Trivial things can have extreme consequences. In this case, tripping over the cable connecting the Awe-32 soundcard to my hifi system's Aux input, damaging the old soundcard, and forcing a long-delayed upgrade to the Soundblaster-Live. The first thing that I discovered, much to my frustration, was that the compositions that had sounded so great on the Awe-32 were somewhere between apalling and intolerable when played through the new soundcard. I spent a bit of time learning to use and experimenting with soundfonts, while hoping to locate one that would replicate the sounds I knew from the Awe-32; but eventually, the creative bug nagged away at me enough that I started composing tunes that used what was available in the default SB-Live soundfont. They have been greeted with the same sort of rave reviews that my earlier work received at it's height of success. These pieces are textured, layered, diverse, and posess the accessability that had been lacking in the works completed at the start of the year. It has to say something that so many of the new tunes have mainlined their way into the favorites list. This ride is only getting started! # Name (Length) Size Download Links Comments       172 Sounds Different (2:27) 15K This started out as little more than an experiment to see what I could do with the new Soundcard. It reveals it's origins in it's brevity. It's largely just bass and drums, but the Slap Bass has enough character on the SB-Live to sustain itself as the tune's lead instrument as well as it's bass. I have been advised that this doesn't work well on other soundcards, though. 173 Dramatis Classique (5:07) 49K A more serious work, designed to take advantage of the more realistic strings and the fairly mellow and defined steel guitar in the soundfont. It has a definite classical flavour over a basic pop/rock 4/4 beat. I also like the fact that it exploits the two different snare drums to differentiate between verses and choruses. And I've always liked false endings..... 174 Simple (2:59) 20K This tune is clearly divided into three sections - A bass-synth & organ-dominated section, a harpsichord and steel accoustic guitar (played spanish-style) section, and a conclusion that blends the two together (even though they sound markedly different when each is playing). The result is a very layered tapestry - it only becomes clear how complex the result of compounding the relatively simple ingredients becomes at the very end when everything plays the same thing. And I especially love the little guitar coda that concludes the piece. 175 8 Bar WOW! (4:43) 54K I wanted to do something that was essentially built around an 8-bar pattern, because I've been doing 4-bar stuff for so long now. Each instrument plays essentially the same melody, but each has a variation of it's own. The result is a sweet little epic which just builds and builds and builds. It always surprises me when it ends because the tune leaves me expecting (wanting!) more. The only solution is to play it again.... one of my best originals to date. I particularly like the way the character of each instrument used adds to the overall structure without getting completely lost. 4:43 but there could have been lots more.... I was still finding variations even after I had finished mixing it! This piece is a little more adventurous in it's mix, which might or might not work on other soundcards (but on the SB Live it sounds great!). 176 Upswing (8:44) 62K One of the world's best jazz trumpet players, James Morrison, is an Australian. You may have heard him play at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sydney, 2000. For a long time, I had been thinking about doing something with a trumpet as lead instrument, but the instrument in the Awe-32 just wasn't up to the job. The SB-Live is a whole different story. Originally, the trumpet was supposed to be an adjunct to the main melody, but it sounded so good that from it's first appearance in the piece it stole the show. The tune itself is a fairly uptempo piece in 2/4 time. Unexpectedly, I had to add lots of extra bars here and there to get it to come out right. Hence the 4 lines of the Chorus are all of different bar-lengths. But it sounds great - at least on the SB Live! Where other soundcards might run into trouble is with the Dynamics of the "lead trumpet". The SBLive card default patch reduces the velocity of trumpet notes as the pitch drops, and this is a large element of the piece. The SB16 didn't do that. It also has a bit of vibrato in the note after the first half-second or so of a sustained trumpet note, which helps add to the "realistic" flavour of the lead. The trumpet on the SB16 sounded like a poor synthesiser a lot of the time (no surprise really) and it didn't do this. This tune would probably sound apalling on that soundcard, but it should be OK on most others. The better the trumpet patch on your soundcard, the better this will sound. 177 The Chorus Of Extraordinary Whispers (4:34) 56K This might sound strange on other soundcards. That's because it (experimentally) uses a lot of unusal instruments - things I don't normally play with much. These form an "echo" of the lead melody. The tune itself divides into a number of progressive phases. Verse #1 is a relatively simple bass line which is dominated by the refrain around which the whole tune is built. That leads into a brief bridge which connects to Chorus #1, which derives from the bass line of the Verse, and introduces some strong synth elements. Verse #2 uses the instruments which played the bass line in Verse #1 to play the complexly interwoven melody, while the additional instruments introduced into the chorus play the bass notes. Choruses #2 and #3 merge and blend the two into a far more uptempo finish, in which the original melody slowly emerges to unify the whole. The idea for the piece came from the schoolyard game of "Chinese Whispers" - you know, where one person tells another a short message, and they tell the next one what is supposed to be the same message, but after only a few iterations of the process, the message being repeated bears no resemblance to the original. The intent was to try and capture the growth of a "rumour" musically, so that what starts as one person (instrument) saying something simple ends up as a wall of innuendo and speculation - by the time lots of others have put in their 2 cents worth. But, at the end of the day, all there ever really was to the whole thing was the original, simple, message. The title is obviously inspired by the recent movie, but otherwise has nothing to do with that piece of entertainment. I wanted something that captured the flavour of the subject and of the inspiration. The logic ran, "OK, so the tune is about rumours and rumourmongering. What is a rumour? Well, it's a confidential whisper from one person to another that is somewhat plausible and dramatic or attention getting - as opposed to an everyday ordinary sort of communication. It is, in other words, and Extraordinary Whisper. And when you get a lot of them coming out of the woodwork at once, you have a chorus of them. So: 'The Chorus Of Extraordinary Whispers". 178 Dawn Over Kosiosco (6:30) 67K I tried something unusual on this piece. At least early on, I started playing around with combining the different drum patches in the SBLive default soundbank to produce sounds that weren't in any of the standalone drumkits. Later in the piece, the drums switch to being the "Power Drumkit" exclusively. This is a big orchestral number with which I am really pleased. Mount Kosiosko is home to several of the most famous (and popular) snowfields in Australia, and I wanted a piece that painted a picture of the life there in addition to capturing the drama of dawn over snowcapped mountains. The lead strings in the second movement of the piece (from about 2:40 or so) were originally quite different, but they sounded so familiar that I was quite sure I had inadvertantly duplicated another song's melody line (something by Pink I think), so after a couple of days agonising over it I tore those bars out and rebuilt them from scratch. This is one piece that has a definite spot amongst my personal favorites. For it's length and internal complexity, the file is astonishingly small - not much more than 10k a minute! It will probably sound OK on most soundcards, but the Drums & Percusssion might not work quite right on anything else. 179 Black Pearl (7:38) 129K "Black Pearl" started as not being all that extraordinary a tune. A bit of accoustic guitar, with some beck-and-call to a piano accompaniment. But the chorus - surprisingly simple despite the way it sounds - lifted the whole piece in quality of content and ensured that it would be a favorite. Then, when I started working variations into the piece, I found that I had structured it in such a way that there was a lot of evolution in the sonic tapestry - there are a lot of changes in patch used throughout the piece. I also fell in love with the bridges. This is one of those rare pieces that come together almost without effort on the part of the composer. Only the 8th bar in each line of the verses gave me trouble - but they gave so much trouble that they made up for the rest of the song! I simply couldn't get the bass line to sound right with the melody line, no matter what I did. In the end, I cut the entire bar out (both melody line and bass line) and crafted each one independantly of all the others - but the result works quite well, so in the end it was worth it. Another piece I am VERY happy with. 180 A New Beginning (3:55) 63K This is built around the interplay of 3 accoustic guitars, each played with a slightly different style. I've also used some non-standard key shifts - down when you might have expected up - but they seem to work. The idea came about because for a long time, I've been doing tunes with beck and call between two different instruments. I got to wondering what would happen if the "call" was on an instrument of the same type as the "beck". I have been told by some that this is their favorite piece amongst my collection. So I must have done something right.