Here are two very small teasers to the soundtrack for the Minecraft documentary:

 

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Hi.

I really let this blog rot, didn’t I. AGAIN.

So to get back to it again, here are some things that happened to me in the last 2 months.

 

• My brother had a serious car accident that should have killed him, but he only got a fracture. We’ve gotten a lot closer in that time, and I’m so glad he’s not gone.

 

• My brother got me sick with some stomach infection he got from the hospital, and for that we hate each other with as much spite as possible. I’m kidding, but the sickness was pretty serious. I threw up, and I counted, 20 times in 24 hours.

 

• I started seriously working on music for the Minecraft documentary, and if they, could happen, kick me out of it, I at least have a new album which I believe is pretty kick-ass.

 

• I started learning Japanese and must say, katakana is much harder to write than hiragana.

 

• I’m still alive! That’s news, isn’t it!

 

• Every year I want to release a new original album, and this year I already started planning. I at least know the name and the cover, and the thematics. WHICH I WILL KEEP SECRET UNTIL I START WORKING ON SOME MUSIC.

 

• I’m still independent, and I love it. I don’t know how much longer though and try to use my time by learning as much as possible. For example I started learning Beethoven pieces. It’s not fun, but fun!

 

That’s all for today.

This game is pretty cool:

Just watch this. I’ve seen this game for about a year now and it’s starting to look really promising. So as an afterthought I decided to make a video with some experiments on how I would probably compose it. Here:

Now, I’m having mixed feelings about this though. People say I should definitely aim at getting this gig, but I’m not really sure myself. The developer said he will probably not be able to give the composer dedicated to this game a decent percentage, he actually stated to not do this for the money.

Money is always a sort of secretive thing between composers and game developers, but I’d like to be a bit more open about this. I’ve seen a lot of composers having low payments, some even would be happy with 100 dollars for 40 minutes of licensed music.

I can only say, don’t underpay yourself.

There are several ways on how to handle a risky gig where the people behind it have no idea what the money outcome would be. Either you want a flat fee, which would, in low numbers be something like 100$/minute. If you want a flat fee, definitely try to keep the license of the music for yourself. You might be able to earn a bit of money from the original soundtrack if you do it clean.

I’ve heard about a guy that made the main song for a very big game, which you know too, and he asked for a small flat fee and had to give away the license to his music too. Damn shame.

You could also ask for a percentage, which is probably what the gunpoint dev wants to do. It’s also the most risk free way of handling things for both parties. Even if the game fails, the developer doesn’t put a hole in his pocket, and the composer at least gets a bit. With this variant you should be very sure not to do too much work. I mean things like 5 hour soundtracks for some indie developed mmorpg. Just a weird extreme example. Not even percentages will get your work effort back, hahah.

A too low percentage might be a bit of a gamble though. Sometimes it’s really hard to judge, but I don’t like percentages under 5% for composers at all.

You could also mix up the two if the developer might be confident.

And there are also million other ways, but these are the main ways of handling composition business.

So, the developer straight out said it would be a very low percentage and the composer shouldn’t do it for the money. On which I disagree. Music quality always comes first, but you don’t want to put in too much effort into something that might be big, but doesn’t help you out enough.

Tough thematic.

 

This is crazy! If you ever wanted to get my music for really cheap and perhaps, like 9 other albums, why don’t you get it right now?

This Music Bundle contains the following albums

Minecraft Volume Alpha

Cobalt EP

Super Meat Boy Digital Special Edition

Impostor Nostalgia (BGC418!)

Ravenmark

ARES

Return All Robots!

Mighty Milky Way

PPPPPP (VVVVVV!)

Tree Of Knowledge!

Phew, that already is a long list, but if you pay $10, you actually get seven more albums!

Wind-up Knight

The Binding of Isaac

72 Minutes of Fame (yes!)

MilkSnake

Antigravity

EXTREME Road Trip

and something sweet, some unreleased Mass Effect 2 tunes, Contigency!

That sums up to over 360 titles with more than 15 hours of well-polished music. It’s a crazy deal and I think you’ll love it!

I’ve been crawling through my server a month ago. And I thought that not all old songs were that bad, so I’ve been compiling them in this free album RIGHT HERE:

 

You can download it for free. Just bear in mind that this is partly really old stuff, so not everything might be cool beans.

I’ll be at MineCon next week, having a talk and playing some music at the Miner’s party, including some remixes of some Beefsteak songs.

But aside that, I will also give out gift codes of my albums!

If you are at MineCon and want a random gift code, the only thing you have to do is just find me and ask for one.

So go find me!

So henceforth I will replace the word “Minecraft” with “Beefsteak”.

I’m not a DJ. I’m a producer. And with that I try to compensate for me not being a DJ by playing unique songs. That generally means I pick some of my favourite songs and put a touch of my own style on top of it. So right now I’m collecting music for the next 8 days to hopefully have a really slick set for MineCon.

So yeah, I might be silent on this blog.

Catherine is great! But an extremely hard game, definitely. However after I beat the game on easy, which is very manageable, normal difficulty felt pretty okay, actually!

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I might have a new release soon… don’t expect really awesome stuff though!

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Yesterday I had a great idea for a theme melody to the Minecraft documentary soundtrack, but as I wanted to maneuver my mouse to the piano plugin to midi-ize my thoughts, the battery of the mouse died. So I ended up running around in my room, searching the battery cable, whistling like a maniac. (In the end I just plugged in a non-rechargeable battery and gave up the hunt)

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I’m out of stamps again, dammit. Next round of stamps for sending away CD’s is on Tuesday…

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Next week I’ll do a bit of preparation work for MineCon. Getting a nice little set of music together. The directions that were given to me for the Miners (Minors) party is to play music that is sort of disco, but not necessarily to make the crowd go dance. Not what I would have wanted to play music wise , but hey, Mojang bought me a ticket to Las Vegas. And that’s so awesome, I will not complain one bit about anything. Well, except someone shoots me. Then I might complain a little bit about getting to Vegas. Or maybe if I get caught counting cards. But then it would be my fault… well, at least the casinos would say it like that BUT IT’S NOT TRUE!

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I made a new remix song for Oxeyes Cobalt. It’s not really mindblowing to me or anything, but I think it does the job.

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OCZ released an update for their newer SSD’s. It reduces the chance of “rare” bluescreens. They were so rare in my case, I had them every week. However the patch definitely fixed the problem so far. I haven’t seen anything slightly dark blue with white text recently. Had to reinstall Windows for that though. And that kind of sucked half of my week away. You know, reinstalling all programs and stuff.

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Next week is the big gaming week. Hm. I think I’ll wait to play most games after MineCon. Like Skyrim and such.

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My actual business cards are done and in printing! Woo! Hope they turn out well.

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Additional very early Monday thought: 5 years ago I disliked classical music. Nowadays I can’t live without it at all!

(that’s the mess of boxes of ready-to-ship packages in my room right now)

Phew!

I finally packaged all of the preorders of “72 Minutes of Fame”.

That means by Friday most of the orders are on their way to the people that ordered! I really hope you excuse my pitiful delays and enjoy the very-soon-be-travelling music!

This also means I will FINALLY ship every ordered CD from now on in real time. Meaning as soon as I see the order, I’ll ship it! I’m so glad this huge pile of work is finished now.

And I also guess next time I’ll get a new CD pressed I will be acting much faster, now that I actually have a structure on how I ship CD’s.

So.

Yeah.