oh god oh man oh god oh man it's been another year already?!?! time flies when you're having fun, i guess...

for the uninitiated, on december 6th, 2020, i published my first ever full start to finish track to youtube. it's not good, but it is the first, and every year since i've done a little writeup to act as a celebration of my progress and recap of what i've done. i'm also actually publishing it on time this year, which i haven't done for the past 2 out of 3 years...

this was quite a doozy of a year if i do say so myself, so let's go over some highlights.

a compost in which i can post gives my soul the most

back in november of last year, hvb on now-defunct social media site cohost.org hosted an event called compost, in which participants would take 1-2 hours during a 24 hour period to make a song based off of a particular prompt. it's not a unique concept, the 1 hour battle competition is already a well established thing in circles such as battle of the bits, but i'd never seen it before, especially not on a regular social media site. throughout 2024, 5 more compost events occurred, and i participated in every single one of them. not only was it just fun to challenge myself in that way, it also brought a lot of musicians on cohost out of the woodwork that i never even realized were there. turns out it's a lot easier to find a community of people who make music when the website lets you upload audio files. ahem twitter ahem bluesky ahem basically everyone except tumblr i guess and also newgrounds but this site isn't really social media imo

i didn't upload all of my compost entries here but i did upload the ones i was most proud of.

unfortunately, cohost is dead now. not an unexpected outcome by any means, but i think it will be a while before we see a website like that again. in any case, most of the musician people moved to a discord server, so not all was lost. even if i don't talk enough in it hehe...

also shout out to my fellow chosters that came over to newgrounds once cohost went under!! hiiii!!

some covers for the "other people's music" lovers

i made a lot of covers this year! compared to the two video game covers i've made before this year, the 5 (soon to be 6) (or 7 if you count long elevator) that i've made this year blows it out of the water. i pulled from a variety of sources, such as undertale yellow, oneshot, the velvet underground, ace attorney, ..undertale, ....undertale again technically..., and i also have another undertale yellow cover coming out on tuesday for the game's anniversary OKAY maybe it wasn't that varied. however, covers are still super fun to create, and i think i haven't appreciated just how much doing a cover of someone else's work can help build my skill in original compositions. seriously, i think doing that first cover of meltdown from undertale yellow back in february permanently and noticeably improved the quality of my work. (for reasons not least of which that it taught me of the value of... using a crash cymbal. i literally hadn't used one prior to that....)

anyway, don't be surprised if i continue to do covers of songs that i particularly enjoy. it's good fun and good practice!

a red & yellow for this mellow fellow

this is the thing that i by far want to talk about the most, but unfortunately i can't actually share anything that i've worked on for it yet. for the probably all of you that are missing context, remember in the last paragraph when i said i've covered two songs from hit fangame undertale yellow? well, i've done a bit more with regards to that game. back in april, i joined the team for a mod called undertale red & yellow, which has the end goal of bringing characters and areas from fan prequel undertale yellow into the base game of undertale. i've made about 8 tracks or so for the next update, which should hopefully be coming out pretty soon. i've gotten to meet and work with so many talented and kind people on this mod team, and it's made my year immeasurably better. i'm so excited to share what i've worked on so far, and to continue helping out with this mod for likely the next several years.

greatest hits with some reflective bits really hits

something really clicked this year for me. i feel like i'm finally making songs that people will actually go out of their way to listen to, and that might resonate with them in a unique way. i'd like to say this isn't because i got a lot of external validation this year compared to previous years, but unfortunately, that is totally the reason. i'm not terrible at keeping myself internally motivated. after all, i probably would have quit after 6 months if i wasn't doing this primarily for my own enjoyment. however, i do share it for a reason, and to have more people appreciate what i make definitely boosts my confidence a lot. as someone who has a somewhat negative tendency to always strike it out alone, meeting some new people and joining new communities this year also really helped with this.

self-reflection aside, the point is that i improved a lot this year and got more confident in my abilities. so, as a result, i'm really proud of pretty much everything that i posted this year. my favorite song that i made this year has got to be "the color of being forgotten". i don't know what possessed me to lock in and make something so emotional out of nowhere, but i think it stands the test of time even 9 months later. i think it says a lot about how far i've come this year when i can say my favorite is 9 months old, when in previous years, i generally considered anything older than 6 months to be pretty bad.

"tomorrow now!" comes in a close second because it was by far the most fun i had making a song this year. it is just pure joyful energy concentrated into a 2 minute long package. also shoutout to the meltdown cover for not only being my most polished song this year but also getting over 1,000 views here?? i didn't think that would happen unless i got frontpaged, so that was a more than welcome surprise.

conclusion to this rambly confusion

yeah, i know the header rhymes are reaching, i don't feel like putting in the extra time to be clever. anyways, that's about all i can think to write about for this year. thank you very much to all the people who have supported me in any way this year, it really does make a difference.