Two Christmas albums produced by Bjørn Lynne

Dear friends,

Now that Christmas is here, I wanted to give you guys a couple of tips if you wanted to put some traditional Christmas music into your homes. Here are two Christmas albums that I've produced. Perhaps many of you didn't know that I'd been involved with making Christmas albums :-). On these two albums I was the arranger, producer, and played some of the instruments. Other instruments were played by guest musicians and the various vocalists were hired for the job, so to speak. So here they are:

Lynne Music Project: "Favorite Christmas Songs":
Spotify /  iTunes / Amazon / Deezer
License the music for commercial or in-public use: Shockwave-Sound

Lynne Music Project: "Favorite Christmas Instrumentals":
Spotify / iTunes / Amazon / Deezer
License the music for commercial or in-public use: Shockwave-Sound

Merry Christmas!

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:

• Dr. Awesome: Original Amiga Works
• Dr. Awesome: Early Game Soundtracks

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.

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.

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.

Bjorn Lynne music appearing in thousands of productions - what's up with that?

Today I received an email from Assad, who had come across my music in a game called SolarMax (I've never even heard of this game before, but that's not unusual) and he had done a little bit of research and found that the same music tracks were up for sale / licensing via the royalty-free music website Shockwave-Sound.com for only $30. So he was wondering - is this really the case? Can people really take my music and put it in their game... and pay only $30??

I wrote him an answer and I thought I'd share it here, since I'm often asked about this.

Hi Assad,

It's true, it is possible to legally license my music, for use in games and other commercial products, for prices starting from only $30. I have made my living on this for many years now. For the last 12 years I have made myself a good income with this business model. Actually, prices start from $30 but if you want to use the music for “bigger” projects, you have to buy the Mass Market License, which costs 2.5 x the amount of the Standard License. So if you see $30, that means the Standard License costs $30 and the Mass Market License costs $30 x 2.5 = $75.

SolarMax - Just one of thousands of
games and apps with Bjorn Lynne music

I own and manage Shockwave-Sound.com and we are working with about 300 composers who have their music sold via this site. We sell many, many licenses each day. After 12 years of having my music licensed like this, I have got my music used in maybe over 50,000 different projects (films, games, commercials, web sites, YouTube videos, installation, trade show / corporate videos, etc. etc.). Most of them, I don’t even know about. Sometimes I surprisingly come across my own music in some video game, iPhone / Android App, etc.

It may sound like $30 is a very small price to license music, but remember, it’s the same music that gets licensed by several hundred other customers, so this customer is not getting unique music. He/she only gets to use the music that potentially hundreds of other people are also using in their projects. I’m making a lot of money on this and I’ve made great success. So… I’m pretty happy with that!

Plus, it's kind of cool to come across my own music here and there, whether I'm watching a film like Respire (where I surprisingly heard some of my music in the background to one of the scenes in the movie) or playing a game like Vertigo on the Wii, where I also surprisingly recognized my own music.

All the best,
Bjorn Lynne

Just a kind of demo video for the music track "Digital Concepts" by Bjorn Lynne (c) 2010.

I made this track in a couple of days in November 2010. It's nothing big or important, just a sort of electronic groove/tech or whatever you would call it, with some piano leads and a little bit of electric guitar strings here and there.

The music has not yet been released on CD, but the track is available to license for use in commercial and non-commercial projects, video/film, games/YouTube, multimedia/Flash/websites etc. If you want to use this track in any project such as this, you can buy the track from www.Shockwave-Sound.com and that purchase includes a License to use the track for such projects. It's "Royalty-Free" music, so you don't pay any royalties based on sales, views, anything like that. Just a one-time license fee.

New Bjorn Lynne CD: "Irish & Celtic Instrumentals"

Dear friends,

I'm very happy and excited to announce the release of my new CD, "Irish & Celtic Instrumentals", today. The CD features 12 tracks of Irish & Celtic tracks that I have arranged, produced and recorded with a little help from some musician friends.

The origins of this CD goes back to the late summer of 2007 when I was lucky enough to spend some quality time along the southern shores of Ireland, a truly beautiful and inspiring place. I came back to my home in Norway full of ideas and inspiration, and I set to work on producing this collection of traditional Irish/Celtic music, arranged produced in the way that I would want these tracks to sound like. :-)

It's not the first time I've used Irish & Celtic influences in my music of course. Many of my previous albums, such as "Witchwood", "Return to Witchwood", "Wolves of the Gods", and others all feature more or less obvious Celtic influences here and there. So for me it felt right to do a sort of "homeage" to some traditional Celtic / Irish music, recorded and produced with "The Bjørn Lynne sound".

When I started working on this project, I decided early on that there would be no shortcuts, no easy outs. No "half-arsed" solutions using a computer plug-in when I could be using the real live instrument etc. So as it ended up, this album is actually my most "acoustic" album ever. There isn't a single "electronic" sound on the entire CD which, I guess, is pretty weird since I started my carreer very much as what I would call an "electronic music composer".

I still very much love electronic music and I will definitely return once more to my electronic music heartland for my next album release. But I have to say, for this album, that it really did pay off to use all live instruments and leave all electronics out of this project. When the temptation was to just use a plug-in and get it done quickly and cheaply, I thought, no, not this time. No shortcuts! The real thing, or nothing. :-)

I don't mean to suggest that no computer was used for producing this album because, as always, I used Cakewalk SONAR Studio Edition v6 to produce this music and everything was recorded directly to hard disk in 24-bit 48-khz. I also used some samples, including "spoons", some drums, Irish Bodhran and electric piano. What I meant to say is that there are no real electronic sounds (synth sounds) used on this album.

Besides various acoustic type samples, I myself played guitars (acoustic & electric), piano (acoustic & electric), tambourine, shakers, djembe drums, and sang live various "vocal pads" (not sung words or lyrics, only "ahh" style vocal instrumentation). My friend Steinar Borvik played various flutes (Irish flute, penny whistle, tin whistle, orchestral flute, recorder), Nicolae Bogdan played live accordion and violin and Jeremy Sherman played dobro and slide guitar.


When it was time to put together the final CD master of this album, I got the idea to include -- as a bonus -- an "underscore version" of each track. An "underscore version" is simply a version where the main/lead instruments are removed, leaving only the background music. This can be an interesting thing to listen to in it's own right. Once you remove the main/lead instruments from a piece of music, you're left with a whole new perspective on the music -- in fact, a whole new "insight" into how it was all put together. So these bonus tracks were included especially for those of you who would like to hear these tracks "from another angle", and get a little glimpse of what goes on "under the lid" of each track. So, tracks 1-12 are the actual main tracks on the CD; whereas tracks 13-24 are all the same tracks again, without the lead instruments. This pressed the CD right up to the very technical limit of how much music you can put on a CD -- about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

CD track listing:

1. Lovely Leitrim
2. The Bonny Boy
3. Scarborough Fair
4. The Jolly Beggar
5. Danny Boy
6. The Rose of Tralee
7. Paddy's Green Shamrock Shore
8. Whiskey in the Jar
9. In Dublin's Fair City (aka Cockles and Mussels)
10. Amazing Grace
11. The Riddle Song
12. Greensleeves

13-24: All tracks again, underscore versions.

You can hear about the first 1 1/2 minutes of each track, on the official page for this CD: Irish & Celtic Instrumentals.

I truly hope many of you will enjoy this CD. You can buy the album now either as a physical CD from my own personal CD shop , or from CDBaby, or you can buy it as a download (320-kbps MP3 files, with high-res cover artwork files included for printing your own cover), from my own personal download-shop.

To encourage you to order this CD early, I will personally autograph - in Gold ink - all copies of this CD ordered from my own personal CD-shop, in the first two weeks of release (that means, within April 15, 2007).

The album will also soon be avaiable from iTunes, PayPlay.fm and many other music download shops. (Takes a few weeks to make it up on those sites).


One last note... the photos in the CD-cover are from my own trip to Ireland; although the actual photos were taken by my friend Kent Fonager -- he had a better camera than me. Kent is one of the guys whom I visited these places with.

Thanks for reading!

- Bjørn Lynne, March 31, 2008

Bjorn Lynne music for Flintstones & Home Alone

Just a quick note, people, to say that you can now hear my music in the two new PlayStation 2 games, "The Flintstones: Bedrock Racing" and "Home Alone".

So if you get a chance to play one of these, crank up the volume. ;-)

PayPlay.fm - a good place to buy my music - for US customers

(Update January 2008: In the text below it says that PayPlay is only available to people in the USA, but I've been told that Payplay has since also set up so that Non-US customers can use them too).

All of my CD's are now available for U.S. customers to buy through a new digital music shop called PayPlay.fm

At PayPlay.fm U.S. customers can choose to buy the music as unsecured, regular MP3 files for $.088 per track or $8.88 per whole CD, or a little bit cheaper ($0.77 / $7.77) for secured WMA (Windows Media Audio) files. Either way, I get about $0.58 per track sold, or $5.80 per whole CD. This is actually a very good artist payment. (For example, it's a lot - LOT more than I got when my CD's were released by a real record company and sold in the shops).

PayPlay.fm is a no-nonsense place, with no software to install, and they have a very attractive web site, with extra options such as cover printing and more. In short, I feel it's exactly what a music download shop should be. No nonsense, great for the customer, and very fair payments to the musicians. Well done, PayPlay.fm! The only drawback is that they only sell to customers in the U.S. (for now, anyway), which is a pity. [Thanks to Björn in Sweden who informed me that only U.S. customers can use PayPlay.fm].

Here are links to each of my CD's at PayPlay.fm:

Bjorn Lynne CD's:

• Bjorn Lynne: Accelerator
• Bjorn Lynne: Colony
• Bjorn Lynne: Return to Witchwood
• Bjorn Lynne: Soothe
• Bjorn Lynne: Beneath Another Sky
• Bjorn Lynne: Wizard of the Winds
• Bjorn Lynne feat. Eco-Mcz: Statement
• Bjorn Lynne & Adam Skorupa: Undercover
  
• Bjorn Lynne: The Void
• Bjorn Lynne: The Gods Awaken
• Bjorn Lynne: Dreamstate
• Bjorn Lynne: Revive
• Bjorn Lynne: Witchwood
• Bjorn Lynne: Wolves of the Gods

Divinorum CD's:
(Divinorum is my pseudonym when working with trance/electronica/techno music)

• Divinorum vs Aural Planet: Power Liquids
• Divinorum: Talisman
• Divinorum: Isms

My Nature Sound Series (One-hour nature sound recordings, available either with or without Ambient Music composed by me):

• Amazon Evening (Nature Sounds Only - no music)
• Amazon Evening (With Ambient Music)
  
  
• Forest Ambience (Nature Sounds Only - no music)
• Forest Ambient (With Ambient Music)
  
  
• Mountain Stream (Nature Sounds Only - no music)
• Mountain Stream (With Ambient Music)
  
  
• Rain Ambience (Nature Sounds Only - no music)
• Rain Ambience (With Ambient Music)
  
  
• Campfire Night (Nature Sounds Only - no music)
• Campfire Night (With Ambient Music)
  
  
• Relaxing Seaside (Nature Sounds Only - no music)
• Relaxing Seaside (With Ambient Music)
  
  
• Tropical Ocean Surf (Nature Sounds Only - no music)
• Tropical Ocean Surf (With Ambient Music)

CD's by my friends:

• Jesper Kyd: Hitman 2 soundtrack
• Jogeir Liljedahl: The Wanderer
  

Undercover - the CD by Bjorn Lynne & Adam Skorupa

Undercover is a 14-track CD composed and produced by Bjorn Lynne together with his good friend and musical collaborator, Adam Skorupa (also known to some as "Skorpic" from the Amiga / PC demo scene, or from his electronica band Aural Planet).

Undercover is released today as a download purchase from the Bjorn Lynne download shop! Here you can buy the album as an instant download, in true CD-quality, 256-kbps unprotected MP3-files. Also included with the purchase are High Res cover artwork images, so you can print the cover yourself and make yourself a real CD to put in your CD collection.

The album will be released as a physical CD in about 2 weeks from now, and then released on iTunes and many other music download sites, about 2-4 weeks after that. At the time of writing this (May 15, 2007), it is only available through the Bjorn Lynne download shop.

The music is inspired by Spy movies, Crime thrillers and international crime/spy action flicks. To hear the entire album through a neat Flash music player, visit the web page for the Undercover CD.

Should you be interested in licensing music from Undercover to use in your project, you can buy a royalty-free license from Shockwave-Sound.Com

Comments about the CD or the download-shop welcome any time! :-) Thanks for listening.