Insert Credit Art Jam 2.0 | December 2022 | BIG

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[size=100]WELCOME BACK TO THE INSERT CREDIT ART JAM 2.0!!![/size]
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[size=30][color=Mediumpurple]_HUGE MONTH, LARGE PROMPT, BIG JAM!!!!!_[/color][/size] -

_**To those new to the concept:**_
A monthly event in where the ever-growing Insert Credit community can come together and create art based on a rotating topic! First created and hosted by @"SuperEffective"#337, now taken over by me. Everyone is welcome to participate and create whatever they consider art. Every possible medium and art discipline is welcomed here. Go wild! Show us your hidden or not so hidden talents!

Here’s the original premise @"SuperEffective"#337 wrote:

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This is not necessarily a contest, but more like a weekly monthly art challenge/show-and-tell. The plan is to introduce a new prompt every Sunday the first day of each month to make a piece of art to. To participate, you can simply post anything from a drawing, sculpture, crochet, animation, writing, a sick beat, heck, why not even a cake! You can post whenever you’re finished, and I’m sure none will mind if you’re a bit late as this thread is all in good fun. Heck, if you’re loving the prompt, post more than one! Send any suggestions you think would be fun to do in the next week, if you have any fun ideas!

**_HERE'S TONIGHT'S (TO-MONTH'S???) PROMPT:_**

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[size=1000][color=hotpink] **"BIG"**[/color][/size]

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Shout out to @"antillese"#59 as always for reminding me when a new month starts. And as always thanks so much to the people that submitted their work last month and also to those of you who just hang out here and enjoy everyone's art. y'all are so cool<3

Maybe at this point you can tell that I always create these threads when I already want to go to sleep but then I realize I forgot to create the thread earlier in the day and I don't want to delay it another day so I just copy most of the text from the previous month and sometimes I forget to remove stuff that's specific to the previous month!

You can read a more detailed introduction of the Art Jams 2.0 and see the amazing stuff y’all came up based on the previous prompt on the thread(s) linked below:

_**[March 2022 | Support and Cooperation](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1421-insert-credit-art-jam-20-april-2022-delicious)**_ -

_**[April 2022 | Delicious](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1367-insert-credit-art-jam-20-march-2022-support-and-cooperation)**_ -

_**[May 2022 | Zones ](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1477-insert-credit-art-jam-20-may-2022-zones)**_ -

_**[June 2022 | Slow ](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1477-insert-credit-art-jam-20-may-2022-zones)**_ -

_**[August 2022 | purple (part II) ](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1694-insert-credit-art-jam-20-august-2022-purple-part-ii)**_ -

_**[September 2022 | LOUD!!!!!! ](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1846-insert-credit-art-jam-20-september-2022)**_ -

_**[October 2022 | Mysteerie ](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1993-insert-credit-art-jam-20-october-2022-mysteerie)**_ -

_**[November 2022 | Windy ](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/2094-insert-credit-art-jam-20-november-2022)**_ -

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[“Insert Credit Art Jam 2.0 || December 2022 || BIG”,“Insert Credit Art Jam 2.0 | December 2022 | BIG”]

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Just so everyone knows… I've got some Big Santa Energy this month.

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@antillese antilles gonna sleigh it this month

i have no regrets

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I made some insert credit fan art this month. I was debating whether to put it here or in the fan art thread but I decided it fit the theme of this month pretty well. Here is my BIG submission.

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@mindleftbody DELIGHTFUL. Can we put it on the twitter, and would you like to be tagged?

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@exodus

That would be cool! I don’t have Twitter so no need to tag me.

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# Insert Credit December 2022 Art Jam Artist Statement

Your significant other got you a homebrew NES game for Christmas. It’s a Santa-themed Konami-style shooter. It’s kind of a ripoff of _Lifeforce_ (though this audience will probably know it by the name _Salamander_), but you don’t even care because the first level’s music goes so hard!

DJ Tent Mode’s **Big** new track drops now!

[You can download an mp3 of “Big Santa Energy” here](https://1drv.ms/u/s!ArDX_50WQOZHrhDemJQoz_VQza2P?e=bxFB8K).

[You can download an NSF of “Big Santa Energy” here](https://1drv.ms/u/s!ArDX_50WQOZHrg89Iu6z3sCpZfYM?e=tQORGA).

The NSF is a ROM that will execute on NES hardware, in an NES emulator, or in an NES music player. I like to use [GaMBi on my phone](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gambi-chiptune-player/id840190547).

# The Big Prompt

What do we want? **Sleigh bells!** What key do we want them in? It doesn’t matter because I don’t think I want them to be too tonal. But we also want this piece to be in 6/8 time because Yuzo Koshiro said the following:

https://twitter.com/yuzokoshiro/status/1597906814158667776

I don’t think I actually wrote a song in 6/8, I am pretty sure it’s in 4/4 with triplet sub-divisions. Still sounds cool and different from what I’ve written in the past.

I also _literally_ do not know what key it is in. I intended to write something in B♭ but I think it’s in some kind of G mode. I’m hoping someone who is better at music theory can look at my notation and tell me what mode or scale it’s in.

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/g0wXkeN.png]

# Sleigh Bells and 6/8 Time

I’m a sucker for 6/8 time and wrote the arpeggiated intro pretty quickly. I had a hard time with the math for how many notes I needed per pattern and ended up with a 10 measure patter rather than a 4 or 8 measure long which is the disadvantage of only doing your hobbies late at night when you can no longer do fractional math and your brain is like, “60 is what you want!” instead of “Uh, no, you want 12-divisions per measure times 4 measures so 48”. Neither of them are a power of 2 - which is what we mostly work with in music that’s in 4 or in 2 - and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to play around with it and figure out what my pattern size needed to be. This is important because it sets how many measures you have and it’s musically awkward to our Western-music ears if measures aren’t grouped in 4s or 8s.

I also wanted to bring in a few samples again and quickly overdid it with the bass and snare hits I’ve used in the past which were fine, but sounded ironically to “big” for the piece. Then I didn’t find a sleigh bell sample in my kit, so I stuck a cowbell in there and it just sounded bad. I went back to just the noise channel for percussion and thought I’d come back to it later.
A fascinating discovery I made when I was kinda-sorta doing research by listening to the _Mega Man 3_ soundtrack is that Bun Bun (et al.) don’t really use any kind of bass drum/kick drum at all in that game. The beats are all subdivided by fast treble-pitched snare proxies in the noise channel without a specific voice to set apart the down beats. Yes, I realize that’s a Capcom house style rather than a Konami house style that I said I was intending to emulate, but I thought it was an interesting thing to notice.

For much of the song’s life I was only using snare patterns on 1346, and I didn’t develop more complex time-keeping until the last few hours or so of work on it.

# Santa’s Melody and Music

All of the Big Santa Energy is coming from the sleigh bells. It’s symbolic and I didn’t want to reference any other holiday music beyond that thinking that the bells themselves will style the song with plenty of holiday cheer.

I started with the intro bass line and expected to have that track throughout the whole song to help subdivide the beat, but it’s just too much volume to have it all coming out of the triangle channel. I ended up using the 6-note arpeggio pattern for the intro and the transitions and wrote a very simple bass line with repeated notes and an octave jump to accent the beats.

I was talking last month about how I wanted to try to specifically work with more chords and I did that with intention this month. I do think I ended up with a bigger and louder sound than I normally get because of it. I can’t say I wrote the chords themselves super intentionally beyond writing a simple harmony of the melody on 3rds and 5ths but I think it works out well. The instrumentation with more sustained instruments rather than decayed instruments that I tend to work with also contributed to a fuller sound.

I’m probably the happiest with the interlude in the middle of the piece. I like the chime-like instrumentation and the triplet feel. It seems to be the strongest reference to a _Salamander-alike_ shooter in the piece. I also think I’ve got a personal affectation of large slow chord swells. I did that last month too. But hey, at least I didn’t plagiarize myself this month!

# Is DJ Tent Mode on Hiatus?

I have a large life change that begins next month. I’m returning school to do a graduate degree in addition to keeping my full-time job to keep the lights on. I’m proud and excited about it, but I don’t think I’ll have as much time to be such a prolific composer.

But as long as I’m talking about being proud, I’m super proud of what I contributed this year. I went from not really having written any NES music to having composed about an album’s worth of music. I think that’s pretty neat and it’s certainly not anything I had on my list of goals for 2022.

I hope that all of you are also proud of what you contributed this year and feel like you developed in whatever you were working on. I’ve enjoyed everyone’s work.

Hope to post semi-regularly if not monthly.

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[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/PCPTULc.jpeg]

Made this with an xmas gift.

When I was a kid I had a friend who's father was an elephant veterinarian believe it or not. He had a piece of elephant hair laying around the house, and I was certain it was a piece of electrical wire. Upon close inspection though I never found any copper, so elephant hair it was!

Happy Holidays all!

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/oeE45La.jpeg]

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@DaveedNoo The presentation on top of that pedestal (plinth?) really sells it!

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@exodus haha yes Im staying at some relatives and lucked out having that on hand

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I wanted to contribute with an illustration this month, but I haven‘t even started drawing what i had planned for this month’s prompt. So instead, I present you this thing I did earlier this month.

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/jWu4MtJ.jpeg]

I think it doesn't fit the theme extremely well, one could say the environment is BIG for the kid and the cat in the picture, but that doesn't convince me entirely. Instead, thanks to the magic of digital illustration, I can retroactively fit the theme by doing something dumb. (making the cat bigger)

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/xkcFzCf.jpeg]

[size=1000][color=hotpink] **BIG CAT**[/color][/size]

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I failed to make time this month to do anything, and I’m now presently on the flight I mentioned earlier today.

This has inspired me to cheat (?) and look out of the window and see a reminder: Australia is [size=78]BIG[/size]

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/DWSIvuI.jpeg]

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In the oceanside suburb of my youth, I remember all the houses crammed together in tiny little lots side by side, with the sole exception of the giant tract of land directly behind our fence. Situated smack dab in the middle of a crowded community, the vacant and overgrown expanse was an oddity, inspiring many a whispered tale amongst the various neighborhood gangs. Spanning what would have been four houses worth of land, the phantom shapes of the lot were hidden under a thick blanket of verdant ivy. But it wasn‘t the mysterious shapes reaching skyward under that dark sea of green that inspired the tall tales and ghost stories, no. The thing that fueled our fantasies and gave life to the whispers in the dark corners of our sleeping minds was the Tree. Dwarfing the surrounding village at over eighty feet tall, knowledge of it’s prehistoric species either lost to time or never known to man in the first place, the Tree was an ancient hulking mass of malevolence always within view during the endless summer of my youth. While the sun was strong, we played without a care as children do. But when the first signs of darkness approached, we would look to the Tree as we made our way inside and watch for any signs it was awakening. It would always start with a distant chirping sound, faint enough to be disregarded as a dream, before growing in volume and pitch until the screeching cacophony echoed to every nook of our little hamlet. The ivy skin of the tree undulated and rippled grotesquely like a madman seeking escape from his jacket, convulsing and shaking as the shrieking took a fever pitch. Then the dark shapes burst from the body of the Tree like a spraying artery, the mist of flapping ,snarling bodies serpentining into the darkening sky. This was my first encounter with the bat, and it filled me with both awe and fear. A few months later, my mother brought home the Burton/Keaton/Nicholson/Prince shindig that was Batman 89 on the VHS, and of course she had to screen it the night before I and my fragile little mind could enjoy it . Little did she realize the skeleton keyhole of my 1950's era door faced the cathode ray tube some 15 feet distant, and there I knelt transfixed, mouth dry, watching with the eagerness of a five year old boy a story of a man becoming a bat, one eye pressed up against the at first cool but soon warm metal of a keyhole in a door in a house watched over by giant Tree full of bats. So strong was the allure of the bat in my young mind that I did not care how uncomfortable that first viewing was, and the only emotion I remember not directly tied to the plot was the fear of being caught by the parentals.

The memories of the Tree and the summers I spent under it's eye have stayed with me all these years later, after all these moves later, of which I count to be around eighteen so far. When I saw the suggestion of BIG for this month, I felt the need. This memory needed to be tied to something similarly massive, a real chonker.

Since my dorter was born some eight months ago, most if not all free time has evaporated due to the apparent necessity of constant state-like surveillance to ensure the little dirtbag keeps breathing. So far, so good. But alas, the dreams of cranking out some custom arcade sticks was a dream pushed off to the side, and for too long. So I did a thing. I wanted a stick for learning some fighting game basics on the Saturn, for playing some arcade games on the MISTer. It's black and white because that's how I remember the Tree in my youth. It's big and obnoxious and heavy because ... just because. And also I wanted to make my first stick fresh off the laser the biggest size I will ever make, and due to convincing myself the smaller ones will somehow be easier after the lessons learned on a big daddy boy like this. Whether or not that's true I don't yet know.

Art made digitally in GIMP. Dimensions are 11.5"x21.5"x3", weight is whopper at 10.031lbs. Interior structure made with 5mm plywood, 3mm and 6mm acrylic for exterior panels. Internals is a Brook Zero-Pi Fighting Board. Buttons are Sanwa OBSF 30mm Pushbuttons. Stick is a Sanwa JLF-TP-8YT Joystick with a 4lb tension spring.

Game Boy cart for reference.

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/peshHk6.jpeg]
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/yp7unCP.jpeg]
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@malidextrious incredible!

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@malidextrious What a beast! Incredible work and a great background story to boot!

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@Toph thanks!