So uhhh... this idea dates back to 2000... Yikes!

The original riff (the main piano part) was written on guitar, but being before the times of using phones to record audio ideas, and when data storage was limited, I 'recorded' this by creating a MIDI file in glorious 'General MIDI Classical Guitar' to save space. I also wrote very basic strings, bass and drum tracks, and had a gradual build up of 2 times guitar, then another 2 times for each instrument added... ugh... it got boring quickly, so I guess my understanding of song structure has developed a little over the last 22 years. The file was called DUNNO25.MID, as most of my nameless MIDI ideas were back then, and because I was not at one with the money gods, I was using an old shareware program to create MIDI, which was so old it saved the names in DOS format (all caps, 8 character max). I'd hardly call this one of my stronger ideas, but it always had a little something about it to avoid deletion, so it's nice to give it a little polish after so many years.

So anyway, as the title suggests, I rebuilt this around the idea of being the first main theme of a J-RPG, just after the prologue, and you're placed in the local village or nearby explorable area, and you first take control of the character you're about to spend many hours with. It's cheesy and upbeat, just like things should be for a bright-eyed adventurer full of hope! In typical fashion, it is designed as a loop, so the fade at the end is where it has looped around (minus intro). The original was super stale sounding, little variety, all levels and velocities at 100%, all instruments using General MIDI, very ew... So I redid the original parts with more natural velocities, assigned instrument samples, restructured and tweaked them to be a bit less repetitive, and wrote some new elements to add variation and dynamics.

Tags: week 15 2022, View by:Jai Cafarella