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Friday, April 18th - The Last City, Earth

Hey all!

Today I’m starting something new for us that I’m calling “The Oakhost Log.” This will be a place for myself and the others to (very) periodically share what we’ve been working on. Some of us will use this a bit more than others, and that’s okay. It’ll probably be just me for now, but in time, Emblyne and Promethean will hopefully use this thing as well.

Here’s what’s been worked on so far in 2025.

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE FOR PIANO

I wanted to start this now to share some details on a project I was really hoping to have out today. The project is called “Hope for the Future for Piano,” which is the standalone release of the “Hope for the Future” song from the end of The Discarded Instrument. The reason I wanted to release this today is because HFTFFP isn’t just a dump of the song from TDI, it’s actually more of a celebration of Hope for the Future and Paul McCartney’s work on Destiny. You see, there are actually around TEN official mixes of the song. Two of them, labeled “Sweet Thrash 1” and “Sweet Thrash 2,” were released on a very limited vinyl run for Record Store Day in 2015. It’s rumored that only 100 copies of the vinyl exist. Record Store Day, in 2015, was April 18th. 10 years ago today. So I have a piano version of the Sweet Thrash remixes set to come out alongside the main take, functioning as a sort of “B-side” if you were to do a standard 7” vinyl release of this. I also have 3 more takes on Hope for the Future I want to release as part of this, but details on those will come later.

Well, actually, let’s talk about one of them now. Back in the day, Paul McCartney made a “radio edit” of Hope for the Future. This mix was the one used in the iconic music video for the song. I remade the same edits that Paul did here for my piano version, and our intention is to do a new music video (somewhat mimicking the original) for the piano version. That’s one thing that makes this is a “bigger picture” release than just throwing the song out there. What else is there?

PAULA THE GUARDIAN

Pictured above: the beginning of the “Hope for the Future” music video

You may have seen this Guardian in the music video linked above, both at the beginning and end. She’s sitting in the hangar, in a spot some of us always wished we could go in the actual game at the time. She’s also (if memory serves) the only Guardian in the video to be shown without a helmet on. What you may not know (and probably don’t) is that this character has a story behind her. She actually belongs to Sir Paul McCartney himself. You see, Bungie actually had Paul make a character in the game and play through the entire first campaign. The character at the beginning and end of the music video is the character that Paul created. You can listen to Paul talk about this below:

Above source: Hope for the Future | Behind the Scenes

So before we continue, there’s a little additional context that’s important here. Back to Record Store Day in 2015- Paul didn’t just release the vinyl, they also came with a card with a download link for an STL file of “your very own 3D Printable Paul.” Paul also put that on his website. Naturally, mine is printed in a deep purple.

Pictured above: my very own 3D printable Paul (not sponsored by Corsair mouse pads)

Pictured above: You’ve heard of Elf on the Shelf, now get ready for…

So now that these two things have been established, here’s something stupid we’re working on:

Introducing your very own 3D Printable Paul’s Guardian!

Pictured above: an early 3D-model of Paul McCartney’s character

Pictured above: an early pass at texturing Paul’s character. Modeling work done by Strider_AU. (Lacking some final fixes to be made).

I went through and painstakingly identified the armor and face that Paul had and used community model-ripping tools to assemble a base model of Paul’s character (special thanks to the Destiny Model Rips server for their help and patience!). Together with Strider_AU, we’ll be remaking the original STL file but with Paul’s character instead. With this, you can 3D print both Paul himself and Paul’s character and keep them side-by-side on your shelf… if you’re crazy enough to do so.

In addition to this, I’ve also commissioned a lovely and talented friend of mine to create portrait artwork of Paul in the armor his character wore. This artwork will be available digitally as well as being featured in the (for now) limited-run of the HFTFFP CDs.

So yeah, that’s Hope for the Future for Piano. I really wanted to be further along with this by now, but I’ve had some serious run-ins with chronic illness stuff so far in 2025 and have barely gotten anything done beyond the raw music itself. The friend that I commissioned the artwork from has been inundated with schoolwork. I have yet to manage to work out a good time to film the music video both for the aforementioned health reasons, but also because I want my amazing friend Rosa Nagashi to direct and edit it and she’s been crazy busy being a successful vocal editor for Vtubers. I’m so happy for her.

So yeah, some things may fall through, but I’m generally under the assumption that we’ll release things when they’re complete. After all, Geomantic Revelations took 5 years to come out.

MUSIC OF THE CUBES

On April Fools’ Day earlier this month, I posted the first track of a chiptune-inspired take on Music of the Spheres that I’m calling “Music of the Cubes.” Please pay special attention to the following note in the description:

“This was made with the official sheet music score used to record the original, I just took all the instruments and put them on chiptune patches. This is not ‘real’ chiptune and I'm not really trying to make it be. If you're a purist, sorry.”

So yeah, please keep this in mind. Today I’m also excited to go ahead and release the next track in the set, The Ecstasy.

No, we’re not going in order. There’s a reason for this: me making these is a bonus production for another ongoing project. The overwhelming majority of the work for Music of the Cubes is actually reused from this other project, and I only have the work available to reuse as I make progress on that other project. For certain reasons, I only immediately have tempo-maps done for The Path, The Union, and The Ecstasy, which is why I’m choosing to start with those three. The Path will be put out soon as I put the finishing touches on it. Fortunately, I may not need to make exact tempo maps for the remaining 5 pieces as those aren’t nearly as reliant on having them for the piece to work.

You wouldn’t want to hear The Path or The Ecstasy without heavy tempo-mapping work. Trust me. Maybe soon I’ll put out renders of what they’d sound like if you just played them straight at the written tempos so you can witness how different (and worse) that makes them.

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES: LO-FI EDITION

The next item is not a promise for a full album, but rather a proof of concept I was recently inspired to work on. I took the piano part from The Discarded Instrument version of The Path and turned it into a Lo-Fi track, featuring Lo-Fi thunderstorm sounds, vinyl degradation effects, smooth sax, guitar, bass, electric piano, and some sounds that were also used in the original game music (such as the “Alien Ice” pad from The Great Unknown). Please consider this a demo and not a finished track. I’m going to see how doable the other tracks will be in this style- almost all of them are going to be considerably more complex to make than The Path. Wish me luck in making a Lo-Fi drum pattern in alternating 7/8 and 9/8 for The Rose!

No Lo-Fi album would be complete without a “Lo-Fi girl” in accompanying artwork. Fortunately, we have a nearly-finished 3D model for a woman character that’s pretty relevant to Music of the Spheres! I’ll be working with Strider on doing something fun in this space.

Lastly, I don’t actually have a fancy title for this other than “TDI Lo-Fi Version” right now. If anyone can think of something witty for a title before I land on something, I’ll try to figure out some sort of prize to give them. No promises it’ll be anything crazy, but I’m genuinely at a loss for this one.

GEOMANTIC is (still) coming to SPOTIFY!

Last September, we released Geomantic: The Collection. At the time, we’d indicated that Geomantic would be coming to Spotify (and pretty much only Spotify). I promise this is something we’re getting to. I haven’t forgotten. Emblyne and I have some things to work out in terms of account permissions, and then it just simply takes time to properly submit over 50 songs to Spotify at once. Both of us have been extremely busy, and it’s just fallen through the cracks over the last few months. This will be something that gets done eventually. I hope it’s soon.

WIDELOAD GAMES DOCUMENTARY

Yes, I’ve been threatening to make this a thing for a couple of years now. Well, it’s happening.

For those who don’t know, we’re video game music (VGM) historians. We specialize in the works of composers for Bungie games, such as Martin O’Donnell, Michael Salvatori, C Paul Johnson, etc. We’ve gone through and categorized the music for all of Destiny and Destiny 2 over the last 10 years. We’re in the process of building a “Halo Music Archive” as we speak. I’m personally working on wrapping up a music archive for the Bungie game Oni. We’re also still meaning to return to Myth II: Soulblighter, as well as eventually Myth III: The Wolf Age. But beyond Bungie, we recognize that all of this music is made by people. So we’ve gone through and documented some lesser known VGM gems by these composers, which landed me in an incredibly bizarre and interesting place: the Wideload Games “Trilogy.”

There was a trilogy of single-entry games developed in the 2000’s by the ex-Bungie-developer-led studio, Wideload Games. These games were Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, Hail to the Chimp, and Guilty Party. All three of these games had complete soundtracks done for them by none other than Myth/Halo/Destiny composer Michael Salvatori. This was how I was drawn into them. I catalogued Mike’s music and put them out as a music archive on my channel. In the process of doing this, I’ve run into (and befriended) several of the games’ original developers. Through them I learned just how cool of a team they were, and so I’ve had this mission in my mind for a while now to tell their story. Recently, we’ve begun on the first steps of that journey. I’ve been interviewing developers alongside Emblyne all year so far, with many more interviews to come. Among the people interviewed so far:

Doug Zartman, Game Designer - You may know him as the voice of BoB from Marathon.
Matt Soell, Lead Writer - You may know him for being Bungie’s old webmaster. He also wrote the flavor text “lore” for the Halo 1 multiplayer levels, as well as a lot of the in-game dialogue for Halo 1.
Cef Grima, Art Director - Crazy cool guy, crazy cool artstyles, crazy cool stories.
Tim Dadabo, Voice Actor - You may know him as the voice of 343 Guilty Spark in the Halo games.

All of the people we’ve interviewed have been incredible to talk to. I went on 3+ hours talking to Doug and Matt and we didn’t even finish talking about just Stubbs! Tim Dadabo remembered all of the characters he did, even after all these years. He’d bust out voicing the Commodore from Guilty Party or Crackers from Hail to the Chimp mid-interview; “the characters never leave!” he’d say. It was like the characters were really there, on the other end of the call. I’d also personally never heard Tim’s “real” voice before.

In any case, this project will be something we have more to speak on much later. We’re not planning to release it anytime soon. It’ll be a 2026 thing when it finally comes out. You’ll be glad you waited and watched it if you do.

MYTH ii: TWICE BORN EDITION TRAILER

Myth II: Soulblighter is a game that came out in 1998 and still gets updates today. Project Magma has been working all these years to keep it updated for modern machines all these years, and they’re about to release a big update in a few days. “How big can an update for a 20 year old game possibly be?” you may wonder. Well, I don’t want to spoil it, but this is one they’ve been working on for 14 years.

So, I got to do the music for the trailer. I was approached by Jon God of Project Magma because of my work with Neo Te Aika on Project Odyssey; I know a lot of info about the various equipment used to make the Myth music back in the ‘90s, and I’d be able to use that knowledge to make something that sounds like it. I took that knowledge and tried to make something that could be classified as “the first new Myth music in 20 years” and have it fit that title. I got to take some existing themes and use them in ways they never were back in the day, all while trying to sound as authentic as possible to the sound of Myth.

My trailer music will be releasing on my YouTube channel alongside the trailer itself, and thanks to specially-granted permission from Marty O’Donnell, the music will also be available wherever you stream your music shortly after the trailer goes up.

And that brings us to the end of the first Oakhost log! I’ll be letting everyone know when these get posted over on my YouTube community page. I’d also like to make some logs detailing some project history for prior works such as The Discarded Instrument and Geomantic.

As a final anecdote, I did want to say that new original music is coming from us for the small population of people who like that stuff. Truth be told, I haven’t gotten as much done as I want to in that space. I’m sitting on some completely finished tracks and over an hour of demos. In addition, much of my composing free-time has gone to working with Breshi on an exciting follow-up to the Fight Forever album. We’ve got some very cool surprises we’re trying to get off the ground, and some of (by far) my proudest work. Breshi will kill me if I say more.

The universe is a beast. Take care everyone.

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Oakhost Log One