It might be interesting to share the process and workflow we use to create music or any interesting info you consider.
Let's take this opportunity while we listen to each other's music to share more about it. I'm sure many of us would find it useful, and it could inspire the comments on the submissions
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How do you compose your music?
In my case:
For this specific jam, after I wrote about the story based on the theme, I chose to go for a genre I like. First, I listened and analyzed the most emblematic osts of the genre. Then I took elements from them that I had interest to explore and I started making sketches based on a leitmotiv that I previously came up with. Those drafts helped to shape the ost's concept and then I started to deepen with them and put aside the ones that I considerate far away from the concept and come back later to them. I composed each track from start to finish, then I did the arrangements and the time left I focused on the mixing
The melodic aspect was the starting point, and during the composing I took interest on the horizontal aspect of music, to think each line by itself.
After that, I made the decision of adjusting them to a specific harmony or keeping the dissonances created by the overlapping layers. I wanted each voice to be as free as possible because the music in this kind of games tends to be quite simple in terms of harmony so I was looking for something of higher complexity that was able to portray the world of the protagonist.
Only one of the tracks was created starting by the harmony because it needed to evocate a very different emotion of the other moments of the soundtrack.
Thanks for sharing! I honestly can't clearly remember the process I used for my composition. Lol.
I only remember when I finally had a melody I liked, I changed the rhythm a little and put some variation in the chord progressions to create a second track based on that same melody.
I also know I wanted to showcase my metal background, so I found a way to work in a drumset towards the end of one of my tracks.
That's a great topic!
In my case:
In this jam i worked with my 3-piece music band.
Evening after theme reveal we started brainstorming story and plot ideas. Next morning after theme reveal we set ourselves 3-5 minute timers for like 10 times. Every 5 minutes you should come up with musical idea. Chords/melody/whatever. We worked on this separately. After few hours we came up with a lot of music ideas. Almost every one of them was little piano part 15-30 seconds. Then we gave each idea description like what emotions we feel about this sketch, what it can tells us. And those descriptions also helped us to build fuller story.
Next step - we organised our sketches in order according to plot and emotions. And when it's done - i started to expand them, with emotions and dynamic, that current scene is needed. Also in that step i started create sound palette that is common for all of the tracks. I came up with few leitmotifs, and in that step started to add melodies from one track to others, that share some common parts of a journey. Some of them share melodies, other - arpeggios and chords.
Next step - we recorded vocals and Voice for songs that needed them. Then looong couple days of arranging all of the tracks.
And... It's done. Dark story about one more journey :)
ENTIOX is waiting for you, stranger...
At the start of this competition, I decided to take inspiration from just the picture. I looked at the colors, the environment, the characters and elements, and started brainstorming ways to convey those aspects through music. For inspiration, I listened music from games or movies that I thought fit close enough to the themes I gathered from the image. Stuff like Finding Nemo or Ponyo which capture the essence of underwater in their scores.
Afterwards, I started thinking of a melody; something that encapsulates everything that I have collected so far alongside my personal tastes and experience. For this competition, I started with choosing the key of Ab, since I though any of the black note keys would create a majestic feel to the piece. When building the melody, I wanted to convey the slow, beautiful and peaceful nature below the sea. The chords for me mostly come second to melody but that is just my preference. However I wanted to use sus chords to represent the feeling of suspension when your underwater.
The piano instrument I used was Spitfire LABS Soft Piano. In addition to the spacious reverb to represent the span of the ocean, the piano created a nice, deep and moody ambience. I also used sine pads to create a deep atmosphere. Some sound effects I thought would fit were also thrown in there for emersion (like bubbling water). Lastly I brought in strings to add variation to the piece as well as add a few more chords in for color. Also, those strings were using either legato or portamento to represent the flow of water.
After everything was written, I added dynamics, changed volume, shifted the equalizer, and did other technical methods to capture the vibes I was looking for. I tend to take a break from working and come back with fresh ears to hear something I miss when mastering or within the composition itself. In the end, I think my pieces turned out great and I'm glad for the feedback everyone provided. But yeah, that's one of the processes on how I write my music!
The Equalizer (EQ) allows you to control the emphasis of the highs, mids, and lows of an instrument. So say you want to make an instrument sound darker or softer. You can shift the left-most icon up to deepen the sound. I shifted the bass of my synth pads to give that deep underwater emersion. Conversely, if you want a brighter sound, shift the right-most icon up.
This is what FL EQ 2 looks like but your EQ would look different deepening on your DAW. Regardless, they all do the same thing.
Edit: image not showing : |
I usually start with the intent of the music, and slowly work from there. For example, very early on I already planned my premise of a dreamy like world, juxtaposed with a much more solemn reality. From there, I would pick the genre, the two emotions I wanted to evoke in different tracks, the recurring motifs, and start gathering ideas. Sometimes I'll try to find other songs that have the vibe I pictured, and then I'd try to emulate that sort of style. I usually make the melody first, then the chords, embellishments, tweaks and polishing come later. Mostly cos I like to write tracks with heavy motif referencing (thanks toby fox), so I tend to come up with that and then write the other parts around it.
In retrospect, planning out what songs I needed, as opposed to writing the pieces as the inspiration came, would've benefitted me in this jam, especially since I was really short on time haha. My original plan was to make at least 5 tracks, but due to a lack of organisation, I only managed to write 3. One of my main regrets is that I didn't have the time to write a "main menu" theme, which would've helped to tie my tracks together. Not sure if that is out of topic, but putting it here anyway cos I think when it comes to making an OST, planning the skeleton out would make the workflow more streamlined, and wanted to share that thought.
I chose to have significant limitations on what the music would be, given that I was restricted to my harp as a melody and harmony instrument, and my voice, and my own physical abilities to play what I wrote. I also don't have a recording setup at all, so each piece had to be recorded in one straight take (as a video on my phone), with no editing after the fact.
In terms of the creative process, I had an idea of the feel I wanted to convey, and basically sat down at the harp to improvise. I got a repeating bass riff which formed the underlying backbone of both instrumental and the song pieces, then started playing around with harmony and melody lines on top. It was then a matter of layering, and getting the fingers to play what I wanted them to, while remembering what bits of improv sounded good.
For the song I had the same chord sequence, and I wrote a poem to go with the theme words. The poem got turned into lyrics when I began singing it, as the accents and the melody have different emphasis when words are sung rather than spoken. Then it was a matter again of coming up with a melody for the song on the fly, then remembering it so I could record it. The accompaniment for the song was chosen to be something that I know I can reliably play while singing (multi-tasking!)
The end result is very different to the vast majority of the submissions to this jam (which makes me feel a bit out of place), but I had fun with it.
I've got myself a go-to ensemble that I use which is a six-piece rock band (2 guitars, 2 keyboards, bass, and drums), string section, and electronics - it's the ensemble I use for Verdris Moth, a studio project of mine. I play with the instrumentation a bit - sometimes I add an extra keyboard or an instrument I don't use all the time like a koto or harp or whatever, and sometimes I strip it right down and just use piano and strings for example, or keyboards and guitars only. Like for instance I didn't feel like drums would have worked on my music for this jam so I omitted those, but if it was for an album for its own sake, I might have stuck some big drum fills in there or something. Depends entirely on what the project is!
I've been mucking about with all of these different instruments and styles and techniques for years, since well back into my teen years, deciding what musical things I really like and would regret not including. For me personally I'm into things like weird chord sequences, memorable melodies, recurring and developing motifs, unexpected structures, and style-wise I'm most influenced by prog rock, film music, jazz, funk, ambient electronica, and a few other things. But it's taken ages to get to a stage where I feel comfortable just coming up with a melody and knowing what sort of things I might do with it.
So for this jam a melody came up, I tried it on piano first, then tried a built-up version with my usual ensemble, and I had something basically there albeit in need of a good polish and fleshing out.
Going on instinct and not thinking too hard about what I'm writing tends to work best for me, then later on I can screw around with my ideas, or shelf them and wait for a more appropriate project to use them on, or indeed just get rid of them altogether if they're not working at all!
Great topic! The first day I didn't even touch the DAW, I just looked at the theme and wrote down notes about what I was seeing and what kind of story could be made from it, determining that I wanted an intro (the girl's theme), a conflict, a theme for the ancestor, and a resolution. Then the second day I decided the orchestration, which was a lot of just looking into how classical Thai music is orchestrated and what instruments are used so I could try and incorporate that. Then once I started, I knew I wanted to highlight the resolution with the girl acting as the melody and the ancestor as the counter melody, so I sort of wrote that as its own thing so I would have their melodies ahead of time.
After that, I just sort of went section by section, voice by voice, using a melody-first take. With this, if I didn't already have a melody in mind, I would just sort of play around on the keyboard until something sounded fitting. Then adding harmony was a mix of creating chords that move according to music theory and just making chords by what sounded good due to time constraints.
At least for this concept album, I tried to imagine the experience of players entering a biome, exploring the space, and finding themselves in a boss fight by splitting the composing into three parts:
1. Establish an evocative setting through sound design, ambience, and instrumentation.
2. Add main melodic lines to reflect the mood/atmosphere the player character has found themself in.
3. Twist both of the above when facing combat by adding electric guitar and heavier drums.
The meat and potatoes of the actual composing was just finding instruments that reflected the image I had in development (in the case of Strange Tides, mandolin and synthetic waves to evoke surging waves or stacks of transient pitched percussion to evoke a deep cavern), expressing a melody that fit, then of course the BOSS FIGHT TIME!
The picture for the jam reminded my team of the Studio Ghibli movie aesthetic, so we drew our inspiration from the music of those films. We aimed to make music that was dreamy, fantastical, playful, childlike. One goal I had for this jam was to experiment more with orchestral arrangements and make music outside of my rock/pop/electronica wheelhouse, so I emphasized variety in our OST. We decided we were going to use orchestral instrumentation and went for a breadth of different timbres. I tried to use a variety of drum sounds to fit the various moods, like jazz brush kits for the more downtempo tunes, some of the quirky drumkits in Ableton Suite like the water bottle kit, and taiko drum for the bigger sounding tunes.
My game compositions tend to be very melody and rhythm focused, so I usually try to get these components down first. I compose most of my music in Ableton’s session view. Usually I’ll start by creating a drumloop to establish the rhythmic feel of the song, and then I’ll try to come up with a melodic idea or a harmonic accompaniment that I will support a melody. Once I’ve built enough loops to establish different sections of a song, I’ll start copying and pasting those pieces into arrangement view and work on the layering of the instruments, transitions between sections, getting volumes and eq mixed properly, adding effects, etc.
I stream music production on my Twitch channel on the weekends, feel free to pop in to see what my process looks like!
Postmortem here for easier reading: https://indiekev.itch.io/tsuya-ost-jam-07/devlog/771078/tsuya-postmortem
I saw the picture and theme but couldn't work on my submission before the weekend. Having around 24 true hours to work on this jam, I decided that I would probably be doing one piece that had to have multiple beats on the same track, as I wasn't sure I would be able to do more than 1 track.
As for ways of working, my process was to understand what the theme meant to me personally, and understand the emotions that I am feeling.
From there I start sketching out the idea for the story of what and where this song is supposed to be played, and also visually imagine the scene.
The goal then is to write the melody and a few chords that would translate the exact feelings I want to express in the song. At this stage there is no need for me to work linearly, but really dig into the emotions until i have a few motives that work to express the feelings I want the song to express.
So I feel emotions, be it happy, sad, melancholic, euphoria, a mix of those... Letting them bloom feels like the process that is most natural to me.
Once I have a few motives that feel the closest to the emotions I want to express in general with the piece, I go from there and just build upon the idea that feels the best and most expressive and that would fit the lore and theme I'm working towards.
Orchestration starts taking place here and i structure the song with different phrases like AABCCD in this case, where repeating a phrase is not exactly just the same as the previous one, but builds upon it. Chords in repeating phrases can be similar but usually the first phrase of a repeating sequence does not end the same way than the second one. The goal is to create enough tension on the first phrase so the release on the second phrase is that much more rewarding.
In Tsuya (link: https://soundcloud.com/kevin-fernandes-878873752/tsuya-main-theme) this can be heard on the AAB pattern, where the repeating A phrase doesn't end the same way. The first one is stripped off and ends with tension, the second one is fuller and keeps the momentum of the and ends differently. In Tsuya I decided to have the release of the tension on the start of the B phrase instead of closing the tension immediately at the end of A. So actually the second A phrase in the repeating sequence ends with even more tension. This is on purpose as I want the B phrase to be the big emotional overwhelming phrase of the piece. Building that much tension I feel helped overwhelm the listener when volume, instrumentation and general orchestration all work in tandem to provide a huge relief, even if that relief happens in sadness. My mental image here, is when you start crying and try to hold tears, but the tension at some point becomes overwhelming and you are flooded by all these emotions that can sometime even contradict themselves. This image is purported by the fact that this is the moment the little child feels this exact thing happen to them. While they were drawing their deceased mother into the drawing and trying to hold the emotions, they end up breaking up.
The B phrase is meant to not just be full of despair, but transition in 8 Bars from Sadness, to incredible melancholy to despair. The chords and melody support that choice and I think I did a good enough job where the listener might feel almost confused by the different emotions that happen almost simultaneously. The most important thing to me was to work with the melody and chord progression that would flow through all these emotions one by one naturally and without hiccups. It was important to build a progression that would naturally fit how our emotions can go from one to another in a moment's notice with us being really aware of the transition.
I was adamant in having some sort of troughs and valleys to the song. I felt that after the B phrase was done, and because I ended in absolute despair, with the chords and melody building tension, but also the general full orchestra being present, I needed to give a moments respite, for the listener, and the little girl.
The C phrase doesn't have the exact same melody on both repetitions, and like A, they do build up as we go. In the first instance, we have piano and cello, like mother and daughter, despair and hope being represented. I knew I wanted to have this moment of respite yes, but I wanted to express the despair in that moment, as a contrast to the piano which sounded like it was trying to comfort the listener and the child. At 1:45 we hear an incredibly dissonant pitch from the cello against the piano melody, that was purposely set up to create immense tragedy and tension. And because there is only 2 instruments playing at that time, the feeling of despair and loneliness felt that much more impacting. I also tried to have the piano play chords in a stable tempo, and let the Cello play a ton. This was important to establish the dynamic between the stability in a way of the mother figure in a children's life, and the almost erratic and infinite questioning and sorrow a child would have on a moment like that one.
The second C phrase, the Cello supported by the piano and some other instruments that fill up the sonic space, seems to morph a tiny bit. Like the efforts of the mother to soothe her child didn't fully work, but still had the tiniest of impact to change the mood from despair to sorrow. This second C phrase ends with again some tension so the final D phrase that ends the piece in a somewhat hopeful manner can be as rewarding as possible.
D phrase I haven't talked but is exactly like the intro but with piano instead of a flute like we had at the start. This was the main motive I worked with when I started the piece, and is supposed to be the lullaby the mother used to sing the child. In the intro, I actually purposely didn't end the lullaby in a proper way, cutting it off as I way to start to build tension. We as humans feel when something is incomplete, even in a passive way, so I wanted to tap into that feeling of uneasiness and tension! The chords are mostly quartile voicings and using colour notes to add tension and mystery. The fact that I have in a way adding the exact key I'm going for makes the listener confused. This is a technique used a lot by japanese musicians and of course Joe Hisaishi which is a big inspiration. These chords built usually in the same way a jazz player would in some ways, have a really huge blend of emotions attached to them due to colour tones and the quartile voicing own quality. I look at quartile voicings like playing mostly a sus4 chord in a way, which is a chord that blurs the exact emotion a traditional chord would have.
I'm using this at the start and at the end to build uneasiness and tension in a softer way that typical super demonstrative chords like i used for the whole piece.
I don't want the whole piece to fully resolve, but to still have this sense of resolution, I actually ended up in a way the lullaby melody. This is my gift to the listener, and a gift to the child. There is hope! Better days will come, it might not be right now, but they will come. now sleep child...
SORRY FOR THE LONG POST: this is the whole thought process I had. It's funny I didn't think of really documenting it but maybe I could put it in a devlog, maybe that would help others like me to find some footing in this realm.
This is my first piece since I started learning piano, music theory (and japanese music) and orchestration, etc... There is a lot of work also on trying to show impermanence but I think that was also a tying theme for other pieces that never happened. If you read all this, ping me @indiekev I'd love to chat <3
I, personnaly, sit at the piano and improvise a lot! I record, cut, keep, throw. And when an idea that I improvised begin to become a real track, I tried to rattach it lorewise. When I began to have the first track, I listened to all the little pieces I had improvised and some inspired me the next track.
Also, for my melodies and rhythm, I find it really important to sing and mimic the instrument I write for! It permits to humanize and add respirations in my tracks!
For pretty much for every OST Composing jam my process has been the same:
I put the prompt photo on my second monitor with the text prompt, then i load up a piano sound in my DAW (usually an acoustic piano sound) and start improvising stuff while "passionately" staring at the prompts. Usually i record 15 minutes or more of material, then depending on what time it is, i go make a cup of coffee or tea and after that i listen to the recorded stuff again and if something sounds good to me, i start working forward from that sketch, but i usually end up trashing the first idea the next day and going with another idea from the same improv recording, or from some other improv i recorded later on the day.
When going forward from the piano sketch, i don't really have a defined "ensemble" or "palette" of instruments that i use everytime. I usually take these jams as a opportunity/motivation to practice/try different genres/styles, since normally without a goal or deadline i won't actually get anything done.
I went with mostly orchestral instruments for this jam, since i've had the EastWest Hollywood Orchestra library for some years now and those samples are very dry without much reverb, so i've had a lot of issues understanding how to apply reverb to those samples without overdoing (which is what usually happens to me with them). I also recorded some vocal stuff with the intention of learning how to blend dry recordings with other stuff, so that they sound like they are in the same space. The vocal recordings turned out a bit so-so, but i feel i'm beginning to understand applying reverb to dry sounds and making things sound in the same space with this jam.
After i chose to go with the orchestral sound route for this one, i started thinking of the arrangement.
I had done a Joe Hisaishi/Anime inspired track for the last jam that sadly ended up being just the initial piano sketch, since i was too lazy/slow on doing an actual arrangement of it, i had decided that for this jam i would go a different route in the harmony/style department even though the image has a lot of Asia influence in it.
So from that, the initial theme sketch turned into the sort of generic starting the voyage sounding track "Daydream", which is probably the polar opposite of the picture theme to most people, but oh well.
After i felt reasonably happy happy with "Daydream", i started working on a second track with the intention of having it be a sort of action track, since the main inspiration i had for the game setting was some sort of kingdom hearts style game. where the player enters different dream worlds during their daydreams.
I started the process again by improvising on a piano sound, this time using "Daydream" as sort of style guide during the sketching process. Then i did the same old long ass improv recording, made something to drink, came back, chose an idea from what i recorded earlier and started arranging the track.
For the second track i was a bit out of ideas for a while, until i remembered recommending the trial of the Musio subscription service in the jam discord. So i went ahead and got the Musio plugin set up, found while browsing that they had a collaboration library with the cello metal band Apocalyptica, downloaded those and after playing with them for a bit, got the inspiration/idea for what turned out as the second track "Twisted Dream".
After that it was just mixing and mastering the tracks, trying to not squash the dynamics too much and submitting the project
This ended up as a big wall of text, but hopefully someone gets some use out of my ramblings.
I've always wanted someone to be interested in my creative process, even though I can't explain it all that well, haha. I know it's not the norm—most people start with the melody or rhythm, but I prefer starting with the chords. I don't play piano, but many of my songs feature it. And I compose mostly with my guitar, so that might be the reason why harmony sounds a bit off or unconventional sometimes. But I think that's what gives my music its unique character!
Once I have a solid structure for a song, I experiment with different instruments and textures to develop melodies. I constantly rearrange the structure, guided by that little inner froggy voice that tells me what sounds cool and what doesn’t.
That's basically it.
I work 8 and a half hours a day for my summer job so my main focus was maximizing time while also trying to go to new places with my music and step outside my comfort zone. I was originally planning on doing a more electronic submission (I used to make more electronic music but somehow I ended up switching to more orchestral stuff) but nothing was really sticking so I messed around on guitar and added strings and synths and created the sound that I would end up using. Once I had that sound I wanted it was mostly easy coming up with new tracks. I had a lot of back and forth on whether or not I actually liked them or not, but I'm really happy with the end result.
I spent the first day at work thinking about my idea. Inside my mind, what if you can go inside minds? What if you can go inside god minds? What if gods are basically just people (like greek mythology but less) with guilt that builds up so much it kills them? What if that guilt ends up ripping apart reality after it kills a god? What if certain special people are tasked with entering the god's mind world to alleviate that guilt to prevent it from destroying reality? That was basically my thought process of coming up with the basic story/plot. For the story around the music I wrote, I came up with it while writing the music so I could fit it in how I wanted it to.
Writing the music was mostly straight forward, for the two area themes I pretty much just made/recorded the guitar part, then built around that using strings and synths and other orchestral stuff. I don't really follow a good structure when laying out my music, I just sort of see where the music takes me and add B, C, or A sections when it feels right. I don't plan ahead at all other than "Oh I want to mess around with this synth patch/sample library". For the Boss themes I started out by focusing on SFX and sound design. For "False Sun of Shadow" I really wanted to make something weird and unnatural so I used my fretless jazz bass that I bought recently, distorted it to hell and back, added like three different reverb plugins, then played a bass line and played in between notes when possible (so I guess it's kinda microtonal). Then I duplicated the effect rack and played a melody over it with the same in between note concept. Then I started adding choir to it then thought, "hey why don't I turn this into a Yuka Kitamura-esque dark souls boss theme?", so I switched up the vibe to be more orchestral in the second phase. For "She Who Planted The Flowers", I ran out of power at my house because of a massive storm when I got back from work. This sucked because I couldn't charge my laptop inside and work. So I brought my laptop to my car so I could charge it in there and work. I couldn't bring my midi keyboard in the car so I focused on using samples and sound design instead as the main part of the music. I was making an eerie bell atmosphere and it was very dark and scary in the car because I live in the middle of nowhere in a very foresty area so this was terrifying. Around midnight I decided that I should go to bed and continue working on it the next day when I have power, so I turned on some Casiopea to hype myself up then ran inside. For the last track, "Guilt That Fades Away", it was the last day of the jam and I still had to finish mixing all the music, upload the music to youtube, and make the jam page so I had like 3-4 hours to compose and mix it which resulted in it being a bit rushed but people seemed to like that track though so I'm happy!
It depends, when I have more time and freedom I like to experiment with different instruments first and create the idea behind the music as I experiment, as long as it doesn't stray too far from the theme requested. But when there isn't much time or the request is more specific, I already plan what tone and instruments I will use beforehand, trying to streamline the process so I have more time to focus on the arrangement. For this jam, I did a mix of both.
