Whelp, I’ve been putting off posting this one to my website because I am exceedingly proud of this little ditty, and I really, really wanted to say something nice about it as part of the update/notification that it had been posted. Turns out I have neither the time nor the mental energy to pen something worthwhile, so we’re going with drivel.
It’s drivel all the way down, sorry.
I love this piece, love it more than a little, and I remain more than a little surprised that it came out of my brain. This piece. This little bit of outro music to run at the end of each chapter of my audiobook is wonderful. It captured everything I wanted to say with it.
I should make a stab at backing up and making sense of this drivel. (Yes, I’m running with drivel, running it straight into the ground.)
So back in the day when I still had more energy than good sense, when the weight of a cruel, sadistic, and uncaring world had yet to beat me entirely into the dust, I wanted to do an audiobook. It was on my list along with making music—penning sonatinas because they were foreboden—doing a web comic and writing stories.
So, a big part of the audiobook—since I was going to post it at the rate of one chapter per week on my website—was the music. There had to be intro music. There had to be outro music, and it had bloody well better be good. Whatever was my damn master’s degree in music composition for if I couldn’t do something useful with it like compose a bit of intro and outro music for chapters of a stupid audiobook that absolutely nobody was ever going to hear?
Writing good music was not a sure thing, but that’s a digression without a purpose in this forsaken day and age.
So, the outro music got written, and it was perfect. It dipped and swayed. It included—entirely without plan or intention—quiet moments that I could speak over, say the quiet part loud. I could remind the nonexistent listening audience that the little piece of personally deluded insanity that they had suffered through was protected by the copyright gods.
And then it only worked on the specific version of Sibelius I had composed it on. As soon as Sibelius upgraded itself to whatever the next version was and had upgraded the sound library, the audiobook outro music sounded like shit.
I was crushed. I had only the existing audio file.
But magic happened during the early days of the pandemic. I found out about this thing called NotePerformer, an alternative performance plugin that could run on Sibelius, and it worked.
It breathed magic back into the outro music.
So here it is, in all of its misguided and unnecessary glory.
And the audiobook is downright embarrassing these days. The early chapters include way too much screaming. I really should redo the whole thing. I learned so much over the two-or-so years I spent creating it. There should be a lot less screaming.
Anyway, here’s the outro music.
I love it so.