Outcast the Third (outcast_the_third.it)

 Completed in April 1997.

Nearly a year after completing my first song, O U T C A S T, I felt my skills had advanced enough that I was ready to give another shot at the same melody. This was the second time I attempted to remake my debut song. The first attempt - OUTCAST ][ - came just a few weeks after the original, and I hadn’t really progressed much. Now that I had more experience, I was ready to give it another shot.

My objective in this song was to make an epic. In my mind, it had to be at least twenty minutes long to qualify as an epic. Now, twenty minutes of just the Outcast melody playing would have been excruciating - so I broke the song into parts. It ended up coming off as more of a concept album than a single song (think Abbey Road, but not as good).

My inspiration for making a long song came not from other mods, but from the epic songs of bands like Pink Floyd and Iron Butterfly. Unlike a live band, which can easily improvise and keep things interesting, a tracked mod can very easily fall into a repetition trap. I wanted to avoid that. Well, I was not successful. Despite my claim in the comments, this song has a LOT of repetition.

Here are the sections, with a few notes:

Outcast - Played on electric guitar samples, the same guitars I used in previous songs like Sorrow's Undoing and Pretzelstock. I think the heavy metal sound works pretty well for the Outcast theme.

Hey Jude - Original by the Beatles. The transition is probably the most seamless of the whole song. I had a synthesized vocal sample that sounds like somebody singing “Naaa,” so making a Hey Jude theme was the obvious choice.

Swing My least favorite transition, and this section of the song is the most awkward and out of place (though not my least favorite). Groove tempo with piano melody.

Soaring lead - Another awkward transition. Very repetitive. Overall I like the section more than the swing section but only by a little.

Outcast (second part) - Smoother transition than the previous two. My favorite Outcast melody segment, mostly because of the xylophone part. It’s a variation of the flute part from the beginning (and from the original song).

Melancholy part - Abrupt transition. It's the slowest, most boring part of the song. It's my least favorite part of the song: only three very slow patterns, two of which play twice. The only saving grace is that it’s not very long and the next transition is good.

Run Forever - A modified version of a song by Subliminal. Probably my favorite part of this song. I wish I still had a copy of Run Forever, but it’s probably lost to the ages.

Upbeat piano - Reasonably good transition at both ends of this one. I like this part of the song as well.

Outcast finale - Starts with an arpeggiator bit, goes back to the main theme, and ends with a big finale. It's too loud and there's an overly repeated melody on the lead, but I think I was successful in having an epic ending to the song.

I’m pretty sure this is my first song that features my own voice. That’s 16-year-old me saying “It’s too quiet! Too, too quiet” throughout the song. It’s another Mystery Science Theater 3000 reference, and I guess I thought the quote was appropriate for the song (which plays during the quiet bits).

And so I was successful in making a 20-minute song. Is it my best work? No, but I had fun giving myself a success criterion and then working toward it. This was my final attempt to remake my debut song. I intended to make an Outcast 4 (titled Outcast Goes Forth, like Blackadder’s fourth series) but never got around to it. But hey, I’m still only just barely approaching middle-age, so I should still have time to do that, right? - arcturus