra.

I ended up landing on Amor Mio by Franck Sarkissian.

Truly a beautiful song, that goes without saying, but before going any further I'd just like to point out that Sarkisian's little hommage to Sinatra (said hommage being taking on the alias "Frank Sark") led me to be utterly confused on the matter of his identity (and apparantly, I wasn't the only one).

But is there something more to it ? - More to the link between Latin America and crooners... Well, I was convinved of that, and what better case study for such a theme than Frank Sinatra ?

There exists a story spread on various Internet blogs stating that after a radio show in New York in 1934, Argentine tango singer legend Carlos Gardel (who was born in France !) was approached by Frank Sinatra, then a troubled eighteen-year-old, inspiring him to pursuit his musical dreams. Long story short, although not impossible, there isn't exactly a lot of historical evidence that such a thing actually happened.

However, one thing's for sure, Sinatra performed in several Latin American countries during his career, including a notable 1981 concert at Luna Park in Buenos Aires or the "Concert for the Americas" in the Dominican Republic in 1982. But if the previous story about Gradel is truth, then according to it, the day right before the Luna Park concert, Frank Sinatra had gone incognito to the Abasto district (the neighborhood of Carlos Gardel's youth), he then pulled a yellowed ticket from a 1934 radio broadcast from his coat, kissed it and placed it in the ground, where he reportedly said :

“Thanks for helping me to live, Mister Gardel”.

A nice little heart warming story, but probably not my favorite one regarding Sinatra and Latin America. Indeed, that title would have to go to his involvement with the mob in Havana :

[...] a subnarrative of his involvement with the mob in general, which was rooted in his upbringing in Hoboken, New Jersey. The mob is even rumored to have been instrumental in launching his career by financing his early development as a singer. He was very close to Lucky Luciano, who came from the same town in Sicily as Sinatra’s relatives and ancestors. Cuba was crucial because of the mob’s plan to create a chain of important hotels and nightclubs. Sinatra was going to be used as a lure to make it all happen. He was like the mob’s mascot in Havana.

All of this isn't completely unrelated to my own music, I may have not sung for the Havana mob (allegedly) but I had a lot of fun composing for saxophones and inspiring myself from the Jazz genre in general. The partition you are seeing below was originally meant to be a sung song in true crooner fashion but I ended up translating the main melody into something that could be played by a sax.

"ton jazz" - it's crazy how much you can do with the Text Palettes in Musescore 4 - works like a charm.

If by now my point still hasn't been made, take a listen to this and tell me that crooner Jazz isn't a perfect fit for a night spent flying towards Latin America.

Now if you excuse, my Brazilian genes crave some good coffee.