Willy Universe (arc-willyuniverse.s3m)

 Composed in July 1996. The title is meaningless.

I believe this was the final CPDP song I composed, given that I mentioned in the notes that the next day was the last day in the class, and it’s unlikely that I would have completed a second song for the final day after this one.

This one, Willy Universe, is probably the best of the six, which isn’t saying much. I had a sample of Homer Simpson saying “D’oh!” and I thought it would be funny to start the song with a few intentional “mistakes” to the composition, followed by Homer’s annoyed grunt. And, to cap it off, I put another one at the very end, implying that the entire song was a mistake.

The song is also longer than the other CPDP songs, though mostly because of the longer intro interrupted by Homer, and because I repeated patterns a lot. The tune itself isn’t bad and could probably have potentially if tracked by somebody with more skill than I had at the time. Granted, a lot of that is because of the beat loop, which is better than any percussion I could produce on my own. There’s not much else to say about this one musically - after this, I would start to take more time to write songs and would very gradually improve.

I don’t recall who was in the class with me at the time but we took it again the following summer (I do remember everyone in that group, there were 5 of us, including good friend and fellow tracker Pretzel). I made a sequel to the title CPDP song, and a bunch of tracks for a game we made called Triangle Man. Due to technical limitations, we couldn’t have the music playing during the actual gameplay, and thus we instead had it play in the level introductions. It never really worked, but because there were 5 of us working as a team, each with a clearly defined role, we still all got an ‘A’ in the class. Sadly, due to a hard drive crash my computer experienced that summer, CPDP 2 and all of the Triangle Man songs are lost forever. Miraculously, I managed to preserve almost all my other songs, save for a few that were probably unfinished and unreleased. From my old modules, I can see the title of one of them (“Imperial Law,” presumably an orchestral piece) and the filenames of two (AQ_CHAIN.S3M and AQ_SNOW.S3M).

I didn’t actually learn much about computer programming in my class, but that’s okay. I learned a lot in college, and now I’ve made a career out of it. In fact, I’m writing this while I take a break from writing code right now!

About CPDP: In the summer of 1996 I was in a computer programming / data processing class, and the teacher let me compose songs in Scream Tracker for class credit. I put together six hastily prepared songs:

CP/DP
Kryptonite Arsenal
Aquatic Jive
Oh! The Suspense!
The Unbrunchables
Willy Universe

They are all short, low-quality, and made quickly so I could get course credit. Look at CP/DP for more context about this series.
- arcturus