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Monday, July 14, 2014

Original Amiga Works and Early Game Soundtracks

Hi all,

Over the past few weeks I have been working on gathering, collating, cleaning up and sorting my old Amiga music from 1988-1995 approx. It has resulted in two album releases:

The "Original Amiga Works" album contains 105 different tracks that I composed using only an Amiga computer and various "tracker" software like Soundtracker, Noisetracker, Protracker, OctaMED and JamCracker back in about 1988-1993. The sound is untouched, exactly as output from the Amiga. I considered maybe fixing up the sound a bit, maybe make the left/right channels less extreme panned, applying some mastering, EQ etc. But after thinking about it, I decided in the end to keep them exactly as they were originally. I wanted the listening experience to be exactly as we remember it. This is a digital-only album, so no actual physical CD's are made, but it's divided into 5 "CD's" anyway, so it's a 5-CD album containing 100 tracks. It's really 105 tracks, but the maximum allowed number of tracks on one album was 100, so I had to join some tracks together into one sound file, in order to get the 105 tracks reduced to 100. The album, or its individual tracks, can be purchased and downloaded from CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon or other similar digital music services, or it can be streamed at Spotify, XBox Music, Google Play Music, Wimp and other streaming services. I hope you enjoy. Click here for a full track listing.

The "Early Game Soundtracks" album contains 3 virtual CD's and a total of 81 tracks. It contains some of the original video game soundtracks that I made for Amiga games and some early PC games, back in about 1988-1995. Some of this music (I guess most of it) was also made using only the Amiga and the 4 channels of digital sound, although some additional tracks were made with MIDI and synth sounds. Games include Qwak, Spinjam, Brat, Siege of Avalon, Bomberman, Cubulus, Shanghai and many more.
This album, or its individual tracks, is also available for purchase and download from CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon or other similar digital music services, or it can be streamed at Spotify, XBox Music, Google Play Music, Wimp and other streaming services. Click here for a full track listing.

It was fun to gather, clean up and release these old tracks and I guess they kind of serve as a "document" to the music I made using the Amiga computer back in the good old late 80's and early 90's.

I did also create several dozens more tracks on the Amiga, which are not represented on either of these two albums. But I had to be a bit careful when selecting the tracks to release, because in my old Amiga music days I made quite a lot of cover tracks, like "Mama" by Genesis, "New World Man" by Rush and many, many others. I tried my best to get those tracks to sound as good as I could using only 4 channels of 8-bit audio. Quite the challenge! But fun. :-) Obviously, for reasons of copyright, I could not include those cover versions / sound-alikes on these two albums for commercial release.

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Sunday, July 13, 2014

At long last an update, with new album release

Hi all,

Wow, I can't believe it's been that long since I last posted anything on this blog. I'm sorry about that. I'm still alive, and well. I haven't been hiding in a cave either. :-)

Over the last couple of years I have been very busy with main two things... (1) Running my music company, Lynne Publishing, and the stock music label Shockwave-Sound.com, and (2) Playing tennis and being active in my local tennis club as both the team captain of the veteran's tennis players team, a member of the board of directors of the club, an assistant coach and an arranger/organizer of events, tournaments, series etc. The photo on the right shows me on the tennis court earlier this year.


Those are the two things that take up nearly all of my time these days, and I'm really enjoying it. The music company is going well; I have about 350 composers from all over the world who have their music sold and licensed via my company.

Bjorn Lynne "Traveller"
I released a new album of my own personal music also, a couple of months ago. The album is called "Traveller", and it was my first digital only release, meaning that the album is released only as a downloadable album, and no actual physical CD's were made.
For this album I tried not to make it very "epic" or difficult. It has been a problem for me in the past that I've made some very big projects, and the next time I sat down to write music, I felt there was a huge mountain in front of me because I had to "surpass" my previous release, to make it even bigger, even more epic, even more impressive. So I decided to try to drop that feeling, and instead go back to basics and just create some nice, chilled-out tunes with an ethnic / world / fantasy kind of feel. I also deliberately wanted to make it a fairly short album, not one of those huge 79-minute epics. :-). Anyway, I hope you like how it turned out.

I will try to write another blog post already tomorrow, about some new releases of old music that I composed on the Commodore Amiga computer already back in 1988-1995. More about that tomorrow.

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