Return to Musical Doodlings of a College Kid

Bassic Training

Download “Bassic Training”

Story

This was my entry for the Military Games Month DoD in August of 2004. From an absolute position standpoint, it was my highest-placing entry, taking fourth place out of seven competitors (For some context as to how far DoD itself has grown in three-plus years, seven entries was a pretty average month for the time. Now, that number would be seen as pathetically small). The song itself comes from the NES port of the game Rush’N Attack (Itself a groan-worthy pun, given the made was released in the late 80s when the Cold War with the Russians–get it yet?–was still very much in effect), which I view as a sort of predecessor to Contra.
Other interesting stuff:

  • The song was the first of my DoD entries to feature a bass-related pun in the title
  • As with Bass One, I left notes out of some sections. You probably won’t even know the difference.
  • This was my first official DoD entry that the instrumentation was entirely bass guitar
  • The spoken intro–“Beware the soldier who both rushes and attacks”–was me attempting to salvage two measures of empty space I had inadvertantly created. I wanted to replicate the “start of level” siren sound effect from the game, but couldn’t make it sound right on bass. So I took it out. Then I didn’t have an easy way to move everything else back two measures, so I filled it in with the intro

Lyrics

Beware the soldier who both rushes and attacks.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.