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December 28th, 2005

10 days since an update? Well... I've been busy with non-royalty-free things, sorry guys. Back in force today with 4 new pieces.

  • Impending Boom - Orchestral piece for use in videos where quiet tension is needed.
  • Seven Off - Another Orchestral piece for film... maybe embracing the mystery? It is named because it is in the unnerving 7/4 time signature.
  • Daybreak - Solo electric piano... I wrote this around 6am on Christmas morning. Now you know what I do on Christmas... I write music.
  • Comfortable Mystery - Yeah... this is an odd duck. It freaks me out in a settling sort of way. Just the thing you need if you need that sort of thing.
And with this batch, I topped the 150 original compositions online mark! Hooray! My goal was to put up 4 new pieces every month. This month I put up 13 so far. Not all are great, to be sure - but more and more are solidly good.

December 18th, 2005

Three new musics in one! Night on the Docks - this little bluesy jazz piece is available as solo electric piano, and also with 2 different instruments; tenor sax and trumpet with Harmon mute.

December 14th, 2005

Seems I have a creative streak going on... Accralate - another African-instrumented piece. The feedback I've gotten on my previous African pieces (which I just put up) has been awesome! Thanks to all of you for writing. I received a request for a slower piece - and this is it.

Graph Paper Preview

December 13th, 2005

And new graph paper type too! I call this "60 Degree Trapezoid bisected every alternate line", or just semi-trapezoid. I got a request for this 4 days ago... I figured it would be easy to do... turns out it was really easy to do... and thanks to that - some factory is getting new piping... or something.

December 13th, 2005

I've been busy, it seems. Music music music! All Royalty-free.

  • Highlight Reel Fast cool beat with nice horns. Listen for the bass finger stops and fretboard noise. (also the trumpet fall... nice!)
  • Semi-Funk Clean acid jazz.
  • Walking Along Methodical slow jazz with vibes.

This is new software, and I'm getting better. Expect a slow-down in pieces and a corresponding increase in quality. :-)

December 9th, 2005

Can you believe it? More music! Untitled African Rhythm. Yet another African piece. Simple, simple. Just a few bars repeated.

December 8th, 2005

And yet again... more music! Kumasi Groove. Like nothing I've ever done before... this is a small hand-drumming ensemble (8 people?) doing a simple little piece. The one thing I remember clearly from when I did hand drumming was that the agogo part was always crazy-go-nuts. And so it is here.

December 6th, 2005

Woah! New music already! Meditation Impromptu. 12 minutes of unchallenging solo piano... Just what you need to slow your day to a crawl! I seriously need to get better at marketing these things...

December 5th, 2005

Hey! New music finally! Consequence. This one is hard to pin down... it is a fixed tempo at 100 BPM, and features some smooth textures set against cowbell and xylophone. I know - it sounds like it would be terrible... I assure you - my terrible compositions don't make it to the site.

November 30th, 2005

On holiday. See you all in a week or so!

November 9th, 2005

New music! Love Song is now available. I have been working on music - but it is all commission work, so I've not been able to add to the royalty-free selections recently. This one was originally intended for a musical, but the piece got cut. It is supposed to have lyrics, but I'm unable to provide them here. You'll need to make up your own. :-)

November 8th, 2005

It appears my Gmail account is never coming back. I've tried to contact people on many many occations... and have recieved only one reply total (which said I'll forward this to a specialist).

October 12th, 2005 - Email Issues!

Gmail deactivated my account (kmacleod@gmail.com) without notice and without explanation. Please don't get mad at me - I didn't know it was coming. If you sent me email in the last few weeks, I don't have it. Please resend it to kmacleodbackup@gmail.com. Thanks.

Also, if I was supposed to get back to you about something... well - I don't know who you are anymore.

Sorry, your account has been disabled. If this should not have happened, please contact our user support team at accounts-support@google.com.

Update! The Adsense team forwarded the problem to a specialist. Hopefully this can be fixed soon!

October 14. Gmail is still down for me...

October 19. Gmail account and Google Account are still down - no word from the Google people. No replies. No nothing.

Can anyone help me with this?

October 4th, 2005

It may look like this site has been stagnant for a while... actually, I just forgot to update the home page. The following pieces of music have been added since I last updated this page...

  • Holiday - Oh! Holy Night!, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Jesu - Joy of Mans' Desiring, Deck the Halls
  • Experimental (mostly orchestral) - Fire Prelude, Water Prelude, Vortex, Immolation
  • Classical Piano - Tschikovsky Op. 40 No. 9; Waltz
  • Horror Music - Apprehension, Anxiety, Distant Tension, Digital Bark, Nervous, Trepidation, Unease, The Dread

All the new pieces are encoded AAC in m4a format. It is like mp3... but better.

So, that's 17 new recordings for you. I also created a handy FAQ loaded up with things I'm sick of answering over email. :-)
A new podcast is also available.

August 14th, 2005

New age impromptu piano solo "Luminous Rain" added to the royalty-free collection.

July 27th, 2005

New podcast up. Podcast? Yup; podcast. Number Four

July 21st, 2005

New Music. Earth Prelude and Tectonic.

Graph Paper Preview Graph Paper Preview New Graph papers... "Tumbling Block" and "60 Degree Trapezoid Diamonds". I'm pretty sure these aren't useful for graphing anything; but you can make pretty patterns with them.

July 20th, 2005

Have I been so remiss? This last week I have scored 2 new pieces of music, and created 2 new graph paper generators (trapezoids!). I have not, however polished them or places them online. I'll get to that hopefully by the 22nd! Please bug me if you want things earlier. :-). Also I started podcasting - more bugs to work out before I announce them in earnest.

July 12th, 2005

There is more new music - a fight sequence for a video game. the piece is called "Stratosphere". See description for "Air Prelude" for more background.

In addition to my weekly music projects - I'm also starting a weekly meta-music project - a podcast. Each installment is some aspect of something music related - be it composition, tech, whatever. Hopefully it will be of use to some of you out there. Even if you're not a composer, you can gain a little insight into what is going on. Installments 1 and 2 are available now.

July 4th, 2005

Titles Picked

Well, I picked out titles for last week's piano solos! Thanks for all of you who responded. I'll post the files with their new names sometime soon.

Music Sighting

In an interesting turn, some of my music is being used in a DVD documentary of "50 Cent", whom I hear is a popular guy. So that's exciting.

Also, you can hear my music weekly on lots of podcasts, including Colskee, World of WarCast, Clever Little Pod, WXnation, and about 70 others.

New Music

...and a new piece for all you Royalty Free fans out there.

Air Prelude Quick Summary - Slow; lots of flutes; some digital synth for texture. This is an interesting piece written for a video game whose site is not yet online. This was composed with quite a few restrictions to make it usable in a video game setting.

It must be loopable. This mean you can feed the ending back into the beginning, and it'll sound fine. Pieces like this don't end... like Ouroboros, they need to refresh themselves. You can't get sick of it. Sometimes these pieces will play for an hour or more at a time - so they have to be sufficiently interesting. It should not draw attention. The action is in the game. Super-dynamics for no good reason don't work. When doing soundtracks, one can synch dynamics to the frame - but in a game, time is malleable - so it must be sufficiently uninteresting.

In addition to those general guidelines - it must also set the mood; This particular piece has the following direction... Light; Airy; Lazy/Calming Effect; Slight Tensions and Mystery

Sounds easy once you hear it. :-)

June 24th, 2005

More music. Actually, LOTS more. 8 new ones. Several people asked for more 'nice' piano solos, so I did a bunch impromtu. This is what you might hear if you hung around my house. They are presented "as is", bad notes and questionable harmonic structures included.

There is a problem with these, though - they don't have names. I leave it to you - the listening public - to name these! Send your suggestions to kmacleodbackup@gmail.com. Include the filename of the piece you're listing to with the proposed title. You can suggest more than one name for any piece, and you can suggest names for any number of pieces. I'll post the new names here as they come in!

June 17th, 2005

More music.

  • Fairy Tale Waltz - written as an overture to a children's play.
  • Divertissement - from the ballet Sylvia
  • Political Action Ad - I got the inspiration for this one from listening to a very bad local political ad urging me not to send my job(s) to Central Americal. They were using an "ominous" 1980's vintage sawtooth drone to underscore the entire ad. Well, folks - it is 2005 and there is new technology available to make your listeners even more agitated, while seming calm. If you need to contrast the piece with how lovable and fluffy your own position is, I suggest you mix that with "Divertissement"... available above.

June 2nd

More PDFs!? How could there POSSIBLY be more permutaions of drawing lines on pages? Well, calligraphers and pensmen (and penswomen?) can now learn letter shapes and proportions! (assuming you're using a font that is divided into halves)


May 31th

In an unexpected turn of Graph Paper Events, I put up what I considered to be an obscure layout called "Cornell Note Taking". I linked to it on May 23rd, and hundreds of people have already downloaded the things. Anyway, there was a request for a lined-only version (not full grid) - so I cranked it up, and here you go!


May 27th

Summer is almost upon us... and you know what that means! Yes! Holiday and Christmas music recording time! I know that I can really get into "the spirit" when I have a fan on my piano pointing at me, and the ice in my beverage is melting at an alarming rate. Currently available - 1 song; 2 ways. Download and play them in 6 months.

Just you all wait until I can put up my Accordion Christmas pieces. Awe-inspiring, I say!

Site Overhaul - May 18th

I got a logo! Isn't it grand? It is blue. In addition to that, there is some new "music" up called Dark Pad. On the pdf side of things; this site has been hammered by mentions on boingboing.net, del.icio.us, bloglines, blogdex, Kim Komando (woohoo!), and this site which-shan't be mentioned. Why all the mentions? Graph paper. So I revisited the generators; updated the interfaces, updated the back-end code, and generally made them all better.

Since I put up the logo - I had to remove some other stuff to keep the site super-fast. What went? The little images on the side that asked for donations. They are now off on their own "Donations Page".

More Music! - April 12th

The most ambitious piece I've recorded yet... and it shows. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G BWV 1049. I've also a little New Age piece called Evening Fall (also availble on harp).

Belated Update! - March 8th

Just because I didn't update the home page - that doesn't mean I haven't been busy. I've just been selectively lazy. There are 3 new pieces of music since the last update - all rock tunes. I'm not a fan of rock, but LOTS of people requested rock. So I called up Mick Fleetwood and had him lay down some tracks for me. (Ok, not really - I bought a disc of Mick Fleetwood samples.) The pieces have the mix feel of Sting or U2. Are they as good as Sting or U2? Heck no! But they are free. Enjoy. Delay Rock, Cool Rock, Pulse Rock, Dead Drop.

Deci-Update! - February 8th

  • New new-age music "Atlantean Twilight"! For the first time in about 2 years, a new new-age piece from me. yay.
  • New Experimental musics, Fantastic Dim Bar and Simple Music to Frighten Small Children By. (also, I took the accordion out of the Comparsa, and updated the mix on Fantastic B.)

Mega-Update! - January 20th

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