Sword Cards
By Catthew O. on March 6, 2016 11:59 pm
I tried a whole mess of different concepts for this week but nothing turned into something I could finish in a week. Ultimately, "three monophonic, unchanging square waves with drums metal" seemed to work for me at the last possible second. Another week of cutting it too close!
Definitely influenced by Game Gear music, which I indulged in excessively the past couple of days, but I'm sure this goes too low for the Game Gear to be able to reproduce it (I should really try! This isn't the first time I've worked with this exact concept)
As it's influenced by Game Gear, I couldn't stop thinking about the feeling of being in the back of my parents' old minivan playing Sonic Chaos and Legend of Illusion, and the general weirdness of having such isolated, emotional experiences, all within a confined space with other people who have no relationship to what I'm feeling. (Not because they didn't care about me, but because they weren't exactly as moved by GG and GB music as I was. I started wearing headphones pretty quick.)
Because I knew time was of the essence and because I wanted to REALLY challenge myself to make something that felt compelling with extreme restrictions, I didn't let myself mess with ADSR automation or write in any vibrato or pitch bends. I literally used YMCK's plugin with whatever the default setting was, since I knew it was at least a basic square sound. NO SHAME.
The drums are all from the Roland XV5080, except for the kick drum. The kick samples in the XV5080 are great, but they were too boomy for this instrumentation, sucking the life out of the bass voice square entirely. I wasn't going to try to EQ one sample on a synth module that I'm still learning to use when the whole point was minimalism and restriction. This one has more iPod click-like triggered kick sound to it anyway.
(One of those cymbals is probably too loud. Maybe next week I'll get it done by Friday so I can give it a fair listen for mixing!)
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
