Hodge Plays Mario Kart

Okay, so a couple of weeks ago I watched the incredibly entertaining King of Kong documentary for the first time, after being recommended it by a friend. If you’ve never seen it, I’d highly recommend checking it out. It basically charts the progress of a Steve Wiebe who’s desperately trying to become the world greatest Donkey Kong player.

The whole thing got me thinking about my good friend Andrew Hodge and the fact that he often claims to be the world’s second greatest player of Super Mario Kart on the SNES, apparently he did an online search for the fastest lap times on Rainbow Road (The most difficult Mario Kart track) and he was about a second slower than the fastest lap time ever recorded.

Now, King of Kong heavily featured the website Twin Galaxies, who are the official score keepers for all things video game related are even recognised by The Guinness Book of World Records, so I logged on and looked up the fastest lap time for Rainbow Road, and told Hodge. Turns out that Hodge is quicker! Several seconds quicker in fact!

You can check out the video of Hodge smashing the world record here, and in dedication of this momentous achievement I’ve written a song in his honour simply titled Hodge Plays Mario Kart, which you can download here.

Joining Taxi.com

This year I've been pretty much flat out on the whole music thing, with an ultimate goal of turning my passion into something that can support me financially. So along with the constant song writing, recording, video blogging, podcasting, twittering and sending out CDs etc.. I've now decided to bite the bullet and join Taxi.com

I've had a few tunes used in independent productions in the past, its something I'd like to do more of, and Taxi claim to be-able to help with that. I've toyed with the idea of joining for a while now, I've spoken to a few members and received some fairly positive feedback overall, although there are a few negative forum posts out there too.

So, I've shelled out $300 (USA) for a years worth of their service, introduced myself in the Taxi forum and begun the process of submitting songs! It'll be interesting to see how it progresses. In the meantime I've actually learnt a fair bit about tv/film music placement from their online resources and I'm attempting to write some slightly more tv friendly tunes, and cutting back on the "naughty words" lyrically ;-)

Aidy.com

8 Bit Antics

I'm a bit of a geek and a retro gaming enthusiast, and whilst recently visiting Bletchley Park I came accross a CD in the gift shop called The Boy With The Digital Heart by Pixelh8. I've been listening to it a fair bit since, if you're not aware of what he does, he reverse engineers electronic toys and random computer game sound effects to make instrumentals. Any how, this has inspired me to do something similar myself, and after reading a few tutorials I've discovered I can get the old 8-bit Mario, Double Dragon type sound out of Reason by tweaking the SubTractor so I'm in the process of re-recording one of my old tracks Seattle's Filled With Stars, which I'm gonna release next Friday at Aidy.com.