hillvisions.com - Music

Foreword

I have been a musician for nearly twenty-five years, starting as a classical pianist and eventually taking up electric bass and guitar while moving towards jazz and modern genres. As long as I can remember, I have been composing and arranging music, though primarily for my own enjoyment. Unfortunately, much of my early work is lost to time, as I rarely recorded or transcribed songs when I was younger.

In recent years, I have made it a point to archive everything, including the many compositions that never evolve beyond a simple four-measure loop. (As I have no desire to harm your sanity, I will avoid publishing these silly exercises.)

While I still plan to create music primarily for my own listening, I feel it is selfish to keep my songs from people that might, in fact, enjoy them as well. So for anything that I believe meets a reasonable* bar of quality, I will publish it here as I have time.

(* Reasonable quality, in my book, is quite far from perfection or even production quality. While I try to clean up entries to remove obvious mistakes, some imperfections in performance should be expected.)

Equipment

Computers have been a constant companion in my journey to explore music. I still have the Commodore 64 and Amiga 1000 that occupied so much of my childhood. Assuming any of the floppy disks I have still contain valid data, I may try to recover some ancient pieces.

My current music production setup includes the following components:

About Numbering

You may notice the entries below are numbered. I never liked naming songs (in fact, my earliest songs had terrible names). In the late 1990s, I started assigning numbers to compositions. However, I changed schemes a few times, resulting in some reuse of numbers. When I first began using Reason for production in 2004, I set my counter at 100 in an attempt to provide enough room to account for all previous music. As I rediscover and publish old music, I will be reassigning numbers to preserve chronology as best as I can.

Copyright and Usage

Except where otherwise noted, all recordings available from this page were composed, arranged, mixed and mastered by Aaron Hill (Seraku). These works are protected under United States copyright law and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Creative Commons License

NOTE: While I would love the opportunity to provide custom music for a project (commercial or otherwise), I am not accepting any requests at this time.


 Year*GenreKeyMeterTempo InstrumentsComplete**Comments
100 (mp3)2004DiscoE minor 4/4120bpmSynth Pad, Organ, Strings, Brass, Flute, Bass, DrumsY

This was the first song I put together using Propellerheads Reason.
I created the rhythmic synth pad heard in the beginning by using the BV512 vocoder and a delayed copy of the first drum loop.

125 (mp3)2004PopDb major 4/4128bpmAcoustic piano, Synth, Brass, Bass, DrumsY

During the DDR/Stepmania craze, a classmate challenged me to write my own song for the game.
Following the trend of bubble-gum J-pop, I created an equally upbeat (though not nearly as fast) piece with an 80's pop feel.
I did track the song for use in Stepmania, but I have not been able to find the step file.

184 (mp3)2005JazzB minor 4/4118bpmAcoustic & electric piano, Bass, Drums 

The main chord progression takes a minimalistic approach by changing only one note from chord to chord.
Also, this song features the peculiar minor major 7th chord, with its jazzy dissonance.

(* Year refers to the original date of composition. Additional arranging, mixing and/or mastering may have been done to prepare the entry for download.)
(** Complete indicates a song that I feel needs no further work. Whereas, incomplete songs generally are missing some elements, such as intros and outros.)




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