6/1/19: Saturday, June 1, 2019
A Few Notes on Music
Welcome everyone! I'm GhostofAStarman, (Don't worry, I'm not one of the bad guys), one of Earthbound Rhapsody's musicians. I'm here to tell you a little bit about how we go about making tracks for the game. Today I'll be talking about one of our town themes and the attract mode theme.
It all starts with the town itself. Each town is designed with a theme in mind, based on a city or culture in real life, and it's my job to make a theme to fit the town. This could be as simple as a bluesy jazz theme for the New Orleans-inspired Montemorte or as difficult as attempting to capture the feeling of a soft winter breeze in Bristlecone's theme.
Bristlecone wasn't easy for me, because the concept of a snowy mountain town isn't something you can outright describe with music theory. If you listen to Vivaldi's "Concerto No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 8, RV 297" without any context, would you think it sounded "wintery?" To give Bristlecone that winter vibe, I used an airy synth with a high pitched piano to give the town an ambient sound. Of course, I added sleigh bells to complete the wintery feel. You can listen to the song here.
As for the attract mode theme, Strut Your Stuff, it was a bit more difficult to make. Similar to Bristlecone, there's no clear way an intro song should sound. There's also no actual movie made yet for the attract mode, so it was even more difficult to write. The song was then composed mostly from scratch, except for a brief piece of Pollyanna near the end. This is an Earthbound fangame, after all. (Note from Parzival: The Pollyanna may or may not remain in the final version) I wrote the song with several different sections to mimic the fade in/fade out style of Earthbound's attract mode, which this game will also have. The final part of the song is one of the main motifs of the game, written by a fellow musician.
As far as production goes, we have several musicians on the team who use everything from FL Studio to Ableton. Personally, I use LogicProX. Everyone on the team attempts to use soundfonts that sound like they could have come right from a Mother game. So even though we have different soundfonts, we still can manage to sound coherent.
That's all for now! Enjoy the music! We'll see you in August!
-GhostofAStarman