The Keepsake - A Narrative Score for Piano and Music Box - 42 Tracks

Forty-two tracks for the scenes a combat pack leaves out. Six character themes, the flashback, the letter she did not send, the confession, the empty chair, grief, the station, the road that takes her, the house sold, rain on the window, the reunion, the kind morning, two lullabies, the last page, and the ending where it is kept.

It is built on one idea. Every theme here exists twice: on the piano while the thing is happening, and on the music box once it is only remembered. Track 1 states the tune plain in C. Track 8 is the same tune, the same key, turning inside a music box. The seed reaches up a minor sixth and then walks all the way back down - the reach is why it sounds like wanting something, and the walk down is why it sounds like not getting it. Five more cells are cut from it: the lullaby is its descent alone, rocked instead of walked; the letter is its reach shrunk small enough to say out loud; parting is the whole thing turned over, so it falls where the seed reached; homecoming refuses the last step down and lifts instead, the only cell in the album that resolves upward; clockwork is its walk compressed into the mechanism.

That is not a description, it is a measurement. The seed is stated in all 42 tracks, 258 times, under 6 transformations, and all six cells are played by a piano lead and a music-box lead - counted out of the shipped MIDI by a proof that ships inside the pack.

What is in it

• 42 tracks, 38 of them full pieces (not a stinger pack padded to a number) across 19 slots - title, six characters, four memory cues, two letters, two home, three childhood, three loss, three parting, two empty room, two rain, two reunion, two hope, two lullaby, two endings, two ambient beds, and four short cues (found again, a good memory, gone, one more turn of the key)
• 65 minutes of music
• 42 x .ogg - 44.1 kHz stereo, ready to drop in
• 42 x .mid - the editable MIDI sources. Re-voice them, change the tempo, pull out a single line. Almost no music pack ships these
• Sample-accurate loop metadata - LOOPSTART / LOOPLENGTH in the OGG Vorbis comments, in samples, which is exactly what RPG Maker MV / MZ reads. 38 of the 42 loop
• Per-engine import notes and a royalty-free commercial licence
• Both proof reports, in the download

Why the loops actually loop

Most packs are cut at a bar line. Even on a sample-perfect loop point you hear the join, because the reverb tail of the last bar is simply gone. Each track here is rendered past its loop end and that decay is summed back over the head of the loop, so the tail carries across the join instead of being cut at it. The loop tags are then read back out of the shipped bytes and checked against the composed loop.

Checked, not asserted

756 theory checks and 492 audio checks, 0 failed. Key discipline, resolving harmony, voice leading (no parallel fifths or octaves between the outer voices), playable instrument ranges, melodic singability, a varying density curve, loop-seam continuity; then silence, clipping, headroom, loudness and the loop tags in the rendered audio.

What those numbers are not. They establish that the music is technically sound - correctly written, correctly rendered, correctly tagged. They are not a claim about taste, and no amount of them can be. Judge that part yourself from the free four-track preview: The Keepsake, What the Music Box Remembers, Grief Is a Room, and And You Kept It - complete tracks with their .mid sources, downloadable without paying. The first two are the whole idea with nothing in between - the same theme, the same key, played and then recalled. The third is that theme turned upside down at 48 beats a minute. The fourth is the one time in forty-two tracks it resolves upward instead of giving itself back.

Made for

RPG Maker MV / MZ (LOOPSTART/LOOPLENGTH read natively), GameMaker, Godot, Unity, Unreal, Ren'Py and anything else that takes OGG. Royalty-free in commercial games; not for resale as a music pack.