Sam Dillard

Certainly a sad revelation that puts fans in an uncomfortable position. I agree that music is not the man; I have many of his soundtracks and can listen to them and enjoy the music on its own merits. However, to be involved in any associated production, which as mentioned above- invariably honors the artist and thus the man, facilitating the very position of fame and power that he exploited against women, is just not an endeavor I wish to lend my own work towards. There's a difference between a dude just havin' bad game, and being an actual predator and misogynistic creep, which unfortunately seems to be the case here. So yeah, as much as I dig Evermore, I'm afraid I must bow out of this one. I wish everyone the best though, I'm sure it will be a cool album.

Thanks, looking forward to working on it!

Thanks Crulex!

Howdy everyone, just wanted to announce the return of the CD albums for Chrono & Metroid Cinematica due to popular demand! They also include digital versions of the albums for every order, but supply is limited so if you're interested in picking one up now's the chance! Feel free to check them out on my site- www.samostudios.com Thanks for listening!

Glad you liked it and thanks for supporting the Cinematica albums; in fact I posted this piece on Kickstarter publicly several months ago so it was indeed heard there first, however I gave permission for this track to be used for this album so they could fill in the slot for the main theme since I was just too busy to make something exclusive for it and had already completed this overworld medley piece. So things worked out in the end, and for those who do like the music and aren't familiar with my own Zelda Cinematica album, perhaps they'll be interested in that as well when it is released in the next month or two.

Many film and game scores just sound the same these days, especially in action genres. The Zimmer Remote Control style has become so trendy that it has permeated basically everything, and the thought process seems to be that simply adding pounding percussion and power anthem styled themes automatically makes something good. Many of the newer composers are products of this mentality. And it's fine in context and works well in certain titles, but there should not be a "default sound" for any spectrum of media. Basically, it's seems like many modern soundtracks are just back-to-back cues for action movie trailers. It's become the new four-chord pop music phenomenon. Sometimes it feels like creativity across the board is becoming bottlenecked, with re-hashed writing and endless reboots, visual effects and cinematography is almost indistinguishable among whatever summer tentpole films are playing, and you can basically inter-change all of their soundtracks and not really tell much of a difference. Art in general is becoming homogenized for the sake of studios being able to mass-produce titles and franchises on auto pilot. It's almost shocking when something truly unique is released these days... now I am laughing at the irony of the Blair Witch reboot trailer playing as I write this.

Also here's a personalized tribute vid to Metroid30 from the fans and me, including Jessica Martin herself:

My favorite series for over 20 years. I celebrated by making a new song based on the Metroid Prime battle XD

A symphonic EP combining the stories of Chrono Cross and Xenogears into one musical journey, Xeno Cross is now available to listen in its entirety on YouTube. There is over 30 minutes of music, and the album can be downloaded on Loudr.fm, iTunes, and Amazon. It's a follow-up to the Chrono Trigger album, Chrono Cinematica, and a final tribute to the music of Yasunori Mitsuda. Thanks for listening!

Howdy everyone, just wanted to announce the launch of my Patreon page and start of a new ongoing series of game-based piano medleys to coincide with it! First up is a rendition of the opening track from The Legend Of Zelda: Fans who join my Patreon can vote for new game songs like each month, as well as get a lot of other exclusive stuff like signed CD albums and downloads. Feel free to check it out and thanks for listening! https://www.patreon.com/samostudios

Haha, I actually had to take a look at the video again to see what you meant. I'm of the philosophy that unless I can provide some useful input, I just keep my thoughts to myself if I simply don't like a song/video/etc. Some do give insightful criticism, but I think many people just like to complain and bash the work of others because it somehow empowers them. Music is an abstract art, so of course not everyone is going to like everything. And that's fine. Folks can be pretty derp sometimes though. But hey, I never realized that "regular conventions of AHHHHH noises" were a thing... and now I've been enlightened! The more you know.

I think it sounds pretty good as it is, I do agree a bit with Chernabogue, but what I would say is since that main string part carries the melody quite a lot, I would beef it up with maybe some more strings or some woodwinds playing in tandem to make it a bit more powerful, -Sam

Nice work, always good to see more Metroid music making an appearance

Hi everyone, there are about 20 Special Edition CD Albums of Chrono Cinematica and Metroid Cinematica remaining for anyone who wants a copy! These disc albums are professionally produced and feature high quality digipaks, Chrono Cinematica is a single-disc and Metroid is a two-disc set. Both are available via PayPal on my site for as long as there is inventory left. Also, as a bonus, anyone who picks up either of these physical albums will receive digital download versions of BOTH albums! The numbers remaining are listed on my site, when they're gone, they're gone for good. If you're interested, check them out and thanks for listening! http://www.samostudios.com

Thank you Timaeus222 And here I thought nobody liked it heh.

From my own personal experience, I was running into bottlenecks with my 32GB RAM machine, so I recently custom built a new workstation with 64GB, 8-core i7 (4.5GHZ), and PCI-E SSD for sample library storage. I still use Windows 7, as it works great and is fully compatible. Kontakt generally works best with more cores, especially with multiple instances loaded. I tend to have about 12 Kontakt 5 instances fully loaded at any given time. A 6-core machine is actually fine for that if your audio interface isn't set at super low latencies though. And in my opinion custom building a workstation is really the only way to go. I have built my own machines for many years and would personally never buy an "off the shelf" system. Of course, I have very specific needs for my hardware however as I primarily do high end orchestral production (very RAM and storage intensive), 3D animation (very CPU intensive), and video editing (both) so yeah. And for cases, as I read someone else mention earlier, I highly recommend Cooler Master. That's my two pesos anyway, -Sam

Aww thanks XD

Howdy everyone, just wanted to drop the new album here About an hour and a half of Chrono Trigger music, which is my follow up project after Metroid Cinematica. It's currently available via PayPal and Loudr, also CD Special Edition albums with fancy digipaks exist as well though I am sorting inventory at the moment to see how many there are left before putting them back up for grabs again. Same goes for Metroid CDs which is a two-disc set. If you're interested, feel free to stop by my site and pick up your own copy, and thanks for listening. http://www.samostudios.com

Just wanted to mention, there is a bit of time left for PayPal donations for printed CD's (for both Chrono Trigger and Metroid albums), for any who might be interested! Just check out http://samostudios.com/chronocinematica/ for more details, once the final order is placed that will pretty much wrap things up unless there are any extra discs leftover!

Thanks everyone! And yep, it's all fake hehe. Some behind the scenes while I was making it:

Woohoo, finally made it on here, congrats Kee!

Awesome thanks! Actually, Zelda was originally gonna come next after Metroid, but really... there is already so much well done orchestrated Zelda stuff out there, I preferred to go with CT since it doesn't quite get the same treatment. But I did some music for the upcoming Castlevania album releasing soon here on OCR so maybe that will do in the meantime! XD

Haha, thank you, and you mean the link on the Kickstarter right? That was just an arbitrary link really as most people are more familiar with iTunes than anything else, but yeah I should probably just link to the site for it, done!

Hi everyone, just wanted to say the new Chrono Trigger album is now live on Kickstarter! In the background of the video is 'Dreams Of The Virtuous' aka Schala's theme featured in the album, with a free downloadable full preview of the track on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/samostudios/dreams-of-the-virtuous The main function of the Kickstarter is to allow for physical printed albums alongside the wide digital release on August 1st! if you dig the soundtrack of Chrono Trigger, or like symphonic music or any of my previous work, please consider checking it out- all supporters get an early digital copy at the end of next month! Thanks for listening! =) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samostudios/chrono-cinematica-symphonic-chrono-trigger-tribute Also feel free to check out the official Chrono Cinematica Website And lots of music previews on the Facebook Fan Page Looking forward to sharing this with y'all!

Nice work, always good to hear more orchestrated Metroid music