Hugi - MP3 Power by Magic of Nah-Kolor
Prologue
After the release of Hugi#32 I wondered why some good MP3's were not included in Hugi because it was actually possible to load a MP3 externally when starting Hugi. After all who doesn't like a quality MP3 to listen to when reading an article? Adok comments: "External MP3s selected by the user worked, but it did not work if the MP3's were specified in config.txt". We of Hugi share the opinion you deserve the best so we asked the coder Chris Dragan to fix this problem. And thus, from this issue on, Hugi will offer some great MP3 tracks for you to listen to! Let's introduce the three guest musicians in this issue of Hugi to you.
Introducing...
- Siatek of Nah-Kolor composed an uplifting tune named 'Beyond'. In the past he amongst others made the tracks for the PC demos Fears and Squash by Nah-Kolor.
- Buzzer & Mice of Brainstorm with an amazing electric guitar track called 'Ballad'. In the recent past Buzzer made the music for the Traction & Brainstorm entry for The Ultimate Meeting 2006 called Fascination. Mice made the music for the Brainstorm productions Solaris andAny Color.
- Chromag of Rebels first donated a pretty relaxed track called 'Hug Me'. But later on it was decided that this MP3 would be used for a Rebels musicdisk so he then composed 'Diskmag Desaster', which is actually better and more suitable for a diskmag in our opinion :) Recently Chromag also made the music for a Rebels demo called 'Reshape' and a Rebels intro called 'Mite'.
The Musicians Speak Out
In the following lines you can read some words written by the authors themselves:
Siatek:
"Hello, my name is Zbigniew Siatecki and my nickname in the demoscene is Siatek. I'm 26 years old and living in Warsaw/Poland. Actually I'm not active in the demoscene anymore but for Nah-Kolor I always have time to do somethning becouse this is the best group in the world... Actually I am working in game development here in Poland. After hours I'm working on my first music album or playing Battlefield 2 :)
It is difficult to say how long I worked on this track. I have a lot unfinished tracks or ideas on my hardisk. For example the first part of this track I made a long, long, long, long, long time ago (about 2 years). I returned to it few weeks ago and made a sketch of this song (the improvisation set). Then when Magic asked me to support Hugi#33, I just finished it in few days. Generally I use Ableton Live 5. This is a really cool application for crazy people like me :) I prefer the hardware synthesizer so most of the instruments you hear are generated by the Korg MicroX synthetizer. I also used Yamaha CS1x and some VSTI (minimogue VA, mda ePiano and a lot of Ableton built-in effects)."
Buzzer:
"Hi! I don't really know what to tell about myself but I am Buzzer, 30 years, from Finland and I am in Brainstorm & Zenon. The co-op with Mice was quite flexible and easy to do. We took about three weeks to make it, we are so lazy at composing :) The main program we used was Reason 3.0, sampled & mastered with Wavelab 5.0. I did the background work and Mice played the guitar."
Mice:
"Hi, my name is Mice. Finnish member of Brainstorm (pc) and Zenon (amiga), age 27, hobbies include drinking, composing and drawing ugly graphics. It's always a pleasure to work with Buzzer. You should wait for more tunes from us in the future. We composed everything fifty-fifty, I played the guitars then Buzzer played synths, simple as that. To make the MP3 I used a lot of coffee and cigarettes + some alcohol... Also my 7-string guitars, boss gt-3 guitar effects processor and wavelab for recording.. I played the guitar, it took me about 2mins. You know, I played everything in 1000x speed, then slowed it down digitally. I guess it took a month or something to complete the whole song."
Chromag:
"My name is Chromag and I'm a member of Rebels. I'm a member of the computer scene since about 1988 and used to be famous for composing loads of diskmag tunes on the Amiga. This is my first diskmag track on PC. I used cubase and some vst-instruments. No audio-samples used, it's all midi. I don't quite remember well but I think it was about two weeks I composed Hug Me. Most of the time spent on listening to the track rather than producing it, though. Once there is the main theme, it's just pure boredom working on putting together different parts and mixing it." After some time though, Hug Me was given to a Rebels music disk and Chromag composed a new MP3 for Hugi #33 called Diskmag Desaster. Chromag: "It took me about a month to finish this track I used a standard midi sequencer and several nice vst-plugins. The acoustic-guitar loop at the beginning of the track is sampled."
(See a full interview with Chromag somewhere else in this issue of Hugi -ed)
Epilogue
All in all we choose a slightly bigger filesize in favour of some quality music! Size does matter, doesn't it? Press 1, 2 or 3 to toggle between the MP3's. Enjoy while reading this issue of Hugi!