Have I mentioned that sometimes I write music to pitch to film, TV, and video games? So far I have mostly pitched through Taxi, which is an independent A&R company that is kind of a go-between for songwriters and the production libraries that supply music to media production companies. 

After writing a lot of tracks that didn't get picked up (including “Lucky Breaks” which I decided to repurpose as a single), I finally did get one past the gate! My first “forward” as they say.

They were looking for an instrumental 8-bit/Chiptune track in the style of 90's video game music. The references they gave were all from Super Mario games. Mine was called “Golden Goofs” and was based on a kind of swingy jazz melody that I always used to get stuck in my head.

The library that picked it up is called Reel Note Music. They have the track hosted on a site called Bulletproof Bear, along with an album's worth of Chiptunes by other artists. 

It was really fun to write a chiptune, the first time I'd done it. Basically you have to imitate the limitations of a 90s video game console. You only get four channels of sound: two “squares” (which are the main melody) one “triangle” (which is the bass) and one noise channel (which is the drums). So at any given moment you can't have more than four sounds happening. Oh, I guess there is also a low-quality “sample” channel, so you can technically have five. Pretty different from my other stuff. 

Hm, I was trying to embed a player here but it doesn't seem to work in this blog format for some reason. So here's a link instead. 

Let me know what you think!