The Arcturus Theme Song (arctheme.s3m)

 This song was probably the only one where I imagined the melody before I had gotten into tracking. The melody, in this case, is the bass line (which I guess is obvious, all the rest of the song is just there to support the bass line). And of course because it was such a simple melody, I had no problem drawing it from memory when I actually wanted to track it.

I distinctly remember coming up with the tune while walking my dog (her name was Heidi, a yellow labrador retriever). I would usually take her to the wooded area behind the houses across the street. The tune was probably inspired by the Veldt theme from Final Fantasy 6 (known in North America as Final Fantasy 3 at the time). I had always imagined it as being played by a brass section. When I tracked it out as the Arcturus Theme Song, it ended up at a much faster tempo than I originally imagined it. This was because the breakbeat that accompanied it didn't really work at a slower tempo.

The samples came from a song called Equinox by Ratz. I downloaded this song from, of all places, MSN. Not the website, the AOL-like network that Microsoft operated at the time. This was our initial ISP when we got our new computer. I uploaded a lot of my early songs there (which, incidentally, might be how a lot of these songs got loose in the wild). Equinox was one of the first songs I downloaded and I loved the intro. I grew less interested in the song after the breakbeat started up and the EDM part of the song takes over (I recall mostly just listening to the intro and then stopping). I haven't been able to find Equinox anywhere so it's possibly lost forever, although a different song by Ratz (Acid Rain) is on Mod Archive.

As alluded, the song was basically just the breakbeat from Equinox plus the melody played on a bass sample. Everything else was just there to support it. I still didn't know about the note cut feature, so I played non-looping samples to end playback of looping samples in the same channel (particularly at the very end).

It's not my worst song, but it's far from my best. I was proud of it at the time, as I was for most of my songs, but in retrospect this one is nothing special. I do like that this is one of my only songs where I can clearly remember how I came up with the melody. If you listen to the Veld theme song from FF6 you'll be able to clearly hear the inspiration - the way I originally imagined it would have sounded extremely similar, probably to the point of being a ripoff. So I guess that's the upside of not being able to track it how I imagined it.

As for the name: I figured I would name the song after myself, since this was clearly MY TUNE (except that it was really Nobuo Uematsu's tune, if we're being honest) and obviously this would be the theme song I would be remembered for. Ultimately, of course, I would be remembered for very little in the mod music community, and the songs that I made that would actually be remembered wouldn't come out for at least 18 months. - arcturus