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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / ViridianLoom's music / Strawberry Jam

Strawberry Jam

By ViridianLoom on September 27, 2020 10:33 pm

I had a pretty productive week musically. I came up with 3 different song ideas, one of which I put a lot of time into this week and I was going to upload it here but it's actually a good opportunity to collaborate with a friend of mine. He's been wanting to write a song together and we used to be in a prog band so I wanted to come to him with a pretty proggy idea, and that track is in 27/16 so I reckon that's going to be fun for him to put drums on. Subsequent ideas were in a similar vein so I decided to set all those aside and write this little diddy.


Last week I asked about the kind of sounds that were used to create post-chiptune video game music. I got a lot of great information, particularly a monster post from ipaghost that was super illuminating. I decided to download a demo of the Korg M1 and the Wavestation and WOW!!!! These sound amazing. They pretty much nail down all the sounds I was looking for. This song was made entirely with just the M1 because I really wanted to experiment with it. Since I'm working with the demo version it kept going silent every 20 minutes and then I'd have to reboot my DAW and reassign all the instruments all over again which was definitely a pain in the ass. I'd like to buy the Korg Collection but that shit is $400 and I really hope it goes on a sale in the near future :X


As for the writing approach, I again tried to go for a song that could work for a video game or something. This one ended up a little too upbeat and its not quite background music but I still enjoyed making it. I also started this one with a melody first, writing melodic ideas from beginning to end before touching the rhythm section which is something I pretty much never do. That's actually something I'm going to focus on more, developing a strong melody to write a song around. I feel like that's probably how a lot of video game songs a probably composed. Like, the melody is the description of the scene and everything else is the vibe.

September 28, 2020 2:29 am

hent03

Could totally picture this as the background track to a beat-em-up. Has that right kind of vibe.

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September 29, 2020 3:36 am

levelcapybara

Nice track! and neat to hear you experimenting with M1. I love those sounds, and I'm excited to hear what you can do with them. smile

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September 29, 2020 6:28 am

Ipaghost


Sweet! Glad you are finding your sounds! Just gonna leave this here... The "DirectWave Channel Sampler" section might be relevant to your needs!

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September 29, 2020 8:01 pm

Alex Fun

This is great. Those drums sound outrageously clean. Real kit?

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September 29, 2020 8:32 pm

ViridianLoom

Alex Fun wrote:

This is great. Those drums sound outrageously clean. Real kit?

Thanks, it's actually the Stadium kit in Studio Drummer from Native Instruments. I think what really makes it sound more realistic is that they simulate overhead and room microphones in the vst. Comparitively, I always had trouble making Battery 4 sound realistic even when I was using the same samples. Also I've been practicing playing these beats live on the keyboard so I can get a more human feel on the dynamics rather than having to program them that way.

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September 30, 2020 6:18 am

Kedbreak136

The drums sound very good indeed, very real as Alex Fun pointed out. The bass is nice. I think you are right about how videogames tracks are built - probably around a single theme and coming back to it often. Your track is more proggy, which is not bad at all in itself. smile

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October 1, 2020 4:41 am

Devieus

What a tasty jam. You can probably find something cheaper that sort of does the same. I bet it'd feel more like a video game song if you didn't use realistic drums. The process write-up is pretty solid, though I imagine it's more likely it starts with the chord progression and building a strong melody around that.

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October 1, 2020 9:33 am

ScanianWolf

I like the bridge/break towards 1:27 and especially the synth melody, a tasty jam! Well done!

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