General Midi / 1996

General Midi was music that was composed and recorded in 1996 for a computer game demo. The game was a Command&Conquer type strategy game that was being developed by some of my brother Tom's college buddies. They had originally asked him to do the music for the game and he invited me on board the project. At first the game music was to be Midi files and so we both spent the months of October, November and Decemeber writing tons of music using the general midi spec only. If any of you have heard the original 128 midi sounds that come stock on your sound card, well you know what they sound like... The trick was to use these sounds and create some music for the game demo "Everlasting Dynasties." The music on the cd General Midi is the result of that effort. For me the hardest part was dealing with the sounds of the general midi drum tones. I really didn't like them at all, in fact I hate them. But we did our best with what we had and I think the resulting music is pretty cool.

Duty And Honor even manages to use the the general midi sound #127 - (gunshot)

Inside sleeve for the cd General Midi

General Midi was found guilty of crimes against musicality as a result of his creation of the general midi standard. At the time of sentencing, one of the judges remarked, that even if all the crappy midi music in the world which resulted from the general midi standard would have been inadmissable, that in fact, he would have still reached a verdict of guilty simply based on the stupidity of general midi sound #127, entitled gunshot.

Afrika Korps / 1997

After writing almost 60 minutes worth of music in the general midi format for the game, we were then asked to write new music in the MOD format! The reason being the game guys wanted the smallest files they could get on the demo, and wanted the music to always sound the same, no matter what the system was that was playing the demo. Unfortunately the general midi format can sound pretty different depending on which sound card a person is using. MODs on the other hand are like little samples and are sound card independent. They are also small in file size and let the composer use unlimited tones in the form of custom samples. But in the beginning, this whole MOD stuff was some bizarre shit LOL! I'll never forget the day Tom(my brother) met me at Round Table pizza to talk about MODs and what we were going to do about writing music using this weird system. We had a few beers and started reading the MOD docs we had gotten off the net, YIKES! the more we read, the more we hated it, but a few weeks later and a few MODs under our belts it was actually pretty damn fun stuff! Anyway, the music on this cd is the result of my first journey into the wild world of MODS and I can't wait to get back.

Inside sleeve images and other artwork from the cd Afrika Korps