Weekly Recap #1 (Mar 5 - Mar 11)

I’m really excited to try this new format of presenting my works-in-progress! The goal will be trying to keep these as concise as possible, but still rich in content. The videos will feature excerpts of things I worked on during the week, totalling no more than 5mins. Below I’ll write some explanations and ideas I’m playing with for each composition.  When they’re complete, I’d be happy to release any of these pieces to patrons. Please let me know below if you’d be interested, and which one(s)!

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I mentioned in a previous post that I purchased some new headphones. For the sake of getting used to them, I spent most of my time this week revisiting old compositions and making them sound better.

Prelude (0:00)

I wrote this a few years ago, when I was a beginner at using Ableton. I’ve always been happy with the composition (in fact it’s the first track on The Last Bot), but I wanted to practice making the drums and bass clearer and punchier. I also toned down a lot of the effects and reverb. 

At the time I wrote this, I was experimenting with compositional form. If you sustain say, an F major chord for 8 bars, it’s interesting that you can add/change one note, move to Dmin7 in bar 9, and continue to keep a listener’s interest for another 8 bars. That one note is enough to create contrast, propel the composition forward, and continue the story. The rest is sound design!

Speaking of sound design, I was also listening to a lot of Disasterpeace when I wrote this. I really like his idea of being expressive with simple, chiptuney sounds. All of the sounds here are using variants of square waves with pulse width modulation.

Slipways (Pico-8) (0:36)

Jakub and I have been working on an adaptive soundtrack for his Pico-8 game Slipways (to be released in the next week or so!).  Jakub mentioned that gameplay can last up to 30-40mins, so I needed to crunch as much music as possible into the cart. There are two ways I’ve tried to achieve this: Recycling SFX and using the instrument editor. 

For example, lets say you have three modes: C Lydian, D Mixolydian, G Ionian. You need at least three notes to express these modes.  So, if each mode lasts one music pattern in Pico-8, you would need nine SFX.  But these modes all use the same pitches (G-A-B-C-D-E-F#).  If you recycle and use common tones, you would only need five SFX (C-E-F#) (D-E-F#) (G-E-F#).  It’s a bit harmonically vague, but enough to create compositional contrast from pattern to pattern.  I’m not certain, but this idea of recycling and repurposing was probably used a lot in early chiptune music.  I tried using this as much as possible in this soundtrack.

Another way to save on SFX resources in Pico-8 is to compose longer musical phases in the instrument editor (this is what you’re hearing at the 1:02 mark). This way, SFX speeds can be extremely slow to save resources, but still have a fast pace.  I’ll probably do a tutorial on this soon.

Untitled (1:25)

I’m horrible at naming my pieces. Any suggestions for this one?

This composition takes a lot of inspiration from minimalist music, particularly Steve Reich. I’ve spent lots of time studying and playing Reich’s music. I love writing music that’s metrically ambiguous. If you have two parts, both in 4/4, but starting at different times, you can create really interesting metric relationships between the two parts. 

Furthermore, if you have one part in 4/4, and another in 5/4, you create complex polymeters.  Each time one-part completes a cycle, their relationship to the OTHER part is different. In this example, it would take 20 beats to complete a full cycle. 

Anyways, that’s what I’m trying to play with in this one :)

Forest Firefly (2:30)

Another old piece, originally written around the same time as Prelude. I really liked this one, so I opened it up again and tried to make it sound better.  I always thought this had a cinematic feel, so I added some vinyl distortion to one of the parts.  If you listen closely, you can hear the pops and crackles.  

Somehow, I managed to reduce this piece to two parts in Counterpoint.

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Thanks for reading!