I just released a new chiptune track that I wrote while out on the road with nothing but my laptop, headphones and a 2 octave MIDI controller. It’s called Battle of the Earworms.
Click the image to download on Bandcamp. You can also find the track on your streaming platform of choice. Hope you enjoy!
I designed the art in Photoshop, using a photo of my ear and the pencil tool. Drawing pixel art is fun!
A couple of years ago, I created a video series called From Scratch where I composed/produced a new track in a short session and captured the entire process. I’ve been wanting to bring the series back, but since the video editing process is so time consuming I’ve decided to live stream the sessions instead.
I did my first stream in this series yesterday and it was really fun! I created two different tracks, which are available to download on this page.
I hope to do this regularly from now on. Old streams will not be public on YouTube, but I’ll keep them as unlisted videos on this playlist so you can still watch them if you’d like.
Here’s yesterday’s stream:
Hope to see you in the next one!
Happy to share my arrangement of the Sunken Frigate track from Metroid Prime, soon to be released on the Gamechops label!
I wanted the video to be fun and incorporate the visor-scanning element that is such a major mechanic of the game. I created all the scanning overlays in Photoshop using screenshots of the game as a reference. My talented friend John Thompson shot and edited the footage.
You can pre-save the track on Spotify here: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/glasysandgamechops/metroid-prime-frigate
It’ll be available on all platforms on June 9th.
Here’s a new tune I wrote this week, titled The Ghosts of Our Past Selves.
You can download the track (and many, many more) on my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/glasys
Your support is extremely appreciated!
Gear & software used:
Hardware - Moog Matriarch, Arturia Microbrute, Sequential Prophet XL, Therevox ET-5.3, Chase Bliss MOOD and Thermae, Neunaber Immerse.
Software - NI Battery 4, Cineharps, Audio Modeling SWAM Viola & Cello, Arturia Mellotron V, Steinberg Retrologue and more.
Hope you enjoy!
An original piece of music that's designed to look like a dragon when viewed in a spectrogram (a picture of sound). I call it Spectro Dragon.
You may have seen that video I posted recently where I open my MIDI art in a spectrogram. I thought it looked pretty cool, and since then I've been wanting to create a piece of music that's specifically designed to be a spectrogram drawing. After a few days of work, these are the results!
The creation process was similar to MIDI art (I actually first composed it as a MIDI art piece), with a few key differences:
1. Since this is a visual representation of SOUND (and not just MIDI data) I didn't have to limit myself to a keyboard and I could use my voice (whistling, singing) and as many different sound layers as I wanted for the arrangement. All sounds here are performed either with my voice, keyboards or Therevox.
2. In a MIDI piano roll, all you see is the separate note blocks, but in a Spectrogram you can see pitch bends so I tried to utilize vibrato and portamento to create curved details in the dragon.
3. The types of sounds I used were very important - they had to be fairly dark, with few harmonics (especially on the low end) because brighter sounds have many more harmonics that show up in the spectrogram and obscure the drawing. The biggest challenge here was finding sounds that worked (without limiting myself only to boring sine waves).
BTW, I know some artists have hidden images in their music before using tools that convert photos to frequencies, but those just sound like random noises and I wanted this to sound like music. In other words, I couldn't rely on any "tools" and I created this from scratch (just like my MIDI art) using my experience in composition, counterpoint and music theory - as well as a healthy dose of trial and error to get the desired shapes. :)
After a pretty hectic year of touring and many other projects, I’m glad to finally share my finished 8-bit album titled Tugging on My Heartchips!
This album is mainly inspired by the Gameboy games from my childhood. As a kid, the only gaming console I had was the original gray Gameboy which I spent countless hours playing. Some of those games had incredible soundtracks (Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge are two examples) and I’d often turn on my Gameboy just to listen to the music! No joke, some of those themes would make me tear up.
I tried to capture those magical, nostalgic feelings in this 7 track album. Six of the tracks are original compositions and one is a chiptune arrangement of a Chopin Prelude (which I released as a single a few weeks ago).
Hope you enjoy! Click the cover art to stream or download the album. Thanks for your support. :)
The cover art was drawn by the amazing pixel artist Danc3r.
As a kid, I would often go to my parent’s orchestra rehearsals (they’re both string players), sit on the highest seat of the empty theater and play my Gameboy. I’ll never forget the magical feeling of being immersed in the beautiful, warm sounds of a live orchestra while enjoying my favorite video games. I asked Danc3r to recreate that setting for the album cover and he absolutely nailed it.
Happy to share the full version of my 8-bit arrangement of Chopin’s Prelude in B-Flat Minor!
You may have seen the shorter version of this arrangement that I created last year, but now that I’m working on a chiptune album I finally had a good reason to finish it.
Here’s my live performance of the lead:
And here’s the cover art I made for it, based on Maria Wodzinska's famous painting of Chopin. Click the art to be directed to Bandcamp where you can buy the track:
You can also find the track on Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming platforms.
New single from my upcoming 8-bit album is out now!
It’s called Gargoyle and you can stream it on Spotify and Apple, or if you’re feeling extra supportive you can buy it on Bandcamp.
Also, check out the video I made for this song. For the first time ever, I animated my live MIDI art! Watch it here.
Happy spooky season! :)
Happy to share my biggest video project to date, I spent countless hours drawing pixel art from scratch and animating it frame by frame to create a GameBoy-style experience.
The tune is my latest single called New World Unlocked which is now available on streaming platforms (links below).
My main inspiration for both the music and art is the GB games I grew up on - Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania and Mario (to name a few). I learned a TON from this animation process and I hope to create more pixel art in the future.
Special thanks to John Thompson (Ballooga Media) for shooting and editing the real-life camera scenes so well.
Hope you enjoy!
Today I released my new compilation album Off Screen - Video Recordings (Vol. 2) which has over 30 tracks and represents close to 2 years of music from my YouTube channel!
I also published a video of my latest Metroid live arrangement (which is included in the compilation). This is Magmoor Caverns, AKA Ridley’s Hideout:
If you wanna check out the new album, I recommend the Bandcamp version because it has the most tracks. But it’s also available on Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming platforms.
You can also get all my tracks as downloads if you support me on Patreon.
I’m back with more Metroid! This is a live arrangement of the Dairon theme, which was my favorite track in the game:
You can get this track (and two others) immediately if you preorder my new compilation album Off Screen - Video Recordings, Vol. 2 - out March 26th. An additional Metroid cover will be released on the same day.
Click the art to preorder on Bandcamp:
I finally opened a merch store! Featuring my MIDI art and my amazing wife's pixel art synth design. Link: https://glasys-merch.myshopify.com/
17 different products to choose from, and I'll be adding more.
Hope you find something you like! Every purchase will go a long way towards supporting my work.
I was challenged on TikTok to draw a Skull in MIDI, live. After I posted that, people demanded a full version of the resulting tune.
Well, I’m happy to let you know that it’s ready! Click the image to download.
The song is free, but if you enjoy what I do please consider buying one of my albums on Bandcamp (click here) or supporting me on Patreon (click here). Your support is extremely appreciated, thanks!
UPDATE: The song is now available on Spotify (and other streaming platforms).
I got a ton of questions about my live MIDI art videos, so I made a full tutorial! In this video, I create one of these MIDI pieces from scratch and share my entire process. Hope you enjoy!
I remember seeing some incredible MIDI Art on YouTube years ago and thinking to myself - Man it would be SO AWESOME to try and create something like that live - record the notes from a MIDI keyboard in one take as opposed to drawing them one by one with a mouse. However, I was so busy with other things at the time (and it seemed like such a daunting undertaking) that I never really attempted it. That is, until last month.
I was feeling hyped for the upcoming Metroid game and I made a video where I draw Metroid MIDI art with my keyboard - it took me a few days of experimentation and practice to get it down but it was a lot of fun. My intention was to do it once and then get back to my regular performance videos - but the response was really great, so I decided to make a Zelda themed one as well.
What happened next completely caught me by surprise - the Zelda video did incredibly well (especially on TikTok) amassing hundreds of thousands of views within a few hours. I received TONS of requests for more MIDI art. So since then, I’ve published a bunch of these videos (with many more on the way), and the last couple have surpassed one million views on TikTok. I mean… Wow. I still can’t believe it!
I would like to point out that I’m not the first to do live MIDI art - Jacob Collier did a couple of videos where he draws text on his screen this way, and he definitely inspired and motivated me to finally give that idea I had years ago a shot. There may have been others who attempted it before as well that I’m unaware of. Regardless, I’m having a BLAST making these, I’m SUPER grateful for the amazing support and response, and I have no intentions of stopping anytime soon.
Watch a YouTube playlist of my live MIDI art here:
I’m back with more Metroid! Nintendo just announced a brand new Metroid game coming out later this year, I’m super hyped for it and it feels like a good time to revisit another great tune from the iconic series.
As usual, all sounds performed live simultaneously in one take. Hope you enjoy!
I paired the Roli LUMI Keys MIDI controller with the Sequential Prophet 6 analog synth (which now supports MPE) and created a few short compositions using this combo.
The LUMI's polyphonic aftertouch and the ability to pitch-shift every key separately makes the Prophet 6 feel like an entirely new, way more expressive instrument - I found these new dimensions really inspiring.
All tunes and sounds performed live, no overdubs or sequences. Hope you enjoy!
I had a strange idea the other day - what if I could somehow play the Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda themes at the same time on piano?
I spent a few days creating this arrangement and practicing it, and here are the results - hope you like it! :)
I’ve always LOVED the incredibly eerie and beautiful soundtrack to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (composed by the amazing Koji Kondo), so I figured it was about time to cover a tune from the game!
This is my live arrangement of the Clock Tower theme AKA Song of Healing.
I tried to stay faithful to the original arrangement in the first part, but then I took it in my own direction. The finger drumming beat mainly consists of various clock samples, which I thought was fitting for a game where time is always running out.
All sounds performed simultaneously in one take. More technical details in the YouTube description.
I just got back home after 6 weeks of performances with Todd Rundgren in Chicago (Clearly Human Virtual Tour). It was such an incredible experience!
Between shows, I had the opportunity to collaborate with fellow band member and incredible singer Mia Jones. With nothing but a 2 octave keyboard and USB microphone, we wrote a Lo-Fi / Soul song together in one short session and documented the process.
We later played the song for Todd and the band and captured their reaction as well.
Check it out here:
Hope you enjoy!
A huge thanks to Mia for making music with me!