Saturday, February 27, 2010

Music, Mix - First Recording


I've been a "bedroom DJ" since 2001 when I bought a crappy belt-drive turntable off ebay. Since I only had one turntable, I had it hooked up to my computer so I could mix along with my MP3s. It was fine for practicing beat matching, but nothing that sounded any good came out of it. In the next few years, I bought 2 "real" turntables, several vinyl records, and a few DJ mixers.

In the last several years there have been huge developments in digital DJing. I love vinyl, but the cost and size of records and turntables is a nuisance. For one year in college I had my own radio show where I mixed live for an hour. Lugging a crate of records plus headphones or anything else I needed all the way to the radio station and back once a week was a huge pain (quite literally!) especially in the snow. Anyway, I've always loved the idea of digital DJing: unlimited amount of music, software effects including looping and sequence chopping, costs less, can mix my own music compositions if I wanted to, etc. So in early 2008 I took the plunge and bought a MIDI controller and some software for digital DJing. What I've posted here is the first recording I made of myself mixing on my computer. It actually turned out pretty well!

Genre: Electro, Breaks, Progressive House
Tracklist:
01- Ikon - Signs (Jody Wisternoff Remix)
02- Deepsky & Marc Mitchell - Lost In The Moment
03- Sean Quinn, Andy Page - SQAP (Broken Mix)
04- Elite Force - You (Hybrid Mix)
05- DJ Naga - Die Rhythmen Ein (Flack.su Remix)
06- Flack.su - Dazzle (9b0 Remix)
07- Blake Jarrell - Okoboji

Listen:

Download
: markmix_2008_3_28.mp3 [divshare.com]

Monday, February 22, 2010

Music - "Omega"

Lately I've been going through all of the music I've written over the years. Some of it I can barely remember, and some of it is actually halfway decent. Unfortunately, I've lost a bunch of it, especially the really old stuff (high school), but the good news is I have backups of stuff dating back to around 2002. Anyway, I thought I'd share some of the less embarrassing music on this blog.


For now, I'm going to post a song I wrote a long time ago (not sure about exactly when, but probably around 2002). This is probably the closest I've ever gotten to actually finishing a song. It's pretty basic trance, which is what I was into back then, but I still like it. Hopefully someone else will, too.

Listen:

Download: omega.mp3 [divshare.com]

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Webwars

12 years ago I wrote a game in Pascal called "Webwars." The idea was simple: you control the player (webwarrior?) , shooting webs to immobilize every baddie walking around the level before the time runs out. The webs shoot in a straight line until they hit something. The catch is, you can't cross your own webs. So, the more you shoot, the more difficult it is to maneuver around and shoot the baddies that are left. Every time you complete a level, you start a new level with even more baddies. It created a very minor and short-lived craze in my 9th grade class (or was that in 8th grade?).

3 or 4 years later I rewrote Webwars in C++. Basically the same game; it still had Ascii-graphics and the same kinds of levels. It took me only a few hours to finish, and it was primarily to get myself programming for fun again.

Another year or so later I rewrote the game a third time, again in C++, this time using OpenGL for graphics which I was learning at the time. It was fun to create all the graphics and come up with interesting "worlds" (web worlds?). Anyway, I've uploaded it here for anyone to play if interested. Requires a Windows OS. Use the arrow keys to move, the W A S D keys shoot webs, push Spacebar to drop a bomb.

Download: webwars.zip [divshare.com]

(p.s. I've lost the source code for the first version otherwise I would have posted that as well. I still feel like the original was the best version (it even had a level editor!) but maybe that's just nostalgia)