Making the Music for Choo Choo Crossing
We're back, baby!
Glad to once again be hurtling forward on a creative project, with no breaks in sight. Check out the game here!
Ludum Dare is always an interesting rush of “music first, sounds effects second” for me. It's easy to get sidetracked (Oh you need a train chugging? That's easy! 1 hour later…) and I often find myself making excuses NOT to work on the music.
It's not because I'm avoiding finishing the music, but because I just can't help but bounce around to different disciplines. Doing some visual art is a distinct, but an adjacent enough task that I can still stretch my creative muscles. It saves me from ripping my hair out listening to that one section of the piece I'm stuck on, looped indefinitely until something clicks.
This Ludum Dare, I challenged myself to write a piece that I sing in. I don't sing. Or at least, I don't particularly consider myself to be a singer. But after completing the jam, I think I've finally broken a 15+ year streak of no vocals in my music. In hindsight, writing lyrics was arguably more difficult than actually singing them. Feeling comfortable writing said lyrics will be the next big goal.
For the music itself, I started with a couple of different sketches. We wanted the music to sync up with the 10-second intervals of our game, so a BPM of 192 was chosen. That way, every 8 measures would line up perfectly (Thank you to our friends and a fellow team for doing the quick math on that!). In paralleling the visuals for the game, the sketches all started off life very sparkly and ethereal. One in particular became a 10-second loop that stood in place as our temporary music for testing mechanics until my partner begged me to give him something else. I wasn't entirely sold or even enticed by the very cutesy marching music that I had, and my process began to stagnate.
I can't really recall why I eventually went with the folk-math-rock vibe that I did, but I definitely blame Tricot. Absolutely check them out, they're a big inspiration. With a solidified plan for instrumentation and a basic ostinato in place, I dabbled in the lyrics on the side. I wanted to still capture the oddity and whimsy of our little creatures, so I tried to go the route of word salad. I really loved what I ended up with, and while some vague meaning of “destination”, “afterlife” and “trains” slipped in, I think it still gives off an air of mystery and the nonsensical.
Recording the vocals was actually a blast. I did some rudimentary warm-ups, practiced the parts a bit, and then belted out as best I could. I wanted some thicker harmonization, so I took the chords for the mandolin and split them into four parts. Likewise, I used a very distinct synth to cut through the noise of the track and used each voice as a guide to make a four-part harmony that lays under the main melody vocals.
Although I felt like I was on a roll, the first problem came when halfway through composing, I deemed the piece too intense for the moment to moment gameplay. We decided to relegate it to a later portion of the game. I started work on a calmer version of the same song. Since the main piece was complete, it was as simple as choosing a slightly different instrumentation. I tweaked the drums and guitar, and added my viola for the melody line in place of the vocals. I love how it came out.
The second issue was more catastrophic. What I can only describe as a bizarre bug, swapped all my instruments around. The mandolin had midi data for the guitar, the drums were now reading the notes for the guitar, and the guitar had wandered off somewhere else entirely. Muting and unmuting my groups was muting a single line 7 tracks down. It was chaos. I (foolishly) saved and closed the project, thinking it was just some weird problem Logic was having. I reset my computer and booted it back up. To my horror, everything was still in shambles. Luckily, it turned out to be a simple, but annoying fix of setting up entirely new tracks and mixing the song again. I have no idea if I hit some odd key combo, but if anyone else has experienced this, let me know!
I think my favorite part about Ludum Dare is the crazy forward momentum it puts on you to actually complete something. I find myself constantly abandoning songs after writing something and then sleeping on it. The energy of Ludum Dare really feels like enjoying a tall water slide. You wait in line where nothing feels like it's happening, but the excitement is building. Then before you know it, you're being sucked down the tube, racing to the end and having a blast.
Album for the game's soundtrack coming soon!