Homestuck Vol. 1 - Commentary
1.5k words across 14 entries.
Homestuck Vol. 1 Homestuck Vol. 1 (album commentary) Listen on: YouTube (playlist)
Andrew Hussie: (MSPA news post, excerpt) captured 8/12/2009
Homestuck songs are finally available for download!
You can buy the songs through Bandcamp. I batted around a lot of ideas for downloading music, and ultimately decided selling them was the best way to go. This way we get to support the artists who did this excellent work, and generously volunteered their time to help me out with the story. As much as I like dispatching free entertainment for everybody, when it comes to stuff that I didn't make, I'd rather give artists the chance to profit from their work than casting it into the wind it for free!
But the songs are priced pretty reasonably, especially if you get the whole album. More songs will be added to it as the story goes. But really, the Homestuck music is the tip of the iceberg with respect to this larger, somewhat mysterious MSPA music project. There will be some more cool developments in the coming weeks and months, so keep an eye out!
edit: also thanks a bunch to Cindy for helping me set all this up!
Homestuck: (Bandcamp about blurb) captured 8/15/2009
> Purchase entire album and see what happens.
You decide to download the entire album and discover a sweet FREE BONUS TRACK you haven't heard in HOMESTUCK.
Today is truly your lucky day!
Homestuck: (Bandcamp credits blurb) captured 8/15/2009
Album tracks by:
Curt Blakeslee
Michael Guy Bowman
Malcolm Brown
George Buzinkai
Mark Hadley
Andrew Huo
Gabe Nezovic
Kevin Regamey
Homestuck: (whatpumpkin.com side blurb) captured 6/15/2010
The first official Homestuck album, which includes the music of Act 1 though early Act 2. This is the album that started it all.
Showtime (Piano Refrain) Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
To be honest, I've fallen off the MSPA train pretty hard. This has undoubtedly been the busiest year (or two) of my life, and I am only now returning to reacquaint myself with what the heck is up.
Malcolm wrote the chiptune version of Showtime first. I heard it, dug it, and created a piano arrangement just for the hell of it. Like Malcolm has said - earlier on, we didn't necessarily know what we were writing for, so we just wrote whatever spoke to us. I had posted a "Work in progress" version to the music boards, and I received some positive feedback. Positive enough for me to elaborate it into a full piece. As luck would have it, Andrew was finishing up the first playable page of Homestuck just as I posted the full version. As such, I was lucky enough to have the honour of first musical appearance in Homestuck, but most of the credit should certainly go to Malcolm - for defining John musically at such an early stage of the game, and for being the sole inspiration behind this track.
Oh, side note: My midi keyboard was misbehaving when I wrote this, so every note of the piece was clicked into a sequencer. D:
Harlequin Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
With the introduction of the harlequins around John's house in the comic, I was inspired to make a theme song for them. Since it was still early on in the comic, I decided to do it in an 8-bit style, and I figured that I could make remixes of it later if harlequins still turned out to be important in the comic. It turns out I didn't have to very much, since a lot of the other music team ended up remixing it! It still stands as my most favorite 8-bit melodies I've written.
Showtime (Original Mix) Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
Probably the first bit of music accepted for HS (The piano version came afterwards but was used in the comic earlier). Difficult to fully recall what was going on with this one, but from what we knew about John at this point (i.e. Bit of a prankster, likes his movies) there was something about the name and the melody that just fit.
Early on in HS Music dev, Andrew would basically announce "Need boss music for upcoming battle: go!" and we'd all whip up some music and present it. These days that doesn't happen any more (larger team, ludicrous amount of already made-but-not-used music) but back then it was a fresh slate. I personally whipped up 3 30-second 'Looping boss battle music in the style of NES chiptunes' as per the original request. (I think it was Andrew's idea to start things off chiptune style and we've been evolving since)
The other 2 unused tracks (Which I still have somewhere) were ok - One was very piratey but quite sinister, the other was incredibly evil sounding, but Showtime had that initial-boss 'fun-ness' to it and apparantly just hit all the right notes.
The melody itself is very simple: It's just a square wave doing some broken chords. For the album version we were told to add some bits to the loopable tracks to make 'em 2 minutes long and have a proper ending, so the album features an intro and second part with a little solo.
Sburban Jungle (Brief Mix) Listen on: YouTube
At this point I was just giddy about the release of "Sburban Jungle", although the version that appears here is deliberately truncated. The full version later released on Volume 4 was already fully written at this point, although we figured that it would be best to give only a taste and otherwise save it for later.
Aggrieve (Violin Refrain) Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
Ahh, the glory days, when we had no idea we were going on a universe-destroying/creating adventure, or even a world-destroying one. This was when the music team's main scoop on the kids was that they were going to have theme instruments that somehow function as their weapons or special abilities as well, although I guess this has only mostly come to fruition with Dave's turntables. Well, I'm primarily a violinist, and Rose's instrument was to be violin/strings, so this was right up my alley. I love just randomly improvising on the violin, exploring different poetic areas, if you will, and coming up with things that sounded beautiful to me. At this time in particular, I was doing that a lot. Hadley's Aggrieve was created first in this case, and I had roughly dictated it, so I knew the notes. I fooled around with it a couple of times, playing with a haunting/sad-but-hopeful tone, and the arrangement that you hear was recorded literally the first time it was played - the first time those notes were played in that rhythm, tone and order was the same time it was recorded. That version, cut, is what you hear in the comic. I reverse-engineered the sheet music from my own recording to do a recording for the album. Unfortunately, I was, and I suppose am still today, new to the recording game, and so there are mistakes I cringe at in both the comic and album versions. Gabe Nezovic's mastering helps to cover most of it, but I still feel kind of guilty about it. Oh well.
Sburban Countdown Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
I really liked Sburban Jungle and felt it was iconic enough to be considered a theme song for Sburb (not just the loading screen as it was originally presented). Since the ending scene for Act 1 was an early pivotal moment in the game, I tried to make something that sounded like Sburban Jungle, but clearly felt like time was ticking away to something big. It's a lot to try and cram into a little over 30 seconds, but I did my best.
Aggrieve Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
This was actually the first Homestuck-related thing I made, when Andrew asked us all to come up with some battle themes. Originally I titled it "Aggress" as a Problem Sleuth homage, but changed the name to "Aggrieve" once the attack command in John's first strife was revealed. Out of all my songs, this one holds a special place for me since it was the first one I did for Homestuck.
Showtime (Imp Strife Mix) Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
I wrote this after listening to the original song for HOURS. I do believe this was what originally got me to send music to Andrew Hussie in a fan-mail and got me writing music for the project. It came down to the thought, "I wonder what that would sound like if I re-wrote it in my software." However, as with most of my obsessions, I got well carried away with it.
Nannaquin Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
A "Harlequin" remix obviously. In order to give it an old-timey feel, I used sounds of a saloon piano and a muted trumpet. Once it was done, I ran it through a filter to make it sound... less good (pitch warping and reducing the bass) and added a loop of some vinyl pops and cracks. For the soundtrack version, I added the needle coming down onto the record at the beginning, and then I thought it would be fun to end it by having the record skip before the needle is pulled off the record. Needless to say, this was fun to make.
Skies of Skaia Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube
Andrew originally did the first update in the comic about Skaia without music, but when I saw the first look we were given of Skaia, I knew something so central to the story needed a theme song. I envisioned something calm and peaceful, with a mixture of wonder and mystery. I quickly wrote Skies of Skaia and presented it to Andrew, who was able to go back and put the music in place. Writing this was a real highlight for me, and at the time it felt like my greatest accomplishment.
Homestuck Vol. 1
Main album (1–10)
Bonus tracks (11–11)