Weekly Recap #2 (Mar 12 - Mar 18)

A productive week!

The Bach portraits with Trasevol_Dog are almost done. I’m really happy with how they’ve turned out. Rémy is doing a great job bringing out the fun, goofy, cute, and surreal side of this project. The playlist is here. Five more to go!

The music for Slipways is now complete! Without loop points, total runtime for the music is about 17mins. We figure it’s probably the longest soundtrack for a Pico-8 game. I think I’ll eventually do a tutorial on this, breaking down how I composed the music and how it evolves. 

I also finished recording and editing Pico-8 Music Tutorial #30 on composing horror ambience. I’ll post it sometime this week.

Untitled #1 (0:00)

When writing new music, the goal over the next few months will be focusing on producing many short compositions, instead of a few long ones.  This way, I can practice solving more sound production problems rather than composition problems. 

Like some of the music from last week, this is another composition I found in the archives. It had a good compositional foundation, so I was inspired to work on it, clean it up, and write a whole new section.

Metrically, it’s in 5/4, but a few additive and polyrhymic structures make the groove more interesting. 

The repetitive theme you hear at the beginning can be subdivided into 3 + 3 + 4 (10 eighth notes). This additive structure is supported by the bass part:

The melody is written in groups of 4, which creates a polyrhythmic relationship with the 3+3+4 structure in the accompaniment/bass:

This is the metric foundation for the first half of the tune, which also takes a few turns harmonically. WHAT DO I CALL THIS THING!?

Fickle Flame (Pico-8) (1:07)

This is the latest doodle from Pico-8 Tunes Vol. 2 with Jakub.  I’ve been interested in how to use the instrument editor to create ambience, and this doodle gave another opportunity to explore that. I wasn’t sure if it would be possible to emulate “crackling fire” but I think it turned out well. 

In the video, you’ll see that I only use two instruments for the fire.  SFX3 is used for short “pops.”  The first note is C1, but when used in SFX 49 and 51, it's transposed down even lower, so it sounds less melodic. The pitches and volumes in SFX 49 and 51 are also changing frequently so it’s much harder to discern loop points. 

The same idea is used for SFX 4, except I used the noise instrument (6). The trick was blending all of these together so it sounds random and ambient.

Zen (2:18)

There’s an instrument in Ableton called Collision.  It’s meant to model the sound of mallet instruments hitting things like a string, tube and a pipe.  I’ve been terrified of this instrument for a while, so I jumped head first into writing some music ONLY using Collision. 

One of the instruments is meant to sound like the strumming of a guitar, the others are just weird concoctions that I thought sounded interesting :)

Pico-8 Sampler (3:21)

Announcing a brand new Pico-8 sample pack!  I sampled every possible note in Pico-8 to create this multi sampler.  It’s 800+ files.  This means you can trigger each file with a MIDI instrument and play along with the Pico-8 tracker.

It’s 90% complete.  There are still a few things I need to tidy up, but I’ll probably release it in the next few weeks. 

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Thanks for reading!