The Prototype : Album 2024

Special​

• Written in June / July 2021, it's one of the newer songs in the album. It was originally shelved because I wasn't too happy with the vocals I'd recorded with a mate. I'd already recorded my vocals on it, but only intended to use that as a way of presenting my idea to the vocalist. But it's ended up staying as my voice for release!

Feel like home

• A written in May 2021. A very similar situation, I recorded a vocalist I knew, actually the same person who I recorded for Called It! My guidance in the studio wasn't terrific though, so when I went to edit everything, the flow just wasn't there... my bad! So i shelved it and stuck with my demo vocal for release instead!

For You

• Written around November / December 2021. This was a super fun song to write, I remember the vocal for this genuinely being a one-take wonder and I'm actually really happy with how I sound on it. The song in general was quite a shift away from my typical electronic / pop stuff so I was pumped when it all just fell into place without any issues. I shelved it because I kept tweaking the mixing of the vocal and reached a point where I was spending so much time on it that I decided I was "Ear blind" (A term in music production, meaning you've listened to something so much that you can no longer identify the problems as you've grown so used to them). So I took a long break and just forgot to return. Until I started looking for tracks to put into this album!

Sweet yesterday ft. Rhian Gilliver

• Written in September 2020. I was playing around on my parents' piano in the living room & recorded myself playing using a Rode i-XY stereo mic. I'd always wanted to use their piano for a song, or just any real piano in a song for that matter. Every other piano in a song I've released is just a digital one from one of the many VSTs I own. I ended up using the song for an assignment at Uni as they asked us to produce 2 songs of conflicting genres. I submitted this pop/electronic song alongside a classical piece I wrote. The vocalist, Rhian also went to my Uni and put out an offer to record vocals for people's assignments, so that's how I got the vocals for this! I sent them the song, the lyrics and my demo vocal. I think they replicated my performance perfectly! I think I only shelved this song because I was swamped with coursework and didn't have time to polish it up for a final release version.

Just like you

• Written in September 2021, I'd shelved it because I'd only been able to write lyrics for the hook, recording the vocals as I was writing. In fact, the bit where I say "It's true, that I don't know the words, I do", I'd literally only written up to "It's true" and was just having fun singing how I didn't have any words left written down. But I ended up quite liking it. After re-visiting the song for the album, I figured that it was quite a nice song as is, so didn't bother trying to write any more lyrics.

Night Owl

• Written in April 2020, I came up with the idea in the shower. I'd come up with the first verse and the hook and actually have the voice memos on my phone dated 5th April 2020 of me whispering into my phone mic with the shower on in the background. I shelved the idea because I wanted to find a vocalist for it, never did and had moved onto other projects by then.

Dancing in the rain

• Written in June 2020, I shelved it because I wanted to find a vocalist for it. It just never ended up happening and so I gave up trying. I also wasn't 100% about the vocals I'd done because of the first verse. I've since tuned it a little and concluded that it was just a dissonance that I wrote into the song as the vocal is in-tune, I've checked many times now. It's just the relationship it has with the guitar that gives it a little feeling of uncertainty, which I guess kinda fits the vibe those lyrics are giving off anyway

Evergreen

• Written in August 2023 for a friend who was developing their own game as a little side project. He was one of the developers I worked with for the games Interspersed and Codeslicer. The piano is all recorded live, not on a genuine physical piano, but on my MIDI keyboard. I then had to automate the bpm of the song to match how I'd played it, something I've never done before. So working the rest of the instrumentation into the song with a dynamic bpm was quite hard. The shelved idea was written up until the soft piano outro and was just the piano with some deep cello in the background. EVerything else was added since & I really really love this song.

The sandbox

• ​Written sometime around May 2020. The inspiration for this was the spiritual successor to the game 'Garry's mod', called 'S&Box' (Sandbox). I was always reading their dev blogs to see how the development was going & they shared a looping video of some boxes floating round in low gravity that I thought would be a cool menu screen background. I ended up writing the song to match the background of floating boxes as menu music. It obviously never made it into the game, I sent Garry the song but it still doesn't says he's read the message, oh well! It's a cool track at least.

Slow down

• Written in April 2022 in about 20 mins during a songwriting activity at Uni. The lecture was about ambient music so we'd been tasked to come up with an ambient track for everyone to share to the class in about 20 mins. This is the song I came up with, I never intended to release it either so I'd just exported the .wav file & sent it to my lecturer to share. I just stumbled upon it while finding tracks for the album and thought I'd include it. Since I only had the .wav file and no original project, as I made it on one of the Macs at Uni and closed without saving, I could only make small tweaks, I think it's a pretty cool track despite all that.

The Latcher

• Written in August 2022 as part of a game prototype I was working on with the team of Interspersed & Codeslicer. I'd written the track as menu music for the game, called 'Latch'. It was about a little crab-like alien that you'd control & latch onto enemies to control them, kinda like one of the head-crabs from the half-life series. But also having a hitman kinda gameplay loop. The song got shelved alongside the game after we came to the conclusion to move forward with another prototype which ended up becoming Codeslicer.

The Bungaleers #1

• Written in July 2022, for the prototype for the game 'Latch'. I'd written and produced a whole 12-minute radio segment that would play inside the game world to hopefully provide some immersive detail and even a bit of comedy into the scene. I thought it would be a neat idea to create fictional 4-person bands, this one being one I named 'The Bungaleers'. Obviously, when the game was shelved, so was this track.

The Bungaleers #2

• Written in July 2022, also for the prototype game 'Latch'. Exact same story behind it as The Bungaleers #1. They were only ever intended to be for the game, although I'd played with the idea of releasing them after the game was shelved. 

The Foutons

• Written in July 2022, once again, for the prototype game 'Latch'. I was really on a roll writing these short & simple 4-person bands tracks for the game's radio station. I wanted another band of a different genre so it wasn't all just The Bungaleers on every song. So then the rock band, 'The Foutons' was born.

A breath of adventure

• Written in April 2023, once again for that programmer mate's game side project. I felt like it told the story of some adventurer & their battles before that sweet sweet peaceful ending. 

Contrails

• Written in February 2024, the newest track on the album! I was just having a play around, experiementing with creating some cool synthesised sounds by processing random drum & ambience recordings through a synthesizer. I ended up getting this song out of it, it's way more hardcore compared to what I used to write, I mean it's practically a rave song. Aside from the Train Sim World DnB track on this album, It's the only track that was truely never shelved and written specifically for this album.

Wander

• Written in May 2021, right before I wrote 'Special'. I shelved it because I couldn't think of any lyrics for it. I spent ages trying, but no luck. 

On the move

• Written in November 2021. There's nothing really special about this one honestly. I didn't think lyrics suited it and I was pretty adamant back then about only releasing songs with lyrics.

Soar

• Written in September 2021, I was playing around with some drum samples I had and came up with a pretty cool beat. I ended up adding the 808 & some guitar to make that cool kinda ambient sound. Made me think of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. 

Spring

• Written in November 2020, I can't remember a whole lot about writing this song. I just wanted to write a happy little tune with a transistor organ and a piano. 

Locked in

• Written in March 2020, one of the first tracks I'd written since the start of the Covid lockdowns earlier that month. I played around with some lyric ideas about lockdown & my lectures moving to zoom. But once again, it was just one of those songs I couldn't write some lyrics I was happy with for.

Train Sim World (DnB)

• Written in May 2023 after talking with the composer of the original Train Sim World theme, Ben Symons, about an EDM version of the Train Sim World theme that I'd written and used for the sound of the nightclub on the Manchester-Hadfield/Glossop line DLC, that I'd written the month prior, in April. He said he loved it and that it would be cool if there was a full version as I'd only written a 20-second loop of the chorus. He even send me the actual score he'd written for the theme so I was able to use the exact same notation as him! When re-writing the track as a full version I ended up changing it from an EDM track, into a DnB (Drum & Bass) track. He really liked this version & it's now the song I've been using for nightclubs & events venues in-game since Train Sim World 4! So another track that was never really shelved as I use it in-game, but never truely released as the full version.

Sea breeze

• Written in June 2023 for Catan: Console Edition, I wasn't asked to write it as I was purely just there to overhaul the base game audio and design the audio for the Helpers' DLC, so that's partly why it was never used. As the producer, Natalie didn't quite think it fit the same vision she had for the music. Ben did a great job on the soundtrack, re-writing the Catan theme for each season was such a cool way of interpreting it. Just means this song stays as my own! 

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Clone Hero levels:

​I thought it would be a nice touch to create my own levels for people to play in Clone Hero!

If you don't know what Clone Hero is, It's basically a Free & open-source version of Guitar Hero for PC. It's great fun & comes with it's own editor for you to easily make levels of your own, so I decided to make some for all of the tracks on this album!

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Click below to download Clone Hero from, their website, clonehero.net​

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Click below to download a .ZIP containing my custom Clone Hero levels:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Adding the custom levels to your game is really easy! Just go to C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Programs\Clone Hero\songs and drag the folders from inside the downloaded .ZIP into it, after going in-game, go to settings, general and select scan songs to refresh the game's song library with the new tracks.

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The art

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I've created a tonne of custom art for the album, I'm quite nifty with Blender and created themed backgrounds for almost every song for Spotify to play in fullscreen mode. They're all perfect loops aswell, which as a fun little challenge.

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Some songs might not have a custom background video, most will though. 15/23 currently have a custom video, so not bad going!