Take a look at this:
That's what 30+ minutes of experimental music made in the span of a few weeks looks like. Well, technically, music doesn't look like anything at all; it sounds like something. Bad metaphor. Sorry!
It's the soundtrack to my jam game, Snow Cone Serenade, which I developed in December 2023. I've never written so much music in such a short time span.
Before I ever made a game, I actually released a bunch of music on Bandcamp. The story so far is that it takes me forever to finish a personal project or an album, because I tend to overthink stuff and tweak it for long periods of time.
Overthinking is not always a bad thing.
It helped me to see how far I can push myself, analyze my work and find a workflow that suits me. It also resulted in projects, that felt like a mixed bag sometimes. The kind of bag, that's already a little torn at the bottom and a bunch of stuff is falling out of it.
For me, that meant, it sometimes felt forced, bulky and maybe even a little safe. Don't get me wrong: I am satisfied with most of my projects, but I can see spots here and there, that feel like I should've let them breathe more and made them feel lighter.
A year ago, I already felt, that I wanted to start changing my workflow to be a little more performative and loose. I got into synthesizers, used more hardware - that's the stuff next to the monitor that you can actually touch - and also consciously decided to play the instruments myself to get away from the perfectly snapping piano roll a little bit. Sometimes, ignoring the click track was also incredibly liberating and resulted in very experimental music that was basically me jamming with myself.
This odd little album is a testament to that period of time:
It's inspired by old video games, dungeon-synth, and sounds completely lunatic - I love it! When I listen to it, I feel like I'm looking into a dark, bottomless well that emanates these odd sounds - a little scary, but also intriguing. I'm not sure if there's a lot of appeal to it, but I loved making these soundscapes and going crazy with them.
By the way, this music was the inspiration for the character Majel in my game. Majel is a computer that sources all the most obscure music it can find.
So what changed when I made my music for my game?
Since it was a jam game, time was such a limited thing, and music was just another part of this huge mountain of things I had to do for my game. It turns out my recent style change became a necessity to make the soundtrack I needed to make for this game.
I knew it would be perfect for the exploratory portions of the game, where you're lost in this snowy city, wandering around and talking to people. Some of the cues are one-take synth performances, recorded over each other, one by one. You can hear many of those in the eleven-minute track, Squeaky Snow:
Go ahead and scrub through the track! These cues are long, atmospheric and not written as themes at all. Their purpose is purely to capture the mood and the feel of these places in the game. In the game, this was realized by a thirty-minute track, consisting of five to six of these sessions that I looped through the entirety of the game, as soon as you arrive in Snow Cone. Squeaky Snow is an excerpt from those thirty minutes.
I used my Poly Brute Synth a lot and dove into my little collection of patches, I made over the years. Lots of pads with reverb and a very limited amount of layers, each with a very distinct place in the mix.
A trick I love to apply to these tracks, especially if they use a lot of reverb, is to pan the instruments far away from each other and have their reverb mirrored on the other side. So if you have a pad playing on the right, its reverb-send will be on the left. The accompanying lead synth would play on the left and have its reverb on the right. So for this kind of project, distinction and limitation were the keys to getting these tracks into shape.
Thanks to this method, the big moments got the love they needed.
So these exploratory cues enabled me to cover a lot of playtime with a lot of music. I also knew, that I would need some tailor-made cues for the emotional moments in the game. Moments like, meeting your little dog Jedediah for the first time, an emotional story by one of the characters, the tense moment of entering the cursed city of Snow Cone, and the ending of the game. These did not have to be long at all. I would slowly fade out of that endless exploratory loop and place these cues that were more finely crafted and thematic. For this simple, little story, I wrote the most simple little theme:
You can hear it all throughout the game in many of those little emotional moments:
As a quirky introduction to your cute little dog.
When you fear for the safety of your cute little dog.
And, when you’re reunited with your cute little dog. This is the credit theme.
What does this all mean?
It would have been impossible to make this kind of music for the entire game, so splitting the score into these two sections was a great way for me to conquer the scope of it all! Maybe some of this rambling is useful to you if you struggle with these things as well?
You can play Snow Cone Serenade on Steam, starting March 1st:
