Music

Soundtrack of a Galaxy

2008.

May 16th, to be precise. It was the date of my first upload to Jazz2Online, the community website for the late-90s 2D PC platformer franchise Jazz Jackrabbit. I was in 8th grade at the time, and the Jazz Jackrabbit games, particularly JJ2, were a massive part of my life. I loved those games something fierce, playing them nonstop and messing around for hours in the Jazz Creation Station, the sequel’s official level editor. I built multiplayer levels. I built singleplayer levels, both standalone and packs. I toodled around with various endeavors involving the first game. I even took part in a community project or two (see Holiday Hare 2018)! You can check out my work, if you like – username PT32. Don’t mind the high-school cringe. I was a kid.

At some point in all that levelmaking grooviness, I took to writing custom level music. See, in JJ2 you can use custom tilesets (the level editor’s building block sets) and custom songs, provided the latter are in compatible formats (.s3m, .it, .xm, .mod, .j2b, etc). Those were the days before broader community support for conventional formats like .mp3, so writing songs required a certain style of music writing program. To be specific… a module tracker writing program.

That program, for me, was OpenMPT.

I was always a musical kid growing up. I learned piano (which I play decently well) and guitar (which I… play), and sang bass for seven years in homeschool choirs. I’ve always had an interest in music, whether making it or experiencing it in various mediums, and so I took to learning how to use OpenMPT to make songs for my Jazz Jackrabbit levels. OpenMPT uses samples (sound recordings generated from playing a musical instrument, such as a guitar or a violin or a keyboard) to construct songs note by note, sound by sound. It’s an in-depth process that takes you down to the granular level of music creation, down to the way a synth sounds or a specific pedal or cymbal on the drums.

I wrote a lot of songs. Way more, in fact, than ever actually made it into my JJ2 levels. Early efforts were, to put it kindly, a bit raw… but with time my tunes improved. They grew more complex, better developed. I acquired better samples. Honed my craft. And by the time I’d been writing for ten years, some of my songs were ones you might now recognize.

That’s because I use OpenMPT to write the songs for Zetarthechannel. I’ve gotten more professional – where once Young Kid Me cobbled together samples from any old .xm or .s3m he could find, now I source my samples 100% royalty free from Splice.com. I’ve pulled plenty of my present tunes from material I made in high school, from a few catchy bars to entire melodies.

And in case you’re wondering… I write in .it format.