Playstation, 2000
I've been a fan of music creation programs and games since as far back as Mario Paint for the Super Nintendo. While it's very fun to create your own songs, it's usually a very time intensive venture as well. How well your songs turn out usually depend on how much patience you have. You can either take your time and carefully place beats and riffs in precisely the right spot, or you can just haphazardly slap whatever wherever you want. Apparently, I had a lot of patience in the year 2000, because I played the crap out of MTV Music Generator that year. Well, it probably also helped that I had nothing better to do, too, but mostly, yeah, that patience thing.
Now, that's not to say that I think the songs I made with this game are some sort of lost musical treasures that the whole world would be better off for having heard them, but I do know that I put a LOT of time into this game. So much time, in fact, that I made an entire album's worth of material. Having recently revisited the songs that I made, I can say that the quality of them varies from "cheesy good" to "meh".
You don't exactly have infinite musical genres to choose from here. You're mostly limited to techno, house, and trance type stuff (thankfully, dubstep wasn't a thing yet), but they throw in enough variety to keep you interested. I must admit, I usually stay as far away from those genres as possible, but the process of laying out the songs from top to bottom make it bearable. And you have a very impressive amount of beats, riffs, and embellishments to choose from for a mere Playstation 1 game. After you've completed a song, there's also an option to create a video for it. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about the video making process, it's basically just a kaleidoscoping screensaver. Simple, but effective if you're in the right mood.
As I previously mentioned, I was recently able to revist the songs I made when I found the cassette tape I had recorded them to. Thankfully, I had even written down the names I had given the songs. There's no way I'd have remembered them otherwise. Not only that, but I also came to discover that I had actually named the album, something I had completely forgotten.
Yep, I named the album after a quote from the 1989 Batman movie. With song names like "Ode to Breast" and "Miracle Whip", I guess we can come to the conclusion that I was on "weird name" kick at the time. After transferring the songs to MP3s, I figured I'd get some Photoshop practice in and created an album cover so that at least some kind of picture was displayed when these songs popped up on my iPod. I didn't spend too much time on it, but I figured I'd share the final product.
Well, I guess the only thing left is to give you a taste of some of the songs that can be found on the "album". I know that I have more reason to listen to and like these songs than anyone else does, but if for whatever reason you'd like to hear more, you can contact me here and we'll work something out.
Radio Goo:
Hast:
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