I wrote another song! I actually wrote the lyrics for this a few years ago, but I was listening to Neil Baldwin chiptunes while I was crawling the final dungeon in Bravely Default when I heard the title track to Shadow Skimmer.
Never heard of this game, but it was for the Commodore 64, and that’s a pretty badass looking title screen, so I bet it’s cool. The music, in any case, IS AMAZING. Neil Baldwin is definitely my favorite chiptunes composer after Nobuo Uematsu. And considering that I have his standing permission to record music with his compositions, I listen to his stuff a LOT.
I started humming along to the song immediately, and then I realized that these old Doctor Who lyrics I had that I never did anything with would fit PERFECTLY. And they DID, too, I barely had to rewrite anything. It was like they were meant to be together!
Clearly, I need to write a whole bunch of other Doctor Who songs to go with it, and then I can stage a Doctor Who rock opera. Wouldn’t Doctor Who make a great rock opera?
Another song using the Magician soundtrack as a backing track for new vocals!
I’ve been having a lot of fund writing these, actually. But after doing some research on the game Magician, whose excellent soundtrack I have been using, I discovered that the composer, Neil Baldwin, was still active in the world of chiptunes and had a website.
This caused me to take pause. Here was an active, excellent composer, and here was I, using his work to write weird music. So I decided to email him and give him the chance to tell me to stop posting my weird mashups on YouTube before he stumbled across one on the internet and sent me a cease and desist order from a scary Nintendo lawyer.
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Hi!
My name is [RPG Rabbit], and I’m a nerdy singer from Oregon.
Last week, my friends and I were playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to NES soundtracks (like you do) when the soundtrack to the 1991 game Magician came up on our playlist. The title screen track was AMAZING, and I turned to my friend and said, “If this song had vocals, it would sound like a Muse track, and it would rock even harder.” It kept getting stuck in my head with a melody that would go with it, and I ended up writing lyrics and recording a song with it. After posting the resultant track on YouTube to share with friends, I started doing some research about the artist and discovered your site.
I have no desire to make money from your work or steal it or offend you in any way, because I think you’re an excellent composer, and the Magician soundtrack is REALLY good. So I decided to shoot you this email. I’ve linked you to the song below. If you don’t like it or feel it infringes upon your rights as an artist or anything, I will absolutely remove the video from YouTube. I love writing music, but I can’t play any instruments terribly proficiently and I don’t currently have any other musicians to collaborate with on writing music. I love the idea of using chiptunes as backing tracks for song writing experimentation, but I have the utmost respect for other artists, and I don’t want to upset anyone, so if this is in any way an issue, I will keep such experimentation with your music to myself.
You’re a wonderful composer! Thanks for all your work.
Sincerely,
[RPG Rabbit]
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Even if he never wrote back, I’d covered my butt by sending it, and if he asked me to take them down, I figured I could just record the songs on my own and not put them on the interwebs. To my pleasant surprise, I soon received a reply!
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Hi [RPG Rabbit],
Wow, that’s made me think of that track in a totally different light. Great job 🙂
No problem at all with you doing this and no problem with the YouTube upload – in fact I’m very flattered and happy that you found inspiration from it.
Take care and have fun with your recordings!
Neil
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Squee! I was so excited! Approval and praise from a real composer! FTW!
This is actually related to video games this time!
I can’t play any instruments proficiently yet, but I discovered that it’s really fun to write lyrics and melodies to go along with old 8-bit chiptunes tracks. This will probably sound better when I get a microphone that doesn’t suck, but I’m pretty pleased with it as a first try.