The following commentary is properly placed on this track's main release, Midnight Crew: Drawing Dead.

Andrew Huo ✑ via early commentary collection

Hauntjam and Hauntjelly are interesting things. They were actually made based on a short fruity loop that The Big Man Andrew did, called haunt.wav or haunt.mp3 or something like that. A jam on his theme, logically, would therefore be called "hauntjam," with the opportunity for naming puns including "hauntjelly." His theme appears mostly unchanged as the bassline for the first part of the pieces. At this point in terms of instrumentation, we were still mostly striving for faithfulness to the canon Midnight Crew "band," as can be seen in the Extras page wherein the MC fill 'em with midnight (bottom), so Hauntjam employs trombone, string bass, piano, clarinet, and sax (I forget which because I've lost the file and am not a band person, but I think it was alto). From there on, it was fairly straightforward to write a haunting refrain and then solos for each instrument. I will admit I got a little writerblock'd for the second part, which was sort of a brief modulation to the dominant, so it sounds a little strange. But it still has its own little charm, with the almost annoying trill put in for a spooky ghost-like effect. In Hauntjam, Bowman did some good stuff with bringing out moving parts in the first refrain. In Hauntjelly, Xerxes emphasizes the spookiness by changing instruments for more electric organ.

Michael Guy Bowman ✑ Music and Stuff

I also went ahead a dropped some good synths and fairly convincing drum part on Andrew Huo's "Hauntjam".

7/28/2017with respect to this album —
about 7 years, 6 months later Michael Guy Bowman ✑ Bowmantown Discords

Uhhh the main thing I did was pick the instruments and arrange drums

But I was really pushy about those drums. I never use FPC, so each drum had its own piano roll in FL studio. Bobby Blaker always said that drums take at least a day to figure out on any of his EDM tracks, and that was back when he was less developed as an artist. So, I'm assuming he probably takes even more time now, if he doesn't just have some presets or something…

I just remember touching in with ham on that and thinking, "good, I'm not wasting my time." I mean, there are ways to have drums centralized on one master application and then route it to different channels, but in FL studio, it rarely made sense to do it any other way than having separate sampler tracks were sound font tracks, especially since you get to work with pattern blocks anyway.

I think drums, more than any other instrument, define the genre of the music. Even very minor choices can change the character of a whole song. At the very least there's been only two songs with no drums on them on the billboard number one slot in the last 50 years.

I still do it by spreading of the parts across different instruments. Just in logic now. Electric daydreams is deliberately simple, and a couple of the songs just have a normal exs24 on there with all the drums going to the same channel. I wanted to imitate what I would be able to achieve if I were just a guy taping himself playing in a room.

7/20/2024with respect to this album —
about 14 years, 6 months later Michael Guy Bowman ✑ Michael Guy Bowman Talks About His Homestuck Music, adapted to text

And, the other thing was an arrangement of Hauntjam, which I just added drums on and synthesized out and did the bounces[?] for. The original on that one is by Andrew Huo, and supposedly it's based around a track that Andrew Hussie himself wrote, that was just called "haunt".