Brainstorming Music Ideas Part Two- Piano Hybrid Song

The second attempt at a quick sample song was a bit cleaner for the second week. I tried to give it a simple structure with two basic parts. Since it was pretty simple I was able focus on making the different parts coordinate with each other in ways that ended up sounding pretty decent.

No more talking, here is the Piano Hybrid Song:

Brainstorming Music Ideas Part One - Sloshy Mess Song

Going back in time a few weeks...




When I first met with my new team a few weeks ago, it was clear that we had a problem with our rhythm based game based on music, and that is that we didn't have any music! We really needed to get started on making some music and making it fast to get some general ideas and some baseline content to develop our game.




So I quickly got reacquainted with my Pro Tools software and started messing around. It can be overwhelming to start brainstorming songs so really this just consisted of grabbing whatever decent sound I came across and recording the first thing I could think of.




This of course made my first attempt to get out a sample song pretty messy, but going through the process was necessary and helped to make the next attempt a little better.




I'm getting ahead of myself though, here is that first sample track, Sloshy Mess Song:






And so began the messy brainstorm...

Starting A New Song

A lot has happened since my last post, so to bring you up to speed...

We still haven't decided on a game title yet for our rhythm based game because we're still working through what the story might be and some finer points of gameplay, but that will be coming shortly.

We have decided on a team/company name however, Noisemaker Games.

I've been working heavily on getting sample music up over the past several weeks and will add some posts describing some of the work I've done to get those sample songs going.

Now I've started to work on a longer, more thought out song.... So how on Earth do you start with that?!

For this song, my process started by deciding on a theme/feel. The theme I'm going with is retro/techno, and this is likely to morph as I build the song and find sounds that fit.

Next, I started thinking about song structure. One of my favorite song structures is ABABCB, or verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus, as this structure seems to keep things changing enough to not get boring. My goal is to have the song be about two minutes however, so this can be a real challenge with an ABABCB structure that easily pushes a song length to 3 minutes. Keeping things interesting might be much easier with the gameplay thrown on top of the music however, so a more simple song structure might end up being better. If I build the song properly, it shouldn't be to hard to chop things out if we find out later that this is the case.

Next, come up with some basic chord structures for the different parts... This mostly just takes some time exploring, but one I got going with a direction and style for one section the others weren't too difficult.

I've come up with some chord progressions for three sections, but I've recorded two of them using some basic techno patches, here is one for what will probably be the verse:


And another that will probably be the chorus:




Stay posted! I'll be uploading some of my brainstorming tracks soon, and I'll also be posting some bits of game development from when I worked on the Timey prototype.