Resources

A bunch of stuff I've come across that's been of some help to me that I hope could maybe be of some help to you! If you download any of these and are confused as to how any of them work, feel free to reach out in one way or another, and I'd be happy to show you the ropes.

(...I really need to make this page look nicer sometime, huh?)

Applications

Musescore

First music composition tool I ever used, all the way back in seventh grade. Entirely free and great for making sheet music, though it's a starting point more than anything if you're looking to get into composition. I found it appealing mostly just because I was already familiar with sheet music, so working in that lens felt like less of a leap than a list of instruments and piano rolls and all.

Reaper

A free DAW that I use now for all my composition, mixing, and mastering. It's a really flexible program! It comes with a bunch of simple but effective VSTs for audio mixing, but anything for composition you'll have to track down and add yourself. (Okay technically it's not really free, but its free trial period is indefinite regardless of what the website might say.)

Polyphone

Free tool for editing or building your own soundfonts. Takes a second to figure out how it works, but once you get the hang of it, it's super straightforward.

Audacity

Free audio editing tool. I don't really use it anymore since switching to Reaper where I can do pretty much all the same things but in a way I like better, but hey, depending on who you are and what you're trying to do, you can still probably get plenty of mileage out of it.

Aseprite

Art tool geared towards making pixel art, but I've gotten a lot of mileage outside of that scope. Basically just my general-use image editor. Not free, but it's fairly cheap (plus, it'll go for sale every once in a while on Steam or itch.io), and your money supports a small and dedicated team of developers! Alternatively, there's a completely free fork of it called LibreSprite, though I think it may be missing a few features. Never used it myself (since I never heard about it until after I'd already bought Aseprite), but it's worth checking out.

OBS Studio

Go-to application for video recordings of all kinds. Also free!

Soundfonts and VSTs

Surge XT

Free VST with a lot of great synth presets (and a lot of options to toy with).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover

Free orchestral VST. Pretty situational (I'm notably not someone who makes a lot of orchestral music), but it does what it does well. There are larger versions out there, but they get pretty pricey pretty fast.

Delay Lama

A classic.

Podolski

Another free synthesizer VST with some good preset patches and a lot of options to toy with that I don't really know how to work!

juicysfplugin

Soundfont player VST, so you can actually use soundfonts in your DAW! There are better options out there, I'm sure, but this is just the first one I found, and I've had no reason really to switch to anything else.

ColomboGMGS2

Soundfont with a huge variety of stuff on it. Overall pretty solid.

Lil'Sness

Completely original SNES-like soundfont. Great for retro style stuff without having to worry about janky ripped soundfonts and whatever legal grey zone.

Fonts

Yoster Island

The font you're reading right now! Credit goes to codeman83 for the original version of it, but I've edited it and added some new characters and such to suit my own needs. Some characters are still a little messy, but I'll probably periodically update things as this website develops.

Cherry Bomb

Really nice bubbly font. Credit goes to asterism for this one.

Hey Gorgeous

Near-identical reproduction of the standard dialogue font used in the Paper Mario series. Originally found on an old blog post (and if you click on "free scrapbook fonts" at the top, there's a bunch of other stuff on offer too). The real font the games use is PopJoy, but it's notably not free and is also made by a Japanese company (thus you'd have to navigate Japanese websites), so, uh... if you really wanna get it, I wish you luck.

Miscellaneous

VGM Sound Sources Spreadsheet

Wanna know what sounds were used in some random video game song? Well, guess what? There's a handy-dandy spreadsheet for that!

Neocities

The website I used to make this website! Very cool!