Album projects, New song(s)

2019 in a Nutshell

This year we celebrate 10 years of DJ the S – and thus 10 years of music. And we do so with music (huge surprise, I know!), namely medleys featuring songs that appeared in each year. I call this project: 10 Years in a Nutshell!

The actual starting point is actually a bit vague. I remember making baby steps with remixing somewhere in the summer of 2009. The first video on my channel that survived the time is from the end of 2009, so we start counting with 2010 as a reference date.

So the basic idea is that each song of the project is a medley featuring a selection of songs from a specific year. We start with 2019 and end with 2010, so we can say: As we move forward, we go back (I always wanted to say that).

Today we’re starting off with 2019 in a Nutshell. This medley features:

  • Fate Administrator
  • A Formidable Foe Emerges
  • Wolfen Mercenaries 2019
  • High Quality 2
  • Dededelicious
  • Coconut Tower
  • Night of the Vampire
  • Shadow Ridley (from Clad in Shadow Vol. 2)

I’ve been wondering a lot how to feature these songs in a medley, for some I’m using the same sounds as in the original mix, for some I try some other things. There’s a lot of difficulties making such medley, regarding tempo, style, scale and transitions, so I’ll have to try to find songs that work well together, while still trying to feature as many cool tunes as possible. It’s always going to be a bit of a compromise I think.

For this one, Wolfen Mercenaries might be the odd one out, but all in all I think I got the transitions down well enough. Let’s hear it:

2019 in a Nutshell (1838 downloads )

As usual, there’s a video too:

And that’s one down. I’m not sure if I can stick to the 2 week schedule during this project – I’ll try, but bear with me if a few of them take a week longer than usual.

This project is basically a big celebration, so make yourselves comfortable and enjoy – we’ll finish this eventually ; )

New song(s)

Crossing the Dark Road 2020

I’m finally back and as announced, we start 2020 with a remake of one of my most popular songs: Crossing the Dark Road 2020.

I don’t know how or when the popularity of that song exploded, but for a good while now I regularly get some non-English comments mentioning “zeta”. A quick Google search couldn’t really give me any lead on that, so if anyone can shed some light on that (in English preferably), it would be greatly appreciated.

Either way, the song was originally a remix of Bowser’s Road, the remake adds Bowser’s Theme from Super Mario 64 to the mix. What I didn’t expect: the song really didn’t seem to have as much potential for improvement as I was hoping for. It seems to have aged rather well, so the only thing I could do was changing around the mixing and a few instruments a bit. Unsure if it’s actually an improvement though, but judge for yourself:

Crossing the Dark Road 2020 (2304 downloads )

Can’t say the video is anything to write home about either, but here it is:

Next up is this year’s special project, which should be rather interesting. But you’ll hear more about that next time!

Album projects

Best of 2019

As announced last time, the Best of album has been released a little later this time – but the wait is over, it’s finally here!

2019 was a somewhat rocky year, with a few unplanned delays and a month-long hiatus. There were a few surprises, songs that worked out quite well and songs that had to be salvaged for a release. To sum it up, I think it was a “meh” year in terms of music.

Despite all that, I still think a lot of the 2019 tunes actually turned out pretty cool. My personal favorites this year are hard to pick, but I’d say Night of the Vampire, Coconut Tower and especially Wolfen Mercenaries 2019 get my vote.

As usual the album features all songs of 2019 which aren’t already on another album (like the Clad in Shadow songs). The songs have been re-rendered for maximum quality and are available on bandcamp in different formats.

As usual, some of the songs got a little makeover for the Best of release – I went all out this time and tried to improve a lot of songs. Some songs got a new intro, like Time to Battle 2 and Night of the Vampire (actually got the Entrance Theme from Super Castlevania IV as an intro) among other changes, Dancing Through Grunty’s Lair 2019 got Treasure Trove Cove, etc. Wolfen Mercenaries 2019 is a bit of a special case, as this album-exclusive version is basically the Surprise Edit with Corneria – so a fusion of both versions we had this year.

Of course these improvements are somewhat subjective – so you might not agree that the album version is better. But we can agree that it’s different at least~

Here’s where you can get the album, it will be available for free for a limited amount of time (just type 0,00 when asked for the price):

I just received 1,000 download credits for free downloads because you guys were very supportive and bought a bunch of my albums, so this should last a while! Finally, here’s the video. I tried to showcase the changes specifically as usual:

And that was 2019! As for 2020: I think we’ll start off the years with a nice little remake of one of my most popular songs before we dive right into this year’s big project. I got something very big and special planned, I sure hope I’ll be able to pull it off! After all it’s our 10th anniversary ; )

Video game remixes, medleys and crossovers