As this page gets updated, you will find samples of music that I have created. Unless otherwise noted, all music here was written and performed by me and is Copyright © Mike Heasley (that's me). You may download any songs here for private listening only. You may not redistribute them without written authorization from me.

If you're wondering what equipment I used to create these sounds, have a look at my studio page.

Instructions for listening

The files available here will be either in MP3 or MIDI format. Most computers with sound capability have MIDI file players builtin with their operating systems (for example Media Player under Microsoft Windows 9x). But you will probably need to download a program to play MP3 files if you don't already have one. Here are a few good MP3 players:

• Windows: iTunes or WinAmp
• Macintosh: iTunes
• Linux: XMMS or FreeAmp

Now on to the music:

• Wedding Music

  New June 14, 2002

  I finished a few of my many partial song ideas and wrote a few new piano and keyboard pieces that were played at my wedding on June 1, 2002. You can find the finished songs at our wedding site by clicking on Wedding Music when you get there.

• ShapeShifter
  Format: MIDI
  Time: 5:39
  Size: 63.4kb

  I created this as background music for a computer game I wrote, also called ShapeShifter. Pretty standard techno feel with lots of synthesizer noises and repetition.

• 3K
  Format: MP3
  Time: 4:02
  Size: 4.74MB

  This song was my entry for the 2000 Van Halen Mailing List Guitar Contest. The entire song was created, from initial idea to final mix, in a span of about 8-10 hours. This was the night before contest entries were due, so I basically locked myself in my home studio and didn't come out until it was finished. I guess I work pretty well under pressure, since I'm very pleased with the result.

  Like my previous guitar contest submission below, this is primarily a guitar rock piece (with a little piano thrown in during the break). People tell me it sounds a bit like something from Joe Satriani's album The Extremist. If only I could play as well as Joe...

• Seven
  Format: MP3
  Time: 3:18
  Size: 4.37MB

  Aside from projects I did for classes in school, this is the first song I actually completed. The primary reason for this was because I had an actual deadline. This was my submission for the 1998 Van Halen Mailing List Guitar Contest. Because of the target audience, this is a guitar rock piece.

  One of the most interesting things about this piece is that its time signature is 7/4. It is generally difficult to write a piece in such an odd time signature without it sounding strange. So I was very pleased at how natural this piece ended up sounding.

  I used my Wolfgang guitar and Johnson amplifier for both guitar parts. The bass and drums were sequenced and performed on my Alesis keyboard. See the studio page for more information on this equipment.

• "What Did You Do To My Voice?"
  Format: MP3
  Time: 3:00
  Size: 3.17MB

  And now for something completely different... This piece was my final project for a computer music class I took my senior year in college. Some people might argue that it's not really music. Certainly, it doesn't adhere to any standards found in popular music of the last several centuries, such as the twelve-tone diatonic scale or any semblance of tempo or rhythm. It doesn't use any traditional musical instruments either (well, technically, there is one).

  Instead, the piece was completely generated by computer using a program called Csound. It's a really neat software synthesis program that lets you generate sounds completely from scratch. It's similar to regular computer programming in that you define the characteristics of your basic sounds in a couple of text files, then "compile" or process them with Csound to produce the resulting sound file. The complexity of the sounds you generate is limited only by your imagination.

  So, one evening a friend of mine was in my dorm room, playing with a cheap microphone connected directly to my guitar amplifier with a few effects turned on. At one point he said, "What did you do to my voice?" while I happened to be recording the whole affair. I used this sound as input for my piece, using it primarily to modify other sounds, rather than directly. You can hear the original sound, mostly undistorted, at around 1:38 in the piece.

  Most Csound pieces consist of a variety of "instruments," each of which can be modified by a few parameters to slightly change how it sounds. In mine, I decided to make one extremely flexible instrument with 36 different parameters (insane!). By changing these parameters on different "notes" throughout the piece, I was able to achieve many vastly different sounds as you'll hear. So, perhaps the answer to my friend's question is, "Quite a lot."

  The one traditional instrument I used for this piece was my guitar, which was used like the sample of my friend to modulate other sounds. You can hear bits of it (distorted and warped) around 2:00 and again around 2:20 in the piece.

  If you're really curious, here are the orchestra and score files that produced this piece. Like all other files offered here, they are available only for you to look at. You may not redistribute or modify them in any way.

• And All That Jazz
  Format: MP3
  Time: 3:00
  Size: 3.52MB

  Blast from the past... This was my final project for the electronic music class I took at college during the fall of 1994. The most interesting part of this piece is that I used a sample of myself playing my trumpet. That is, I recorded myself playing a note on the trumpet and loaded that sound into one of the school's samplers. This allowed me to play notes on the keyboard and have them sound like the note I had just recorded from my trumpet. The trumpet sound you hear is a combination of the sampled sound on the right and a preset sound from the synthesizer on the left.

  The countoff was a sample of Wynton Marsalis from the track Cherokee on his album Marsalis Standard Time, Volume I.