an impossibly beautiful piece if I ever heard one. Definitely hear a big power metal ballad vibe, which is wonderful. Everything about it is amazing, loved the leads, especially in the upbeat section half way through. I also just looked at the guitar pro 5 tab for this as well, and never before have I ever seen a piece of music written in 24/4. Whazzup with that lol?

Ah, I wondered if anyone would notice that ;) The reason is because it was converted from a different file that didn't have any concept of time signatures, so each measure of the piece became one bar. I meant to correct it to a more... human 3/4 time signature when I'd finished it, but GP5 just went mad every time I tried (I think it was confused by the later time switch as well).

Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much - thank you for your comments! It's nice to think that my old pieces haven't aged badly ;) I will have to get back into posting new music, although most of it sounds quite different from the mood of this one...

Ahhh that would explain it then lol. Manually splitting bars is a pain in the arse, and the most I've done is half the bar length.

And my pleasure, it was very good =D, and well written music is timeless :), and I can definitely relate to comparing old music from new, very nostalgic experience

This is more "too good for its own length" >:3 I woulda played it a second time even if it had been 20 minutes long. Favorite part is definitely where the lead picks up at 5:52-ish.

Well, thank you very much :) I remember it was the first song that I'd done to have an actual... slow/fast/slow progression like that, after I'd only done one or the other before. Strange the things you remember...

Pretty cool ballad track, but I can't help but feel that this song would have been helped along a lot more if the bass is used as more than just a backing track, and brought forward a couple of times with a couple of bass riffs.

The benefit of hindsight :) After dragging this one out of 2003 I found myself really liking it again far more than I thought I would, partly because it's so different from any of my other songs, and in the tablature version from a year ago I remember pulling around some sections but not really doing much to the simple bass. It's a thought, particularly if I end up doing an actual full remake of this at some point.

That would be pretty cool if you did.

nicely done. good job

damn dude. IT makes me think of everything fromm the past

It has quite a lot of nostalgia in it for me as well, as you can probably imagine :) The date on the file says September 2003, so... that would have been my first year of university, the time of a lot of life changes.

Oh, you bastard..! Putting chiptunes in a ballad, that's just not fair. That one-two punch almost, almost made me +favorite this, and you know what that's saying coming from me! The only reason I didn't was... well, there were two. One, it's a WIP, so I'll just wait for the finished version. :) Two, as amazing as it is when it gets going, I think it could stand to be tightened up a bit more--some parts of it seem like they go on a bit longer than they need to. I have nothing against overly long songs--I listen to Symphony X, for God's sake, and I never complained about any of the gigantic ones you slipped into Unreality--but working on writing a novel has helped me to develop a bit of an understanding of the difference between "this is amazing, and more of it means it's even more amazing" length and "there is some fat here that can probably stand to be trimmed" length.

Even as it stands, though, this is still going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the day, now. I do hope you're happy.

Absolutely, like I said in the description... there's definitely more to it than a song being 20 minutes long versus twelve minutes long, more that they have enough actual content to justify their length. This one was from a phase of my songwriting in 2003 where I had two songs that were twelve minutes long back-to-back, and honestly felt that that was all right at the time but it's easy to see now that neither of them really needed to be. It wasn't until Unreality much later on that I'd do another album that had only one full song below five minutes long on it, and I think my... sense of length had improved enough by then to be actually justifiable that time.

That said, it was necessary to tab this out in order to update it (the tab itself is from a year or so ago) and I remember intending to edit it down but leaving all of it in there in the end, even adding sections (not in terms of length, just extra instruments to blank-sounding parts). So editing myself is not yet a strong point.

Editing is... I don't really know what to say for that, since I know what it's like to have and to not have that skill, but I have absolutely no idea how it changed for me. I remember when I first finished the rough draft of Nemesis and thought "this is 22,500 words compared to Our Father's 12,500, this is ridiculous, but that's okay because surely I'll edit it down" and then I... didn't. I went through it specifically looking for things to cut, and didn't find anything--like you, I even added a thing or two during the polishing. Now the trimmable moments are absolutely jumping out at me, and Nemesis is 6,000 words lighter so far and I'm not even done yet. (And I edited Our Father down to a little over 10,500, too. That wasn't even my goal--it was already the smallest chapter so I wasn't exactly going in there thinking "I need to edit this down" or anything. It just sort of happened when I excised the crappier parts and left the better stuff to stand on its own.)

I was about to say that you made My Children (Short Version) and therefore I'm sure editing is at least possible for you, but I actually really like the long version, too. On the other hand, I guess it's proof of the concept of content being more important than length, if I have no problem whatsoever with either of the two 20+ minute giants in Unreality yet I'm suggesting that this not-quite-twelve minute piece could be compressed a bit.

My Children was something of a special case, and fortunate that it was easy to edit down... it had both a more traditional song structure around it and the colossal sort of medley middle section, which I had been halfway through writing for ages and then had the luxury of just being able to go "Wow, I'm never going to finish this - forget the whole thing" and throw it out, then stitch the gap together, only later restoring what I had and finishing it for the "epic" version. As a result, the short version doesn't even have much of a solo and is still five minutes long... it sort of defies all time boundaries. I've actually attempted to do a shortened Find You, futile as the concept is - I just looked at it again, and seem to have managed to get it down to eight minutes. The interesting thing about that one is that I actually ended up making a few (short) alternative sections for it, because just compressing it didn't work... I should look at that again some time.

In a similar way, I think I'm going to be very interested to see how your chapters differ from the ones that I've read, now that the editing has taken place. I didn't notice any obvious sections that I imagine could have disappeared when I read it, so they'll most likely come as surprises to me.

Going back, I've found quite a lot of issues that are just... slightly bad form for writing, but I might have gotten away with them as my current audience isn't as critical as I am. (With the exception of Kyran, my friend who tends to be mercilessly abrasive with me anyway and therefore turned into my most brutally honest reviewer, who ended up spotting a lot of these issues....) However, I really need to try to make something flawless if I'm aiming as high as I am with this--I'm told that there usually isn't room for "good enough" in publishing! Think of it as... I guess a program that technically works but the code is dreadful would be a bad example, since in writing, the entire point is to be looking at the elegance of what I've written... maybe it's more like going back to try to XS a Trauma Center level on which I had previously gotten an A, or something. (Or maybe just S, since I'm sure I'll be doing this again and wringing even more out of it once the final four chapters are done as well and it's time to review the entire novel....)

Some of it may be comparatively minor in the actual writing compared to the thought process behind it--especially if I fixed a problem you weren't even aware was there in a scene you had already completely forgotten about or something--though there are one or two immediately obvious noticeable things as well. I was thinking of making a sort of change log to explain it all when I'm done and everything is released, if there's any interest in that sort of thing. :)

Meanwhile, I'm impressed that you got Find You down that small, especially because I really didn't think there was anything wrong with the full version!

Oh, and actually, speaking of My Children... have a listen to 12:27 again, now! I forgot about that connection until right now...

Well, how about that... I'm never going to be able to un-hear that, now.