Reiterate means reinvigorate

By: Anders Hagström / March 12, 2015 /

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After many ups and downs our group finally decided that enoughs enough and opted to redesign the game Dragon’s Song into a more traditional shooter. The reason for this was an issue with player input response being delayed due to sound playback latency. Simply put, it wasn’t possible to make the sound effects from the dragon to play at the same moment as the player hits the fire key, instead there was a hefty delay making syncing playing with the music impossible.

Thus my group set about on an ambitious last minute redesign in order to be able to deliver a playable game at the final turn-in date. For me as sound designer this meant, among other things, to create new music for the game. We were originally limited to a very small palette of notes in the music because it all had to sound right with the players input which had to be in one key. As this no longer applied it was decided that I should make a new soundtrack with a richer melody and variety.

For the new soundtrack I chose to make a more upbeat, happy sounding, house track. The track follows a simple ”intro, verse, prechorus, refrain, repeat”-structure and is designed to be loopable which means no fade out outro or the like. To make this track I started by making a basic beat using some classic drum machines such as Roland 909 and a Virus TI. I then boosted the basic sounds by adding more drum samples of different character over them. This is a common practice to make drum sounds fill up more space and be more assertive in the mix. The hi-hat consists of several layers that are panned to the left and right to make them clearly distinguishable while leaving room in the middle of the mix for the synthesizers. There are several different types of reverbs on the various drum sounds to create a sense of space in hte beat. The whole drum package except the bass drums were then grouped through a mix bus and treated with sidechaining to make them groove a bit more and feel more hooked up to the bass. They were also treated with a SPL Vitalizer which is a sound effect that can be used to widen the stereo effect and add clarity to the sound through a mix of saturation, EQ and compression.

The lead riff on the refrains is a mix of four different synths playing simultaneously, the melody was programmed using a sequencer built into the software synth Nexus that I used for the lead. Working with a step sequncer has the advantage of making it easier to tweak rhythmic details on more complex riffs such as this. In this case i used something called a swing function which moves the notes slightly off beat to create a swinging motion in the music. The drums are playing straight fours which makes for a nice contrast with rock solid drums and a more playful bass. The riff is also grouped together and treated with sidechaining, but to much greater effect than the drums. Here we can hear that the riff is really ducking.

The verses are smoother and sidechained somewhere in between, feeling more airy and fluffy as a result. This makes the refrain seem more energetic and powerful by comparison. On the verses I’ve used several different organ sounds and synth pads panned to the left or right to create a wide, swooping feeling. Slightly more in the center lies two muted guitars, their position in the mix makes them stand out as the main focus. There are also some white noise, heavily sidechained and treated with an automated low pass filter to denote high points in the arrangement. This is a common practice in house music. I’m using a white noise sample I’ve made myself by recording the white noise from a hardware frequency analyzer. Good white noise is hard to achieve on digital equipment so I’ve created one using an analogue source.

For the Final version of the game I will be adding a lead melody to the verses and embellish the arrangement with breaks, filter sweeps and the like. At the moment creating effects for menu buttons and enemies are the main priorities. Our lead art also jumped ship this week to pursue other career options which means I’m likely going to be doing graphical work from now on too.

Link to track below