0027. 2023-12-06 Hard Bass.mp3 Repetition is hard for me, so this time I decided to try to repeat myself a bit more. This one started out by me playing the first phrase heard in the song on my keyboard and then deciding to record it aka “find out what kind of rhythm was playing in my head”. This is actually pretty good training, as “music playing in my head” is a very good source for music I have not written down before. Afterwards I decided to give it a comically hard bassline and… actually liked it. To add some flavor I added some chords, but while writing them down I made a mistake, which in the end got made into its own track (the jumpy beep beeps that get harmonized at some point).

0026. 2023-12-01 S2DPM Let's Get This to the Finish Line.mp3 Again, something written with the Super 2D Platform Maker in mind, but this time more in terms of style than that I have actually thought about where I’d put this piece of music. This is a more heroic-sounding theme. I had a lot of fun harmonizing the lead and I’m pretty happy with some of the more weird sounding of them near the end.

0025. 2023-11-29 S2DPM Map View.mp3 I wrote a short 4 bars melody/thing! I think it works excellent when looped. For me it has a vibe of a game-map-view or maybe a post-game summary screen or credits. The uploaded result has three versions in it, one after the other: plain version with drums and bass added lead added “bell-like” flavor chords And yes, the whistle is a required part of the drum arrangement.

0024. 2023-11-25 S2DPM Menu Theme.mp3 This is a short theme written for the Super 2D Platform Maker. I tried to convey a more playful vibe with rather simple instruments, clicked together in Vital. Bassdrum “Four to the Floor” style to give the whole thing a certain drive. I think it loops quite nicely and I like the short break at the beginning / in the loop where you can only hear the drums.

0023. 2023-10-31 2D Platformer.mp3 In our regular online hacking sessions Gesche continued to transfer her Unity knowledge to Godot and in doing so wrote a small 2D platformer proof of concept. Seeing that on stream I wrote a very short piece of music for the game. Made with reaper, instruments quickly clicked together in Vital. I used the “old and free” version of Sitala for some drums. The game can be played here.

0022. 2023-04-28 Synth Wave Basics Try One.mp3 Sat together with a friend and started into looking how to make synthwave songs (or… anything in that direction). This is the first try of this! Well, not really. It’s the first try of getting some instruments ready that sound a bit like the instruments I want to have later on. But, that’s the first step anyway - get the instrument somewhat right, learn what chords, patterns and other tricks are used in a synthwave song and then try to emulate it.

0021. 2022-01-30 Bespoken Thirds.mp3 Today I took a short look at Bespoke Synth, a free OpenSource synthesizer. It is a module-based synth and lets you connect them to each other to generate… music! I’ve seen some people do really cool things with this thing, especially in the directon of generative sound design. I, on the other hand, didn’t leave my comfort zone that far. I started out by putting the thing into “chromatic” mode, popped up some note sequencers and started writing down notes. It was still a lot of fun and Bespoke’s looping capabilities are really nice. This is how the thing looked in the end:

0020. 2021-12-22 Unknown 8-bit.mp3 I got again distraced by what I actually wanted to do and made a short chiptune-style piece of music. This one is designed as a loop, so instead of a proper ending it just starts again. I had a lot of fun messing around with panning and pitchbend in vital. So much fun that I forgot to invest into a proper title.

0019. 2021-12-18 Angry D&B Computer.mp3 Originally I wanted to test out some ambient drone music stuff with Vital. This did not happen. In this track I started out with the riff, which sounds a bit computerized, thanks to Vital’s “Sample & Hold” randomness connected to the frame selector of my waveform. Then we have the “strong bass”. Just put distortion on it, makes it sound angrier. Perfect. I also added a pattern played be something like a synth-bell, which I find fills the track quite nicely.

0018. 2021-12-12 Mellow Sunset.mp3 Originally I only wanted to play around with vital and create some sort of “synth string” sound. The riff was what I came up with to continuously listen to my synth while messing around with the dials of vital. In this song you can hear: somewhat relaxed synth-string riff (which is just a filtered sawtooth with a long release) a bell sound as lead (a sine with a matching envelop does the heavy lifting, plus some filters for a better fealing; I’m really surprised what you can do with a proper envelope on a synth instrument) some hacked-together bass - sounds a bit more synthy for this track than I would like, but eh… a “woosh” sound! LMMS triple oscilator with all voices set to noise, a long tone and an automation opening and closing the filter Soo, why “Mellow Sunset” you ask?1 Well, because the riff has a major seventh on every chord! Also, the chords are appegiated to not come in as strong. Also, bells! At least to me it sounds pretty chilled.