Music Stuff

Every once in a while there's a track that comes along and just blows me away and I listen to it over and over again trying to piece apart and decipher any clues about how exactly it was constructed to be so damn good.  This time it happens to be the song "Worn Out Tapes", from the Unbeatable OST, and also featured as a bonus level in Rhythm Doctor:

https://peakdivide.bandcamp.com/track/worn-out-tapes

Music has elements of both "art" and "craft" in that there are aspects of producing a song that are a little more technical in nature (mixing, mastering, etc.) as well as elements that are more creative in nature (arrangement, sound design, melodies and harmonies, rhythm selection).  That is not to say that the technical aspects are cut-and-dry, good-and-bad, because there are many different schools (and "non-schools") of thought regarding them, but at the very least you can argue that they are a little easier to approach in a replicable manner.

The creative aspects are a different beast altogether.  Like with any artform, you can of course template your decisions here on the styles of other artists, and that is in fact what most (?) people do, frequently drawing from multiple complementary traditions in order to synthesize something new.  My own sound borrows heavily from traditional chiptune, but also draws influence from trance music in the way that it heavily uses repetition and layering, as well as anthemic choruses and simple chord structures.

I've said before that music is one of the rare things in life that I feel =truly= excited about, in that my anticipation and desire for exploring new creations and expressions actually manages to surpass my constant regulatory circuit that shunts down new ideas that are too impractical to achieve given my other goals.  Of course, my approach to music is still slow and steady, but it is extremely rare for me to find a subject matter in life where I =will= say, "Yes, I want to do that, and that, AND that, and THAT, too, I want to do it ALL."

I have of course tried countless times to replicate and emulate the styles of other artists.  I went through a long phase of trying to emulate she_music, for example.  This was a phase when I tried to make heavier use of global sidechains, trim down on the reverb effects, and throw in a lot more 8-bit sound effect everywhere.  There was the phase where I was trying to achieve the sound of BT in This Binary Universe, using odd meters, tons of glitching, and less chiptune sounds in favor of instruments like mallet sounds and dulcimers.  There have been experiments with 16-bit sounds trying to emulate SNES soundtracks, stabs at making lo-fi chillhop, synthwave, attempts to sound like Puru, etc.

In the end I almost never manage to quite reach a perfect emulation of the original feel of the source material -- because, of course, so many different things go into making a track.  It's hard to replicate every last thing, especially when you don't have access to the materials nor the process that were originally used.  But these are always worthwhile experiments in their own right because of their ability to increase my musical vocabulary and explore new worlds.

There is so much going into this track here, it's daunting to even begin to decompose it into its constituent parts.  There's a lot of varied sounds, lots of different sections with different stuff going on in each, there's a lot of transition effects, lots of different things going on in the drums, etc.  But in the end I think a lot of it lies in the powerful riffs with heavy focus on syncopated accents -- this is something that is especially highlighted in the Rhythm Doctor chart for this song.  These riffs are played at a fast tempo (150 BPM) along with energetic drum patterns that are almost DnB-esque, along with general solid production.

But really the core of it is these riffs with syncopated accent patterns.  I think if there's anything for me to really take away and try to digest, it's those.  They're everywhere, with different types of syncopations, and I think there's a certain energy and feel that comes out of them that really drives the song along in a different way than I've felt before.  The little breaks in the song are "nothing special" -- they're good of course, but they're easier for me to understand since breaks in-between high intensity sections are a tried-and-true technique even for my own sound.

Ugh, everything here just sounds so good.  As someone who has been producing for 15+ years and has made some objectively really good stuff, let me tell you, even among us experienced producers, there are definitely stuff that just feels forever out of our reach.  I'm sure there are people who probably feel that way about my work, too.  There's so much for all of us to learn and to create.

I think one of the reasons that I am so proud of my track "Memoirs of a Whale" is that it represents a song where I deviated from my own style to create a new synthesis, and I didn't just half-ass it.  I went the full distance and put the time and effort into that track to really take it all the way, and I really delivered on what I wanted it to be.  It wasn't just another 9-bit chiptune track where I came up with a catchy riff and dialed in the rest of the elements.  I mean, those are valuable in their own right, too, but those ones will never compare to the achievement that this song represents.