Sauli Hirvi
Composer Portfolio

I always feel a bit guilty after making dance music. Guilty and dirty. But atleast I put in some strings, so it’s great art.

More toys. I used to have numerous hardware synths. Then I sold them all, because softsynths were so much easier, but now I’m going back in time and getting some analog gear. The lack of MIDI is a really good thing IMHO; It forces you to play your stuff live and really think about what you’re doing.

Korg MS-10 from 1978. Lovely leads from this one.

Korg Polysix from 1981. This one sounds really good and really versatile. I’ll propably be using this one a lot.

After making some random song with an 80’s vibe, I decided to turn it into a project called Squidman, for which I’ve finished two tracks so far.

Squidman at MySpace
Squidman at Mikseri.net

I have three R’n'B tracks almost done, but I don’t know what to do with them. I wish I had a singer, who also wrote lyrics.

I also got myself two new toys:

Korg M500 Micro-Preset and Roland Alpha Juno 1 (in front)

The Korg is a somewhat simplified, but fun analog synth from 1977, which makes it older than me. The Juno is from 1981, or so. I’m bidding on two more synth, so hopefully I’ll get them next week.

I had this idea that I would start a project in which I made short one minute songs of all the genres I could think of. I ended up with a list of 25 genres with all genres being different enough from each other. The main point being an excellent exercise and also a nice sample of variety in my portfolio. The end product might be a collage of short clips from all the genres. We’ll see.

I’ll hopefully get things started next week.

Did a little song called Treasure Hunt. Maybe a bit inspired by Pirates of The Caribbean, which I went to see recently. The counterpoint’ish beginning, though, reminds me a bit of the Jurassic Park theme, but no matter. I like the calm harmonies towards the end.

Treasure Hunt:

Did a couple of film score songs just for fun.

Marching In The Dark:

Through a Storm:

I made some background music for a corporate presentation at an expo.

I wrote the theme for RAY’s Pajatso World Championship campaign. Pajatso is a legendary Finnish slot game. They wanted a retroish fanfare along the lines of Eurovision and the olympics.

The track was used in radio and TV advertising as well as the contest itself.

Fanfare (15sec TV version):

Find out more about the campaign here (in Finnish).

Taivas Advertising won an award for Best Food Industry Interactive application with their Real Snacks Junior Adventure Island site, for which I did some sound design.

The Award

The Real Snacks Junior site

The music: (1. Loading, 2. Main screen, 3. Arcade cave)