Well, after slaving away a lot of free time between February and March, I've got this sophomore album complete.



Hguols - Celestial Powers Intervened To True Supremacy
8 tracks - 43:52 running time

1- Destined to Find Sanctuary - 4:30
2- I Found the Essence of Darkness - 5:04
3- Within the Grip of Insanity - 4:34
4- All But Life Was Lost - 4:44
5- In This Exchange of Demise - 4:37
6- Celestial Powers Intervened - 7:12
7- My Eyes Have Opened - 4:37
8- To True Supremacy - 8:31

For those of you familiar with my MIDI work, I've done something a little different from Epitome - I'm utilizing soundfonts for a few of the instruments. The album will still be sequenced in a similar fashion, but for example, rather than a GM strings sound, a Campbell's cello is used instead. Rather than a GM distortion guitar, an Ilkka Palmroth's SG Electric Guitar through Zoom GFX-707 Guitar Effect Processor is used. The soundfonts bring not only a different sound, but a more realistic and lifelike approach to this project.

I guess the real meat and potatoes of this post is that the songs in bold in the above tracklist can be listened to at the Hguols myspace page, or at http://www.hguols.com
(though, they'll sound better at the dot com than the myspace streaming)

The CD will be available on Barren Meadows Recordings September / October 2010.
The digital release will be available in a few months.

Any and all question, comments and snide remarks are welcomed!

Thanks to all who are interested!

sounds great, good job!

Thanks Jim!

Beautiful... this seems incredibly promising.

Thank Elan!

I'll absolutely be snagging this once the CD's out! The new sound is definitely a step-up from Epitome. The drums sound down-right thunderous!

Great work again!

Thanks Andy! ....and I still have yet to see Matt's nips.

^_^

I'm really liking the new songs, man (I listened on your site).

Kind of sounds like an electronic Emperor. I like it.

cold, dark, futuristic, twisted and beautiful!

Wow...awesome work, man! I will be picking that up too!

Thanks for the compliments you guys!

I appreciate it!

Wow, this is good stuff

I'll be honest, when I saw you say MIDI I didnt expect to like it. But I seriously loved the music and thought it was very good. What software do you use? Reason, FLStudio?

I've played around in the past making music with both VST and Soundfonts, but I can never make it blend together well or sound appealing. Youve done a good job at this.

If only they had you writing music for video games in the 16-bit days. Makes me think of an epic boss fight.

Any chance you can send me an mp3 to play on one of my radio shows? I'd be glad to feature it on next Monday's show

Sophmore effort, hell Tom I am still looking for the first one on CD. Congrats man.

http://barrenmeadowsrecordings.bigcartel.com

Metal Blessing wrote:

I'll be honest, when I saw you say MIDI I didnt expect to like it. But I seriously loved the music and thought it was very good. What software do you use? Reason, FLStudio?

I've played around in the past making music with both VST and Soundfonts, but I can never make it blend together well or sound appealing. Youve done a good job at this.

If only they had you writing music for video games in the 16-bit days. Makes me think of an epic boss fight.

Any chance you can send me an mp3 to play on one of my radio shows? I'd be glad to feature it on next Monday's show

The sequencing software I use is an older version of Cakewalk. Cakewalk Sonar 6 Producer Edition to be exact.

I'm using a Roland GM wavtable, so it's not the format 0 or RIFF MIDI that plagued 80's brightly covered websites. These sound fairly realistic.

Another part is sequencing technique and layers upon layers - the same instrument divided into tracks. The distortion actually can be up to 10 layers to create this HUGE sound. I do the same with all the instruments, except the drums - those are a single "track".

On top of that, I add the right amount of reverb that blends the tremolo notes together a little better, yet not too much reverb that the drums sound echo-y. Not only that, I have iZotope Ozone 4 mastering plugins for cakewalk.

Mastering makes even more of a difference.

I can give you MP3s from the Epitome album to play on the radio - if you'd like. I'll hold off on the newer songs until they're actually available to purchase.

Speaking of the 16-bit days.... I just did a soundtrack for an XBOX live arcade game early in development. I do a mean techno as well ....but I even managed to sneak in some black metal elements into that music as well. The "epic" last boss theme has blasts-o-plenty for the drums.

Thanks Matt and 325ad for the comments!

Hguols wrote:

Speaking of the 16-bit days.... I just did a soundtrack for an XBOX live arcade game early in development. I do a mean techno as well ....but I even managed to sneak in some black metal elements into that music as well. The "epic" last boss theme has blasts-o-plenty for the drums.

Sweet, what is the game called? I'll have to look it up when its out

The game is called Shadow Edge. It's still really early in development though.

Here's the prospective splash / title screen theme song:

http://hguols.com/test/titlesong1.mp3

Hguols wrote:

The game is called Shadow Edge. It's still really early in development though.

Here's the prospective splash / title screen theme song:

http://hguols.com/test/titlesong1.mp3

soo cool!

The "Celestial Powers Intervened To True Supremacy" digital download is available on CDBaby. It will be on iTunes, Amazon and others later. (should you prefer that location)

Even if you don't want the digital release, you can still preview clips of the songs not featured on the sites.

Here's the link:

http://www.cdbaby.com/hguols1

If you get it, thank you very much!

Reviews for the CPITTS album will be on the site soon.

Bought it, but the download link is messed up. I hope they fix it soon, I want to hear it!

HellxBovine wrote:

Bought it, but the download link is messed up. I hope they fix it soon, I want to hear it!

Thanks for picking that up! It's showing in my account balance, so that is working.

I e-mailed them about the problem - hopefully this will be resolved and quickly. (they just upped the page) I would keep trying to download it periodically.

Since I got your money, worst case scenario is that you'll get the album directly from me.

I got a reply back from someone at CDbaby.

They said they fixed the problem. You can download it now.

Also, the album is available at iTunes.