Now here's a journal nobody will care about but that's okay, I'll just have a conversation with myself and pretend I'm talking to somebody who does care. I've done it before.

Last fall I obtained my Yamaha keyboard and while it's certainly no $5,000 professional piece of electronic sound production that you'd see on stage of a reputable band (which used to exist, trust me, music used to be sorta good, and game music used to be more than just ambient, look it up), it certainly allowed me to add more layers to my otherwise sad attempts at composition. So I'm just gonna look back and what I've put together in that time in order of appearance.

Zane's Theme: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/45656089/

This was kind of the catalyst for me getting the keyboard to begin with. I was excited about making this character (before I remember that it's wrong to feel excited about anything non-pornographic in this fandom) and wanted to give him the works, a reference sheet, a full bio, and even entrance theme music, which I felt would really hammer home his whole vibe. The trouble was, my bass guitar seemed to be busted in some unknown way and I didn't want to try and put something together using just my other guitar, alone. So that's when I rather impulsively decided to buy a keyboard while sitting in the upstairs office at work. I figured, hey, it'd allow me to synthesize a bass line and also give me access to all kinds of other sounds and 'instruments' so I can do more than just try and make my guitar sound different and/or awkwardly import outdated MIDI sounds. Although a mid-tier, at best, piece of equipment at around the $500 mark, it still stands as the nicest instrument anyone in this riff-raff family has owned.

With the keyboard in hand, my ambitions with Zane's theme expanded a bit. Inspired by the saccharine, upbeat tone of Hopes and Dreams from Undertale, the goal of the song was to try and manifest Zane's character in audio form. Zane is a very friendly, undeniably adorable, and somewhat awkward bunny boy whose love of games and cartoons dominates his public persona, and he aims to present himself as something of a living cartoon character, a kind of bright-eyed, irresistibly cute manchild who seems almost not real, too pure for this world, but that's juxtaposed with his in-ring abilities which are not only impeccable, but even a little bit ruthless. A bouncy submission expert who tears at his opponents' limbs and then lovingly hugs them after they've been defeated, the song needed to present that this wasn't your typical Wrestle Wrabbit.

It's a track I've considered remaking now that I have more experience with the keyboard and also with mixing. It's not terrible but as the first thing I ever did with the keyboard upon acquiring it, there were certainly some growing pains to be dealt with. Really makes me wonder what my plan was when I just had a bass and guitar.

Interestingly, his super-upbeat theme song is actually a repurposed riff that I wrote for a much more melancholy track a while back. I don't like to listen to it much since I biffed the audio and you can hear a lot of noise that kind of ruins it when listened to with headphones but nonetheless, here it is: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/38388601/


Last Question: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44605525/

After finishing Zane's theme, I practiced with scales on the keyboard. I'm not a pianist in any sense of the word, not even really a musician. When it comes to guitar, I can basically jam and fuck around until something happens but I can't objectively say I know what I'm doing. The imposter's syndrome is strong. Due to my stubby, generally useless fingers and self, I knew there was no chance of me ever succeeding at actually playing in piano in any meaningful way but I did manage to self-teach myself a simple scale progression, and that progression is what became this song (If you look through my gallery, you'll see an earlier version of this riff when I was just calling it practice, I hadn't yet committed to turning it into a song. My secondary goal was to make a decent song using only the keyboard, and not my guitar, in an effort to get better using the keyboard and not rely so much on the guitar as a crutch, since I've played that for many years (and am still so very mediocre).

Conceptually, I wanted the song come off like a dramatic peak in the finale of a video game. Specifically, I was looking to kind of capture that feeling of a fight that goes from being epic to being emotional, like when the final boss becomes his final form, and while it's not his strongest form, it's definitely his most profound, if that makes sense. Hell it might even be his weakest form, when he abandons all weapons and just faces you man to man. To sell the idea I thought about concepts for a fictional video game for a while the result being a story-driven puzzle game about a troubled, young prison escapee confronting his emotional past and psychological demons, the final battle being a fight within himself to determine if he's the monster he's become or at least thought to be, or if he's the hurt little boy who never had a chance to be anything else. In that sense, the song went from being a faster paced battle theme to being more of an introspective, cathartic one. Did I succeed? I don't know. The only feedback I've ever gotten on it is that the drums are bad.


Heaven: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/46707369/

In a watershed moment for me, I discovered Akuma's Street Fighter II theme a little while back and have been obsessed with it, and various versions from other entries in the series ever since. There's something about those themes that so excellently capture the concept of the character, the original expertly portraying a monumental battle against an overwhelming, other-worldl;y opponent that you can't begin to fathom. You're in there with something above you, spiritually, and you have no chance to comprehend it. Secret characters rule, and I can't point to a better theme for one, anywhere.

So that was my goal with the Nyra character, to give him a theme song that went well with his secret character-like presence within my wrestling world as well as give him an adrenaline pumping battle theme that accurately portrays the intensity, as well as brevity, of the encounter. I'm not saying it's good but it remains one of my favorite attempts at composition, and it's also probably my favorite thing I ever did on guitar, the solo at the 1-minute mark sounding somehow better than I know I really am. The name of the song, Heaven, is a play on its inspiration, as Akuma has the Japanese Kanji for "Heaven" on the back of his gi, highly appropriate, as he's about to unleash an ass-kicking so destructive, it may as well be ordained by God.



World-6: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/45699886/

With that yearly FA music contest coming up, I wasn't actually planning to submit anything to begin with, having tried the year before and, as expected, failed miserably. This project is actually a result of a tune that's been in my head since I was like, 8 or so. I started thinking about it and wondered if I had any chance at recreating it, myself. Since unlike my other music, I had the tune of this one pretty much entirely 'written out' in my head for years, I put it together in incredibly quick fashion, just in time to go ahead and submit it to the contest with only days to go before the entries closed.

Of course, I failed miserably once more.

The song itself has a weird and complicated history within my psyche which I go on to explain on the submission itself if you're interested, which you aren't, so I won't bother to write it all out here again. All I'll say is, I tried to keep it simple and make it sound like it could feasibly exist in a 90's platformer game. It more or less succeeds in that regard, at least to me.



True Happiness: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/47016658/

This one was an intimidating prospect. Written for my Jin-Yuta character, Yuta is presented as kind of my biggest star among the wrestling characters, not so much in terms of world-wide recognition, which would likely go to some kind of Western meathead. Yuta was more slotted into the rule of someone like Okada, a generational living-legend widely regarded as the best in the world by those close to the business itself. Yuta was made to be more mysterious and essentially presented as wrestling's 'final boss.' So he needed a theme song that lived up to that kind of hype.

Once again taking inspiration from an Akuma theme, Yuta's theme borrows elements from Akuma's Alpha 2 Gold theme as well as Orge's theme from Tekken 3. The latter is very apparent in the intro. In all the song was meant to signal the arrival of an absolute megastar, not with an overtly sound and aggressive tone, but with one that builds anticipation and mystique. The sitar sound is the aforementioned Akuma influence and was designed to give Yuta's theme a kind of other-worldly, imbalanced feel in that section. The main, repeating flute riff that plays throughout actually started as a heavy-metal riff I made up on my guitar over a decade ago, which is potentially appropriate because I imagine that Yuta, in his younger, less mystical days, presented himself as a brash hair-metal rocker type, so if I can ever find a decent way to record guitar audio (I can sort of do it with my Loop Station pedal but it's not at all adequate for recording heavy metal tones), it'd be neat to write a version of his theme from earlier in career that contains that same riff, albeit used very differently. I tentatively want to say that Yuta's theme is objectively the best music project I've put together in terms of overall execution and mixing. I feel like if nothing else, I successfully portrayed what I wanted to in the character.



Music has slowed down a lot as the world's become shittier, I've become more depressed and unable to put together more involved projects, and am now focused on college and ultimately leaving the country but, if nothing else, I feel like the keyboard purchase wasn't in vain, and I've enjoyed seeing what I can do with it. I'm still not great, I've never been great at anything, but I've objectively been getting better and if nothing else, it's been cool to finally do something with all those riffs I've had in my head since I was a kid.


Wow Whimsy, that was all really interesting, I'm glad we're friends :)

Thanks, Whimsy.