I started doing the video for ‘First Light of the Fifth Day’ and decided to also do a little remastering of those older tracks as I go. Next up will be doing the same for that entire soundtrack. It still annoys me a little that I put so much work into that soundtrack only to have the game producers effectively do nothing. My own fault for not vetting them properly but I was trying to break into commercial game composition at the time so I was desperate to get something published. When trying to plan your time you need to know how many hours it takes you per finished minute of music, not just the composition and performance but the mixing/mastering etc.. At my peak I managed about 4 hours per minute (nowadays it’s closer to double that), at the time I was at around 6. So having written about 30 mins of soundtrack for that project means I poured in about 180hrs of work. I’m still glad I did it, orchestral is not really my thing but it forced me out of my comfort zone and while not technically proficient I’m proud of the work, but that was a lot of time to spend on something that never saw the light of day. Anyway working on the remastering has allowed me to test run the new Convolution Reverb and Analyser I picked up from Melda Productions. The MMultiAnalyzer in particular is great for live comparative views, you can have multiple instances of the plugin showing their results overlayed in one window so you can see in realtime exactly how the original and mastered tracks compare visually (yes yes the ears are still the most important but those can be fooled when you have been working on something all day, it’s always good to have a visual reference to back them up). Highly recommended. New site (3.0) is finally live. I know the design is pretty rough but as explained previously the site itself is not my main priority. I will likely update it over time though but for now at least the main goals of updating all the actual music to higher quality versions has been achieved. Also I posted up “Nedarra’s Theme”, dedicated to my wife and one of her upcoming works. It’s a trancey soundtrack piece that I think is one of my better, maybe best works. I hope you enjoy. Well the old site has had it’s day, while I’ve been publishing on Youtube I hadn’t updated here in so long it was embarassing. At the same time my web skills and time to maintain it have decreased so I decided to just hit the ‘Easy button’ and go with Xara web designer. Yes I know I am just blatantly modifying one of their templates so you might have seen this design in a 100 other places (if you know 100 other similarly challenged site owners :) ) but I need to use the time I have to work on the actual music. Also keeping it simple should allow me to post more frequent updates. First up is re-uploading all the previously published works in much higher quality. MP3 is still there but all files will be 320kbps CBR, most (space allowing) will also have lossless 16bit and 24bit versions.

All audio, and the ‘Stone Halo’ logo on this site are copyright Derek Coleman 2014.