Midis By Mike Bourke

When you work on 30-odd midis at a time, advancing each one a bit each time, you suddenly reach a point when your productivity seems to explode. The first three months or so of the new millennium is when I achieved maturity as a composer, and everything was bursting with melody. Stage III of my career begins with the completion of "THE DAWN OF TOMORROW" on 3/1/00, continues through the completion of my second Signature Tune, "ELECTRIC MELANCHOLY", the completion of my personal favorite, "VALEDICTION", and concludes with the completion of "GETTING BETTER" on 3/3/00. On this page you will find the first 13 of 25 midis composed over a period of three months - an average of almost 2 a week! But there was no compromise of quality for speed, as shown by the number of tunes on this page and the next which remain amongst my favorites to this day, more than 3½ years later.

Name (Length) Size

Download Links

Comments

The Dawn Of Tomorrow (7:32) 97K

This was written to commemorate the beginning of the new millenium. In it, I tried to capture all the fears and hopes and dreams (and above all, anticipation!) for what the new era - the 21st Century, no less - might hold. For so long, it had been held up as the proverbial future - and now it was here.... A far more complex and textured song than any that had preceeded it. This piece doesn't sound quite right on the SB-Live, unfortunately.

Will O' The Whisp (1:44) 18K

A Will O' The Whisp is a supernatural creature from British Mythology (I think, more specifically, Irish, but I'm not sure) - a ghostly ball of light without substance that lures people into the swamps and moores. In modern times, it has come to mean someone or something that is ephemeral, that might not even really be there - something that vanishes like a whisp of smoke whenever you try and come to grips with it. It is therefore also a metaphor for any unobtainable goal. Unfortunatly, the SB Live completely submerges the melody of this piece - it's almost as elusive as the subject....

City Life 2 (2:04) 16K

I thought I had more-or-less finished with this subject with "CITY LIFE" (in the 1999 section) but found that I had more to say. In particular, this piece focusses on the stresses of life in the heart of a modern metropolis - at least, it does on SB16, where you hear car horns beeping and traffic congestion.

Dreamers (5:33) 76K

This stayed amongst my favorites for a very long time. It has, in recent times, become fairly common to use the term "Dreamer" as a derogatory adjective, someone with their head in the clouds. But there is the arguement that it is the dreamers, who dare to imagine a better life, a better way of doing things, who are our hope for the future. It is to the latter concept that this piece is dedicated. This needs a serious remix to work on the SB-Live, where the instrumentation choices just don't quite work, and everything is buried under the drum section.

Dreaming (5:33) 2K Zipped (33K Unzipped)

(continued from "Dreamers" above): On the Awe-32, however, the drum section was largely buried, and was "almost" good enough to stand on it's own. So I did just that - ripped out everything else and left only the drumtrack. It's of some interest to note that this represents over 40% of the total file size of the full version!

Goodbye Jo-San (Vietnam 1973) (5:25) 67K

I wish I could make this available to the public, I really do. There was a 30-day demo game of Mahjongg that I downloaded because it contained a number of pieces of music that were reported as being excellent. For the most part, I was dissappointed, but there was one piece that was absolutely wonderful and inspirational - aside from one or two poor choices of notes and a couple of problems with the mix. It was so close to perfect that I simply had to rescind, temporarily, my self-imposed restriction about working on non-original midis. I now suspect that the original was correctly mixed for the SB-Live, just as this is wonderful on the SB16. But the tune was clearly copyrighted and I got no response from emails asking permission to post the remix. Sometime in 2001, the website from which the game was downloaded vanished as well. And so this piece remains in undeserved limbo.

The Breaking Of Enigma (4:09) 90K

Another tune that stayed in my personal favorites for a long time. Enigma was, of course, the Nazi code in World War II, the breaking of which gave the allies such a significant intelligence advantage in the war. The tune is all about the surge of enhusiasm you get when an insoluble mystery begins to fall into place before your eyes. It starts uptempo and only gets more enthusiastic as time goes by. It wouldn't take too much of a remix to make this work on the SB-Live, but right now it's not quite there..

Goodbyes (The Keening) (4:06) 30K

In direct contrast to the previous tune, this has NEVER been amongst my favorites. I was captivated by the notion of a walf-pack keening their dead pack-leader into the afterlife, a vision from a novel I was reading at the time, and that led to this tune. At the time it sounded OK, but now when I hear it, I can only say "What Was I Thinking?" I can't even listen to the whole thing. Well, they can't all be winners....

Pages In An Endless Diary (3:58) 46K

One of the long-unfinished tunes was a remix of one of the demos that came with my sequencer software. In fact, I finished this before realising where it had come from. Curiously, it's one of the pieces that would require the least remixing to be SB Live compatable. The piece is of course, copyrighted and hence not available here.

True Love (5:10) 131K

I hadn't done a pure pop piece for a while - the last one was "Summer Sunset" back in '99 - but this filled the niche perfectly. Pity it sounds so apalling on the SB-Live; a definite candidate for a remix, but the piano in the deault soundfont is so thin in comparison to the SB-Live that it might not be possible to salvage it.

Keyboard Wizard (6:36) 133K

I wanted a piece that showed off the advantages that the midi format had over other forms of recorded music. This piece used only instruments with Keyboards (other than the drums) and would be physically impossible to play live, with some sections requiring the use of 8 fingers per hand - and others demanding a third hand! This won't need a lot of work to remix for the SB Live, but it's a low priority.

Seasons Of The 70s (19:35) 24K Zipped (277K Unzipped)

Autumn (0:00 - 3:45)
Winter (3:45 - 9:55)
Spring Rains (9:55 - 13:50)
Summer & Finale (13:50-19:35)

This was a conceptually epic piece, there's no doubt about it. Using only the one set of instruments - no changes of patch permitted - I wanted to capture a quintissential slice of each season of an Australian Outback year. Spring Rains, the third section, was the first complete, and it was only after it was done that I became aware of the possible bigger picture. This was followed by the middle section of Autumn, then by Winter. I then composed Summer, defining fully the group of instruments available to me. Finishing Autumn and the intro, I ended with a rousing uptempo finale built around Summer. With 70s beats, synths, and bass riffs featuring so heavily in the finished work, the title of the overall work was never in doubt.

Unfortunately, to update this to the SBLive would mean violating the "no instrument patch changes" rule and would be quite a lot of work. But it's definitly on my list of things to do.

The Lies That Haunt You (4:16) 103K

The "lie" from which this piece gets it's title is that it sounds like it was a lot of hard work. It wasn't.