Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
So this might be the first and only song I've written as a MIDI that existed as a live composition first. At some point in late 2020 I got my hands on an MPK Mini MK3 and was really excited to experiment in the software it came with, MPC Beats. This song came to life from that, via a lot of experimentation with the touch-sensitive pads and faders on the included synthesizers. It gave me access to dreamy pad sounds saturated in reverb with long lazy attack and decay and percussion I could actually tap out and then quantize instead of composing everything on a piano roll.
I wrote a lot of little loops and jammed over them across quite a few sessions until I eventually started to grab actual parts and stitch them together into a song. Eventually I even recorded vocals over a version of it, but I never really completed the song or landed on an iteration of it that ever felt like the "official one".
Even years later, it's a bop that would get stuck in my head here and there, so at some point I leaned into the urge to hear it and decided to sequence it for midi. Whatever scratch files I had laying around for the original are probably lost on an old hard drive somewhere, so I did have to do all this from scratch. A lot of it has been adapted to being more suitable for a Doom midi, but the overall feel and voicing of the song I tried real hard to strike as close as I could. You can hear this most in the layered swelling pad sounds that carry the song, but other voices from the MSGS soundfont come pretty close as well when combined with each other in the right ways. In places I tried to mimic the soft variations in note velocity you get from playing with your actual hands, which isn't something I always pay the most attention to in my usual compositions, but which gave the original song a lot of texture that I wanted to retain.
After I finished this MIDI, I didn't really have a project in mind for it so it sat on my computer for about a year before I dug it out for my submission for CCSS13, a map titled "Ghost in the Tell". I don't know if the song is a perfect fit but I'm glad it's been given the light of day to a broader audience than just my wife and a few of my old band mates ;)
So this might be the first and only song I've written as a MIDI that existed as a live composition first. At some point in late 2020 I got my hands on an MPK Mini MK3 and was really excited to experiment in the software it came with, MPC Beats. This song came to life from that, via a lot of experimentation with the touch-sensitive pads and faders on the included synthesizers. It gave me access to dreamy pad sounds saturated in reverb with long lazy attack and decay and percussion I could actually tap out and then quantize instead of composing everything on a piano roll.
I wrote a lot of little loops and jammed over them across quite a few sessions until I eventually started to grab actual parts and stitch them together into a song. Eventually I even recorded vocals over a version of it, but I never really completed the song or landed on an iteration of it that ever felt like the "official one".
Even years later, it's a bop that would get stuck in my head here and there, so at some point I leaned into the urge to hear it and decided to sequence it for midi. Whatever scratch files I had laying around for the original are probably lost on an old hard drive somewhere, so I did have to do all this from scratch. A lot of it has been adapted to being more suitable for a Doom midi, but the overall feel and voicing of the song I tried real hard to strike as close as I could. You can hear this most in the layered swelling pad sounds that carry the song, but other voices from the MSGS soundfont come pretty close as well when combined with each other in the right ways. In places I tried to mimic the soft variations in note velocity you get from playing with your actual hands, which isn't something I always pay the most attention to in my usual compositions, but which gave the original song a lot of texture that I wanted to retain.
After I finished this MIDI, I didn't really have a project in mind for it so it sat on my computer for about a year before I dug it out for my submission for CCSS13, a map titled "Ghost in the Tell". I don't know if the song is a perfect fit but I'm glad it's been given the light of day to a broader audience than just my wife and a few of my old band mates ;)
