Alternative Soundtrack - music jam #2: Daily Journal

Day 1

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Initial sketch

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First thing I do every jam, is to first get some ideas from the theme while playing the piano, and then record a long continuous take improvising around those ideas. Then I listen back a bit later, and if anything sounds good to me, I start working on from that.

Since the jam started on a Friday for me and I was going to have no time during the weekend, I made a quick sketch of a faux Bossa Nova track, after listening to a track from the Animal Crossing: New Horizons soundtrack.

The idea I had with this was that I would work more on this if listening to it after the weekend it still sounded OK to me, and stopped there for the day.

Sketch from Day 1:

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Day 2&3

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Didn’t Work on the jam.

Day 4

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New attempt

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Took a listen to my sketch from Day 1 after not hearing it since Friday, and I was really feeling uninspired to work on it any more, so i got another idea on the piano and started working on that.

This time I decided to go more in the “make it my way” direction, while keeping the guitar and upright bass that they use in the original soundtrack, but moving away from the Bossa Nova stylings and using a flute sound from Steinberg’s Halion Sonic that I really like, called “Expressive Flute” for the lead part.

After getting a short sketch of what I was feeling, I stopped for the day.

Sketch from Day 4:

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Day 5-9

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Sort of giving up, I guess?

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Got the same feeling with my Day 4 sketch as I did with my first one, so I was feeling really stuck on what I could really do, and thought about playing the actual game itself to get some ideas/inspiration on arrangement and other stuff for the track like I had done for the previous jam, by playing Metroid Prime.

Last console’s I’ve bought were the PS2 and PSP since I mostly play on a PC, and I definitely wasn’t going to buy a Switch just to play Animal Crossing for the jam, so I looked to try playing via an Switch emulator but the performance was pretty terrible (laggy, 2-20 fps, literally unplayable) probably due to my CPU being a bit too old.

So I just decided to try some stuff every day hoping something sticks, but ultimately I really seemed to be uninspired on the arranging side of things this jam, so on day 9, I decided to just take my sketch of the track and play it again over a drumbeat and submit that, knowing that it does not really fit the vibe of the outside island area that much.

A little final attempt to try get some ideas going on Day 9 below, that kinda turned out as the final submitted track with a second section added to it 😅:

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The singing/mumbling is what I usually like to do when thinking of lead parts/melodies, and sometimes I do the same thing with whistling instead. (There’s a fun “hack” with the Pitch Correction tool in Cubase, where you can take the Note and Pitch Bend data from the audio recordings, and use that then to control a VST with the recorded “performance”)

The actual final submitted track:

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