20.02.24 – Latest music releases

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Hello, everybody!

For a while towards the end of last year, I didn’t release much music, as I had so little time to practise/compose/record. Thanksfully, I’ve had a bit more time recently and have managed to release four videos, three of them original music and one cover.

The first release was a piano piece of my own called ‘Let the Scheming Begin’. It’s a character piece and is related to a piece I released at the end of 2022 called ‘Inexorable Force’. It shows a different side of the same character.

Next up was the orchestral version of the aforementioned ‘Inexorable Force’. It’s the music that would play for the final battle with the main villain of a game. It took me a couple of months working on it every night to get the orchestration sounding how I wanted. I expect if I return to it with more experience, I’ll make some subtle changes, but I’m very happy with how it turned out.

Before I started work on that orchestral version, I’d actually made a prog-rock version of the same piece, largely inspired by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, as are many final boss themes in Japanese RPGs. I ended up releasing it a week later than the orchestral version as I’ got so focused on working on that one that I hadn’t thought to release this one. I hope this, the orchestral version, and the original piano solo will serve as an interesting example of how multiple arrangements of the same piece can be made.

Finally, I just released a piano arrangement of Motoi Sakuraba’s ‘Majula’, from Dark Souls 2. It took a while before I was happy with this and there’s still one section that I’m, unsure of. Generally, I’m pleased with it.

While I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up a schedule of one release a week, I hope to keep things more regular than before.

Re-release: An Ill Presence (orchestrated)

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Hello, everybody! While I’m not a huge Halloween person, I do like horror media, so thought I’d work on some creepy music this month. My first release is actually a re-release. Just over two years ago, I released a piano album and not long after I started to orchestrate some of the pieces from it.

One of the earliest was ‘An Ill Presence’. Listening back recently, it sounds excessively harsh, and at the same time, quite muddy. The panning of the instruments is also fairly arbitrary. I decided to remix it with the knowledge I’ve gained in the last couple of years and feel that it sounds much better now.

So here is ‘An Ill Presence’, arranged for piano, violin, flute, and oboe. There are two versions. The first has emulated tape wobble:

The second version has no tape wobble, as I know it can be disorienting for some people, especially if they’re listening in headphones:

Please let me know what you think!

New track – Life

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Hello, everybody! It’s been a while since I last released any new music. Here is a new track, released in two different flavours, subtle, and unsubtle! The latter has a lot more mangling done to the sounds.

You can listen on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist…

If you prefer to download, you can do so from Bandcamp, where it’s available in ‘pay what you want’ format (that includes free, if you prefer not to pay): https://nicholasowen-petch.bandcamp.com/album/life

Piano cover: Evil Boss Pig from Tombi!

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Hi, everybody!

It’s been a while since I posted any music. I’ve had relatively little time to practise or compose recently and most of the time I have had has gone into learning to sight read better. That said, I have made a video of the boss theme from the PSOne game Tombi, an old favourite of mine. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it!

Performance of ‘Is It Over?’ and first album available as ‘pay what you want’

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Hello, everybody! I have a new performance video. It’s a slightly truncated version of my own composition ‘Is It Over?’. Truncated due to the fact that the ending is designed to run straight into another piece of music and doesn’t work if this one is standalone. I’d noticed that I’d done a lot of covers on my channel recently, so decided to get something original done.

Piano arrangement: Quiet Withdrawal from Tormented Souls

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Hi, everybody! I finished a piano arrangement I’ve been working on and just released a performance video of it. The track is ‘Quiet Withdrawal’ from the video game ‘Tormented Souls’. It was a request from someone who follows me on YouTube.

I tried pushing and pulling the timing a bit so as not to be too metronomic – I’d be interested to hear whether people think it sounds good or if it just sounds out of time.

100 Subscribers on YouTube and some music previews

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Hello everybody! It’s been quite a long time since I last posted as I’ve been very busy and have had little time for music outside of teaching.

I recently became aware that I now have more than 100 subscribers on my YouTube channel, so I made a video to say thank you and to share previews of a few of my upcoming projects! I’ll be glad to hear what you think of them!

Inexorable Force – new composition

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Hello, everybody!

It’s been a while since I last released any music – my most recent was my EP about six weeks ago. After the relative simplicity of the EP, I wanted to go in the other direction and work on something much more musically complex. I’m happy to present the results of that work in my latest video!

This piece, Inexorable Force, is my attempt to capture chaos in musical form without going completely abstract. For the average listener, there are still plenty of hooks, as I’ve gone by the adage of making anything that supposed to be clever also be catchy. For the theory loving musicians, I think there’s a lot of interest.

The main riff in this piece came about by a small challenge I set myself – to write a rhythm in 5/4 time that doesn’t split up the quavers into 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 groupings. I ended up going for 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 1 2 3 and started to think of the time signature as being 10/8. Then I was curious about adding one more beat into the next bar to add to the feeling of chaos. I built on this and ended up using frequent time signature changes, irregular numbers of bars for some phrases, plenty of chromaticism, and some quartal harmony for further strangeness. I’m really happy with the final result!

I’ll be releasing the track on Bandcamp as soon as I get the notation finished.

New EP released and anniversary of my first album!

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Hello, everybody!

I’m delighted to announce the release of my latest EP, Moments of Safety! It’s currently available to purchase on Bandcamp, and will be up on YouTube and Spotify in the coming days. Here’s the link to buy: https://nicholasowen-petch.bandcamp.com/album/moments-of-safety

This EP is something I’d thought about writing for a while. I love the ‘safe room’ themes from classic Resident Evil games and decided that I wanted to do my own take on them.

Additionally, the idea of safety took on new meaning to me earlier this year – I was living in Kyiv in February when the Russian military started its renewed invasion of Ukraine and I know the terror of waking up at 5am to explosions. Sheltering in an underground car park never felt entirely safe, but it was with trepidation that we ventured outside when the air raid warnings had finished. While two of these tracks were written in Kyiv before the invasion, they developed nuances of emotion that they didn’t have before in the time since.

An interesting aspect of these themes from the old Resident Evil games (and some other survival horror) is that they’re usually quite simple – just a few chords with memorable melodies (and orchestrated beautifully). At the same time, they capture both feelings of comfort and unease – for me, it’s quite incredible how effectively they do this. In my writing, I tend to go quite complex and often have to pull myself back from that. Here was a challenge for me – how could I simplify my writing for each track without making it boring, and how could I write multiple tracks without falling back on the same ideas and chord progressions?

I’m satisfied with the results – each track is quite different from anything I’ve previously written but still sounds like me. In the end, whether this music is effectively written or not is up to each and every person who listens. 

In addition to the new release, today is the anniversary of my first solo album, Let the Journey Begin! The last year has been a very long one and I barely remember frantically trying to release that before moving to Kyiv. I’ve learnt a lot about composition since then and plan to learn even more in the coming year. Thanks for all of the support thus far – I hope you’ll continue to find my music engaging and interesting!

Clockwork Sanctuary (performance)

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Good morning, everybody! I have a new video this week, a performance of my composition, Clockwork Sanctuary. It’s far from a perfect performance, but I decided to post it anyway, as I’m tired of the requirement for perfection that is so prevalent when it comes to performances. I much prefer being a studio musician and teaching, and I don’t enjoy performing – these videos I make are a challenge to myself to at least develop the skill of performing a bit.

I hope that you can enjoy it despite the flaws! It’s a lot of fun to leap around the piano, but I’ve practised it so much recently that I need a break from it!