Jeremy's Music Devlog - Dynamic music, recording/editing/mixing

I spent a lot of time jumping between tasks on this project, but ended up devoting much of my time to the audio portion of things and well, the script.  I'll spend some time of the non-audio stuff I did in a later post, but let's focus on music for now. I primarily work in FL Studio, Ableton Live, and Audacity but since this is all studio and not something I was going to perform, I mostly worked  in FL Studio and Audacity.  Ultimate God Angel Gigaforce EX features four songs, though in the current build you're only hearing two of them. The rest will be added in the near future.

First I want to talk about the tech behind the dynamic music before I talk about how I made the songs.  Basically I split each song into multiple tracks. Percussion is isolated into its own audio file, bass is its own audio file, samples are in their own file, lead synth in its own file, et cetera. The  master track (always percussion) is playing  at all times (in Unity it's set to Play On Awake, Loop,  and NOT muted). The primary music gameobject has a child object that has a series of audio sources, each of which is set to Play Awake and Loop but they are ALL muted.  Then I  have a public GameObject variable on the master and just tossed the  child object into there. And then all I am doing is selectively unmuting child audio sources.

But it's not that simple because if you do it that way it will get out of sync over time and it happens a lot quicker than you would think it would. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that sync is broken. So to avoid that even when the secondary audio sources are muted, I  am constantly resyncing the child tracks to the master  with a coroutine I  am constantly calling from FixedUpdate(), Technically this could be expensive but it's doing so little code-wise I'm   not super worried about eating too many cycles.

So once the dynamic music code was there, I had to think about how I mixed my songs pretty carefully because I  had to assume for a fair amount of the time you would not be hearing the entire song playing at once. I  also had to think about how they would loop and ended up adding drum bits to the beginnings of most of the songs to  make it a clear loop. I actually wrote one completely new song for this project ("Lonesome Memory") and finished three others that I had been working on for a while and just couldn't finish before. Well they're finished now.

So with "Lonesome Memory" I was using samples from the Citizen DJ projectthe Library of Congress put up recently to provide all kinds of freely remixable samples. I used to do a lot of sample based stuff years and years ago (Skinny Puppy influencing my work for sure, but I also co-produced a hiphop album in the mid-2000s) but I  just stopped using any samples I didn't create myself (excluding drum samples) around 10 years ago and never went back.   This was a good opportunity to do some sample-based stuff and I had a lot of fun with it. The samples I'm using in "Lonesome Memory" are   "I love the name of Mary" tenor and chorus with orchestra  "Guitare 2" by Monplaisir, "You, yourself and the main character" by Komiku (full credits on my Soundcloud).The  "Mary" stuff is what I sampled to make the choppy vocal bit at the start of the song and the "Guitare 2" is the guitar samples I've autotuned and otherwise manipulated for the chorus and the Komiku bit is used for the part where the chorus changes up.  The bass synth I'm using is from a VST called Modalities 2 by LoopLords, a Depeche Mode themed synth. The trance-ish pluck is  the String-Thing VST from Simple-Media. The lead synth is from one of my all-time favorite VSTs, Sytrus by Image-Line, a FL Studio original VST. Sytrus is such a versatile VST and I've been using pretty heavily manipulated versions of its Database Horn preset a lot lately for kind of that sad Vangelis-y '80s synth feel. The Blade Runner soundtrack is always going to be a big influence on me.I wanted to make a soundscape that was kind of eerie and sad but also had that '90s hiphop bombastic feel, which is where the samples and the drums come in.  The samples are from the  E-mu SP-12, an early drum machine/sampler combo from 1986 which you hear a lot in late '80s to   mid-'90s hiphop because they were obsolete and cheap to get (for  a while). Conveniently, the Citizen DJ page actually includes good drum sample sets from the SP-12, the Aka MPC, Roland 808 and 909 and other classics. I was trying to imitate the sort of drum patterns you hear in old hiphop and I was specifically thinking of Naughty by Nature, but my drum implementation is more aggressive I think, probably because of my punk and Detroit techno  background.

Another track is "Turo Erash" (which is Euro Trash garbled because I am a child). There's this period in the late '80s/early '90s where you had some really fascinating pop electronic music drawing on house and techno coming out of Europe that suddenly imploded into tacky, horrible horseshit. So within like a year or two you go from genuinely good hiphouse like Technotronic and Soul 2 Soul to absolute garbage like Real McCoy and Ace of Base.

(Don't @  me, "Pump Up The Jam" slaps  and Ya Kid K's solo album , which Technotronic producer guy  Jo Bogaert produced is surprisingly great. "One World Nation" is great and bold. Who else was writing lyrics like this in hiphouse?)

But for a minute there before The Chronic completely redefined hiphop you had both sample-based conscious hiphop like A Tribe Called Quest, Arrested Development, and Queen Latifah co-existing with dance-oriented hiphouse and it was really interesting. The one-two punch of gangsta rap and fad-y white European rappers on cheesy Eurodance just obliterated an interesting little subculture in electronic music. I wanted to write a song that was a tribute to this era of music. I  also wanted to write a song that just had that good dance floor groove. VST-wise I'm again using Sytrus and Modalities, but I'm also using Harmless, another Image-Line FL Studio original. I like Harmless because it has some interesting characters. I've always liked the Commodore 64's famous SID chip, which is a subtractive synth using digital filters on an analog base or something like that. I'm not a chip designer. Harmless  is "a subtractive synthesizer powered by an additive synthesis engine", and the filters and whatnot are all digital, like the SID. So I'm not saying it sounds LIKE A SID per se, but it's got a feel that I like. The samples are largely a combination of a trap drum kit I've been messing with in recent years mixed with some bits from a house library I assembled like 15 years ago.

There's also  "Bad Future" which started out as my attempt to write a future bass track that went down a sort of melancholy industrial path instead. It's not what I originally was going for, but I really like how it came out. It shares a lot of DNA with my remix of Alice  Knows Karate's "She's Got Legs" remix. This track is using the Sytrus Database Horn preset as a base as well, with different tweaks and effects. I'm also using Harmless on this track for the New Order-ish synth bass. I'm also using Novakill's DREAMkILLER, another Sytrus sound, and a lot of automation clips to twirl knobs virtually on the fly. I really wanted to make something chill but just wound up with something sinister instead but with some low key sadness too. Perfect for a space battle where you have to fight to protect a goddess that might just hate you.

"The Stage is Our Church" is a song that has a convoluted origin. I wrote a song like 5 years ago called "Scars" and after playing it live for a while, collaborated with Keiko Takamura (of Alice Knows Karate and Crashfaster) on vocals but the song just never came together in the studio like I wanted it to. I was writing a song that was influenced by trapwave like M Huncho and trap influenced synth pop like Purity Ring (check their collab with Danny Brown "25 Bucks" that I especially love)  mixed with my own industrial/punk background and ended up making something that had that trap vibe but also a cold, mean synth line that really gives the song some bite. About ten years ago my friend Star and I met with a couple of other musicians in the drill court (a big empty space) inside The Armory (a former  National Guard base in the Mission district in San Francisco) . The Armory has been everything from a sports venue to a shooting location for several The Empire Strikes Back to a porn studio. We basically went in there to the biggest natural  reverb chamber I've ever seen and made a bunch of noises for several hours and recorded it to build a sample library we could all drawn from. People brought musical instruments  and noisemakers of all shapes and sizes and Star and I also took turns singing. So I used some samples from that experience, mainly and sort of flute sounding thing. I also used the DSK Music Box VST, Harmless, A-Sine by Odo Synths (a simple  FM sounding VST), Phuturetone's Phutura 2, Humanoid Sounds' Scanned Synth Pro VST (for those really deep sub bass frequencies), and you guessed it, Sytrus (for that acid bass). Then it occurred to me Keiko's vocals for "Scars" would work great on "The Stage" if I chopped them up and autotuned them, so I did exactly that! For the game, though, I took out the vocals. It's kind of weird having vocal music in a game outside of intros/outros/cutscenes.

I'm going to do another post later about the more technical stuff I worked on for this project, too, but I hope you enjoyed reading about the music!