OST Composing Jam: Overtime

1 hour of music?!?

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Early thoughts

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This is a new jam type for the OST Composing jams where participants are given a month to make a 1 hour long soundtrack to the given theme.

Now making an hour of music in a month is a lot of work, especially if you avoid making too many ambient tracks that don’t have a lot of stuff going on, since making more simplistic ambient stuff is a lot easier than more energetic/melodic stuff that has more complexity to the parts of it.

Initially was intending to give it a go solo and probably wouldn’t have been able to make an hour of music in the allotted time with my pace, but some other people from Impression’s jam series discord started making a group for the jam and decided to join that instead.

With a lot of people working on one big music project it’s probably going to be a bit of a mess stylistically but that’s what makes it interesting, and I’m really looking forward to see what comes of the end result if we ever get there 😅

I’m writing this a bit after the jam has started and have been playing around with a little idea I got from the theme image, but I won’t start doing any concrete work on actual proper tracks before the whole team decides on the imaginary game setting and the direction we collectively want the music to go towards.

I’ve only done collaborations on a few jams with a mate, but those have been just me and another person, so I’m exited to see whether this will affect my musical output to the jam in any interesting ways.

In a previous Impressions: Mystery #1 jam, we were given a motif to work with and that was really fun and I got a lot of inspiration from having something that was not my own making to start making stuff from, so I’m hoping to get some inspiration from what all other group members will be making as well.

I’m a bit sad that there was no text theme alongside the image theme this time, as OST Composing Jam’s have always had both, and the image theme is a bit hard to get any ideas from since it’s a collage of paintings depicting iconic places from classic horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, so it’s hard to get the original music of those games out of my head while trying to come up with something original that fits the image.

In each painting there is also a pair of chickens for some reason 😅, which I guess were put there so participants wouldn’t feel like they HAVE TO make their imaginary game setting a horror one, and could make more goofy/lighthearted stuff as well.

But won’t do much yet until the game setting and direction is decided on.

The theme

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Initial ideas

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Before getting together as a group and discussing the direction were going for I spent a bit of time just noodling ideas around on the piano as they came to me from the theme and got a little melodic idea/figure that I like and recorded a improv take playing around with it on the piano.

Piano improv of the first idea

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Then on the day after I started trying out to make an arrangement based on the earlier idea improv stuff, which ended up pretty heavily riffing on the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack stuff, with a sampled m9 chord played up and down the keyboard to get that lofi feel.

Arrangement test of the first idea

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Will have to see if this type of stuff will fit the game setting and chosen direction after its decided, but at least got something started for now 😉

Experimentation Week

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As a group we decided to do a week of just each coming up with different sounds and ideas and then gathering together and going through those and then deciding on further progress, but the initial plan is to do mostly ambient music and nothing too in your face, which will be good practice for me since I’m still pretty bad with sound design… 😅

The first day of the what I guess I’ll call the Experimentation Week, I spent some time trying to make some ambient sounds and effects but everything managed to make was not really good at all…

So because I spent 2 hours on making nothing good, I decided to spend another hour coming up with new ideas on the piano, during which I got a pretty minimalistic idea that I liked and then just recorded some playing around with the idea without a metronome hoping to maybe turn the idea into something later.

The new idea is a bit similar to the first one with the usage of the semitone motion as a central part, and I noticed that I’ve been using that sort of figure a lot lately so maybe I really like it since I keep unconciously using it? 😄

Second idea?

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The day after I tried to do some sound design again, hoping to get at least something that feels usable…

I tried a lot of stuff, but eventually got a sound that felt somewhat OK and sparked some ideas, the sound being a choir sound being mangled through a lot of effects to make it sound a bit weird and ambient.

I’m not going to try and explain what effects I used and why, since I just slapped multiple instances of the Surge-XT-Effects plugin and fiddled with dials without knowing what half of them even do 😂

After I got the sound made I just started playing stuff that came to mind, keeping the earlier minimalist piano idea in mind while doing so.
Eventually got a around 2 minutes take that I liked and started to think about the rest of the instruments.

Another group member had made some cool wonky noises using earlier so I took those and started to try and incorporate them somehow, and eventually ended up chopping a short part of one of them and slapping a lot of effects on which turned it into a sort of distorted WHOOSH sound that I put in the background every now and then as a sort of a drone, alongside the choir drone that I also had.

There was also a recording of duck’s screeching by another team member that I took and added in the background at places to feel like a monster roar in the distance or something like that, by just time stretching the audio file longer and adding reverb and some other effects I also had on the choir to make it more weird and ambient/distant.

While thinking of other instruments I got the idea of trying a Celeste to play some stuff in a second section where the choir would change to just padding as a drone, and also eventually deciding to double the Celeste with a Vibraphone to give a sort of a dreamy feeling to the track.

Maybe having such bright instruments playing melodic stuff will make the track catch the ear too much and not ambient enough, but I’ve decided to try every idea I get this year so in they go..

Probably still a bit of a muddy mess but for starters I like it.

First ambient try

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Rest of the first week

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For the rest of the week I just messed around trying to make sounds but never got anything I really liked, until I gave up on making things from scratch and just took some time playing around with some of the sound generator instruments/patches in NI Reaktor where there are some pre-mapped macro knobs and value randomization to fiddle with while the sound is playing and that got me some little drones and other sfx sounds I somewhat liked.

Whether those will actually be useful or just a waste of time I don’t know, but after the next team meet-up we will hopefully have a more defined direction to go for as that usually gets the ball rolling for me 😉

Week 1

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Focus of week 2

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After the last team meet we decided to start focusing more on the musical side of things with coming up with motifs track ideas and other such thing during the second week, which I kinda was already doing on the first week mostly because I’m so bad at sound design and that was my procastrination method for that 😂

One team member had also come up with a little story outline for the game and also some lore for the two birds and other characters appearing in the pictures, which are really helpful to me as that gives a bit of sprinboard to get my brain going.

What instruments we are using is still a bit undecided on, but there is kinda 2 different sort of soundworlds people are interested in working with, one a bit lo-fi ish ala silent hill and the other more modern with electric guitars and synth ambience. There was discussion that we could do both ways if we have the different soundsets be for each of the 2 birds, so if this was a co-op game the player experience would be different depending on which of the two birds they are playing as, or just have a diffrent playtrough for the Big Bird and Small Bird like in Resident Evil 2 that is a different experience with its own music.

So armed with that info from the meeting, I took a bit of a executive decision and came up with two soundsets that I will work with this week while trying to come up with motifs and tracks for the two birds, since I kinda need some guidelines to work inside or otherwise I get stuck with option paralysis and get nothing done.. 😅

The two soundsets are as follows:

Soundset #1:

• Acoustic Guitar and Nylon Guitar for the Lead Intruments
• Strings (Violin, Cello, Contrabass etc.)
• Woodwinds
• Percussion

Soundset #2:

• Electric Guitars as the Lead Instruments
• Synthesizers
• Percussion
• Something else TBD

Those are the rough instrumentation I quickly came up with based on what I felt other team members were already doing, or just overall interested in going for. I’m also thinking that the lead sounds sound also be a part of the other soundset as a support too, just to make things feel cohesive, but that will probably naturally start happening as I get to actually making the test tracks.

Motif 1

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For this first track idea I had already recorded a little improvisation of it using a guitar sound, as the idea had come to me during the last meeting while one member had been explaining their story idea and its lore.

So I took that recording and started to extend it and build a track around it, initally starting with the idea of a nylon and acoustic guitar duet after a discussion on discord with another team member showing one their older tracks which I wanted to copy the vibes a bit for this newer track.

After a few hours I’d gotten about two minutes of the track in a somewhat OK state and had to stop there, since I had reached the point where I’ve run out of steam and started to overtweak things and making them worse, which is audible in the latter half of the track as things get a bit muddy 😂

For this first one I ended up using the Soundset #1, using the nylon and acoustic guitars as the leads, but switching to a electric guitar as lead near the end, which I’m still a bit 50/50 on as it kinda sticks out not in a good way.. maybe its just the sound itself being too METAL LEAD tone but I’m not good with making guitar fx chains so I just used a stock preset from the samples I was using which are all made for metal music 😅 Maybe it will blend better with a more cleaner and less bitey tone, but other than that I like the feel of the track.

Alongside the lead instruments I used a contrabass to play the bass part, a woodwind ensemble patch to add some color and fullness at parts and then in the latter half a childrens choir, sine lead and a celeste to double the electric guitar and hopefully add some otherworldliness to the mood of the track + a drumset to play a soft and steady beat to have some momentum.

As I alluded to before, the latter half might still need a bit more time in the oven, but overall I like the feel of it it.

Tomorrow I will probably try to start a new track using the other soundset Soundset #2 with the Electric Guitar as the lead, and should probably try to incorporate the nylon guitar/acoustic guitar or both?? in that to keep thing cohesive.

Audio

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Motif 2

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Since the idea was to have the different soundsets be for the two birds respectively, for this one I took the little figure I used as the motif in the previous one and altered it slightly and improvised around with it using a electric guitar sound that I actually managed to modify to a more clean tone version.

From the altered version I started to build an arrangement on top of the recorded skeleton, and since I had all my sounds ready this one came together a bit faster than the earlier one, and since I’m using the same sounds on these I’m going to keep them all in the same project file for the ease of use 😄

Since the acoustic guitar sounds I’m using have a lot of pre recorded rhythms in then, I came up with a progression to go with the melodic stuff I recorded in and had the acoustic guitar play accompaniment to the electric guitar which felt like a good combo and fits the vibe of the two birds moving together.

I dropped the contrabass out from this one and instead replaced it with a synth bass playing the bass parts with a constant 1/8th note pulse pattern to give a feeling of momentum and a bit of tension hopefully as I also decided to drop out the drums for this one to give contrast, but might add drums anyway in a later version..

I also had the celeste doubling the lead e.guitar again as well, with the sine lead playing a slightly different melodic idea doubled by a harp later in the track, and that melodic idea gets echoed by a slightly human voice sounding synth pluck and a nylon guitar with after a 1/4th note delay.

To me this one feels more mellow and less bombastic than the previous one, and in hindsight the first one is probably too bombastic to fit the vibe of our submission or maybe it could fit in some sort of cinematic which needs the energy, but for anything else its too much and probably needs to be toned down IMO.

But anyway, this will be all for this session.

Audio

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Week 3

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Merle The Lighthouse Keeper

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While reading though the story outline our has and noodling on the piano at the same time, I got a little idea for the lighthouse keeper Merle who is a bit of a doom and gloom person waiting for someone who has left to return back.

Since the setting for the character is a lighthouse by the sea, my mind unconciously went to Dorian territory as it usually seems to do with anything nautical 😄

Since using just plain dorian is probably going to feel not dark enough for the “after the apocalypse” setting we have in mind, I added the 5-b5 motion to the melody that I also have in the previous tracks and usage of the V chord in minor to amp the folky feel of it that the dorian stuff already gives it.

Only got the piano skeleton sketch recorded as I have 0 ideas on the instrumentation. I did try out a harmonium since its pretty typical for this sort of seaside/nautical setting, but the base sound of the Harmonium from the Kontakt Factory Library is too harsh and reedy in its tone to really fit the mellow vibe I’m going for… Or maybe I’ll have to look for different samples, which I do remember getting a softer freebie harmonium sample instrument at one point (if I can remember the name of the company to re-download it 😅)

Just a piano sketch for now that will get arranged to a mellower version as it’s a bit too energetic to be bgm, but it will work as the starting point.

Audio

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The Lighthouse, first arr.

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Spent a few days doing absolutely fuck all on the jam, but now I got something going arrangement wise for this track.

Per our last team meetup we are doing pretty well track wise, with about over 30 minutes of music done between everyone. Of course of that I’ve done the least, with around 5-6 minutes or so of material with my 3 tracks and 2 of those are pretty much just variations on the same motif idea..

The electric guitar focused one has been taken as the main theme for now, but I will probably need to polish that one more and maybe even make it longer?? since its only just about 2 minutes long.

I don’t know what to do about the original acoustic/nylon version of the motif, if that’s just going to the discard pile or use it for one of the main birds or both of them? but going to be a big question mark for now.

With 2 weeks left of the jam as I’m writing this I feel like its time for me to start actually getting ideas going and tracks completed, since I’m the lowest contributor at the moment track wise and I’m intending to freeload my way through this jam 😂

Even though I hadn’t touched the tracks at all for a few days, I had in the meanwhile redownloaded some old kontakt/sine sample libraries I own that felt fitting to the lighthouse area and it’s keeper Merle after discussing what instruments use with a team member.

Those instruments being:

• A Harmonium (A proper pump organ, not the small tabletop one)
• A Zither (A sampled estonian Concert Kannel in this case)

With those sounds I tried to take my initial idea sketch and simplify/granularize it to make it more ambient and not so ear catching as it initially was, since for area music in a horron/creepy game it would feel a bit jarring it the whole track is so melodic 😅

I also came across a free Delay/Reverb combo FX plugin that had some wonky bit crushing and other creative effects that can be applied to the signals and found some use for that as an insert on sounds to make them sound crappier and felt they fit the vibe I wanted when made worse 😄

Still a really rough proof of concept and needs a lot of work, but at least I finally got some arrangement ideas for the track..
Maybe I’m going to try and make a new track next, or if after a break I can continue this one further, then I’ll do that instead, but worked on this long enough today that my ears need a break from it.

Audio

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Change of scenery

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Yeah, really felt that I needed to start a new track instead of continuing working on the Lighthouse track… So took another place, The School from the story document our team has and started doing something for that, hoping no one else is currently doing the same 😅

But even if someone all ready has tracks for the area, I can repurpose these somewhere else.

Since the school comes after the lighthouse area in the story and is connected to the person there in a way, I started out by taking the little melodic idea I had for the lighhouse keeper Merle (B-G-D-C#) and the second half of that an octave down, so instead of going up to D from G, it goes down which changes the vibe a lot.

Of course I granularized the inital melodic stuff for the lighthouse a lot in the second version, but hopefully this can help connect the places a bit thematically.

Sadly at least for today I only managed to record a short piano sketch of the idea I got for the area ambience track, and hopefully tomorrow I get some ideas going on how to arrange it to a NOT IN YOUR FACE ambient thing..

Since making the sketch was a quick thing, I used the rest of the time to try to do a tension/action track for the school area, since I’ve only done chill/moody tracks for the jam till now and hopefully it will also be a good change of pace for my brain to reorientate a bit.

School Ambience sketch

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Tension track

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The initial idea for this came when I was messing around just slapping the BattleFX plugin on the different instruments in my template for this jam, and after trying it on the piano and slamming octave B notes down lown on the piano I got some sort of vague rhythmic idea to go for and started slapping layers of stuff on top of each other.

I made a couple other instruments like the acoustic guitar double the low E’s on the piano with the same effects also applied to them, and then made a pretty massive layer of different instruments like the harmonium, bells, harp etc. to play the same melody I had for the ambience track to the area, just played more march like with a rigid TAN TAN TAN, TAN TAN TAN rhythm to hopefully get that feeling of shits hitting the fan 😉

I also had the zither and harmonium play a fast arpeggiated fragment of the melody that starts quiet and then keeps getting louder and then some pitch bending to those and the melody to make it weird? i guess..

After that I just slapped some big old industrial/trailer drums, which may be a bit too much and slightly corny/generic, but I’ll know later on a fresh listen back to it.

Pretty copypaste in the vibes, but at least a start 😄

School tension first version

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School Ambience first arr.

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After sharing the piano sketch with other team members, I got some recommendations on what to go for arrangement wise, with some like slowing the tempo being what I already had in mind, and a cool suggestion of having a call and response structure for the piano and then something else to mimic breathing.

Now I didn’t really go for exactly that, but did something quite similar but a bit more low key, with the tempo slowed down by 20bpm to 50 from the around 80bpm the initial piano sketch was and then taking the phrases and adding a bar or so of space between them where some bell sounds do a little response chord.

I also made a FX Buss track for the piano to send at full volume to. To that I added another instance of BatteryFX alongside some tape modulation, glitch plugin and other effects to make the echo feel a bit weird and wonky, which has a compressor at the end of the chain that is sidechained to the piano. So whenever the piano is playing over the lower dynamics the echo bus gets turned down, and when the notes are decaying at the end of the phrases the echo rises back to full volume to to hopefully add some unsettling feeling to the track as the bell sounds play their response chord stab.

After adding low drone under those the track feels pretty full enough now to me, but maybe adding a second more contrasting section would be great, maybe something softer since bgm music shouldn’t be too noticeable in this sort of area/game imo.

I guess the thing that has really ended up feeling the hardest for me this jam, is trying to keep area ambience/bg music sparse and mellow enough to not be too annoying when listened to for a long time, but also have something still interesting to listen to and not just ambient pads and textures…

I mean, there is nothing wrong with that sort of music and I really like those, but if we have an hour of music in our submission and 60-70% of that is just ambient pads, drones and textures its going to be really boring to the people who bother to listen to the whole submission, especially if they are not fans of ambient music 😅

But hey, with the inspiration gained from a team members arrangement ideas I think this is in a pretty OK state for now, or at least I’m not hearing any ideas on continuation to it for now (maybe in the next session with fresh ears?)

The chase/action track is pretty full of stuff already, and mostly just needs something to fatten up the mid/low mids a bit more to make it more meatier of a texture.

Tried some stuff to no avail, but will keep trying stuff after a break and maybe something finally clicks + probably a second section would be nice? maybe change the drum part for that since it gets pretty monotone near the end.

Audio

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Little tweaks

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Few days later, I’m really feeling like the school area tracks don’t really need anything more added to them, since the ambient track feels pretty long as it is, and the chase track feels almost too intense for its purpose.

So, for now I’ve only done some slight tweaking to the ambience track and modified the chase track to slowly add layers as it goes on to show how it would sound like in a gameplay context, where it keeps getting more intense as the danger gets closer to you etc.

We have almost 50 minutes of music now so I’m a bit 50/50 if I should start making any new tracks at this point, but might try to make 1 more if I get any good ideas for places in the story, or since we are using my motif idea 2 track as the main theme, maybe I could do a slower moodier version of it on the piano? we have guitars as the instruments for our two main characters but I’m not confident enough in making a solo guitar arrangement without it sounding too fake.

But anyway, here’s the tweaked chase track with the layers getting added on top for intensity.

Audio

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Week 4 (Final Week)

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Final Week game plan

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Only this week left now to get everything done and ready to submit, and I’m feeling that it’s best that I try to get my stuff finalized before the weekend, just in case something unexpected happens…

I have around 5 tracks at this point, which are in a pretty good state as they are now all though some of them could be longer in lenghth? but probably will keep them as is and just focus on mixing them the best I can.

I probably could manage to make 1 more track during this last week, but we probably all ready have almost around 1 hour of music so probably will just focus on the mixing and maybe adding some pads/textures to fill out some tracks that dont feel full enough..

Latter half of the week

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Spent the first half of the week just doing very minor balance tweaks to the tracks I have, and also got a very repetitive idea for some sort of main menu music using some of the motifs together as a repeating synth sequence, decided to just scrap the idea and start to get the tracks I have mastered and ready to add to our submission project page early enough.

Mastering for me pretty much means just slapping a limiter on the master buss and pumping the volume to the lufs values we decided on as a group to have everyone’s tracks around the same volume and avoid having too drastic changes in loudness between them.

Later a group member Einel offered to run others tracks through their mastering chain and after hearing their master of 1 of my tracks I just told them to run the rest throught their mastering chain as well, since what they made was a lot fuller and meatier especially on the low-mid/low end.

Probably going to have to do some more studying on mixing and other processing to up my game on that stuff, since the comparison between the two masters really showed my lack of skill on polishing with the mix/master.

I guess I was shown that it’s actually possible to take one of my turds and polish it somehow to sound a lot better 😅

So with that motivating revelation, I guess this devlog will end here?

If you actually managed to read this whole thing, good job 👏

Final submission:

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This the submission page with all of the tracks our team made during the jam

My tracks on Youtube: