I did the music for Sticky Diagnosis and just wanted to talk about that for a bit. @zombree and @made3 came up with the mechanics and setting. They wanted something kind of goofy and hillbilly-esque but I thought adding a more serious/darker tinge to the goofiness would play into the "deeper and deeper" theme.

Try our game out! Sticky Diagnosis

I knew right away that I wanted to use banjo and heavy synths because that just sounds dope. I like the dichotomy of bluegrass and dance. I wanted the banjo to have little reverb, like it was close to the player making them feel small, and the other instruments to have more reverb/echo to give the feeling of being in a large space.

The first thing I needed to do was figure out how to midi a banjo. I found good samples and took a lot of time to get the slides/nuances as close as I could to analog. I used a lot of trial and error. You can see below that I definitely repeated lines (a must in 72 hours) but I tried to keep the "solo" banjo as varied as I could.

The drums were pretty easy. I made a kind of trippy/funky beat adding a four to the floor kick and 16th hi hats during the dancey part.

The bass mostly follows the drum beat with changing note lengths to give the feeling of momentum. The setting is weird so I wanted the music to feel weird as well and varying the rhythm slightly like that helps. Also in the picture below there's another ending melody during the dance part. This is pretty close to the initial banjo melody with a big synth attached.

Other than that it's just adding little synth instruments here and there to fill it out.