Background Music

    Composing music that actually gets used somewhere is something that was always at the back of my list of things I wanted to do someday. Working with a very low budget provided a perfect excuse to try to learn GarageBand and make one myself! Of course being used in a game, which I have creative control over, obviously doesn’t mean it’s any good, hahahaha… But trying something new for the first time definitely was a fun experience! During the pandemic, piano became my new pandemic hobby so I’ve been playing a fair bit. But coming up with a game music track took some time, especially without formal training or professional experience.

    I first tried to come up with the main melody by playing various random notes that popped into my head. In the beginning, these tended to be more serious sounding tunes probably due to the types of music I was practicing on the piano. Since the game is a casual game, I tried to think of lighter and happier simple tunes using lighter sounding instruments like vibraphone. After a month or two of playing various random tunes without writing any of them down, some tended to stick around longer in my head and some tended to fade away. Doesn’t mean the best tunes stuck around, but probably the worse sounding ones withered away and ones that are catchier (at least to me) stuck around to win the survival of the (subjective) fittest tune.

    Next while recording, I came up with minor variations in melody, switching octaves, and also switched around instruments to make it feel less repetitive, sometimes fading in/out instruments. This appears to be a common pattern in many songs but was especially true, since for games it needs to continuously loop forever in the background.

    Then I had to do some editing. Fixing mistakes, trying different instruments, experimenting with effects and various knobs to see which combinations work best together. I once saw a YouTube video of a professional music writer recreating a well known song from close to scratch, and pretty much exactly knowing which effects & knobs to get to the desired sound for all the tracks. Actually trying this myself made me appreciate even more how much experience and effort must have gone in for that person to get to where he is. I only had enough time to scratch the surface and often just had to settle with what seemed good enough, rather than being able to get the exact sound I want in my head.

    So I found myself keep wanting to experiment and enjoy music making longer, but in the end I just had to stop at my self imposed deadline and get back to the other mountain of tasks to actually make this game playable by others! :’) Hopefully this BGM is at least somewhat tolerable to players. Just in case it’s not, I guess I should definitely add a mute music setting.