on or off botb doesn't matter, what's the thing you felt the strongest about that you made in 2024, and more importantly why? what makes it your favorite?

https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/THE+LONG+JOHN/72198/
this was the only thing i made in 2024, therefore it is my favorite thing i made in 2024

hm honestly idk, 2024 has been the year where i finally felt like i started hitting my stride so i made some songs people and myself liked.
i have a few songs i made in december 2024 but that are still unreleased and might be tweaked for release this year, but for the stuff i've released in 2024 there's a lot of stuff i'm proud of

i can't just choose one because like i said this year was when i made multiple songs i'm still proud of.... and also i'm bad at choosing a favorite x . x:

Wanna Be With You Dear (Final Version)

- the original BOTB release of this song was already a good song, but it became even better when i learned how to mix and master rock-adjacent stuff. a lot of details are way better too, like the drumming is way more natural i think.

Flying Spirit - I'm really proud of this song personally, I managed to create that 1996 PS1 racing game vibe really well I think; using a lot of sounds accurate to that era and also just making a song that's quite a banger :3

Romance Under The Blooming Spring (released under my catgirl alt nya) - Wanted to create a late 90s to early 2000s visual novel opening theme, and I feel like I did a job at that. Also my highest ranking entry in a major to this date, at 5/272 on Spring Tracks XIII

Hole Inside My Own Heart - Melancholic Post-Metal ig. I think this was my breakthrough song, where it finally all feel into a place where everything worked where i wanted it to be.
It was also a song about something I really needed to say for a long time, since i struggle with depression and mental health issues for a long time now.
Special thanks to nu11 for helping me with this song

Flying Sawtooths - I guess I'm decent at sample manipulation somehow. I made this in literally less than 4 hours and yet it got 3rd place out of 45.
I wanted to mimic the oldskool 2008 amensin and apache saw vibe and also make some breakcore, and guess it worked in my favor.

My Heart Glowing Around You - Dedicated to my girlfriend Alexis~
I made this for Viraxor's longcatislong series, and I'm really proud of managing to compose a really serene sound and a kinda math-rocky sound at the same time.

Candy Paradise (collab with nicole) - We did a little chiptune, and everything was good. Inspired by earlier and later ko0x works, and we even used samples from an older module of his lmao.

B R E A K I N G P O I N T

- My more aggressive side is on full display here, with really harsh sounds and a overall restless feeling in general.

the ball of fuzz

i really like how well the melodies went together. i have been chasing it's vibe since making it.

Too Many Squares purely for the fact that I unintentionally pandered my way into a category gold, while also scoring near bottom in another category, which is funny to me. It was also a fun kinda-gimmick entry that turned out pretty good.

I made an album: Neat Gunk

.

The last time I did that was in 2019, and it was quite patchy. Joining online music-making communities and having deadlines to make things was great, because it pushed me to actually finish things and get a lot more practice, and I wanted to apply what I was learning to another project that was all my own.

But when I'm not on a deadline, I work very slowly -- a combination of intermittent free time, perfectionism, and an insanely inefficient workflow. I started making some of these tracks back in 2022, and the bones of "Purity" date back to late 2020. So I'm proud that I managed to hold it together and finish this.

And, looking back, it came out basically how I wanted it to! I had an idea of what I wanted this thing to sound like -- more subtle and atmospheric than the things I was making for compos -- and I accomplished it. I'm really pleased with the production, given that I'm still kind of shaky on how to mix things. And other musicians I respect liked the album too!

(my favorite track is Dude

)

prezzy4u.png

I can pick my favourites with entries I have made!!

i had a stupid series called "Cat Facts Monday", a parody of classic youtube slop, that i started in january 2024 and ended on the last monday of december 2024. it was fun and i liked doing it, even though most of the series is pretty actively-terrible (partly on purpose, but some of the suck was not on purpose). first monday of january this year, i ended the main part of it, so it's something i only did during 2024.

here's a link to the playlist on youtube

the playtime of that playlist is heavily lopsided towards one video, which is about an hour and a half long, with only the first 10 minutes being remotely worth-watching.

every single video in the series was really fun to make, but the only one that actually met up with the exact quality i was trying to hit was the credits roll. I highly recommend making stupid slop that sucks on purpose to get the hang of video, tbh, it makes the whole process engaging in a way that trying to start with like... video essays, doesn't.

I really diggin of how I made submissions to remix xhbs because they're fun.
(especially dami's yea vg and tex's ds sample battle)

Here are my favs that I attended:
https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Battle/9032/MainScreen/LIME+MIX+1
https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Battle/9034/MainScreen/color+chip
https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Battle/9035/MainScreen/terrible+ingredients+%234
https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Battle/9044/MainScreen/Your+Snare+Sucks%21
https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Battle/9053/MainScreen/Marsy+Folder+-+folder+i+hardly+even+know+her

bouncy keep.mp3 is a perfect piece of music

what was your favorite, dami??

my favourite BotB 2024 thing might be my Apache Saw entry
https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/Last+Man+Standing/73568/

just really enjoyed making it, my favourite BotB entries ive done are the ones where i wasn't stressed at all and this is probably the most "unstressed" ive been making music. also just really enjoyed making a rave-y kinda track, i wanna do more of that.

favourite non-BotB thing was a remix of Sky Babylon from Sonic Rush Adventure i did
https://youtu.be/TBM99f5dtt4?si=LgVJRoIr2U3ou6Fy

first time recording actual guitar for any piece of music (even if it sucked ass and was pretty minor), and first properly good sonic remix i've done, like ever? remixing sonic music was how i learnt to make music so it felt nice finaly doing it justice. also made it for my friends 20th and she really liked it so that was nice.

Some collabs come to mind, but of course they're a joint product and the things I love about them tend to be my collaborator's solid contributions.

I'm really proud of the thing that took the most time to make in 2024 and in the album I released, but my favorite thing? I think The Seahorse Café is some pretty good smooth jazz and I friggin love it. Now self-favorited ✅

I put this one up because it's got a solid chill feeling that I always enjoy, brings me right back to what was going on at the time, and it reflects quite accurately the track I had imagined in my head, which felt like meeting a new composition progress checkpoint.

Stomp Fling Chop may not be my favorite to listen to, but it's the one I had the most fun making for sure.

I always thought the remix format was just too much work for me during XHBs. I never get satisfied with the sound design of my remix entries before the time runs out. It sort of wrapped my perception of the format, made it feel like a chore.

But wow, if you actually have time, it's surprisingly fun to take a sample and make it your own with all the tools available. The sounds you can get out of a sampler are just unlike anything else I'm used to.

So yeah, more remix majors please!!!

Outside BotB in 2024, I took part in my first game jam, and made something I am very proud of: The Encased Ponderer

.

Going in, I had no idea what the experience was going to be like. I think working with other people to realize an artistic vision really pushed me to do something better. What's crazier is that we actually won the jam!

Finally, I could say similar things about Afterlight. Working with kilowatt64 was also one of my highlights of the year.

Thank you Battle of the Bits

:) There’s one of my references from my comment about collabs ^

collabs++

New friends on botb. I need not explain

it's between two for me.

The Color of the Wheat Fields - ballad inspired by a wonderful fairy tale. i don't think i usually end up with the exact vibe i want, but i think i nailed the bittersweet feeling i was trying to reflect in the passage i quoted in my post. and anyway, i think most of my favorite media is bittersweet in one way or another, so i guess this one just particularly resonates with me.

To My Two Dearest Friends - a keyboard improv that i degraded in post. i did a decent amount of keyboard improv last year (and i'll certainly continue cause it's like my favorite thing to do in music) and i'm happy-to-ecstatic about most of it, but this one in particular had a fun process. messing around on my CP40 until i came up with a neat patch, recording a moody improv, and adding on some effects in Ableton to mess it up more, i enjoyed it all, and considering how atmospheric the final product ended up being, i really need to experiment with making music like this more.

Music wise, I think this was my best year. If I had to pick my top three, it would be:

Lightshow

- Funk/jazz fusion inspired by Mario Kart 8. The drum solo and basslines are my proudest moments.

Gutterball

- Funk track with authentic instruments. Very proud of the solos and melody.

Panoramic Island Resort

- Beachy island track I made for Summer Chip. Stil so proud of those melodies and percussion.

for me its a tie between

Sunset Sparkles - i went all in with music theory
and
Sunburn - i didn't use music theory at all

two extremes; both difficult, but fun! :)

probably this song

, Pocket Disco. It’s one of my best LSDJ songs to date and shows my progression as a musician this year pretty well.

I’m also really picky about my musical work, so go figure.

i wrote a lot of music that i was proud of this year, but my absolute favorite thing to work on was "blue whirl (feat. Cryptovolans)

", from my album Elemental Fusion. the whole album involved collaborations with instrumentalists, but i had a very specific idea in mind for this track, which was to have Cryptovolans play a few minutes of pseudo-improvised drumset grooving with the freedom to change meter and rhythm however & whenever he wanted. i would then write the rest of the song over the top of whatever he played. this ended up being incredibly fun to write, almost like a compositional puzzle of sorts, where my moves were all dictated by phrasing and meter and accents that were already laid out. the result was very different than what i would've written on my own and i found that combination thrilling honestly. it's for sure the thing i had the most fun with in 2024, and inspires me to do more in that realm.

alot of my early 2024 stuff sucks imo but my favorite would probably be my gba entry for oops

My Summer Chip entry, Nocturne for a Firefly Orchestra, is probably my favorite song I've ever composed. It's for the album I'm working on so I was especially happy to see it score well in a major.

I also really like this silly entry of mine to WinterChip XIX: Space Bar Blues. It's rather short but at the time it was the longest chiptune song I had made (and also a rare case of me actually using the dpcm channel).

I feel like I did some of my best botb work for FAMICOM GRANDPIX this year - Our Children Grew Up Together is my fav conceptually, though admittedly it didn't really reach the level of "what if dueling banjos, but NES & Gameboy instead of Banjo & Guitar" that I wanted it to be. Those consoles were my intro to videogames and chiptunes, so they're nearest and dearest to my heart, and I'm always trying to recreate the bleeps and bloops of my childhood whenenver I'm working in that format.

Also, way earlier, even though it isn't much, THE APPROACH OF THEIA.nsf just came out exactly the way I wanted it to, told the story I was trying to tell, and I think kind of set the direction for a few other pieces I did soon after, like SQUADRON AIRMECH.

Eager to see what my list looks like in 2025, I'm gonna need to get back to grinding XHBs though!

I think I have problem liking my own making.
When I finish a work, I say "yes, this is good, I should submit it now" and the next day like this "This is absolute sh*t", and then battle ended and what do i see, people liked my thing and i say "WHAAAAT"

i think Chippy Tunes of my piece art is my favorite thing even if it performed poorly

My biggest step forward so far :-) "Enjoy it while it lasts"

2024 was pretty bad to me but I did make a few things that keep drawing my attention. For the three That tied (personally) on BotB, Not in any particular order,
- Murder Train!
- A New Path
- Caged Egg

These have a "spark" of potential I guess.

Outside of BotB I had made quite a few things as well.
I have the link to the projects in Ultrabox or Unbox(my in progress mod of Ultra). Its kind of weird and it sounds the same to me, these also have some lore to it some Non-song entries such as Festival of Shadows and Space (TIC-80) are apart of that lore. I do like those two but not as much as the 3 above. My ISP still hates me in the regards of the file sharing site I used for samples so I cannot really load them at the moment without a VPN so I will stick a few in this Pastelink

instead. I just kind of vibe with this although its dark and "cold" as someone called it.

I kind of want to get that style to work in Renoise or Open MPT. Perhaps then I can get the ideas to work without it lagging to the point I have to cut it short. I dread remaking instruments for that purpose though.