A collection of songs I composed in private during my time at the Cork Academy of Music college. along with arrangements/covers of other pieces I came up with when I figured out how to do chord charts earlier on this year. (It's worth mentioning that parts of each track have been cleaned up and newly arranged to show what I've managed to learn over the last two years, though it's still based on what I'd originally written at the time).

It's mostly done in MuseScore, so it's essentially an album's worth of MIDIs. I previously composed music by ear, and this was my first time making music through sheet music, using my understanding of music theory and terminology to help me out.

This album is named for the now-defunct FFShrine forums, and specifically the community of the Big Orchestral Action Music Thread. This is a community where we would upload and discuss orchestral music, mainly in media. It's one of my favourite places on the web, having learned and discovered so many interesting composers, works and so on.

My interest in composing had become reignited after I started frequenting the thread, and I wanted to become good enough at my music knowledge to engage more meaningfully in those discussions and create music that I hoped could even slightly compare to anything I'd heard being praised and discussed.

Over the next two years at the college, I learned a good deal about music theory and terminology, which I've been using ever since to become better at composing and arranging songs - to the point where I feel I've become much better at it than I used to be.

But just as importantly, I also made a lot of new friends who I still keep in contact with regularly enough, ended up performing a song with a band (something that especially meant a lot due to my own performance anxieties and how easily I suffer from sensory overload), and worked on two college plays in various capacities such as writing, acting, lighting, and more.

I've even been able to get into a big-name college because of what I had done - where I'm continuing to learn more about music, along with a few other subjects that I've found endlessly fascinating.

This may sound silly, but I feel that I wouldn't have been able to do all this if it wasn't for the community for that thread, both in inspiring me to get out there and for cheering me up when I didn't have any confidence in myself through many, many, MANY excellent discussions. Whether it's on FFShrine or SquidBoard (the thread's new home), the community have come to mean the world to me, and I wanted to show my gratitude through an album.

Thank you.