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Finally done! This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of drawings of the PANDAs who play Team Fortress 2.

The only thing that wasn’t digitally painted is the background. I went into the game and screenshot-ed a view of cp_badlands overlooking the control point. I guess that’s the cool thing about doing TF2 fan art — I can get away with screenshot-ing the game for backgrounds. :)

Right-click to download:Charlene Valerio – Traverse Town (Cover)

This is originally a song from the game, Kingdom Hearts, that I really enjoy listening to especially when I’m relaxing, so I decided to cover the song as a basis for learning how to mix and arrange instruments on my keyboard that were beyond just the Live! Grand Piano.

I’m not particularly too fond of the piano and bass combination, but somehow that got resolved with some recording issues Audacity had. For some reason, Audacity was having some issues recording the bass track into my laptop, and even when it did, the bass came out a bit faint. Increasing the gain or amplifying it didn’t help too much either. So you don’t hear it very much compared to the recording on the keyboard, but it’s still there.

I kind of tapped out the cymbal on the keyboard very much like how one would tap out DDR/ITG steps idly. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but as I was recording I was visualizing red, blue, and purple arrows. Specifically, right arrows for some unknown reason.

Right click to download: Charlene Valerio – The Sad Song of Work (Improv)

I came home from school really tired and upset one day, mostly from the fact that I was at school nearly all day and besides going to class, I didn’t get much work done.

At all.

To take a break, I plopped on the keyboard. I was trying to play perk me up songs like Belle, or even some sort of song from Pirates of the Caribbean that’s invigorating to play, but nothing was really helping my mood. So, I ended up messing around with random keys I don’t normally play much, which is pretty much anything other than C!

I don’t really know how it happened, but I ended up with something I just had to record. I guess the minor tones are in part based on how I was feeling this whole day. It conveys my sadness of work. :P

Of course, this doesn’t help that I have other more important things to do, but somehow I was able to put this all together, including recording it onto my laptop, in less than 30 minutes(?!) which was also pretty surprising.

Right-click to download: Charlene Valerio – Still Alive (piano cover, short)

After I was able to figure out the melody and chords for Still Alive, I recorded it so that I could reference it for later when I would actually go back and redo the song using similar instruments that were used in the original song. I didn’t want to notate it because I remember doing this during a busy schoolweek, so I recorded it playing it slowly and “stretching” the chords out into arpeggios in the beginning so that it’d be easy for me to remember how to play it if I did end up forgetting.

The other version of Still Alive with the guitar, drums, and other instrumentals is set on the back burner for now where it’s “done” but not yet “done-done”, if that makes any sense.