How I Make Music

Join Emmy Award-winning composer Marcus Bagala in a trip to the bottom of the ocean for magical realism audio drama Stone Island by Gimlet Media. Set in present-day Maine, Harry is followed by a journalist who aims to uncover the truth of his harrowing encounter with dark beings from a terrifying storm. In this episode, hear how peaceful ocean field recordings set Marcus off on a journey to write, produce and score a two-part story set in his childhood homeland. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended. SHOW NOTESStone Island audio series https://open.spotify.com/episode/3ka100351RGSDxA1LuXejHMarcus Bagala home https://www.marcusbagala.com/Youth In A Roman Field band https://www.youthinaromanfield.com/MUSIC CREDITSMusic: Schooner Fare - Will Ye No Come Back AgainMusic: Townes van Zandt - LungsMusic: Gustavo Santaolalla - The Last of Us soundtrackMusic: Mark Korvin - The Lighthouse soundtrackTRANSCRIPT http://howimakemusic.com/episode/WHY BECOME A PATRON?Patrons get bonus episodes, early access to all future episodes, full video interviews with contributors, a listing on the Wall of Fame, access to the show's hidden back catalog, bonus material for creating your own show and a massive thank you!Become a patron https://patreon.com/howimakemusicABOUT THIS SHOWDiscover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Immersive listening. Headphones recommended.* Follow How I Make Music in your favorite app https://pod.link/howimakemusic* Show notes, transcript and credits https://howimakemusic.com * How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.comSupport the show

Join acclaimed composer Christien Ledroit in a trip into popular dark sci-fi audio drama The Program audio series. In a future time, protagonist Mira is a scientist whose work rattles the establishment. In this episode, hear how Christien combined mid-pandemic choir recordings and an electronic score to tell the story of Mira's explosive discoveries. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended. TRANSCRIPT http://howimakemusic.com/episode/ABOUT THIS SHOWDiscover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Immersive listening. Headphones recommended.* Follow How I Make Music in your favorite app https://pod.link/howimakemusic* Show notes, transcript and credits https://howimakemusic.com * How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.comBECOME A PATRONPatrons get bonus episodes, early access to all future episodes, full video interviews with contributors, a listing on the Wall of Fame, immersive podcast editing tutorial video livestreams and resources, access to the show's hidden back catalog, bonus material for creating your own show and a massive thank you!Become a patron https://patreon.com/howimakemusicSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)SHOW NOTESThe Program audio series home https://programaudioseries.com/Christien Ledroit home https://cledroit.wordpress.com/Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

Join Windfall co-creator and composer Adam Raymonda in a fun-filled trip into audio drama sitcom Forgive Me!. A Catholic church called St. Patrick's is the backdrop for an anthology of stories from a range of colorful parishioner characters, from the zany to the troubled, all rallying around the long-suffering Father Ben. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended. SHOW NOTESForgive Me https://roguedialogue.com/fm-aboutAdam Raymonda http://adamraymonda.com/MUSIC CREDITSMusic: Jon Brion - Knock Yourself OutMusic: Blink-182 - All The Small ThingsMusic: Radiohead - CreepTRANSCRIPT http://howimakemusic.com/episode/ABOUT THIS SHOWDiscover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Immersive listening. Headphones recommended.* Follow How I Make Music in your favorite app https://pod.link/howimakemusic* Show notes, transcript and credits https://howimakemusic.com * How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.comBECOME A PATRONPatrons get early access to all future episodes, full video interviews with contributors, a listing on the Wall of Fame, immersive podcast editing tutorial video livestreams and resources, access to the show's hidden back catalog, bonus material for creating your own show and a massive thank you!Become a patron https://patreon.com/howimakemusicpreroll mar 2022Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

During our recording session for episode 106, Irene Zhong did a whole lot of laughing! Here's just the giggles and cute blooper moments, doused in SFX and played back rapid-fire over a quirky nerd-rock soundtrack by John Bartmann. This bonus episode is a companion to the full episode "106 The Godshead Incidental - Irene Zhong - So So Much To Hold". You can get that in the feed. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.ABOUT THIS SHOWDiscover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Headphones recommended.View transcript, credits and show notes https://howimakemusic.comSubscribe https://pod.link/howimakemusicView perks for patrons https://patreon.com/howimakemusicHow I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.comSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

Join Australian violinist and composer Irene Zhong in a baroque-meets-hip-hop trip into urban fantasy audio drama The Godshead Incidental. To create the theme tune for the show, Irene was Influenced by experimental hip hop group Clipping, found sound sampling, irregular time signatures and their classical music roots. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended. SHOW NOTESThe Godshead Incidental audio drama https://godsheadincidental.com/Irene Zhong https://www.irenezhong.com/MUSIC CREDITSMusic: Clipping - ShooterMusic: Sylvan Esso - Hey MamiMusic: Dessa - Children's WorkTRANSCRIPT http://howimakemusic.com/episode/ABOUT THIS SHOWDiscover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Immersive listening. Headphones recommended.* Follow How I Make Music in your favorite app https://pod.link/howimakemusic* Show notes, transcript and credits https://howimakemusic.com * How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.comBECOME A PATRONPatrons get early access to all future episodes, full video interviews with contributors, a listing on the Wall of Fame, immersive podcast editing tutorial video livestreams and resources, access to the show's hidden back catalog, bonus material for creating your own show and a massive thank you!Become a patron https://patreon.com/howimakemusicpreroll mar 2022Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

Caleb Ritchie shares 3 short, lighthearted tales about stuff that's happened during his time as composer for horror anthology audio drama 'Thirteen', with an underscore of original music by John Bartmann. This bonus episode is a companion to the full episode "105 Thirteen - Caleb Ritchie - Barrier Islands". You can get that in the feed. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.ABOUT THIS SHOWDiscover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Headphones recommended.View transcript, credits and show notes https://howimakemusic.comSubscribe https://pod.link/howimakemusicView perks for patrons https://patreon.com/howimakemusicHow I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.comSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

Join classically trained pianist and composer Caleb Ritchie in a lighthearted trip into anthology audio drama Thirteen. Island witches, ocean marimbas and Rachmaninov all formed the basis for the composition ‘Barrier Islands', a piece for which Ritchie chose instruments based on the sound of water. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended. TRANSCRIPT http://howimakemusic.com/episode/SHOW NOTESThirteen audio audio drama https://thirteenpodcast.com/Support Woe.Begone on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/join/thirteenpodCaleb Ritchie music https://www.calebritchie.com/MUSIC CREDITSMusic: Etude Tableaux Op39 No2 in A Minor - Sergei Rachmaninoff (Lugansky)Music: Secret of Mana Opening Theme by Hiroki KikutaMusic: Your Welcome Voice by Dan GibsonABOUT THIS SHOWDiscover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Immersive listening. Headphones recommended.* Follow How I Make Music in your favorite app https://pod.link/howimakemusic* Show notes, transcript and credits https://howimakemusic.com * How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.comBECOME A PATRONPatrons get early access to all future episodes, full video interviews with contributors, a listing on the Wall of Fame, immersive podcast editing tutorial video livestreams and resources, access to the show's hidden back catalog, bonus material for creating your own show and a massive thank you!Become a patron https://patreon.com/howimakemusicSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

In this short bonus episode, Woe.Begone creator Dylan Griggs delivers the lyrics of his composition 'Painted Glass' in a poem, with an underscore of original music by John Bartmann. This bonus episode is a companion to the full episode "104 - Woe.Begone - Dylan Griggs - Painted Glass". Listen to it in the How I Make Music podcast feed. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.ABOUT THIS SHOWDiscover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Headphones recommended.View transcript, credits and show notes https://howimakemusic.comSubscribe https://pod.link/howimakemusicView perks for patrons https://patreon.com/howimakemusicHow I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.comSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

Join Woe.Begone creator and composer Dylan Griggs as we explore composition 'Painted Glass' and take a trip into the mind of the sociopathic fictional series character Mike Walters. With influences ranging from The Postal Service and Bon Iver to alternate reality games, 'Painted Glass' is a rich and varied indie love song which musically conveys the inner workings of a troubled mind. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.TRANSCRIPT 00:00 INTRO The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Painted Glass. It's a narrative intermission song, which I wrote for a time-travel mystery story Woe.Begone today. We'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart the music of a fictional podcast and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Dylan Griggs. I'm a showrunner, actor, writer and musician from Kentucky. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, Painted Glass from the audio drama Woe.Begone by me, Dylan Griggs. Thanks for listening in. 01:40 ABOUTYeah. So my name is Dylan Griggs. I am the, I guess showrunner is the appropriate word because I'm the actor, writer, soundtrack, artist, editor, all of that stuff for a show called Woe.Begone. Woe.Begone is the story of this guy named Mike Walters who discovers a mysterious and violent online game called Woe.Begone. Mike is a danger to himself and others to put it lightly, who is in love with someone and is very concerned about that and what that can mean for their relationship. Horror sci-fi mystery with some comedy, roughly in that order. The show isn't for everyone, there are some violent moments. There are some moments that might cause discomfort in some people. I record the whole soundtrack for that episode, from front to back in response to the things that happened in the episode. I've been doing indie music since I was like 13, 14. I just have this workhorse mentality as far as getting songs done. I really like breaking format. I wrote a whole bunch of electronic music as a teenager. And then I put it away for a long time and became a de facto rock musician. Bere's a rock track from my band Sadloaf. I started playing around with Ableton as a way to write the show. I feel like it sets me apart a little bit to have so much music and so much focus on music. It's a very fast paced...there's a lot of ‘go with your gut' story writing and songwriting. Honestly, everything is written in a week. It also became a way to trick people into listening to my music because in order to listen to the episode of Woe.Begone, you have to listen to my music.04:27 INFLUENCESThere is an immediate comparison to be drawn between Painted Glass and The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service. They are the same tempo and in the same key. That was totally on accident. I like the sort of organ-y sounds that The Postal Service song has. We're going home at the end of every bar, essentially. Yeah, going home. It's like a full release of tension. It's what you imagine as the last note of a song where everything is completely resolved and there isn't any tension to glean from it. You're completely at rest. There's a pedal tone of like the F the whole time. We're very grounded.When I grew up, I didn't have anything but a computer for the first couple of years that I was making music and I got really into Telephone Tel Aviv, where they're doing these sort of, I guess, simple melodies, but they've got these drums that are sort of IDM. And they're not afraid to be abrasive with the drums. Like the drums are the key instrument in the song. It's almost like a breakcore. And so I love that whole album Fahrenheit Fair Enough.Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

Okay. The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Pandemonium. It's a theme from Among the Stars and Bones, an audio drama about a team of xeno-archaeologists investigating alien ruins on a distant world. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. I love doing voiceovers. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart the music of fictional podcasts and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Oliver Morris. I'm a composer from Bedfordshire. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, Pandemonium from this audio drama Among the Stars and Bones by me, Oliver Morris. Thanks for listening in.  1:36 ABOUT Among the Stars and Bones is a xeno-archaeological horror show. Chris, the writer, he was like you did the theme for Modern Fae and I was like yes I did. I didn't know a lot about it other than the fact that it was a xeno-archaeological horror show, which was just the best combination of words that I had heard in a pitch document ever, because you've got xeno for aliens and then archaeology. So I was very excited to make this piece of music that was going to build and grow along with the show. The show itself is about a bunch of xeno-archaeologists who get together to go investigate this ancient dead alien civilization. They find relics from it, and then they start to get convinced that the relics are controlling them in ways and it goes to some wild places for sure. Take us to outer space! Chris Magilton is the writer of Among the Stars and Bones. Oh no, wait, hold on. I've mispronounced that already. Go me. Chris Marlington Chris McClinton. Hold on. I feel really bad. Chris Magilton. Magilton. Magilton. Chris Magilton. Chris Magilton, the writer, and he also plays Ben on the show. I only know him as ‘ungodly hour' because that's the time that he always contacts me. Sorry Chris. 4:13 GETTING STARTED I own approximately 27 guitars. I play keys. I do at all. My intro into composing properly was for my podcast Kane and Feels, Paranormal Investigators. Kane and Feels, Paranormal Investigators, a horror noir audio fiction show. Which is just very funky from beginning to end. That's how I kind of got my start in composing. I'm a fiend. I just I make music. I can't stop. It's nicotine and music. Those are my two vices.  5:20 HALF LIFE GAME INFLUENCE When we started kind of composing, I asked Chris if there's anything he wanted it to sound like and he was like, well I do really like the Half-Life video games. I love the soundtrack of Half-Life, which are these wonderful, industrial synthetic beats. Play scientists with a crowbar, it's one of the more bizarre opening concepts to a thing. You're like hitting undead zombies with a crowbar. Delving into the back catalogue of that was joy. Doing that sort of initial kind of figuring out of what the sort of the timbre of the piece was going to be like. I'm a big fan of an Australian band called Pond, who wrote a song called Giant Tortoise. Huge, soul-evaporating baseline. And I was like, how soul-evaporating a baseline Can I come up with? 7:10 MARIMBA BITCRUSHER  The piece itself is a waltz. So it's in 123. So we had these piano lines. One of the piano lines we eventually switched over to a marimba. We used bit crushing on it until it sounded like something that a servo could sing something that a piece of machinery could sing. You can get like orchestras of servos now. Somebody will play Smells Like Teen Spirit on 50 dead hard drives from computers. Were sort of building up the rhythm section, trying to make it sound as digital as possible, trying to make it sound as kind of inorganic as possible. without actually succumbing to a boom clap. This hi hat that's just going to and a couple of little toms sound like they come straight from Kraftwerk. There we go! The German lads. 8:59 POINTILLISM We had this boom bap. I was inspired by pointillism. The art style where you kind of draw lots of little dots and then it creates a sort of grander picture from very simple, kind of movements of the pen. It's making beats but with the bare essentials of it, like making sure that you're not using too much or too little, just enough as much kind of reverb as one could legally get away with. The other bit was a sort of spaceship drone, which was just this big and low humming. And then the atonal bubbles. Big retro synth. I love this sound. This was the sound that came straight from Wolf 359 for me. Beautiful swirling. There's a bit of trepidation in that second chord. The big retro synth used to be a guitar part. But Chris's brother is in a shoegaze band and he was like ‘if I hear another second of shoegaze I'm gonna fall apart'. Which is kind of funny, because Pond is a shoegaze band and so I still took influences from shoegaze. I'm sorry Chris. Please forgive me Chris. I own 27 guitars, what can I say?  11:35 THREE THEMES  So when I was working with Chris, we came to it very quickly that we were going to need three themes. We're going to need one for the slow build, one for when it starts to get a bit wobbly, and then one for the final show. So initially, we called them Patience, Purpose and Fuck. We renamed Fuck to Pandemonium, which is the track that we're talking about today. The basis of all three of the tracks is very slow, meandering, bom, bom bom. We fiddled a lot with the the piano sound. Eventually we sort of stuck with this ba-da-da-dum-doo-doo-doo. Had a real sense of drama to it. And then I was like, I need something to really nail this home. I was just, you know, playing around with these big bass sounds and trying to get something. And then it was only when I put a phase distorter on it, that was when it all just came together. Basically, it was just wow. And like, even when it was like settled down, you could just hear it kind of humming and trying to escape its parameters! 13:37 TICKING  We'd had this ticking sound that had been going on throughout the whole piece. And we were like, right. Final Episode. Final stretch. The clock strikes 10. You've got to have that sound in there. So I think this is just the sound that I got from Freesound under Creative Commons zero. So shout out to Freesound for the majority of my professional career. I think that's everything. I think I've spoken more about this right now than I've ever thought about it.  14: 26 OUTRO That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full composition in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes on HowIMakeMusic.com or wherever else you listen to podcasts. We've been listening to the music featured in the audio drama called Among the Stars and Bones. To hear the full story or to check out my other work follow the links in the show notes. I recommend Kane and Fields. We video recorded this episode, much to my horror. Check it out and support the musicians of audio drama by becoming a patron at Patreon.com/HowIMakeMusic. And now, here's Pandemonium, the theme in its entirety. My name is Oliver Morris and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next time

Discover new audio drama by music. How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Visit https://howimakemusic.com and subscribe in your podcast app. TRANSCRIPT The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called The Trial. It's featured in the soundtrack from the fiction podcast Marsfall. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart the music of a fictional podcast and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Sam Boase-Miller. I'm a composer, producer and voice actor from the US and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, The Trial by me Sam Boase-Miller. Thanks for listening in. 1:06 ABOUT Marsfall is a sci-fi/fantasy story about the first colonists to settle on Mars. We follow them starting in the year 2047. So maybe 2047 is actually the year that we'll get people on Mars. Mini helicopter that's flying around from the Perseverance lander. And yeah, it's pretty incredible the strides that we're making. Life imitating art! The scene takes place in the trial for ANDI, our colony AI. It's his trial for closing the door on a particular colonist who was about to create havoc for the rest of the colony. That philosophical debate, the trolley debate: should you pull the lever and try to avoid most people knowing that you'll kill one person? Or should you just let the trolley kill all five people to save the one. So this was the trial that we're all of our main characters kind of come together for the first time. And in this scene, we hear interjections from several of our characters. 2:52 CELLO I started playing cello in school. Sort of like a string music petting zoo. My good friend at the time was playing viola. And so I thought, I really want to play viola. So I expressed this to the director of the orchestra and she was like, “no, you don't want to play viola. Your hands are big. You should play the cello.” So I was already at nine years old being told what to do! Like what musical instrument I should be taking up. It's actually the closest instrument (other than the trombone) to the range of the human voice. Both really, really low and it also gets into that high coloratura kind of soprano end of things 4:38 P-FUNK & INFLUENCES I'm a big George Clinton fan. And part of what I love about Parliament Funkadelic is that they're very imaginative harmonically and melodically and rhythmically. Yeah, I just I love that era. funk music from the 70s. Right around, you know, ‘75, ‘76. The orb is an electronic music group, I really got into their ethereal and ambient music where you're just like taking on a whole journey. The place where you end up is certainly very different from where you started. 6:03 ERIC SARAS My co creator and music editor, he's director extraordinaire, Eric Saras. He's also one of our writers of the show, he and I first connected through music, we both went on an orchestra tour to China together. And as you can imagine traveling to another country and touring and performing music brings people close together pretty quickly. And so I met him and we realized that we were very similar in our outlook on music, and that just got a lot of things kind of kicked off creatively. We wanted music to be featured really heavily. He kind of realized that there was more or less these like kind of pillars or buckets that the majority of our music was falling into. And we called them a numbering system essentially like one through six being silence to total music taking over and being the focal point of the scene. So going through that and knowing that ahead of time helps me really plan. Okay, my workload, is this seen a one or is it a six? Or is it somewhere in between that, and the way that 07:15 LEITMOTIFS & MUSICAL TRANCE I write music in leitmotifs, which are little motives for each character or place or emotion. What you're hearing now is the claps. I picked up clapping after cello, you know. I phased it so that it's actually kind of moving around your ears. Even though you're hearing that over and over again. Since it's panning around and moving around your head a little bit subconsciously, it's keeping the rhythm driving and moving. This point, I would consider myself a professional clapper. There are several speakers during the scene of the trial. We'll hear interjections from Jeff. He's the finance officer of the colony. That low cello by being that that's actually one of the first themes that I wrote of the entire series. We hear Kyla, our medical doctor's theme. She's got several horn pads. So you'll hear those horn chords. Chip Huddleston, the character I actually play, he interjects a couple of times. So you'll hear this kind of muddy patch just really jokingly kind of come in and dip out because all of his interjections are just jokes, they're just little quips. So I wanted the attitude of the character to be represented or representative of the music that you're hearing. You know, the beats that I sampled from Ableton and bring in drop in and then highlight at different times, they help to kind of break up you know, the monotony of that clapping rhythm. There's a whole cadre of composers from the 60s 70s 80s that was using minimalism to try and get you into musical trance almost like you're looking through a kaleidoscope. So a lot of what I tried to do here was take this continuous beat and then add a little something to it, or take away a little something that would highlight or dampen the inherent, strong or weak parts of the beat that you'd hear. 10:11 PLUS ONE With podcast or film or television, all of that is collaborative. And so you, you immediately have to shelve your ego and say, What's the best thing for this whole artwork? Rather than what's the best thing for my track? Or what's the best thing for, for me as the composer, none of that matters? What matters is how does the whole thing come together? And how am I adding to it? How am I plus one-ing rather than deterring, or covering something up? That seems to be of the main thing that I've learned over the last...this entire project working on Marsfall. Sometimes I just want people to just listen. The best way for you to know me and to know my music is to just like, check it out. Just go and slap on some really good headphones, or go stand in the dark with some giant speakers and like, you know, close your eyes and like, just get swallowed up by the sound. And then you'll know. The one thing about music is the ability to communicate with people around the world on a different level that almost has nothing to do with what language you speak, but it is that other language right? 11: 42 OUTRO And that's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. Thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes on HowIMakeMusic.com or wherever else you get your podcasts. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called Marsfall. To hear the full story or to check out my other work, follow the links in the show notes. We video recorded the making of this episode, check it out and support the musicians of audio drama by becoming a patron at https://patreon.com/howimakemusic. Top tier patrons get mentioned right here in the credits of every episode. How I make music is created by John Bartmann. And now here's The Trial, a quirky, minimal electronic soundtrack in its entirety. My name is Sam Boase-Miller, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next time. SHOW NOTES Marsfall audio drama https://marsfallpodcast.com/ Sam Boase-Miller https://sjboase-miller.com/ MUSIC CREDITS Music: Sarabande in D Major from Suite No.6 by J.S.Bach (performed by Sam Boase-Miller) Music: The Cave Paintings by Sam Boase-Miller Music: One Nation Under a Groove by Funkadelic Music: Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb ABOUT THIS SHOW Discover new audio drama musically. How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In a dramatically edited sound experience, we challenge fiction podcast music composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

Discover new audio drama by music. How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Visit https://howimakemusic.com and subscribe in your podcast app. TRANSCRIPT The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called A Chance To Be Free. It's one of the themes for the audio drama soundtrack from Hood: Noble Secrets, and the whole series by Spiteful Puppet. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers gets to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart the music of fictional podcasts and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Samuel Pegg. I'm a composer from London, United Kingdom. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, A Chance To Be Free from the audio drama Hood by me Samuel Pegg. Thanks for listening in. Hood was the first audio drama that Spiteful Puppet had ever put together. So we were all learning really what to do. But at the same time, we didn't have any conceptions of how to do it. So maybe that was a good thing. And it's a story of while Robin Hood, but in a way that you're probably not used to hearing it. Robin Hood is not the character you expect him to be. There are quite a lot of twists along the way. 2:06 ABBEY ROAD In London, there are just a plethora, you know, there's just a huge pool of fantastic musicians, and especially at the moment, there isn't a huge amount of work going on. So people are keen to come and record. I'm sort of classically trained, you know, playing in orchestras. But really, most of my training actually came through working with live musicians in the feature film world recording scores, the top studios in London and abroad. Next week, I'm going to go to Abbey Road to record something for an album I've written, got a string orchestra, and we've got some interesting baroque instruments as well, which will be quite fun. Oboe da caccia and oboe d'amore. They're both period instruments from I guess, the baroque period of music, so they're very old-sounding instruments. Here's a snippet of how it sounds. Yeah, it should be really fun day. 03:22 DREAMING OF ANOTHER LIFE This piece, a chance to be three plays between a poignant dialogue between Little John and Will Scarlett. John is dreaming of a different life - an alternative life - and Will is unsure, you know, maybe we need to play it safe and keep doing what we're doing. There are three sections to the cue. But the major shift is when they decide they want to take as they put it "one last roll of the dice". And they're going to pursue a rather daring and sort of risky plan, with the aim that they might get a royal pardon and finally have a chance to live a free life with their families rather than being outlaws. Little John is really looking for this alternative life where he can be with his family. He could be dying. 04:54 SOLO CELLO So the cue needed the emotional heart, but all honesty to it as well. It's hard to beat a solo cello. Gives it a sort of sense of gravitas. My friend, Lily Thornton just gave an absolutely beautiful performance here. Redemptive type theme. I suppose it's them just dreaming of another life. And then when there's a shift in the narrative, we bring guitars, drums and energy. Because the decision has been made that they are going to pursue this risky course of action. It's easy to write music when you have fantastic performances and an expertly written script. 06:17 FELT PIANO A felt piano does sound a little bit different to a typical concert grand. It's basically any piano where you put a layer of felt between the strings and the hammers. Here's how it sounds. It gives you a level of intimacy you wouldn't normally get. It's almost got a ballad sound. The chords are very simple. It's really meant to be music of the common people. It's not sophisticated. It's not clever. It's just you know, simple music and triadic harmony. It's the music that the people in the forest listen to. 07:13 PROPANE CANS These are some cheap propane cans, I think or some paint cans or something like that, that. Yeah, they just, they sound great. And we got two colors, one played with brushes, one played with fingers and then panned left and right. 07:48 OUTRO That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full composition in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. catch new episodes on Spotify, apple, or wherever else. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called Hood by Spiteful Puppet. To hear the full story or check out my other work, follow the links in the show notes. We video recorded the making of this episode. Check it out and support the musicians of audio drama by becoming a patron at https://patreon.com/howimakemusic. Top tier patrons get mentioned right here in the credits of every episode. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now here's A Chance To Be Free, a gentle and dreamy piece written for the audio drama Hood in its entirety. My name is Samuel Pegg, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next time. SHOW NOTES Samuel Pegg http://www.samuelpegg.com/ To listen to "Hood", visit Spiteful Puppet Podcast Network For a full list of music and sound effects credits from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW Discover new audio drama musically. How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In a dramatically edited sound experience, we challenge fiction podcast music composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

How I Make Music will be going to half-time. Instead of one episode a week, I'll be releasing them periodically going forward. Why? Read the full post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/50063994 The show must go on I want to still be doing this show in 5 years, so I've decided to set a pace that matches my availability to avoid a being forced to quit entirely. Each 15-minute episode takes around 8 hours to make. It's been 2 years of showing up every week. Nearly 50 audio drama musicians have been blessed with an episode! Now it's time move into the next dimension: quality. To make it better Producing episodes often feels way too rushed. I want the quality of the show to improve, and that takes more time. I want to be better at vetting (and even training) new contributors and screening their audio setups for maximum recording quality. I need more time during the mixing process to avoid the constant rush of "getting the audio in the podcast in the feed on time". Time will be spent revisiting and re-mixing past episodes to really polish the feed. W~e~i~r~d~e~r As an audio experience, the show must sound more unique. Specifically the contributor voiceovers. There are some awesome audio processing tools out there that I need time to research and implement (and perhaps even custom code my own ones!). I want the reaction to every episode the show to be

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Hood Theme. It's a main theme for the soundtrack from the audio drama Hood: Noble Secrets and the whole series by Spiteful Puppet. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. My name is Samuel Pegg. I'm a composer from London, United Kingdom. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, Hood Theme from the audio drama Hood by me Samuel Pegg. Thanks for listening in. Hood is a historical audio drama with a sort of fresh twist on the Robin Hood stories that we all know. He's this kind of lone figure against his better instincts. Well, I grew up in Oxford, and I played cello and piano growing up. Played in orchestras. At the moment, I'm doing quite a lot of things for a historical theme park in Spain and France. Take a listen. It's just been really nice to record a couple of them in London and two of them in Vienna and one in Prague. Big orchestral stuff. Doing a few things at Abbey Road next week. All the musicians are so grateful for the work.  2:39 IDEAS ON HOLIDAY  I was holidaying in Cornwall right at the tip of Cornwall. It's a very kind of atmospheric place very windswept with craggy cliffs. So just walking around the coastline, exposed to the elements. And the writer of Hood sent me the script. A friend had introduced us. I basically spent the entire holiday kind of trying to form themes in my head as I walked around the Cornish coast. But it was a good place to have some headspace. Quite rare for me nowadays to have a chance to think about something like that. 3:47 INFLUENCES  I suppose one of the influences at the time was the Game of Thrones main theme, with its kind of rustic sort of, I don't know very sort of war-like feel. Another influence would have been How To Train Your Dragon with the Celtic feel. That's what I was trying to do is try and find my own fantasy world for this story.  4:48 BREAKDOWN  For the Hood theme, I wanted to convey a sort of rustic seriousness with the adrenaline of running through the forest evading the law and I came across a sound palette that I thought was interesting with various masculine and muscular brass...strings...heroic. Then lots of guitar, mandolin, ukulele, and they were performed by my friend Andrew Simmons. With lots of percussive elements. Tuned metals to give you this sense of, I guess the countryside really. What you're listening to now is a waterphone. It might be surprising to hear it's a percussion instrument. Very spooky sound. I found it really conveyed a sense of being in the dark woods with the shadows closing in.  6:22 CELLO  My good friend Lily Thornton, who's a fantastic cellist now based in Melbourne, came over to my place and recorded the theme. Absolutely phenomenal player. And it gives it a real unique character and a sort of soul.  7:20 AEOLIAN  The Hood theme is rooted in Aeolian mode, which gives it a Celtic rustic sound. Rooted in D. The tune itself just keeps rising up until it gets dragged back down to its root key. 8:18 MARION  I don't think any of these parts I've sent you will have Marion in them. Because she's actually like an anti-character really. As you learn more about her, she's actually not a good person. 8:46 STRANGE TIME  Here is another piece from a different episode of the same series. This has a sort of lilting time signature in 5/8. Take a quick listen. This was my first audio drama that I'd worked on my background having been in feature film, I really just treated it much like that. 9:43 OUTRO  That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full composition in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes on Spotify, Apple or wherever else. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called Hood by Spiteful Puppet. To hear the full story or check out my other work, follow the links in the show notes. We video recorded the making of this episode. Check it out and support the musicians of audio drama by becoming a patron at Patreon.com/HowIMakeMusic. Top-tier patrons get mentioned right here in the credits of every episode. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now here's Hood Theme, an urgent and heroic theme for the audio drama Hood, in its entirety. My name is Samuel Pegg, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next time. For a full list of music and sound effects credits from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In a dramatically edited sound experience, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the outro theme music from the historical audio drama 1865. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where the musicians of audio drama get to tell their own stories. This show will break apart a song soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. My name is Lindsay Graham. I'm a composer, sound designer and podcast host and producer from the United States. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, “1865”, by me, Lindsay Graham, thanks for listening in. "1865" is a historical audio drama that tells the story of the aftermath of President Lincoln's assassination. The protagonist is largely forgotten in American history. He was the Secretary of War at the time. He really rose to the occasion, and tried to put the country back together in this fraught period of American history that still reverberates today.  2:28  INFLUENCES  When I was thinking about a civil war themed show, you immediately think of the Ken Burns documentary and those in those fiddles. And while violin is the lead instrument, I wanted the rest of the score to sound nothing like what you would expect a civil war documentary to sound like. And I was inspired by Cliff Martinez. His score for The Knick, their use of modern dark synthesizers was really not something you would expect.. Conflict. Tenseness. So I wanted to borrow that methodology. I think what was striking about Cliff Martinez's score was how anachronistic he was. He just went very far in the direction that he sought. And I think you can hear that. At the same time, I also wanted to nod to the the era and and so there's a recording of an old song Shenandoah by Bill Frisell that, that - I really enjoy Bill Frisell in general - I enjoy and it speaks to, you know, kind of a very Americana feel to it. It's got a lot of open, wide intervals in it. And that's where my head was when I started writing this and so it went in that direction. I wrote this as I do most things on guitar first. Starting on the guitar keeps me honest, I suppose. And it's where I feel most helpful. trouble. 5:07  BREAKDOWN  Harmony usually comes to me first before melody although one can lead to the other. Like I mentioned, I wanted a synthesized sound. You spend hours and hours auditioning sounds and sometimes you create some. I did want to bring period acoustic instruments into it, but mangle them. They're time-stretched and distorted but it's violin and acoustic guitar and mandolin. Take a listen.  6:17  OUT OF TIME  I had gone too far with a modern synthesizer sound became too close to a Stranger Things kind of feel. So I needed to back off and do something else lest I be compared to this very popular thing. And it wasn't the right feel, anyways. 6:55  PEDAL TONE  In this instance though, I can pose the entire thing over a low A pedal tone. And the song is mostly in D. But it felt too static this time. And so I was surprised when I moved away from the low pedal tone to a more standard base that followed the harmony that had suddenly opened up a great deal. I remember the shift from you know, there's a B flat chord and the A underneath a B flat chord was just not working. Once I went to a regular harmony, then then it just opened up and felt a lot better. You want to be complex and clever but sometimes you can outsmart yourself Pedal tone or drone. The name comes from the organ when the lower register is played with your feet on pedals. And so oftentimes in organ music, an organist will just plant their left foot on a very low octave note and hold it even though the harmony above it moves. And it has a routing effect. And, you can reverse it and have a high pedal tone, which you will hear very often in orchestral music with a high string note. And it also does the same thing it keeps it in place. Even though things are changing. 9:08  VIOLIN  Period pieces like 1865 usually use historical music and hear the violin is the lead voice. Everything else though, is aggressively synthesized. The violinist in this case was Becky Howard, a good friend of mine. We recorded her just playing long waves of notes, single notes that I recorded and sampled. And that allowed me to manipulate her - the same violin that's in the lead instrument - into a much different beast. A synthesized, distorted mangled sound that nonetheless is not a synthesizer. It's not a circuit-derived sound. It has all the organic noise of a real acoustic instrument, even though it's not recognizable anymore. Maybe that comes across, even though you wouldn't know it.  10:36  TEMPO The tempo that I chose was deliberate to also provide uncertainty intention. The arrangement, especially those synthesizers could be counted off pretty fast. While the violin the melody is very slow, it feels halftime. This is deliberate. I chose 65 or 130, depending on how you count it. And that simultaneous feeling of fast and slow, I think really does a good job of achieving the uncertainty intention that I was looking for. 12:14  PASTORAL MUSIC  So this being an American story about American history, you can't go too far without thinking about American classical music. And Aaron Copeland is certainly probably the king there, at least the progenitor. One of the things that makes American pastoral music like Copeland's sound the way it does, is the use of wide intervals. These are notes that are far away from each other. If you take a listen to just the first few notes in the melody, you will hear a very open wide sound. They're almost all fourths and fifths. When you think of a symphony, tuning up, you're hearing a bunch of fourths and fifths altogether. These intervals are often heard in this type of music. But when the melody leaps like this, between these large intervals, it has a call-to-action feel. Any sort of heroic music will usually use one of these intervals, probably on a brass instrument.  13:39  OUTRO  That's about it. For this week's episode, we'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called “1865”. Be sure to catch season two, which comes out this month, April 2021. To hear the full story or to check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. We video recorded the making of this episode, check it out and support the show by becoming a patron at Patreon.com/howimakemusic. How I make music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now here's the theme from 1865 in its entirety. My name is Lindsay Graham, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. We'll catch you next time. For a full list of music and sound effects credits from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In a dramatically edited sound experience, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Fear For The Storm. It's the theme song from The Strange Case of Starship Iris. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition from a fiction podcast and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Erin. I'm an audio editor, sound designer (and sometimes vocalist) from San Francisco, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 98 "Fear For The Storm" by Jess Best, S.E. Winters and me, Erin Baumann. Thanks for listening in. 1:38 INTRO So Starship Iris is an outer space mystery shows that then evolves into a really great found family romp. All the while, it's still in outer space. Within the world of the podcast, there is a mysterious band called Birdy and the Swan Song. No one has ever seen the lead singer of this band, but they do have a hit song and the song is called Fear For The Storm. 2:32 BEDROOM DEMO Diegetic music is music that is actually taking place within the world of a story. So stuff you'd hear on the radio, stuff a character like actually sings, things like that. Today, we are going to listen to three versions of Fear For The Storm - a demo version, a full cast singalong, and the third version is fully produced as the theme song. Jessica best - Jess - is the writer of Starship Iris and one of the founding members of the Procyon Podcast Network. She writes songs, so she's the original composer. She was just casting around going "does anyone know a vocalist? I'm just trying to record a demo of the song real quick so we can throw it into an episode." And I was like, "if you just need someone to record a demo, I can bang that out in probably an hour." I recorded that first demo version just sitting in my bedroom, sent it over real quick. They're like "it's great! We're gonna put in an episode" and I was like, "oh, okay, I guess I'll have to listen to my own voice a little longer!" 4:16 SINGALONG Fear For The Storm started out with this demo version, just me on vocals, just on guitar. And it ramped up from there to - delightfully - a full cast singalong. They all recorded it separately, actually. They were never all in one place. The cast is very widely scattered. They all have lovely voices. We love to hear them. Brittony LeFever, who plays Krejjh and Jamie Price, who plays Brian Jeeter, are both actually vocalists in real life. They were instrumental in kind of building it out. They gave everyone else something to really hang on to, including me.  5:55 INFLUENCES  I'm not really - you know - a folk style singer. When I was recording Fear For The Storm, I was drawing on a couple of different references. One of my biggest influences was Laura Marling, specifically a track of hers called Night Terror. Give it a listen. At the time, I was listening to Lera Lynn's cover of TV On The Radio's "Wolf Like Me" so that was another big influence in the tone I was going for. Give it a listen. 8:33 FULL VERSION Jess just got in touch with me and was like, "would you still want to record vocals for this full version?" and then I was like, "Sure." I had just moved into a new apartment I found myself recording in a closet surrounded by boxes. Kind of like scrunched in next to my jackets. The instrumentals were provided by Chiron Star. He provided a really great instrumental track and honestly an awesome guitar solo that I think is the best part of the song.  9:43 OUTRO I think that's the awesome thing about podcasting  - the barrier to entry is really so low. If you have a good concept and you have good ideas and a decent setup, it'll carry. It'll read That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes on Spotify, Apple or wherever else you listen to find podcasts. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama The Strange Case of Starship Iris. To hear the full story or to check out Procyon’s other podcasts, follow the links in the show notes. We video recorded the full interview for this episode. Check it out and support the show by becoming a patron patreon.com/howimakemusic. Visit howimakemusic.com for more about this show. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now here's Fear For The Storm, the theme song for the Strange Case of Starship Iris in its entirety. My name is Erin Baumann, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next time. SHOW NOTES Listen to The Strange Case Of Starship Iris https://pod.link/1193720457 Visit The Procyon Podcast Network https://www.procyonpodcastnetwork.com/starship-iris Chiron Star on Bandcamp https://chironstar.bandcamp.com/ For a full list of music and sound effects credits from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In a dramatically edited sound experience, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann

Alex : Dude, so like, it's gotta at least be like - I was thinking about it the other day - it's gotta be like 15, 17 years at this point. Andrew: Probably Yeah. Alex: Holy shit. John: That's Alex Aldea speaking to Andrew Joslyn. They're part of the Paragon Collective, the network responsible for audio dramas like Darkest Night and The No Sleep Podcast. Alex: Andrew and I do compose a lot of podcast music together but Andrew is also a music luminary. He's done string arrangements for Ke$ha to compositions from Macklemore to literally everything. Andrew: Yeah, even film stuff with like Corbin Bernsen and Denise Richards There you go! Alex: Andrew plays every single string instrument. So even like in Darkest Night, a lot of the strings that you hear are real strings. John: The audio quality in this episode is a Zoom rip. Sorry about that. But I got some great conversation with these guys. My name is John Bartmann. I'm the creator of How I Make Music. I'll let these two audio drama stars. take it from here. Andrew: The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called The Opening of the Oyster. It's a dystopian soundtrack from the psychedelic audio drama The Oyster. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I make music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song or soundtrack or composition and take a trip - a wild trip - into how it was made. My name is Andrew Joslyn. Alex: And I'm Alex Aldea. Andrew: I'm a composer from Seattle, Washington. And this is How I Make Music. 1:58 INTRO  Alex: The Oyster takes place 30 years in the future, where humans basically don't have as many resources and they have to figure out whether they want to plug in and just feel eternal bliss in the machine or face the harsh reality. The basic premise of the show is a philosophical argument on utilitarianism. This show came about really quickly. I kept thinking about this idea of "do we plug in?" Or do we not know what happens if you invent something like this and how it kind of goes in society for months and months and months? Definitely psychedelic. I knew we had something with the show. You never really know if you have anything, let's be quite honest! The point where you can work on a project and you're like, "oh, this isn't terrible. I don't feel so delusional about it." I don't know if you've heard about the philosopher John Stuart Mill. If something feels good, then it's good. There's the great argument against that has always been like well, what if you were an oyster and you felt nothing except for bliss, but you never could have really any experiences? Is that not the ultimate life? That monologue "choirs of crickets fill the sky with a cascading cacophony"... we actually had her record that monologue on top of Love On A Real Train by Tangerine Dream.  4:34 SUBTLETY Andrew: These episodes are so musical because it's an audio drama. The music has to ... not foreshadow and give away too much, but it has to help guide the audience. Emotionally. On the journey that, you know, we're taking them on. I usually like to think of it as like breathing. You know, if the VO allows room to take a breath, let the music take a breath with the VO as well. So sometimes what that means to me is just add a longer reverb. So you can't hit them over the head and be like super aggressive, but you also got to give them enough guidance. So I would, I would choose something really subtle. You know, just drones, some other stuff. Make sure the chord progression isn't anything too aggressive. Make sure that none of the harmonies go a little too far up in the spectrum. You know. Never Never, never, never never step on the vocal no matter what you do. I come from the pop realm so I always think of stuff as underscore and top line - top line being your your vocals, your main melodies, your VO voiceovers. You don't want to draw too much attention away from the vocal and to yourself as the composer.  6:32 TOOLS Andrew: Omnisphere is this just huge synth library. I don't know there's like 500, 700 frickin samples in there. And I also love Zebra 2. Zebra, Serum, especially in this kind of like world building. Heavyocity is one of the plugins. One of the things that we love to use is I think it's Evolve Mutations. Alex: Dude, we can't give away all of our plugins we're out. I'm not going to get them all the way I was literally going to be someone who's gonna go through here and like download all the plugins we use there's gonna be like three darkest night soundtracks and like six months. 8:09  PROCESS Alex: My process for the most part is I'll just listen to a part over again and over again and just jam something in the mid range like a piano or whatever. Then I'll build it, I'll build it. And then usually a day later I'll have something and it's usually worth ... not leaving my house for like an entire day. 8:38 LAYERS Alex: We have like a little choir on top. It's kind of mixed with whistling bells. We have Gregorian chants towards the end. We have a substance bass that goes with the Gregorian chants. We have a whole horn section we have a trumpet layer and a horns layer, brass layer, woodwinds layer, string ensemble layer that kicks in right when that part builds. Then also with this with this track we played a lot with with Logan's vocals. I mean I can honestly consider that part of the score. I love sound particles and it basically is a way of just like making this whole like ... multiplying the vocals by like 1000. Especially if I'm trying to make something that sounds really trippy the characters coming to these big realizations about her life and how she's choosing to look at what it means to be alive when everything goes to shit. 10:28 OUTRO  Alex: That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. We've been listening to music featured on the audio drama called The Oyster. To hear the full story or check out Andrew and his my other compositions, Follow the links in the show notes. Andrew and I did Casefile, Darkest Night, Deadly Manners. Andrew: I did a bunch of co-writing for Leslie Odom's record, Ke$ha, all the Macklemore records that have ever come out, I'm a co-writer on. And then the list goes on and on and on. Alex: How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now, here's The Opening of The Oyster, a dark unsettled, dystopian underscore in its entirety. My name is Alex Aldea (and I'm Andrew Joslyn) and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. SHOW NOTES Listen to The Oyster https://pod.link/1538224217 The Paragon Collective https://www.theparagoncollective.com/ Andrew Joslyn https://andrewjoslynmusic.com MUSIC CREDITS Tangerine Dream - Love On A Real Train Ke$ha - Take It Off For a full list of music and sound effects credits from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In a dramatically edited sound experience, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

“When we first got into doing the audio drama thing, it was very clear immediately how supportive the community was. Made us feel a lot better about getting our feet wet and just like diving into this madness.” 0:21  ABOUT The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the main theme for the audio drama Spacemerica!. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Ian McGowan. I'm a speech and language therapy student and musician from St. Louis, Missouri, now based in Scotland, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 95, Spacemerica! by me, Ian McGowan. Thanks for listening in.  Spacemerica! is a space opera sci fi comedy about a group of people - a ragtag motley crew - that ends up going on the hunt for a treasure. And when you set things hundreds of years in the future, high jinks ensue. And there's some pretty good comedy in there. So I guess the goal for me is to put the audience in the room with with whatever's happening. 2:27  INFLUENCES The piece that we're hearing now is called Panoramic by Atticus Ross, who composed the soundtrack for The Book of Eli. I was always interested in it because they use a lot of electronic stuff. And they create these really beautiful soundscapes these textures with a lot of really simplistic individual parts that build on each other. Pretty dystopian. There's a little bit of grunge, a little bit of distorted guitar. I think I was probably always gonna pull from that. Another influence is the soundtrack for Oblivion, which M83 had a heavy hand in. Because the story that we set out to tell in Spacemerica! is pretty epic. I wanted to make sure that the intro the outro really set up that kind of feel for the audience. Those two were main influences and building the space for a theme that really takes you on a journey, rather than something that's kind of tight together and makes you feel like you're kind of in a closet. 4:59  ELECTRONIC TOYS On a whim I purchased this Akai XR20 beat development machine, whatever the full name is. So when I was starting to work on Spacemerica!, I knew it was going to be epic futuristic. To me that sounds electronic. You think robots you think cyborgs you think electronics. I was always going to start there. And so I kind of messed around with a few beats. It took me a while to come up with the backing beat that you hear. I turned off all the lights in the room, I shut the blinds. The Akai has a three by three pad grid and they glow. I just sat there and just kind of let that run to get this feel of drifting through space. I purchased a Mother32. A Mother32 is an analog synth. I don't actually know a ton about analog synths and so when I recorded, I hooked it into the Akai and played the the melody part of the Akai melody through the Mother32, there's just a slow legato, an ethereal melody in the background. And that's courtesy of the Mother32. Almost a ghost like feel like you're kind of drifting, which I loved. I might not ever be able to recreate this exact thing, but that just makes me appreciate it that much more.  8:46 BASS GUITAR I needed to create a bigger boomy sound behind everything. The bass on it just wasn't quite enough; it wasn't round enough. I that's when I got out my my bass guitar - my Fender five string - and I just added those notes which ended up actually being an octave lower to make to really kind of fill it out. I then added some distorted guitar chords in a slow build. I added an airy synth sound like B-movie, sci fi kind of stuff.  10:04  FLOOR TOM I searched desperately actually for a good sample of a booming drum. My friend Daniel is a drummer, and he has very large drums. His floor tom is the size of a kick drum for most people. It's absurd. The sense of trepidation of apprehension. And that was it. You know, I was like, hey, let's add something that's a little bit more real to this. Can I use your drums? He's like, Yeah, okay. 11:03  ORPHAN SYNTHS Since I moved from the US, I'm now in Scotland, I had to get rid of a lot of stuff. It's something that I do regret, but I ended up selling both the Mother32 and the Akai to a good friend of mine. They're both getting a lot of love and a lot of use. And he knows what he's doing with those things. I was like, Hey, man, are you interested? I know you have a good home for these things. 12:03  CIRCLE OF FOURTHS Something that I have kind of touched on a little bit before is this, this lack of resolution, this kind of apprehension, this building. I started with circle of fourths or fifths however you want to look at it. So a circle of fourths is a group of intervals should resolve but you can keep it going for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever until you get through all of the notes in the standard Western scale. 13:04 OUTRO That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you catch podcasts. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called Spacemerica!. To hear the full story or to check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. We video recorded the full interview for this episode. Check it out and support the show by becoming a patron at patreon.com/howimakemusic. Visit HowIMake Music.com for more info about the show. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now, here's the main theme for Spacemerica! in its entirety. My name is Ian McGowan, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next time. For a full list of music and sound effects credits from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In a dramatically edited sound experience, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

In today’s episode of How I Make Music, we drench ourselves in reverb once again to recap the highlights from the first five episodes of the show. Take a trip into the work of respected and acclaimed audio drama composers. Join David Devereux (Tin Can Audio), Gabe Alvarez (Starcalled), Nate Fisher (Observe and Report), Randy Greer (The Culling) and Erik Jourgensen (Heroics) in a 5-star musical expose!  DAVID DEVEREUX, TIN CAN AUDIO Scottish composer David Devereux runs Tin Can Audio and has produced the audio dramas Middle:Below, The Tower and The Dungeon Economic Model. In this short insight, he reveals how imposter syndrome can make us feel dishonest for using software versions of instruments.  https://tincanaudio.co.uk GABE ALVAREZ, STARCALLED Texas-based composer Gabe Alvarez writes and composes for Starcalled, an action space sci fi audio drama with an epic cinematic score. Gabe shows us that creators need to write and make the content that they themselves want to hear.  https://starcalled.space NATE FISHER, OBSERVE AND REPORT Nate Fisher composes epic music for the sci fi audio drama Observe and Report, which tells the story of an earthbound alien called Zuri. He shows us how limiting it can be creating from templates to avoid compositions from all sounding the same.  https://www.observeandreportpodcast.com/ RANDY GREER, THE CULLING The horror genre relies more than most on the interplay of tension and release. Composer for audio drama The Culling Randy Greer shares how the balance between them is required to make emotive music.  https://www.randygreermusic.com/the-culling.html ERIK JOURGENSEN, HEROICS Heroics is a comedy podcast about superheroes who pivot to become evil. Composer Erik Jourgensen was given a budget to record live musicians for the theme, and repurposed the live recordings to create his own sample pack.  https://www.erikjourgensen.com/ ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In a dramatically edited sound experience, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Free music assets for audio drama creators https://johnbartmann.com/music (coupon AUDIODRAMA) How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called The Kinesigraph. It's the solo piano soundtrack from a short film called The Kinesigraph, which is tied into the universe of the audio drama Brass. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to how I make music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Amanda Laven. I'm a composer and sound designer from the capital region of New York. And this is how I make music. I'm Amanda Laven, I'm a composer and sound designer living in Schenectady, New York. 0:52 INFLUENCES I was the composer for The Kinesigraph, which is a short silent film set in an alternate steampunk version of 1885 known as the Brass Universe. The same universe in which the Brass audio drama and several stage plays and short films are set. My work is primarily chamber orchestral and electronic pop stuff for video games and audio dramas and films. I was basically born with a Nintendo Entertainment System controller in my hand. My dad used to be a hardcore gamer so I spent a lot of time playing video games growing up. I played a lot of Mario, played a lot of Legend of Zelda. So Koji Kondo, definitely one of my formative influences, and one of the reasons why I got into playing music and why I wanted to start writing music. And then Yoko Shimamura, as well, very big Kingdom Hearts fan. I played a lot of it growing up, and the music was definitely one of my favorite parts of that game. Yeah, so basically, I grew up listening to classic rock. It's what my parents listened to. So it's what I listened to. And then as I got a little bit older, became more of an angsty teenager, I started moving more into heavier stuff, hard rock, punk rock, nu metal. Still listen to it today, I'm still a sucker for nu metal.  3:33 PIANO SCORE I was specifically asked to write a solo piano score for The Kinesigraph, which was great because I only had about a day to produce the score. The Kinesigraph stars the Brass family, who live in an alternate version of 1885, in which technology has progressed, and King Albert is still alive. They are approached by an inventor who has created a device that produces moving pictures, and he's looking for an investment from the family. And they agree to invest in his device provided that they get to choose the subject that is filmed. The problem is, none of them can agree on what they should be filming! So I wrote a theme for each of these very different characters. So we have Lord brass who is an inventor and scientist. Lady Brass, a Sherlock Holmes-level detective. Gwendolyn Brass, a grade A con artist and master of disguise. And Cyril, Brass, master of martial arts and weapons. So in the end, we did it all in such a short amount of time. But it was kind of nice the way it worked out because at least it was done. And it was just a matter of finding someone to play it. And the producers did find a very lovely pianist named Jung-Sun Lee. And she was able to turn the score around in a really short amount of time, get us enough recordings that we were able to edit together a really good sounding score. And I was really happy with how it came out. If I recall correctly, it was recorded on an acoustic piano using mics rather than played directly into a DAW.   5:53 SOUND EFFECTS We live across the street from three sets of freight train tracks. They cause a lot of disruption they interrupt phone calls. Trying to record anything has to be done around both the trains and the traffic. I've got a couple of cats, so when it's close to mealtime, they'll start meowing or coming in wanting attention. And my partner plays electric guitar. So sometimes he'll start playing that while I'm trying to work on something it can be very distracting. And my 10 year old stepson, his bedroom shares a wall with my studio. So he's very into music, he's got some electronic keyboards and a flute, and he'll just start up at any time of the day. So it can get very noisy here makes it hard to find the time and the sonic space to do what I need to do sometimes. 7:18 OUTRO That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to how I make music. Catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple or wherever else. We've been listening to music featured in the short film from the Brass audio drama universe called The Kinesigraph. To hear the full story or to check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. We did a video recording of behind-the-scenes chat for this episode. Check out the full interview at patreon.com/howimakemusic. How I make music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening. Contact John Bartmann via the show notes. Visit HowImakeMusic.com and find out who else has been on the show. And now here's The Kinesigraph, the solo piano score from the Brass universe short film of the same name in its entirety. My name is Amanda Laven, and thanks for listening to how I make music. Catch you next Wednesday. For a full list of music and sound effects credits from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called In The Timestorm. It's the theme song from Timestorm, an audio drama about two kids who get the chance to preserve their history. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Michael Aquino. I'm a composer, musician, sound designer and podcast producer from New Jersey. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 93 by me, Michael Aquino. Thanks for listening in. Timestorm is an audio drama about two twins Alexa and Benny Ventura, who are yanked into another dimension by their cousin who gives them this crazy mission: to travel through time to preserve their culture's true history. Throughout the the series, they visit three different continents across the span of five centuries. And they're meeting people who have left their mark on Puerto Rican history. 2:32 INFLUENCES So a big influence on the theme song was the theme song for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Every time I watched Buffy, and I heard that theme song, man, I was ready to watch the show. And I think that's what I wanted to create with this theme song was this this energy and excitement about getting into the world of times. My next big inspiration was Saturday morning cartoons and cartoons in general. The creativity and imagination of Fraggle Rock, that theme song has always struck a chord in my heart. The Smurfs were another one. You can tell I'm 80s, 90s kid. Saturday morning cartoons really tapped into my kid imagination and inspiration. They didn't speak down to the kids. We wanted something that felt like you were talking to the kids. And also hopefully engaging the parents because you know the parents are listening to this too. So we want to share it. They're having a good time. Dan Zanes is a performer of kids' music. And I watched when Dan Zanes was performing, the kids were jumping around and having a good time, and the parents were jumping around and having a good time! And I always think about that energy when I'm creating music for this age group, which is tweens, typically. 4:44 THE HOTEL Timestorm is created by me and my partner in crime, Dania Ramos. Dani and I decided that we were going to take a weekend and hole ourselves up in this inn and write the theme song. "We're going we're getting out of our comfort zone and just going somewhere and and we're gonna create this." So we traveled four and a half hours north, in our in our little four cylinder car. It was the middle of February, and it was frickin cold. And if you know Vermont, it's cold! Bumpy roads, it was crazy. We got there. We were the only ones The only other ones in this inn, so it was the innkeeper and us. And because it was so empty, he upgraded our room to this really wonderful suite with this fireplace. I went into the other bedroom, closed the door. And this is what I started on guitar. This whole theme song started on guitar. Dania gave me some lyrics that she had written. And I went to work on trying to compose the song. I wanted it to be energetic, so I kept it to two three chords and finally got it to a point where I came outside of the bedroom, opened the door. And, and I was like, Okay, I think I've got something and I played it for her. And, and she was like, and this happened a bunch of times. So like I would just come out, work on some things. She gave me some notes. I we'd hash it out. I go back into the bedroom, close the door, worked on it some more and came out and it was just a lot of fun. And by the end of Saturday, we had the the first version ready to go. And we had another day so we just kind of enjoyed the last day in Vermont without having to do anything else. It was great. 7:50 INSTRUMENTS I enjoy rhythm so I knew that it was going to be very rhythmic and different drums, some electronic some actual drums, combining MIDI with actual sounding instruments. And then I went to the low end, finding a plugin of synthesizer that I really enjoyed. Very fluid and very wavy. And I got obsessed with a theremin when a friend of mine created what he called a "Theremin Devil's Phone". And he would use it at his gigs and it was really cool. It was this red phone. And it was it was a theremin so he would just play it. Added the theremin in there. I was the person who sang and rapped on the track, preparing the listener to re enter the world every time and just reminding them that the core focus of this this show is to witness find and remember history. History being the important treasure touchstone of the whole thing. 13:12 SLOW IT DOWN So yeah, so I think a big challenge for me was lyrically, making sure that a can sing and rap it and be the listener can understand some of these these kids that were listening to it when we were prototyping it, were like we just can't understand everything. So we paired it back and being able to make that clear, make those lyrics clear and understandable were really important when creating this theme song. As I was beginning to pull out words, I was like, oh, wow, it's so much easier now to sing and rap over! 14:04 VIOLIN We had brought in this amazing violinist Aurora Mendez to come in and record some violin parts that were featured in the episode. And she came into the studio and did an amazing job in adding her touch to it. 14:39 TRANSITIONS What I really enjoy doing is creating these short musical transitions. So I'll use natural sounds like for a play like they were outside and they were by a playground. I included basketball dribbling as a drumbeat. You know what I mean? It's it was just so much fun to be able to create music that way. Here are a couple of the transitions. We're gonna play them back-to-back. 15:15 ANNOYING DRUMMING I think I drive my wife Dania nuts. Sometimes when I when I find things with like tones or specific overtones to them, I'll like begin to drum or hit on them because I'm very rhythmically oriented. So I'll just be like, Can we please stop drumming on the microwave, or whatever it is, you know what I mean? It's here, here's the spouses that put up with our ridiculousness. 16:14 OUTRO That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple or whereever else. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called Timestorm. To hear the full story or to check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. Keep a lookout for Timestorm season three dropping this spring. We're super excited about it. Check out what's on offer at https://patreon.com/howimakemusic. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann for audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now here's In The Timestorm, the theme song for Timestorm in its entirety. My name is Michael Aquino, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next Wednesday. For a full list of music and sound effect credits from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Mars Patel Season Three Main Title. It's the theme from a podcast I co-created called The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel. Today we'll break it down, get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Chris Tarry. I'm a musician, composer, writer and podcast producer from New York City. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 92. Mars Patel Season Three Main Title, written by myself, Chris Tarry. Thanks for listening in. The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel is sort of like a Stranger Things-esque podcast about middle schoolers who start to go missing. And Mars Patel and his gang of friends try and get to the bottom of the mystery.  1:40 INFLUENCES I come from a real jazz background and I'm a jazz musician primarily. I came up with Weather Report, there's a great, you know, what's that one doo doo dah dah dah dah dah dah - Black Market! It's a great track. So I'm really big into like 80 synths and 80s pop music and all that sort of stuff. And that has a big influence kind of on the sound of the music from Mars Patel. Spacey, and so sort of like, retro a little bit, I guess I would say. A lot of jazz influences whatever I'm doing so so for me, it's all about melody and sort of vibe, you know. Tangerine Dream is very much an influence on this. The Risky Business soundtrack. And that individual track. You know, when they're on the subway, they're like making out on the subway. That Tangerine Dream track comes on. I hear so many influences and so much film music just based on that one track. Take a listen to it. I just brought it up to my wife. Like two nights ago we were watching a show I'm like "this is a ripoff of that Tangerine Dream track! Everybody's doing this!" And she's like "yeah, whatever, I'm going to bed." Return to Forever, that's another one. You know, when I was a kid just listening to tons of Return to Forever and, and just crazy fusion jazz guys. Stuff that nobody who ever had a girlfriend would listen to. I play in a lot of jazz groups, obviously here in New York. And we always - especially with the fusion stuff - we say everybody in the audience is just guys with ponytails who still live in their parents' basements. 4:48 DIFFERENT VERSIONS So this theme, which is called Season Three Theme - I did a version for each each season and kept the same form and harmonic structure, but produced the song differently every time. Here, I'll play you all three versions of the theme in a crossfade. So you can hear the difference between season one, season two and season three. And hopefully you'll be able to hear the similarities in the melodies and the harmonies. What changes is the vibe or the production of of the tune. You know, if you listened to season one, it has a very sort of very, very indie kind of feel. And see some two uses a lot of the same instruments, my bassline. You can hear me singing the melody. I'm not a great singer. So there's a lot of auto tune on this! And then in season three, again, the same harmonic structure but a completely sort of rewrite and shift to a new kind of sound. This version took a lot a lot a lot longer. There's an arp that goes throughout. More synths. I played synth bass instead of my Fender P-bass.  6:47 DRUM PATTERNS The melody's in three. But in this version, the drums are in four. And a bunch of the arps are in four as well. So it has this weird sort of feel to it, where it like flows over on itself. 7:49 VIOLIN I brought in my friend Zack Brock, who is a well known jazz violinist who just happens to live down the street from me and had him record the melody and the harmonies. And interestingly, it's a lot of people It sounds like a trumpet to a lot of people, but it's actually violin with some effects that I put over top of it. And we've played on tons of stuff together and we play in a piano player band. There's a really big New York piano player named Jim Riddle, and we've been in his band together for you know, probably going on six years now.  8:39 SERIAL In season one, one of the one of the interesting things you know, I like I said, I didn't know anything about writing podcast music. So Serial was the big show at the time. This eighth note pattern, just a very simple triad. And so I added that to the original version because I thought that's what podcast themes do. 9:14 MELODY If you listen to the melody, there's a high part and a low part. There's like the main line and instead of having like a harmony that comes over on top of it, it actually comes in underneath it. So the harmony part is lower than than the main part which is maybe a little bit atypical.  10:23 COLLABORATION I flew out to LA to mix it with my film composer friend named Shawn Pierce. Really one of my closest musical friends. I'm a weird hybrid of a musician and a writer. Getting into podcasts was was the one thing that brought the writing together with my musical part, right from an early stage, Gen Z always had this idea that all of our music for our shows would be made in house because that's what I do. It's been a blessing to be able to have something obviously, a business that you've co created. Especially during the pandemic when there's absolutely zero gigs for a bass player like myself. 11:09  OUTRO So that's it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you'd like to listen. We've been listening to the music featured in the audio drama called The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel. To hear the full story or to check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. We've got a new show starting this Friday, February 12 called Cupid and the Reaper, which we're really excited about. Check out what's on offer at https://patreon.com/howimakemusic. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now, here's Mars Patel Season Three Main Title in its entirety. My name is Chris Tarry, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next Wednesday. For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called King Arsen Approaches. It's this regal fantasy theme, which I wrote for the audio drama, the LaFresian Chronicles: Arsen. Today, we'll take a very quick look at the behind the scenes of why and how this track was put together. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers tell their own stories. My name is John Bartmann, and I'm a music composer from South Africa. And this is a little show called How I Make Music. 1:02 ABOUT So today's show is a little bit different. As you might know, I usually speak to other audio drama composers and then edit my voice out entirely. But to be perfectly honest, I was dropped by a few contributors this week and I had to plug a gap so I'm forced with the happy task of interviewing myself today! I'll keep it shorter than usual, and hopefully I can convey some of my own passion for the music of audio drama. The LaFresian Chronicles: Arsen is a full cast fantasy audio drama written by Nicole Tuttle and edited by Mariah Clawson. A fantasy fairy kingdom where a young orphaned woman seeks to find the truth about her parents death. Writing for the show has put me into the space of cinematic composition. I've had to come up with numerous themes throughout the series, which is now 12 episodes. Themes like this one, which is got an action and tension feel. I do love the team that I work with. Brad Holbrook does the sound design. It just feels like I'm basically a part of something that's really working. That's what I love most about this job.  3:18 SLOWLY MAJESTIC The piece that I wanted to look at today is called King Arsen Approaches. And it's a moment where the Royal Guard is confronting the king, having found the young Fae woman Aurelie. It's all set up the palace, and the scene is described as having 'floors of white marble that you can see your face in.' This really royal atmosphere. It's at this moment, that we meet King Arsen for the first time. And he proceeds down the set of stairs to stand right before Aurelie. To convey this feeling of majesty, I knew it had to be a really slow composition. This is 40 BPM which is way slower than a heartbeat (unless you're Bruce Lee). The percussion does a lot for this piece because they start to like field drums and timpani drums convey a military field. And the king obviously being the head of the kingdom comes with that authority. 5:00 ORCHESTRAL ELEMENTS I have a bias towards strings because I am an amateur violinist. I play violin every day. Paying attention to melody and bow articulation and things that can be done with the software instruments. The library that I use is sort of an entry level library. It's called Native Instruments Symphony Essentials. It's a good starting point for me, I mean, I'm actually fairly new to the world of, orchestral composition. Aside from the percussion and the strings, this piece, King Arsen Approaches also contains a wind section. Here's what the wind and the brass sound like together in this piece. Those little brass flutters are called triple tongues. So next time you watch a movie, and you hear Ba Ba Ba, it's usually like action or something significant happening. And right at the outro here, we've got a beautiful, pretty oboe. Just carrying the final notes of the cadence.  6:22 TENSION I want to play a piece now from a different part of the series, which has a much more tense feel. And I'll include the narration too, so you have a sense of what's going on. We immediately start with the action. If you want to create tension in your cinematic music, use brass swells like this. Another great trick is the use of tritones. Tritones are the flat five interval. Sounds horrible. So if you don't resolve it, then it creates an ongoing sense of tension, a super useful tool. And that's better. Feels like I can relax.  7:18 RAPID FIRE Now, I just want to do a little rapid fire sort of showcase of some of the other music I've written for the show. What we're hearing in the background now is majesty or grandeur. If you listen closely, you'll hear it's actually also the intro theme for the show, which I slowed down. I use the piano mostly when we have diary sequences, very tender moments where she gets to sort of do a monologue, often to her deceased parents. That piano is very soft. It sounds funny to say, but I picture of the bedroom of a young woman where she's got some privacy to sit down and confess her feelings. I turned to the piano again, when I was asked to write a piece for a magical folk story retelling. A scene where the librarian is telling the history of the fairy people. And I got in some typical kind of chord progressions of this type of genre, but very simplistic, very minimal. 9:31 CONFLICT Conflict drives a narrative, and I've had to write a piece which underscores conflict between the characters. Often they're having an argument or there's a sense of betrayal. And that's what this piece is. The challenge with these scenes is that you often have to end it on a positive note, like some kind of resolution has occurred. So you'll notice the change here from a minor sad sound to a more triumphant major sound. And here's one last piece, it's got the silver bell sound almost like a monastery bell. I use that little touch. Just as a way of conveying some of this almost spiritual power that we come to realize that Aurelie has, I wanted to convey a sense of spirituality. And I found that that bell patch worked quite well.  11:05 OUTRO So that's about it for this episode, I'd love to go into way more depth about my own music. But that's not really what the show is about anymore. If you are interested in how this show How I Make Music came to be, the first 58 episodes of it were me doing what I did today, which is just basically deconstructing my own compositions, go to Patreon.com/howimakemusic and you can access the first 58 - the first year of the show, the lost hidden year - for just a couple of dollars. So that would really help me out. Thank you. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, head over to JohnBartmann.com. And now here is King Arsen Approaches in its entirety. This fantasy themed music composition that I wrote for the LaFresian Chronicles: Arsen. Thank you guys so much for tuning in every week. There are about 50 of you at the moment and I love all of you. Keep making your audio dramas and I'll catch you next week Wednesday. SHOW NOTES The Lafresian Chronicles: Arsen podcast https://arsen.pinecast.co/ John Bartmann audio & license-free music asset packs https://johnbartmann.com For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the main theme from the dystopian science fiction podcast windfall. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Adam Raymonda. I'm a sound designer and composer from Syracuse, New York. And this is How I Make Music.  1:54 ABOUT  The show takes place in the weeks and days leading up to Contact Day, which is the celebration of when the citizens of Windfall first met Wanda. The people on the ground will say, "Wanda damn it!", like instead of "goddamnit". We were certainly inspired by Battlestar Galactica. And Battlestar specifically has "frack" that they use as their - instead of saying "fuck." Right. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." Right. 2:55 INFLUENCES  A big influence have been Coheed and Cambria. One of the biggest prog rock influences on me personally, that has a science fiction story that's associated with their music, and they have these repeated themes.  3:51 FOUR VERSIONS  For the Windfall main theme, I wrote four different versions. The first version appears in the first few episodes. And then I sort of realized that tonally, it didn't match the very intro section of the episode. So I made an alteration where we have a little bit more of a dramatic version in the second version of it. The second version comes to a more dramatic ending. The third version that I actually wrote was the outro music that appears in just about every episode. A much more chilled out version of it, too. We were trying to add some context in for the very last episode to really make sure that we were celebrating contact day, this supposedly joyous celebration of our tyrannical God queen. And I have made an orchestral arrangement of the theme, where we have big horns and brass and sort of this triumphant, sort of soaring version of the melody that allows us to kind of really feel that sort of patriotism, for Windfall. 6:52 5/4 OSTINATO  All the versions of the theme have that same core structure, there's an ostinato, or a series of repeated notes, it's A, C, D, G, A. And that sort of drives us forward in this 5/8 feeling that we've got here, which helps us feel maybe a little bit out of what we would consider normal. Most music that you might hear that's in contemporary Western music, at least, is in 4/4. I wanted something that felt a little bit different. So that five, eight feeling that 1-2-3-4-5 really helps drive that sort of out of this world feeling. 8:39 OPERA SINGER  I recently moved to Syracuse, New York and got set up in the studio that I'm in now that was actually in the home of one of the writers of our show, Christy. She had a good friend who happened to come over one day, and Christie was telling her about Windfall and what we were working on and showed her my studio. Her friend was like, oh, I'm an opera singer. She was actually here in the United States on a visa to almost like represent the Czech Republic as like an opera singer and was working in Manhattan. And I just had to ask her, I was like, would you possibly sing on this? And Christy was like, Yeah, you got to do it. You got to sing on here. And so Pavlina (Horakova) was like, Sure, let's let's sing. She just came up into the studio, and we sort of improvised a couple of different things. Pavlina was nice enough to actually replace one character in the show to like one background character and an episode which was great. 10:47 DORIAN MODE  The Windfall main theme is written in a Dorian key. The happiest of all sad keys. The Dorian mode is very similar to a minor scale, your traditional natural minor scale. The sixth note in that scale is raised up. So, in this instance we're playing in a Dorian. So it's A B, C, D, E, F sharp, G, and then back to A up at the top there. And that F sharp kind of gives us allows it to semi feel hopeful or triumphant in certain uses. OUTRO That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple or wherever else. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called Windfall. To hear the full story or to check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. We did a video of the recording of this episode, visit patreon.com/howimakemusic to check it out and to check out the studio that I work in. Visit howimakemusic.com for more on the aims of this show. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now, here are the four different versions of the Windfall main theme back to back. Have fun spotting the differences! My name is Adam Raymonda and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next Wednesday. For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the main theme from the dystopian science fiction podcast windfall. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Adam Raymonda. I'm a sound designer and composer from Syracuse, New York. And this is How I Make Music. ABOUT Welcome back to how I make music Episode 89 the windfall main theme, by me, Adam Raymonda. Thanks for listening in. Windfall is a large ensemble cast science fiction drama and it takes place on a planet called Proxima. It's this towering city where the wealthiest of the wealthy live on the top of the city and the poorest of the poor live on the ground. This city was built up to a castle that appeared in the sky on Proxima. The residents worship their god queen who was found in the castle. Her name is Wanda. She bears no resemblance to a certain leader that we have in the country I live in, the United States. 02:07 INFLUENCES I listened to a lot of prog rock throughout the years. A common thing in progressive rock or metal music is the use of odd time signatures, which probably influenced me in just as big a way as composers like John Williams or Ramin Djawadi. There's a piece from the band Between The Buried And Me called Famine Wolf. Take a listen to it. It has this natural sort of seven four '1234567' feeling to. That may have been an influence in the way that I put together this theme. 03:24 BREAKDOWN The Windfall main theme is played at the introduction of each episode. It features this Rhodes keyboard ascending line that is supposed to represent the sort of the upward motion of going up towards the top of the castle. There's a couple of the more melodic elements which help drive us through that rhythm. This version ends with some more organic elements and is sad but sort of triumphant at the same time. I added some guitars that have some pitch shifting on them one that has a higher octave above it and then one has a lower octave beneath it and they're kind of panned off to the sides. I kept most of the melody on the one of that five. It would help keep us grounded or more straight. Because 5/8 can sometimes be this like very almost like Balkan music. It's all downbeats. Just helps keep it driven and you know, sort of in time. I ended up adding some fake strings to it. That would help accentuate sort of the chord progression. And then I ended up adding in some organ. 06:18 CELLO My friend, Gabi ended up playing cello on the track. She came over to my studio that I had at the time that was my bedroom studio. And we just plugged in her cello in through direct input or a DI. It had an electric output but also was an acoustic cello. So we were able to capture both signals at the same time. So we got a lot of the lower droning notes that are in there that help make up the bassline. We had her double the melody as well. I'm so grateful that she did record that on there because it just sounds so much better than anything I could have programmed at that point. And to this day. 07:50 OTHER PARTS We very lightly put a glockenspiel in there to kind of bring something that would be like a higher timbre. It ends with these more organic elements, there's some acoustic guitar that comes in. A ukulele. The music fades out with the first scene happening over that. It also allows space for the scene to trickle in when we cut out a lot of these other elements. 09:02 OUTRO That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple or wherever else. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called Windfall. To hear the full story or to check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. We did a video of the recording of this episode, visit Patreon.com/howimakemusic to check it out and to check out the studio that I work in. Visit howimake music.com for more on aims of this show. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now, here are the four different versions of the Windfall main theme back to back. Have fun spotting the differences! My name is Adam Raymonda and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next Wednesday. For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called You Probably Shouldn't Trust Me. It's a villain theme song from season two of the audio drama Dining In The Void, a sci-fi podcast about sleuthing and secrets in space. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, we're audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Ali Hylton. I'm a synesthetic podcast creator and composer located in South Texas, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 88. And you can trust me when I say this is the song You Probably Shouldn't Trust Me by me, Ali Hylton, who you can trust. Thanks for listening in.  01:19 ABOUT Dining In The Void is about six alien celebrities and they're all brought on to a space station for a dinner party. Upon arrival, they find out that someone has trapped them. And someone among them has trapped them there. Who trapped in there, why are they trapped? It's basically like Clue in space. And really gay...is like...a simple way of explaining it. 01:49 SYNESTHESIA  So I have this thing, kind of a condition called synesthesia. So when I hear music or voices or just sound in general, my brain tells me what color that is. When I was a kid, I would sit on the bus and close my eyes and kind of move my hands and the gesture of how the music is going. And there's always been this color to it. And it's always like a black blank space like a black black background. And then this color moves in time with the music in different colors come in and out. And I paint a lot of podcast music, and I try to interpret the whole song into one piece, or at least the biggest part of the song and get kind of the feeling for that song in one image. One of my friends AR Oliveri sent me a superhero clip. And they're like "you're the superhero!" I don't remember which one - it was some Marvel superhero who turns sound into light energy. And I'm just like, this is so cool. 03:25 CHARACTER SONGS  So it's telling stories through music, they'll have different themes for different characters and then those themes will come together to tell the story of who they are. I've used this song You Probably Shouldn't Trust Me to merge it with some other character songs. So we're going to play the first track Like Mother Like Daughter and fade it into the song I'm Here To Kill You. Let's see if you can figure out where one ends and the other begins. 03:51 COLORS IN THE WOODS  This piece in the background is called Remembering. It's another song I wrote for season two, two of the characters in the show called Katie Bell and Waverly. It plays in the scene where Katie Bell and Waverly are talking about how they both grew up. They both grew up in these places filled with nature and forests and life. Picture the scenes going on in the background and those colors will come into play. Later, like when Katie was describing running in the woods away from the danger, I always pictured these blues and greens and some reds and yellows. And you can see bits of those colors coming into the song.  05:08 GARAGE BAND I just started composing this year. When I compose music, I use GarageBand loops. I taught myself how to do this, I have no idea how to read music. jumped in feet first and we're still going. 05:40 AUDIO DRAMA INFLUENCES When composing music, I'm influenced by a lot of my friends within the audio drama community. James Barbarossa from The Orphans, who has also been on How I Make Music Episode 68, which you should listen to. He has played such a big part in being an inspiration because we often are talking about how we compose music and stuff and he's always so encouraging. And I love the music from The Orphans because it's a space show, science fiction as well. And it's so colorful. Like all these reds, blues, teals and purples and pinks and the colors are so vibrant and fun. What you're hearing now it's one of the pieces James composed for The Orphans. Another influence is Sam Boase-Miller from Marsfall. What you're hearing now is one of the songs composed for the show, Through The Irrigation Pipe. The show also has a lot of character themes and specifically in Marsfall you can pick out the different motifs and the different songs for each character. I've painted a lot of the Marsfall music. It's got a lot more muted colors than The Orphans. But also sometimes it can get very bright like their main theme, literally a rainbow of color. Another influence would be my co-composer Benny James. They actually compose the main theme for Dining In The Void and all the music for season one. I love their music so much. Take a listen.  08:46 THEME BREAKDOWN  You Probably Shouldn't Trust Me is a character theme for our main villain. I want to walk you through some of the musical moments throughout the track and what they represent. So it begins with this violin loop that plays throughout the whole song. And then we have our beats come in. There's two different beats there's like this. There's like your standard beats. And then it's like ... it's called African talking drum. I use it a lot in my music because it adds like a good beat to the song. And then we have a few more strings and our bass come in and there's this loop called Low Oath strings. It's just like a very low string instrument that adds more depth to this character. And then we have our piano come in, adds a lot of space and these brighter colors to it. And then in the middle, we hear these two different loops. It adds this kind of innocence and represents the mask that they put on during season one. The second half of the song is about who they are now and how dangerous they are. So the music just comes back in full swing, like we've picked up where we left off before. So the vocals come in to represent the stars in the star souls that have been stolen. And so the song crescendos and then it kind of fades out. A challenge I come into face when composing music is I don't know how to read music. I've never been able to read music I have tried for years, I can't do it. And part of the problem is I have dyslexia, which is why my brain sees the notes on it but it doesn't transcribe into what those notes are. And sometimes those notes have moved places. And when I was in choir, I learned how to sing the songs by learning through ear and kind of using it as like a guide. So I teach myself as I go, and I do it all through ear and stuff. That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you so much for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple or wherever else you listen to podcasts. We were listening to music featured in the audio drama called Dining In The Void. To hear the full story or check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. Check out patreon.com/howimakemusic for a behind the scenes video of us recording this episode. Visit https://howimakemusic.com for more about the aims of the show. How to make music is created by John Bartmann. For more audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now here's You Probably Shouldn't Trust Me in its entirety. My name is Ali Hylton, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next Wednesday. SHOW NOTES Dining In The Void podcast https://zebulonpodcasts.wixsite.com/main/ditv Ali Hylton https://www.instagram.com/missalihyltonart/ For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Visit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

Announcement: How I Make Music will be back on Wednesday, January 13th 2021. ♦ Listen to How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com ♦ Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic ♦ Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Dark Streets. It's one of the soundtrack pieces I wrote for The Lost Cat podcast. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You will listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and take a trip and how it was made. My name is A.P. Clark. I'm a musician and writer from London, England. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music episode 87, Dark Streets. by me A.P. Clark. Thanks for listening in. The Lost Cat podcast is a storytelling audio drama that details my continuing adventures and trying to find my cat, which is lost. It features monsters, ghosts, old ones, some cats, several ends of the world, and lots and lots of wine. 01:44 INFLUENCES I've been a musician since I was a teenager, you know, started in rock bands. But then I discovered all of the 60s singer-songwriters. And that was just much more narrative driven. Ballad form and story and character and stuff. When podcasts exploded about five, six years ago, it was like Ah, I can do music and I can do storytelling and I can do spoken word stuff. I can do all of it in one thing. So that's what got me into doing the Lost Cat podcast. So one of my influences at the time was I was listening to a lot of Sigur Ros, which is that post rock minimalist atmospheric style of music. Take a listen. It's a beautiful sort of cyclical piano. Piano figures. It affected my practice as I plonked away at the piano. I was getting into all of the the like the minimalists, classical composers like Reich and Glass. And that obviously fits perfectly with the idea of scoring which goes underneath and doesn't take focus off of the talking. So another influence that I was listening to a lot was the Magnetic Fields, all of the works of Stephin Merritt. A very specific song that I liked was his side project called The 6ths. I think the album was called Hyacinths And Thistles. And the impossibility of pronouncing that does give you an idea of his sense of humor. It's called The Dead Only Quickly Decay. Take a listen to it. Obviously has that slightly Gothic but slightly funny but slightly dark but slightly warm and human. It doesn't undermine the morbidness with funniness All of the Magnetic Fields is fairly wonderful for this stuff. 05:06 WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE  So as I was starting to make this podcast, Welcome to Night Vale was hugely popular is one of the first big independent podcasts, audio dramas to really break through. And so I was listening to it, and I was massively inspired by it. The fact that there is a song in the middle of all my episodes is just entirely because Night Vale did it. I was looking for a format, they had a format that was really good. And I really responded to so I just went with it. Because even Welcome to Night Vale, which is a famously sort of subversive queer podcast, still kept the Lovecraftian tone of fear of the other. So my unique input was to take the Lovecraftian tone, subvert the fear of the other and make it into a going towards the other, use what you got around you and make stuff. That's what I did. I needed a format. So I borrowed stuff from Night Vale.  06:41 GOING DIY  I was freelance at the time, which is to say I was massively underemployed part of it was just to like, give myself a project. You can't neurose about like, "is the idea ready yet? Is it good enough yet?" You just have to dive in and go with what you've got. I needed some music, it needed to be sort of dark and scary. So I just played something that sounded dark and scary moved on. The piece of music is improvised, it took 10 minutes. And I find that a very useful way of actually creating stuff. As an example, me and my friends made a feature length movie last year, called Apocalypse of the Blood Freak, which you can actually watch on YouTube, if you dare. We made it in five months. Cost 200 pounds. And it was all about just doing that DIY, put the show on with what you've got. And amazing things are possible when you do that. 07:59 PROCESS  The inspiration from the making the music was just I've got a hole in my aural landscape and I need to fill it with some dark blue scary music. Essentially, in the left hand, you've got a fairly you know, it's a drone, basically, it's that's the bed of it, that's the atmospheric bed that the right hand will sort of just sort of meld with the left hand. So it's just sort of shaping the atmosphere. If you press hard, it'll sort of come through really strongly. So mostly when I was improvising, I was I was I was worried about pressing the buttons too hard. It kind of didn't matter how the music changed as long as it changed, that would shape the scene. You know, when the dialogue had an emotional shift. You as long as you had some sort of change in the music. It would it would light up at the moment and it would really really work. I'm not quite sure which organ I use, but you know, like the Wurlitzer is or the the Rhodes or something that often have a speaker that actually span around in the cabinet so that you'd have this whoo sound. And at that point, I could just put stabs in there. Created the atmosphere really, really well.  10:04 NEW INSTRUMENTS  So I am a guitarist. But one of the ways to spark creativity is often to just move to an instrument that you're not comfortable with. And for example, the piano or the the MIDI keyboard synthesizer that I was using, pretty much, I could just play it one finger at a time. That's about as good as I could do. So just improvising in that very, very simply, without trying to get complicated at all, really created a bunch of different atmospheres that I couldn't create as a guitarist. So this is the theme tunes of The Lost Cat podcast, just written on piano, which I felt set the tone for the entire podcast. The interesting things here is the balance between repetition and variation. Because if you make it too repetitive, it's boring. But if you vary it up too much it you lose the atmosphere. I would recommend not giving into trying to be wacky if you're doing a funny thing, like don't use slide whistles or anything, you can just have a piano playing a slightly dark piece, the comedy will still come through I promise. 12:00 FREEING YOURSELF  I think it's very useful advice for those who are worried about what they don't have the resources or the talent to create something to not get ground down and paralyzed with. I'm not quite ready for this yet. I haven't quite figured it out, I can do better. Nope. I've got one weekend to write this story. So the ideas that are going through my head, that's what the story is going to be about this week. And it frees you immensely. 12:32 OUTRO  And that's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you listen to podcasts. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called The Lost Cat podcast. To hear the full story or to check out my other compositions, please follow the links in the show notes. And check out what's on offer at patreon.com/howimakemusic or visit howimakemusic.com for more on the aims of this show. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now, here is Dark Streets, a moody, menacing organ drone in its entirety. My name is A.P. Clark, and thank you for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next Wednesday. ABOUT THIS SHOW**** How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Devil's Gamble. This is part two of a two-part break down. It's a soundtrack I composed for the horror, fantasy, audio drama, Dark Dice. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Steven Melin. I'm a music composer in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, Devil's Gamble by me Steven Melin. You can check out part one in the feed if you'd like. Either way, thanks for listening in. Dark Dice is a horror actual play DnD podcast that uses immersive soundscapes to create an added layer of intensity. The story is about six travelers who embark on a journey into the ruinous domain of the nameless God. They will never be the same again. Basically, what this means is, it's a tabletop game, which gets recorded while the actors and the performers are playing it. So it is a real Dungeons and Dragons game. But during the recording, we're using music to bring the story to life. 02:16 BOSS BATTLES In the Dark Dice show, there are a bunch of boss battle moments. And this is when the intensity is increasing, there are stems. So they're separate instruments. The producers can actually throw in any combo of these instruments at any time to help up the intensity. Where the intensity is increasing, they might throw in the drums. They might throw in the cello. Things that will help make it feel more intense. We're actually working on a video game right now working on the soundtrack, which is going to be an extension of the Dark Dice universe. And we get to reuse some of those for actual boss battle moments in the games. So I'm really pumped about that! I'm a huge gamer. And that just fills my heart with all kinds of gladness. 04:03 HORROR HARP So this is the this is the horror harp sounds like this. It's a one-of-a-kind instrument. It's over 100 years old. This is actually an empty harp passed down from my wife's grandmother, way back in the Great Depression in the 1920s or 1930s. They couldn't afford strings. So they put guitar strings on here. It's never been tuned for 100 years, just about, and now it sounds like this. But it's amazing. Ever since I used this for the first time on Dark Dice - it was actually this track - Travis just lost his mind and he thought that was the coolest thing in the world. Because it's so messed up. And you actually hear the rattling wood in it, and it's just creepy. 05:10 ALEATORIC VIOLIN I'm a violinist, and I've been playing for about 20 years. But there are very cool times like this where we need these aleatoric random atonal sounds and so I'll just pick it up and go crazy. Let me grab it, why not? You don't have to be good an instrument to do that. You literally just you whack your instrument, whacking it with the wood, or just scraping it. It makes these glorious noises that have no business belonging in any soundtrack. listen out for glissandos and scrapes in sound effects that I've also recorded with the violin in the track. 06:07 PITCH BENT CELLO Originally, when I was presented with this track, I wanted to have a low tension. So what I did is I recorded the solo cello. And I also asked them to record it a second time. And we did a pitch shift down an octave. So whenever you hear any of the cello, whenever it's really scrubbing as hard as they can play, it just creates the perfect, rich tone that's not muddy, but has the clarity that you get from a cello. 06:56 PERCUSSION BOX So behind me in my studio whenever I work and have an inspired idea to add percussion, I just grabbed my percussion box. It's full of all kinds of goodies that I've collected throughout the years. But some that have made it into this track Devil's Gamble. Most notable is the tambourine, which may not seem like a very sophisticated instrument. But even just having those kinds of rattles in the background. That can actually add so much power, you'll never get the intensity you want until you add the high range as well. 07:37 NOT QUANTIZED So whenever I can I use samples, I use MIDI to get the low end. And I actually use an EQ to strip away the mids and the highs. And then I like to use real instruments recorded because of the sloppiness, I don't quantize them, I don't perfect them. I literally grab a tambourine or something like a shaker. Get that high end. A foreign drum like a duty back which sounds like this. 08:16 WOOD FLUTE One of my favorite instruments to pull out of the box is a wood flute. This is actually a bamboo flute that's been woodburned it it has this almost like a grave. Like a haunted sound. I'm aiming for notes. But even if you just blow on the lowest note. You add some reverb to that or some delay to that and you spread it out in the mix. It creates this hunting vibe. So I love to use this whenever there are softer quieter moments. It just let it soar on top. It's got to feel human and musical. 09:20 TRITONE In music theory, there is a chord or a an interval relationship called the tritone. It's a sharp four or a flat five. And it's known as one of the most evil and diabolical relationships in music. When I was writing this, I had no intention of using tritones. But it's really funny thinking back and looking back at it that this is just completely filled with tritones. And that was totally unintentional. I think it's one of the tropes that people lean into, because it works. So it was very subconscious but I think it's also neat that that I usually The devil's chord in Devil's Gamble. 10:11 OUTRO That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple or wherever else. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called Dark Dice. To hear the full story, follow the links in the show notes. Check out what's on offer at patreon.com/howimakemusic. Visit howimakemusic.com for more on the aims of this show. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now here's Devil's Gamble, a diabolical medieval battle track I wrote for the Dark Dice podcast in its entirety. My name is Steven Melin. Thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next Wednesday. SHOW NOTES Listen to Dark Dice Podcast darkdice.libsyn.com/ Steven Melin www.stevenmelin.com/ Simple Sample Audio simplesamplesaudio.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Devil's Gamble. It's a diabolical medieval battle track I wrote for the Dark Dice podcast. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Steven Melin, and I'm a music composer in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to how I make music Episode 85 Devil's Gamble by me Steven Melin. Thanks for listening in. Dark Dice is a horror actual play D&D podcast that uses immersive soundscapes. The story is about six travelers who embark on a journey into the ruinous domain of the Nameless God. They will never be the same again. 1:26 Live instruments One of the requests from the team on this show was to use as many medieval historic timeless instruments as possible, and one of the top requests was to use a hurdy gurdy. Take a listen to how ancient it feels when put next to a modern orchestra. Medieval instruments are very hard to tune, and they're hard to play in tune with Western music. We decided to also add a lute to this project. A lute is basically a medieval guitar, take a listen to it. It's an ancient instrument that was traditionally used to kind of strum along, playing a little tremolo. And those are two instruments we use constantly. As much as possible, throughout this whole soundtrack, we really have tried to hire as many live musicians as possible. Because typically, when you get raw recordings, even from world class musicians, it doesn't sound good together. Even if it sounds out of tune, and it sounds rough, I think that's part of the charm. It's happening live right in front of you. And so as a composer, specifically for this track, Devils Gamble...This isn't just a one-time track that plays in the background. This actually plays on loop and we'll repeat five, six, seven times. And it can be cut off at any point. So in a way, it's almost very more similar to video game music than film music. 3:50 Creative Team I think whenever you're working with a creative person, in this case, Travis Vengroff and the Fool and Scholar productions team, they're so creative, and they really don't repeat themselves. So they have a lot different IPs. They have a lot of different shows. And we're even right now working on a video game, which is kind of an extension of this world. And we're kind of trailblazing in a way. 4:16 Hammered Dulcimer Another instrument that we have used a ton and this soundtrack is the hammered dulcimer. It's basically a giant harp but it sits on a table and you hold two mallets and you just play it kind of like a drum set. It's an instrument that like teleports you to that medieval stage. It has a very fantasy vibe to it. Be very pretty or also very, very evil sounding. If you whack it hard enough. We did record the live dulcimer. But well, here's the funny thing, we noticed that it sounded too wimpy, dainty and beautiful. But this is not meant to be a beautiful track we kept to the original. But then we also pitch shifted it down two octaves, to play unplayable notes. To play this earthy growl that you hear whenever the big drums hit, it's this BAAAHHHM! that helps bring all of this low end that you wouldn't get otherwise. We wanted to keep as much as we could live. But if you've ever worked with live musicians, you'll notice that there's always this lack of production. When you take a bunch of different little puzzle pieces and you throw them together. It's kind of like cooking. Sometimes you need to add a little bit of spice. 5:55 Recording the choir Travis asked me to write this piece of music. We had this final version, and I thought that we were done. And then out of nowhere, right before the release of the episode. Three weeks in advance, he called me up and he said, "Steven, I just hired a choir. They're in Hungary. Can you write a language for them?" I was like, "What? What are you talking about?" I had this crazy idea. I wanted to record them in Icelandic, which no one speaks! In a previous episode of How I Make Music, the White Vault episode, Travis and Brandon talked about the process of how we all worked together creating this choir piece and recorded the Budapest choir. So basically, I said yes, and I said very honestly, Travis, I don't know how we're going to do this, but we're going to figure it out. So just give me some time. And let me think this through. What you would do is with the choir conductor is they would literally go word by word, they would say the word out loud. And then you take a pen or pencil and you'd literally write out phonetically. However, it makes sense to you to read it. So that's what I did. That's all I knew what to do. And then when I created the sheet music, which is you know, where the choir is going to sing off of this for each part, I would just use those phonetics, and I put it all out. And it was this crazy process. This is what it's like to work with Travis every single time. It's always this crazy wild west adventure. But I think the result speaks for itself. Take a listen. It was just crazy. Honestly, it was crazy. 8:21 Double the sound The reason I wanted to have two takes of every phrase is because I wanted to double the sound of the choir because we recorded a 40 person choir, but I wanted an 80 person choir. And so the way to do that is you take two clean passes, and you layer them on top of each other. And there's some production things you can do using EQ and reverb and panning to help make it feel like it's literally double the size. 9:06 Separate the stems One of the secrets I've learned over the years is if you don't want the team to turn down your music, you should create your own layers. Give them the tools, say here are 20 layers that I've created at different intensities. Here's what I suggest, to combine for different types of intensity. And then let them do the fun editing, of writing their show around it. 09:42 Outro And that's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thanks for listening to how I make music. catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple or wherever else. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called dark dice to hear the full story or to check out Some of my sample instruments that I've built for this very show, follow the links in the show notes. You can go to simplesamplesaudio.com. Check out what's on offer at patreon.com/howimakemusic visit howimakemusic.com. For more on the aims of this show. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now here's Devil's Gamble, a diabolical medieval battle track I wrote for the Dark Dice Podcast in its entirety. My name is Steven Melin. Thanks for listening to How I Make Music. Catch you next Wednesday. For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to now in the background is called Discovery. It's a retrowave soundtrack from a fiction podcast called Gr8 And Terrible by A.R. Oliveri. Today we'll break it down and get into what retrowave is and how and why this piece was put together. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Lee Rosevere. I'm a composer in Charlottetown PEI in Canada and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 84, Discovery, by me, Lee Rosevere. 01:12 Gr8 And Terrible audio drama Gr8 And Terrible is a fiction podcast about a high school student that stumbles upon an ancient curse that grants immortality. But there's a catch: every full moon she must kill someone or she'll die. 01:26 80s influences I was always a big fan of the 80s in general as being a child of the 80s and growing up and listening to all the pop music that was around at the time, including a lot of the synth artists. My first introduction to the synth world was probably Jean-Michel Jarre, the Equinox album that I owned on an eight track. Played it a lot. Then moved on to listening to pop songs that were hits at the time such as Axel F. Paul Hardcastle had a big hit with the song 19. Fly By Night by him was one that I listened to a lot. Take a listen. 02:17 Retrowave The entire retrowave genre I rediscovered in 2012 or so by an artist named D/A/D. He put out an album called the Construct and one song on there particular called Love Will Make You Stay really caught my ear. What is this whole retrowave thing? I lived through this once already. So it's kind of cool to go through it again because it's just you know, firing all the nostalgia synapses. I was really taken with the whole sound and how it's changed and what it was doing in the current time, and how it can sound somewhere in between the past and the future at the same time. I really taken with that and started listening to a lot of it and then decided that I think I'm going to try making some of this music. So retro wave is a bit of everything the past and the future all brought together with the sounds of the 80s but a lot of them have been amped up for current times. They're mostly associated with movies from the 80s like the action, sci-fi or the horror movies. The Stranger Things soundtrack really brought the retrowave genre back and more recently in Kung Fury, which is actually scored by Zack Robinson, also bringing that sound even more into the mainstream than it was before. So some of the most common and instruments that are used in retro wave are a huge snare drums. Lots of reverb, which I am always a big fan of. Retro synths, like the ones from the 80s. I'm always drawn to spacey or ambient because that's where all the influences are. And like Brian Eno's music and other things all just kind of mush together. 04:46 Song breakdown So I want to break down the song for you and show you some of the individual parts. It first started with this synth melody And then I brought some arpeggios into it. And there's two basses going on at the same time here. The strings are an instrument called Manitron that I have used on practically all my stuff. There's an organ pad that's doubling up the main melody and adding a little bit more texture. There's a synth called Futura, which is adding that brassy sound. The guitar is actually a sampled VST. I wish I could play guitar properly, I would have a lot more fun doing this kind of music. And there's a little bit of a vocoder in there, which is an instrument used a lot in Daft Punk or Kraftwerk's music. 06:41 Recording while composing The bassline was played slightly differently each time because I couldn't remember what I had played the time before. So I was just playing it from beginning to end in real time, and hopefully didn't make a mistake. I was writing it and playing it at the same time. And this is actually a way they used to do it in the 70s. Before they had sequencers, they had to play all the parts in real time on real instruments. And if they messed up, they had to go back to the beginning and do it again. But there is something to be said for playing the song from beginning to end. And really kind of hearing how the whole thing sounds as it's being composed, you know, as it goes along. 07:48 Sampled drums Drums is my first instrument, but I didn't play and I haven't played drums on anything in years. So just because it's so easier now to just like not well, the sounds are all there and they're all perfectly recorded, I can just like hit a button. And there are no actual live drums on this because I wanted to have the authentic 80s drum sound, which means using drum samples or instruments from the times. Or with that kind of sound on it, because I can't replicate it in the studio, the little studio I have. But obviously, you need that sound for this kind of song. Otherwise it just won't sound right. The production of this music sounds better if it's bigger. So up till halfway through the song I'm using a Linn drum machine for the kick and for the clap sound. But then I really wanted this next level to come in with a snare. 08:53 The 80s gated snare So have this huge, huge snare drum sound. I was imagining Phil Collins or Peter Gabriel. It's in your face. It's got a lot of reverb on it and it just sounds massive. A lot of people are not fans of the gated snare sound that was very popular in the early 80s that Phil Collins basically created by accident. It was on a Peter Gabriel record "Intruder". Here's how it sounds. And Phil was playing drums and they were in the studio and he had just hit like this big drum sound this big word room and then they lifted the talkback and it just over-compressed sound came out and it just cut off. And they just thought that sounds awesome. So like they completely discovered it by accident, but then after that everybody copied it. 09:55 Rockit Maxx I was trying to come up with the most 80s name I could possibly think of. And I did a combination of Rockit by Herbie Hancock and Max Headroom and put them together and added an extra x at the end of Max just to make it a little bit more cheesy. Here's another snippet of one of the songs from the Rockit Maxx album. This is called LA Montage. A lot of the music that was written for this Rockit Maxx project was used with free VST s which are virtual instruments. I would always say to someone, don't let the fact that it's free stop you. 10:53 Outro Well, that's it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. You can catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get podcasts. We've been listening to the music featured in the audio drama called Gr8 And Terrible. To hear that full story or check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. You can also check out what's on offer at https://patreon.com/howimakemusic. Visit howimakemusic.com for more on the aims of the show. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John via the show notes. And now here's Discovery in its entirety by my retrowave alter ego Rockit Maxx. My name is Lee Rosevere, and thanks for listening to How I Make Music. We'll catch you next Wednesday. For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the theme tune to Hector Vs The Future, a comedy podcast about a cantankerous museum owner's battle against technology and obsolescence. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind the scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and share some of the musical insights into how it was made. My name is Óðinn Örn Hilmarsson. I'm a composer and sound designer living in London, and this is How I Make Music. 00:52 About the show Welcome back to How I Make Music episode number 83. Hector Vs The Future by me, Óðinn Örn Hilmarsson. Now, this episode of How I Make Music features some stronger than usual language and our tech overlords demand that we label it explicit. You have been warned. Enjoy. Hector Vs The Future mostly follows Hector, a cranky old curmudgeon who curates a museum called the Obsoleteum, where all obsolete technology is collected for pointless posterity. Across the road is another museum in many ways its exact opposite the Uptodateum, run by Biz and her half-robot half-hologram assistant Phil. The show is about Hector's struggle to keep old tech alive in a world that is constantly updating itself. He himself has a clockwork pacemaker, that he constantly has to wind up with a turnkey sticking out of his chest. And we have planned obsolescence in the tech that we use. Even though Hector is this sort of kook, it's absolutely something that feels very real to now. 02:33 SID chips I was definitely deeply influenced by what the 70s and 80s thought the future would sound like. In particular, old game sound generators, Commodore computers, SID chips. Arguably for Hector, even that is too modern for him. There's one synth, which is specifically a chiptune sound. And I knew that that would translate the tensions of old versus new in a musical way for the audience listening in. Hector is this bitter and combative character. He's always in conflict with the modern age. And it's Hector versus the future. So I knew that I wanted to approach the theme tune with this sort of battle music. Giving a boss battle where Hector is the unlikely hero. 03:41 Clockwork rhythm So the time signature of the piece I felt had to be in an odd time signature. For me that has a lot of urgency. That was sort of my first building block and I built up from there. We have two drum layers. One sounds quite static and is mostly hitting all the straight notes. And then there's another track which has a more traditional modern action drum feel to it. And that was meant to sort of give a lot of power and a lot of oomph to the whole proceedings. And underpinning the rhythm section the sort of more traditional drum sounds is the rhythm of Hector's windup pacemaker. The pacemaker actually starts the piece as well it winds up and starts the whole episode. And I knew that once we were into the main section of the piece, the pacemaker should be there as a rhythmic element as well. I added a little noise gate to just add a bit of stuttering effect to actually make it feel like the ratchet was quite creaky and a bit worn 05:33 Rick and Morty Funnily enough, Rick and Morty was very popular at the time and I do think there are quite a few similarities between the sort of dramaticness of Hector Vs The Future and the Rick and Morty one. Feels like it's aping Doctor Who a little bit. Doctor Who has that sort of theremin sound with the gliding synth. 06:03 Musical abacus The kalimba is a sort of very old tech instrument in terms of music making. It's just metal prongs stuck to a resonant wooden box. It feels like a an old tech instrument. Hector would be very admirable of or admiring of. It's a musical Abacus. Yeah, exactly. 06:42 Live recording So Hector VsThe Future is quite unique in that it was all recorded live in the upstairs Theatre of, of a pub in London. But quite often, when Andy the producer was editing the episodes, he'd messaged me, you know, about a day before. It was very frantic, I sort of remember every Friday setting apart some time knowing that Andy would message me and I'd sort of be on call essentially. And it was challenging, but it was fun. It was great. It was very energetic and made you feel alive, I felt a little bit like we were working like the guys in South Park. This sort of slightly rough around the edges approach, you know, it was all recorded live and had this live feel. You're allowed to see the strings a little bit, you're allowed to sort of feel that you're involved in the making process as well. And so we were absolutely fine with the fact that it was such a short turnaround, because that was sort of part of the charm of the whole piece. 07:50 A wide range For the show, I had to write quite a wide range of music, there was a theme tune then there were a lot of transition sounds that are peppered throughout the show. Here's one where you can hear that ratchet sound that I mentioned earlier. And then this one sounds a bit more chiptuney. Here you have quite a dirty digital bass mixed with a ratchet as well. And another one - this is very quick and cheerful. 08:27 A Nightmare Before Christmas So what we're hearing now is a piece from the series called 'What's That?' And I should probably say I can neither confirm nor deny that I wrote this song as sort of it's meant to be aping 'What's This' from A Nightmare Before Christmas by Danny Elfman. 09:04 Hotseating So in the world of Hector VsThe Future, there is a massive tech company such as Apple, Google or Facebook. I had the task of writing quite a lot of you know, corporate music maybe being pumped through speakers in the background whilst everyone was hot seating. Here take a listen and see how much you hate it. It was definitely part of the brief to make it kind of annoying and hateable and a bit cheesy. Right enough of that. 09:39 Robots with emotions There's an episode in the show where the half-hologram half-robot assistant Phil is given emotions. The chord progression is very simple, it's just ascending in a major scale. And then you have some bras and I think is one of the only instances where I actually busted on one microphone and recorded a guitar part. A little bit outside of the very tech-heavy sound palette of the rest of the pieces. 10:26 Bag Of Dicks One episode has two raps in it. The writers James Hamilton and James Huntrod, neither of them would say that the rappers. One funny thing that did come out of it was that they sent me the lyrics and I had the task of trying to make it work. I performed vocal tracks on all of those demos to give to the actors. Take a lesson. See what you think. There is this concept of flow in rap. The rhythm it's the fluidity is the flexibility. And people have an ear for it. People have a gift and a talent for presenting an idea with very complicated but elegant flow. I'm not sure that I got it completely right. Maybe I didn't do as elegant a job as I could have done. MUSIC & SFX CREDITS For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a dramatically edited sound experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge audio drama composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic Support How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusic How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Riders In The Night. It's an Ennio Morricone fever dream from the supernatural cowboy show Grimwell County. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. If you're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. My name is Ben Valdmets. I'm a composer, musician and voice actor from Austin, Texas, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode number 82, Riders In the Night by me. Ben Valdmets. Thanks for listening in. 01:34 Grimwell County This audio drama's called Grimwell County. It's a story about a bounty hunter and a vigilante who get roped into hunting supernatural threats in the old American West. Sort of X-Files meets cowboys. It's meant to give the listener strong cinematic vibes. If you close your eyes, maybe you can visualize, you know, not only just the characters in the situation, but the style too. It's awesome. I'm very excited. I'm excited for it to come out. Yeah. I work with Gabe Alvarez, who created Starcalled, a show where I do one of the voices, Captain Landris. 02:34 Spaghetti Western This piece - Riders In The Night - is meant to be kind of a modern spin on a classic Ennio Morricone sound. Dry, cinematic Western. I always have enjoyed that kind of spaghetti western sound. And what he was describing sounded like that would fit but it also needed kind of another angle. Recently, I played a game called Disco Elysium. It's almost less like a video game and more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book or something. It's a lot of reading. It's all about this world-building. And as you're walking around in this world, one of the ambient pieces is a very stark just sort of lone trumpet to start. So I wanted to take that idea and run with it on my own track. I was inspired. 04:01 Psychedelic trumpet  I studied trumpet in school. So it's not like a high bright trumpet. It's naturally sort of dark. You know, I knew that I just wanted to reflect the melody from the whistling and I ended up just going crazy putting effects on it. It's got a chorus effect on it. Full of reverb with echo. It sounds very cool. It's like lonely but psychedelic in a way. Once I got kind of bored with that aesthetic, I thought, you know, I just sort of jumped ahead and said, Okay, I'm going to keep the key. I'm going to keep the tempo. Let me try to just take this harmonic concept and do it completely stylistically different. The more classic cinematic track grows and grows until we hit this apex We completely take the left turn, and that's when I got out the trumpet to keep the energy up. I got out the guitars and bass and wrote this sort of groovy drum track to go with it. And I thought, well, that sounded good, too. They both sound good. They're very different. So then the work, the real work was stitching them together. This track also includes a lot of instruments that you might not expect to hear on a spaghetti western, really anachronistic sounds. A cowboy would be shocked to hear an arpeggiated synthesizer! You're supposed to hear that and immediately be thinking like grainy film quality, like...I don't want to say cheesy, but maybe over the top cowboy action. You know, blood, six shooters, bullets whizzing everywhere, horses going crazy. Things like that. I wanted to move beyond those typical tropes and push it into some weirder direction. 07:22 Trust the sound There were some challenges. I tried re-miking and redoing some parts. And I took it back to Gabe, the show's creator. And he said, You know, I liked the old one better. I tend to put a lot of trust into just, you know, did it work or not, rather than that take was on the hundred dollar guitar and the other take was on the $2,000. guitar. I mean, just go with what sounds better.  08:00 Sicilian 2-5-1 progression I didn't finish University with a degree in music, but I started one. So I have some music theory background and stuff. And like a 2-5-1 is a very common chord progression, right? And I realized, I have a flat 2-5-1. Which in classical music theory, I think they call it a "Sicilian flat 2" and I thought Sicilian, that's where they filmed all the spaghetti westerns,. I did that subconsciously! Anyways.  09:08 Making it sound live I think it's important when using a software version of an instrument, that you're doing it in a way that the instrument could actually be performed live. If you haven't done your homework, and you don't really know what would be going through a drummer's head at all, you might write a drum part on an acoustic drum software kit. The actual sounds sound fine, but you spawned a third hand somehow. Even a listener that doesn't know anything about drums, they're going to hear that and think that's too weird. You know what I mean? Like that's, that's an easy thing to accidentally do with a sequencer. 09:46 Devil Horse  I wrote this other piece of music called devil horse that's used as the outro sort of a sinister take on the psychedelic cowboy vibe. Take a listen. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama Grimwell County  https://grimwellcounty.com Check out other work by Ben Valdmets https://perimeterbreach.bandcamp.com/; https://vhmd.bandcamp.com/ Check out audio drama Starcalled by Grimwell County show creator Gabriel Alvarez https://starcalled.space Visit https://patreon.com/howimakemusic for bonus behind-the-scenes stuff from this episode. For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the Unwell closing theme. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and get into the insights into how it was made. My name is Steven Poon. I'm a composer based in Chicago, USA. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to how I make music Episode 81, the Unwell closing theme by me, Steven Poon. Thanks for listening in. 01:15 Mennonites Unwell is a Midwestern Gothic mystery. It's about a young woman returning to her hometown, the fictional place of Mount Absalom, Ohio, where everything is a bit more spooky than it seems at first. And this piece is the outro theme, which also plays under the ending credits. I'm from Ohio and the rural Ohio, we have a lot of Mennonites, which are like Amish people. They don't use a lot of technology. Like it's kind of anathema. When I'm driving to Columbus, or Cincinnati, there's some stops where you might actually run into a horse and buggy and there are some religious communities that don't make use of modern technology. And so it was really at the forefront of my mind going into this setting to not include a lot of synths and digitized music. There are loads of real, actual instruments in the track. I've been far more used to sequencing music, and to be able to go into the studio with half a dozen musicians was really rewarding. 02:50 Charango Take a listen to this. It's not a guitar. It's not a mandolin. It's a charango. It's one of a number of instruments that we recorded live for the Unwell theme. A charango is a Peruvian stringed instrument. It's 10-stringed. And traditionally, it was made from an armadillo shell. This was an instrument that I had found when I was in Peru for my honeymoon, and really took to it. I thought it was a beautiful sounding instrument. And the first thing that I even wrote for the track was on the charango when I was in Peru, and I found a luthier, who was making these instruments. And you could still smell the sawdust in the air of his shop. And he didn't even speak English. So I think it was his daughter who was translating for people who came into the shop and only spoke English. And so this was a melody that I had been picking around on. And it got stuck in my head so bad that I'm like this...this has to go somewhere. 04:49 Influences I've had a lot of influence when it comes to music over the years. So here's like a few things that came to mind as this track came together. First and foremost was The Chieftans. I really like Irish session music. There's really this tone of freedom and playfulness that comes from it. I'm thinking of a rural, less populated place. I had recently been watching Deadwood. So the Deadwood soundtrack by David Schwartz. That opening theme was also in my mind. I've always had a lot of inspiration from specifically Japanese RPG soundtracks to music from the late 80s, early 90s. There's not a lot of samples going into these songs. Very simple melodies that can very easily get stuck in your head. Because you're only working especially with the original Nintendo, there are only like four different samples that you could really fit in a cartridge. And I don't really want to go too deep into this because it's not a common game. It's like literally a visual novel. That's a spin off of an RPG that was released in the 90s. We can get into that. I just feel like it might be a little obscure! 07:19 Jeffrey Nils Gardner Jeffrey Nils Gardner was involved with this music and really all the music of Unwell too. And when they were working on an older project, Our Fair City, there was no music. And I approached them and said, "Hey, would you like a theme song?" And that was that! They did that show for eight seasons. And then when Unwell started, it was kind of a natural progression of this collaboration. And it was really cool to finally do some work with Jeffrey that involved live music. And they could, they could record they could produce and they could mix the song. 8:08 We were recording on a college campus because that's where Jeffrey was doing their masters at the time. Going into recording, I didn't I didn't know who was going to be there. I think I remember there being a list of musicians, but it hadn't really internalized before I got into the studio. It was my first time in this space. And so walking in, we're setting up the studio, no one else's there. It's me, the recording engineer. You know, we're wrangling cable. And I'm, I'm a little anxious, because there's a lot of unknown, going into the studio like that. One thing that was really important for me was to make sure we got the tone of the song right, and the atmosphere of a small town and the unspoken things that you always get in that kind of small community. This was my first time meeting, recording and performing with all the instrumental performers on the Unwell theme. So I really kind of went in with a thought of like an Irish session, where you have a bunch of musicians who come together in a pub, you don't know who's going to show up, but they all know the song If you really want to have a lot of fun with it and have that come through and the track and so on. We walk in, and all you can really hear is the sound of cable being laid on the floor. And you know, your heartbeat. Then the others arrived and we started recording the boot stomps. 10:08 The recording process So the boot stops were really important really is a form of punctuation and exclamation points at the very start. I really wanted something that could maybe slightly startle the listener, like the end credits of a TV show when you see the first name of the credit and the first note of the song hits. After that, we wanted to include even more percussion, particularly a little bit of hand percussion on top of the boot stops. So we threw an egg shakers because they just happened to be in my guitar bag to add a little bit of texture to that percussion. The next is banjo. And that's Gunnar Jebsen. And we gave him a lot of freedom to really do whatever he wanted. On top of the melody. We also had Lauren Kelly, a multi instrumentalist. We started her on guitar. And then we went in and did some individual tracks with her playing cello to add a really nice, you know, lower piece to the track. We brought in Travis Elfers, to do viola. I really wanted to have strings on this and was glad that we're able to have that fourth Unwell theme in the middle of the track. You hear this slightly dissonant voice come in. And that's Betsy Palmer. You can give her anything and she will internalize it and sing it. It's a lot of fun to work with her. I played guitar on the track, which is the first strum you hear at the start. Mel Ruder isn't just a recording engineer on the show Mel Ruder is the recording engineer on the show, and is most often present for the episode recording. 13:09 Celery Festival So when season one of Unwell was being put together, we knew what songs we wanted to include for the entire season. including an episode with a celery festival that has a jingle writing contest. So I was writing music for groups of musicians that were playing a folk song, a punk rock song, even a kind of a barbershop quartet for a jingle. I wasn't in a space or I was just thinking of one particular genre of music or even a kind of unifying style of music. It was all over the place. And it was really creatively satisfying. 14:17 Stinger So as we were putting together all the tracks for Season One, I wanted to do a very short kind of stinger intro piece that would kick off every episode. And the closing theme would start out with this mirror of that stinger. So it opens with this simple three note ascending melody. And the stinger is a three note descending melody that was really just bookends every episode as a whole. 15:02 Multiple microphones We use multiple microphones to record each instrument. And so we wanted to be able to use both of those sources. Mix them together. Let me show you what I mean. Here's what a guitar sounds like with multiple microphones, here's just pointed at the neck. Now, here's the microphone on the body. So here's what the banjo sounds like with multiple microphones. Here's the neck. Now let's crossfade to the body. Here's how the charango sounds at the neck. The body. 16:09 Rusty Standish There is a moment in season one, featuring a composition by a fictional songwriter Rusty Standish. Let's take a listen. The script originally described this song as Nick Drake, after a few cocktails and a long walk home. So that was a really fun descriptor to try to work with, especially because I'd never listened to Nick Drake before. So I took an afternoon, sat down, had a drink and just listened to like three hours of music. I wrote, played guitar and sing on the track. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama Unwell https://unwellpodcast.com Unwell Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/hartlifenfp Check out other work by Stephen Poon https://stephenpoon.bandcamp.com/ BONUS  Visit https://patreon.com/howimakemusic for bonus behind-the-scenes stuff from this episode. For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a sound collage experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the theme to the podcast Civilized. It's a regal intro theme with a vintage sci-fi feel and today we're going to break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song or a soundtrack or composition and get into how it was made. My name is Eli Hamada Mcllveen. I'm a composer, sound designer and writer from Canada, and this is How I Make Music. 01:12 Civilized is a dark comedy sci fi series that's also completely improvised. There's a small terraforming team who have crashed landed on a far-off planet, and they're doing their best to survive. And they're pretty terrible at it. So this is the opening theme to the show and introduces us to the world via this opening narration read by our actor Risa King. And kind of kind of builds the mood until Mike comes in with "Civilized". 02:11 Analog synths Early on, some of the influences we had for the feel of the show itself drew on science fiction. Both my partner Sean and I watched a lot of Doctor Who as kids. A big part of the sound of the music was the analog synthesizer of the day. Your Arps, your Moogs, your Polysixes. Here's the synthesizer lead to the Civilized theme. 02:53 Larry Fast I got really into electronic music in high school and used to raid used record shops looking for old records and one of them was Synergy. It's the project of a guy named Larry Fast, who was the synth player on a lot of Peter Gabriel's early stuff. Pure synthesizers. One of the best known tracks is one called Legacy. Here it is. 03:26 Peter Howell Peter Howell was the guy that did the The Leisure Hive in 1980. It sounds like this. It's got the same kind of military drums with its synthesized horns, but it's got the kind of feel I was aiming for. It's got that marching band kind of feel. So I wanted to capture a little of that. So that's that's why I chose this ensemble. It's two horns, tuba, timpani snare drum and synthesizers. Oh and piano. 04:49 Quartal and quintal harmonies So I did what I usually do. I noodled around on the piano to create some interesting melodies and harmony under them, and I started playing with quartal and quintal harmony. Quartal and quintal harmony use the fourth and fifth. A stack of those. So right at the beginning of this piece, you'll hear the synthesizer. It's a I think it's a model of a Solina string synthesizer that's playing this big stack of fourths. And over top of that there's an arpeggiated synth that's playing those same notes. And that adds some motion and a little bit of glitter. They're like the stars twinkling in the distance or something like that. 06:06 Great leaps The melody itself the main melody uses a lot of fifths and it has these great leaps that make it sound kind of heroic, I guess. You get those sounds typically in brass parts. I guess they evoke things like fanfares or bugle calls, because a bugle doesn't have any vowels. So it's pretty much limited to the harmonic series. So the bump, bump, bump bump up, up, up, up, up, up up. Those are the notes that you have at your disposal. So those big wide striding leaps, give it this big open kind of optimistic feel, I think. So as a composer, I lean on my very limited playing ability. I I know a bit of bass and enough piano to kind of be dangerous, but reality is I'm kind of like an author that types with like one finger on each hand. Yeah, I'm not sure where to go with that! So these big leaps in the melody give it this very forward looking feel. I I use the word heroic. Yeah, the opening phrase actually reminds me this one phrase in the opening titles to Deep Space Nine. Similar, I hadn't heard that theme a whole lot. Before I created the theme to Civilized, I didn't have a TV during that era. 08:20 Small ensemble So also that idea of writing for small ensemble. It's something I started doing on Alba Salix which was our first audio fiction show. And for that, I don't really have the tools on hand to pull off a decent sounding orchestral score. So I did drums, bass, guitar and recorder creating a folk rock sound. We also do an actual play podcast based in the Alba Salix world called The End of Time and Other Bothers. I decided to see if I could do the score as pieces of a concept album almost. So I've created this imaginary prog rock ensemble with bass drums, guitar and Hammond organ. Maybe all these pieces can add up to a big concept album when we're all done. 09:40 Pitch bend So this is the synthesizer lead to the Civilized theme, an earlier version of it. There's a tiny bit of pitch bend right near the end of this second phrase, just it goes a little bit sharp. And I don't know why but I just like that a lot, I don't. And then there's just a real slight scoop to it. 10:20 Layers I've mentioned the timpani and the snare drum. And there's also synthesized drums, which are another classic beatbox sound, they've got that sort of crickety sound to them. And that's just sort of subtly ticking along in the background. And then to kind of further animate this whole scene that we're setting, there's these great big whooshes like rocket engines, zipping by nebulae, or clouds of luminous, whatever that are that are drifting past the imaginary camera in my mind. 11:16 Score notation So in preparation for this episode, I actually wrote out the score to this piece, it's not something I usually do. But it was a fun exercise to just go, what the heck did I actually write in the first place. "Synth lead" doesn't say much, but "monosynth with the portamento turned up a little bit"... that gives you a bit more to go on. The portamento setting lets you adjust the sound for a very quick transition to a slow sweep from one note to the next. I've tried to notate what the sounds of the synthesized instruments in particular sound like. Analog synthesizers also typically use filters a lot. It's like the tone control on a stereo, where you're cutting out certain frequencies. In this case, it's that all the high frequencies are backed off. And we open up the filter slowly to give it this big, rising feel. These aren't things that would typically come up in an orchestral score, but it's kind of fun to to inject them into written notation. As I said, I'm totally winging it and sort of learning to notate stuff as I go. So that'll be available on the Patreon feed for How I Make Music. That was like me desperately trying to remember every scrap of music theory I ever learned. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama Civilized https://civilizedpod.com/ Check out shows by the Fable & Folly audio drama network https://fableandfolly.com/ BONUS Visit https://patreon.com/howimakemusic for bonus behind-the-scenes stuff from this episode. For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a sound collage experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the main theme from podcast sitcom Wooden Overcoats. Today, we'll break it down and look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into the insights into how it was made. My name is James Whittle, composer, performer and conductor from the UK, and this is How I Make Music. 00:46 About Wooden Overcoats Wooden Overcoats is a podcast sitcom about two rival funeral directors. On the one hand, there's Rudyard and Antigone Funn, siblings who rival themselves at times! And then newcomer to the island Eric Chapman, who has a fantastic presence and everyone falls in love with him. They compete for funeral business and a lot more on the island of Piffling. It's kind of satire comedy of small island and village mentality. But also a very nostalgic and affectionate take on rural living and community. And lots of lovable characters too. 02:15 Leitmotif The Wooden Overcoats Main Theme appears at the beginning and end of every episode. We hear the motifs from the theme throughout the show soundtrack to represent siblings Rudyard and Antigone. I had quite a lot of fun with the little jingle dum-dah-dum. It's often there, even under the surface. You might not always notice it. 02:44 Influence: Trevor Wishart One of the influences on Wooden Overcoats Main Theme is a piece by composer Trevor Wishart called Beach Singularity that was written in 1977. The piece is actually a live performance that takes place on a beach with brass ensembles and electronic recordings all at the same time. Victorian musical songs all combined with brass playing at the same time. Quite a noisy, almost absurd sound, which I love. I was drawing on these leftfield, avant-garde experimental compositions to try and get that sense of the absurd of satire. Of something a bit off kilter. We have in Wishart's piece, even dogs barking! So there's a lot of humor. There's a lot of chaos in this piece. 04:08 Inifluence: ‘Allo! ‘Allo! British sitcom Wooden Overcoats is set on a fictional Channel island. So one of the key musical influences was the theme tune from a British sitcom 'Allo! 'Allo! which is set in France and features lots of very bad accents. Very tongue in cheek, take a listen. The feeding tune has this dadadada rising fifth. Wooden Overcoats does a little quote of that. 04:48 Large melodic jumps The Wooden Overcoats theme moves up and down in quite large jumps. It's that stuff which for me harks back to 1920s operetta, which is very expressive with these big jumps up and down. Here's an example from the 1920s operetta The Student Prince by Sigmund Romberg. Sounds very romantic. I kinda wanted to add a little bit of that kind of nostalgic feel in the tune. 05:44 Live performance recording The Wooden Overcoats main theme was recorded live with a group of four musicians plus a conductor. And part of the challenge for me in writing the soundtrack is to get the most out of the minimal means. So even with just four musicians, how could we have, you know, a bass and some harmony and a melody, and make it all sound engaging? We wanted to work with live musicians, we wanted that raw sound that you get from live instruments. That's really the joy of music making for me is working with other people. It might not be a perfect sound. The drums are quite rough and ready. And that's maybe partly to do with how we recorded it anyway. But for me that makes the piece represent the show better. Because the Funn twins are not the most organized or necessarily straightforward of characters. 06:35 Odd ensemble The ensemble for this piece is not your average, you don't often combine a mandolin, cello, drums and an organ. And I had a lot of fun writing for that combination, that it made sense because we needed an organ to represent the funeral aspects of the show. We wanted a mandolin for the folk part. The cello was added as a sustained counter-melody to the mandolin's theme, and also as a bassline. But it's a bassline that is its own melody and the drums. Of course, we needed something that's that gave the whole piece a bit of pep. You know, I've worked a lot with musicians and it's about trust. And you know, actually because I'm the composer of this music, my job was to bring it to life. 07:22 Concert hall recording experience I was first approached for the show in early 2015 by producers, directors, John Wakefield and Andy Goddard. So I went away and wrote six or seven ideas at the piano and I scored these out. An organ was an obvious choice to be in the peace with the association of churches and funerals. When you walk into the concert hall, you see a large hexagonal space with red chairs and a bright wooden floor. It's a big resonance space with the tall white walls and more. And at the very ends, and the center is the organ. It has this magnificent sound. It's wonderful to play in. And it's also a very bright light space with the wood and the chairs. It's almost cathedral-like. You have a sense of expanse. I think you can hear that in the sound. 08:52 Twisty, crunchy chromatic sound I was experimenting with different options for a very chromatic dense chord that had a twisty sound. A really crunchy sound chords that move outwards and up and down at the same time just by semitones to land on this final chord in the piece which is in a completely different key to everything that's come before for the drums. We ended up with quite a rough and hectic sound. A mandolin plays the lead theme in this piece. A mandolin would have that the lightness and sound is quite a stark contrast to the organ and the drums. 09:57 Ode To Noggins Ode To Noggins is an expansive melodramatic song very sincerely felt, take a listen. In the episode, Noggins has his funeral and it's a celebration by the whole village for this person that nobody seems to know. When I was given the lines for the song I just laughed and laughed because the writer had included all of these uncertainties! You know, "we think this" or "we've been told that you're this". It's unsure of really what it's singing about. It always seems to change track. 10:54 Barbershop music I have a love of barbershop music. I grew up singing in close harmony groups and choirs. And I've always enjoyed the humor, the naivety, the kind of just the effortless, joyful, fun of it. And so I definitely wanted some of that close chords that move very lightly up and down in stepwise motion. It gets quite claustrophobic, sometimes barbershop harmony. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama Wooden Overcoats https://www.woodenovercoats.com/ Check out other work by James Whittle https://james-whittle.co.uk/ BONUS Visit https://patreon.com/howimakemusic for bonus behind-the-scenes stuff from this episode. MUSIC & SFX CREDITS For a full credit list of music and sound effects from this episode, visit https://howimakemusic.com ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is a sound collage experience where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusic How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

John Bartmann writes and records an original soundtrack each week, then deconstructs it by sharing the separate musical parts, decisions and stories behind how each complete tune was made.

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Deneer Death Experience. It's an action cue from the sci fi audio drama Entropy, which tells the story of a group of people working to find a new habitable planet. I would describe this cue as an action cue that kind of dips and turns, slows down speeds up. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. My name is Aaron Weatherford. I'm a composer from Summerville, South Carolina. And this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 1:21 About Entropy The name of this audio drama is Entropy. And it's about a group of people trying to find a new habitable planet. Within that, there is a little bit of conflict between colonies. My favorite character is actually the villain Deneer. His full name is Pron Deneer. The name of the piece that we're going to be breaking down today is called Deneer Death Experience. Very funny. Nobody dies. It's okay. Everything's fine. You'll just have to watch the audio drama ... listen to the audio drama in order to find out what happens. 2:17 Influences One of my main influences is Michael Giacchino. He did Ratatouille and a lot of Pixar movies. The Incredibles, Star Trek scores. And what I really like about him is his sense of storytelling. It's really really cool and the fact that he manages to be both old school and new school at the same time, fresh and new. John Williams style orchestrations, like very golden era silver era mixed with stuff like synths. 3:09 Context of the piece The context of this piece is during when the main character Jan is in the middle of having a conversation with her mother. And it gets very rudely interrupted when the ship blows up, and there's a hole in the ship and they almost fly out and die. And then this whole battle ensues, then Deneer comes in and gives this speech. And then Jan and a couple of other crew members have to escape. Really slow and kind of menacing and has a little bit of kind of these weird orchestrations that can tell you what type of guy Pron Deneer is. Here's what his theme sounds like. More of a motif than a theme because of the fact that it's only a few notes and it's so short, you know. 4:54 Off the tempo grid So the escape stuff, the escape juice, all of a sudden are these kind of magic. Measured trems that start going. And it gets faster and faster and faster. And it builds up and builds up and then stops. That's when the piece finally ends. There's a part in there in the piece where the tempo starts to ramp up here, take a listen. You don't really hear this sound of tempo ramps often in modern film scores. I feel it kind of adds motion and emotion. And it kind of needed that ramp. It's one of those moments where it's like, here goes nothing, and then they blast off. For me, everything is about story and emotion. And a lot of stuff stays the same tempo for a really long time. And it kind of gets it kind of gets boring after a while. Alexander Desplat brings this up a lot, the fact that we're really attached to the grid and we don't like to get away from it. Sometimes I don't do a metronome at all, I just play and whatever happens happens. 6:44 Mother Knows Best So there's actually another piece in the audio drama Entropy called Mother Knows Best. And it's actually the talk that happens right before the battle scene that consists of Deneer Death Experience. And it's just really slow, no tempo, just piano. And it has this little like pad synth under it. And really, that's just those two things. And that kind of made up this little. This motif that I come up with for the relationship between Jan and her mother, they're obviously very close. 7:43 Slap bass orchestration Orchestration is basically the way that you use instruments. There are rules sometimes. Other times, I personally don't care about the rules. There are two things that I use in all of my scores, the electric bass and the kick drum, which would be like a synthetic kick drum. Giacchino, he adopted this technique of using the electric bass as kind of like a hype method. But you hear it in chasing the dragons in Jurassic World. And it's like this slap bass in the background. You're thinking like, what the hell is this? But it makes it so much cooler! It's not used enough. 8:47 Cymbal mistake So 39 seconds into Deneer Death Experience, there is this cymbal thing that happens. Coming in and out, like switching like... It was like I was trying to do two cymbals at once. And I meant to fix it. And I never did. But you may not even notice it. It may just be me. I don't know. 9:23 No narrative mistake Entropy episodes are actually really, really short. They're under 20 minutes each. I really like that. One of the challenges that I had was that I had to start scoring with nothing, no audio, no narration, no anything. I was basically writing a piece of music with nothing attached to it. And I just wrote the music based off of what I knew happened in the script. And that was a very hellish experience. I had no narration I had no audio. It was basically like I was just going in and writing a piece of music to nothing. And that was a that was a big no. That was big challenge. 10:06 Strings and woodwinds I'm really proud of the string runs I usually don't do string runs because I can never get them right. I recently got Cinematic Strings 2. It works beautifully. Here take a listen to this section with the string lines. I'm a really big fan of woodwinds to the point so much so where I used to forget about them and feel bad for it. I try as much as possible to specifically in the near death experience. There's a couple parts where you hear like flutter tongue flutes. I want to show how some of the woodwinds work in this piece. We're gonna go through and we're gonna play them all one by one just to show the different roles that they play. Take a listen. Bass clarinet and bassoon both serve as a sort of kind of color for the for the cellos and the double basses. They add a little bit of color, add a little bit of bite. Clarinets add a little more of a rounder sound to the strings. Flutes add a little bit more of a airy sort of light silky sound to the strings. The oboe is really pretty. I don't use it that often. I just pair it with the flutes whenever I can. But it is a really pretty instrument on its own. The piccolo actually as a very exciting instrument for me just like a burst of like, Ah! It just pierces right through the mix. It's definitely not something you can hide from. Here's some highlights of the brass from the Deneer Death Experience. 12:31 Starcalled So there's another audio drama similar to ours called Starcalled. The music between the two has some similarity in the approach and whatnot. So if you like what you heard today, go check out Starcalled. 12:52 Emotion over everything "Emotion over everything". To me that speaks to how I feel about film scores. If there's no story, there is no score. I'm the type of artist that can't work on something unless I feel something from it. And that's kind of what I mean by "emotion over everything". SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama Entropy https://pod.link/1529499626 Check out other work by Aaron Weatherford https://clyp.it/user/dafd5c0q BONUS MUSIC & SFX CREDITS Michael Giaccino and Jay Bocook - Symphonic Suite from Star Trek Michael Ciaccino - Chasing the Dragons from Jurassic World "Metronome, 168BPM.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Shaylee meets Black Annis. It's a somber soundtrack which I wrote for the fiction podcast The Hidden People. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind the scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition, and give composers a chance to share some of the insights into how it was made. My name is Katharine Seaton. I'm a composer and sound designer from the UK, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:07 Welcome Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 76, Shaylee meets Black Annis by me, Katharine Seaton. Thanks for listening in. The Hidden People is a long format audio drama. In this episode, you'll hear me talk about Shaylee and Black Annis. These are two of the characters in the story. I first got involved with Dayton Writers Movement to make The Hidden People when they were looking for somebody to develop a sound world. I am primarily a musician. Sound design is definitely a second string to my bow. 02:11 Female sound design There was a competition a year and a half ago run by an advertising firm who wanted to get more women into sound design. And the prize was a professional development course. On that course, I found out some new techniques and one of them was the use of contact mics on various surfaces. And they showed us how they put a contact mic on one of those big rubber birthing balls. The result was a creaky groan, sort of...I think it's like a tectonic plates moving under the belly of the earth sound. Maybe because they're underground, they can almost hear the earth moving under the soil. And I thought yes, I've not heard anything like it and I thought it was great. When I got home, I started incorporating these techniques into my composition. I used a contact mic on various items to create the sounds in this score. So rubbed my leather handbag and a blown up balloon with wet hands to get some of those creaking noises. I taped a microphone to my throat to get those swallowing sounds. This was about trying to get the earth swallowing Shaylee up. What do you listen to this piece at the end of this episode, see if you can spot some of those strange sound design elements. 03:55 Inside Shaylee Within the series, there's a character called Shaylee. She's a mentally and physically dexterous survivor. Another character, Black Annis, is based on folklore. In the legend, she's a terrifying figure used by parents to scare their children into behaving. When Shaylee meets Black Annis, she's engulfed by a dark cave, as well as her own feelings of fear and sadness. Shaylee Meets Black Annis involves a lot of bringing the sound design in the series into the music itself. And I was able to use the sound design to try and reflect how she's feeling about that space. So it could be the sound in the actual narrative or it could be musical score because there's that blurring of the boundaries there. 05:00 Influences When I got the initial brief that they wanted to incorporate the folk music that comes from the origins of the folklore, this story is based on, I looked into it. As an English person, I'm quite familiar with British folk music, just through living here and knowing that tradition, so that was all already in my sort of inside my ears. And I think in Shaylee's original theme, the fragments of strings that play under the melody might have been inspired by composers like Benjamin Britten in the first part of the 20th century of English music. Take a quick listen. I did spend some time doing the classic music composer thing of going on to YouTube and just finding what looks like authentic performances. And just listening for a bit and getting into that sound world. The Irish folk music there was a lot of sort of social gathering based music going on there. And the Scandinavian music, which is obviously sort of quite fashionable these days, I think as a kind of inspiration for soundtracks. As it happens, I have a Swedish composer friend, Thomas Gyllin, and I sent him the Black Annis tune as it first came out. And he said it sounded like a Swedish song about a troll! Sounds about right. While I was working on Season One of The Hidden People, I was listening to the album Origin of Symmetry by Muse with my children. And I feel like the music in this cue might have been influenced by the way Matthew Bellamy chooses to bridge tracks with guitar feedback and other sounds, which are more noise than music. Listen to this typical transition between two of the tracks on the album. That's where a lot of this came from. 08:06 Aeolian mode There's a scale which in composition theory is called the Aeolian mode is also known as the natural minor scale. Here's how it sounds. So the chord sequences of these two themes - Shaylee's original theme and the Black Annis theme - interact beautifully because of being both based on this Aeolian mode scale. I wonder if it might have been a subconscious process as I tried to evolve a sound world that feels cohesive across a series. Shaylee's theme is throughout the series, her leitmotif if you like as the one that goes along. And in Episode 20 of season one, which is where this has taken form, it's a flashback. So it's the first time Shaylee meets Black Annis because both of their themes are in the Aeolian mode. They were able to combine really effectively actually, on top of each other. So we had the vocals doing Black Annis and we have the viola playing Shaylee's theme. So that's that's how come there are two things going on in one cue here. It's a very complicated story. 09:44 Classical vocalist I was a classical singer before I got into the creative stuff. And I put some vocals on this track. It's a very different game to singing quietly and with a slight rough edge from singing in a large space and using your voice to project into the acoustic. That was a learning curve for me. So the vocals are doubled and panned, and I believe there's some ping pong delay. So actually, I noticed it's not completely in tune! But I was kind of going through a rough feel. I sing them through twice and I deliberately pan them apart and didn't try to harmonize them too much. And I always like the feel like there are two ladies sort of walking along next to Shaylee whispering nasty stuff in her ear, you know, like, you're gonna die. I like it to feel real. I really detest vocal, particularly choir libraries. Actually, I've never found one that I like, because I just think vocals have to be real. 11:20 Iron Claw fingernails The script for Black Annis specified that her fingernails are made of iron, and she's called Iron Claw sometimes. And so I recorded those metal taps initially for foley and I wanted to record them spatially. I went inside a good cupboard for recording. And I tried various sounds - nails on bricks was one example. I recorded them in stereo, but somehow you do get sort of height and depth information from the acoustics. So when I put them into the music and started adding things like delays, you've got these really interesting spatial characteristics, which I think added something good to the music. And they're also some clicking and ratcheting sounds which I used children's toys to make. The scoop from a toy digger and the whirring sound is the wheel of a toy truck. And I was trying to evoke the idea that they're under the ground and under Black Annis's power, and there are roots from trees growing down and encroaching into Shaylee's space. And so the whole of this episode is underscored based on one rhythm, and that is the rhythm of Shaylee's piano figuration in her original theme in some guys or other, it literally appears in every second in this scene that with a mostly appears on tribal percussion with an iron drum, and this is to represent Black Annis. And that ancient scary mood that comes through in this scene. 13:29 Omnisphere Omnisphere is a software synth with a lot of power and capability to be creative, because it uses organic sound as well as synthesis to create the sounds in there. I used Omnisphere a lot in creating this cue. It's such a wonderful tool and one of the sounds we hear in the music is a patch that I made of a rough patch based on the rubbing a glass and producing that ring. Here take a listen. 14:04 Mixing process Part of mixing involves selecting where sounds will fall in the stereo field left right or center. Only the viola melody and the iron drum are dead center in mono as they most closely represent Shaylee's core feelings sadness and fear. I feel like it cuts through like a sort of knife. And it sort of almost draws together all the other elements kind of like it sucks it in to its gravity well. I mixed this cue specifically to get that engulfing feeling which meant I had to rely a lot on heavy reverb. 15:01 Challenges There were some challenges in making this whole episode. When you've got a long dialogue, it's really could be quite difficult to get the energy pacing, right and underscoring without overwhelming the dialogue and providing more of a backdrop, which is able just to morph. But I feel like in audio drama, every sound you hear is more relevant than it would be in a visual medium, because it could skew the visual picture that the audience is getting. So that was a challenge. 15:38 And the biggest challenge of all was when I had a disk failure halfway through making this episode, and discovered that the cloud backup that I thought was running was not, and we had to retrieve the data. And it was not that relaxing. So always check your backups are running, folks. That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full track in a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. catch new episodes every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else. We've been listening to music featured in the audio drama called The Hidden People. To hear the full story or to check out my other compositions, follow the links in the show notes. Visit HowIMakeMusic.com for bonus behind the scenes stuff related to this episode. How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, contact John Bartmann via the show notes. And now here's Shaylee Meets Black Annis, a dark, sound design-rich folk influenced piece of underscore in its entirety. My name is Katharine Seaton, and thank you for listening to How I Make Music. We'll catch you next week. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama The Hidden People https://hiddenpeoplepodcast.com/ Check out other work by Katharine Seaton https://katharineseaton.com/ BONUS Listen to the full suite of music from this episode by Katharine Seaton https://soundcloud.com/katie-seaton-565873597/episode-20-blood-on-my-hands MUSIC & SFX CREDITS Benjamin Britten - Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes Reeltime - The Trucks of Bohermore Muse - Hyper Music Muse - Plug-In Baby ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we’re listening to in the background is called Unsealed. It's the mysterious title theme for season three of the audio drama The White Vault. Today, we'll break it down and look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. My name is Brandon Boone. I'm a composer from Cincinnati, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:17 Intro I used to have a cello that I rented for like a year for some projects and people would see it in my room like oh, you play cello. I'm like, no, I just use it. I just use a cello. I don't play it. I took lessons with the strictest teacher from Russia who had like the old school like slap on the wrist if you do it wrong. 02:13 Two versions So today we're looking at two versions of the song unsealed from the white vault. There is the first version that was used in season one and two and then the second version and season three and four. For season one, we were going for a more isolated cold feeling in Antarctica with these researchers. Whereas in season three and four, we wanted to do something more South American and so we started to introduce more instruments from that region. 03:13 Influences What's most noticeable about the theme song is that heartbeat that's throughout the whole piece. We drew on that from Ennio Morricone’s title track for The Thing. Here's how that sounds. This desolate, lonely research facility. So I kind of tried to start with that heartbeat feeling and glass sounds, sounding as cold as possible. While still having a melody to it. That simplicity kind of lends to being kind of memorable and you recognize it when you hear it. Separating our found footage story is a documentarian who's compiling it together. As she speaks, we have the drone from unsealed playing underneath, to glue the production together. 05:00 A 40-person choir The expression on my face when Travis called me he's like, how do you feel about writing for a 40 person choir? And I'm just like, yeah, I'll figure it We'll figure that out! We worked with a friend - Steven Melin - quite a bit on this piece. Travis mentioned that there was a choir. And so I wrote the choir piece on my computer and then sent the score to him. 05:32 Remote recording Steven did the orchestration for the choir. He's very much a classical musician. So you can't just write notes on a paper, there's actually a lot that goes into it. And the directing session also was quite terrifying because I was suddenly directing a choir for the first time in my life. And it was quite the experience at four in the morning. They’re in Hungary. They have a unique Skype-like service that has zero latency, perfect audibility of exactly what your wave will sound like, in real time. It's both exhilarating and terrifying. With 40 people, you've got a split of gender, and you've got a split of alto, soprano, etc. We had different variations of the arrangements. So we've got one where it's just the women doing the higher end voices, whereas there are a lot of rest notes for the lower end. So there are a lot of variations within the choir. 06:54 South American version For season three and four, we wanted to do something more South American, and so we started to introduce more instruments from that region. What you're hearing right now is a live guitar played by Steven Melin for a track. Hearing the scrapes and taps and breath of an actual guitar is something that's very difficult to fake. Even with high quality samples. There's also an ocarina , which is a small handheld wind instrument. You're probably familiar with it if you've played Zelda. There’s some really cool percussion. There is some brass and an actual flute. Breathy and emotive. We have two approaches to the strings, one that we considered more tense and another set that we considered more scary. Brendan also snuck in a number of really cool synthetic layers like this one. We wanted to add some sort of creepy pitch shifting notes as well. As the note is held, the pitch will shift and that's what you're hearing now. This one is the kalimba instrument, which resembles a thumb piano. This is played by Steven Melin. 09:09 Compliments You know, it went from just me working on this thing on a computer to 40 person choir to Steven playing these instruments. When I tour with the No Sleep podcast, five times a show people will come up and complement either The White Vault or Vast Horizon so I’m very happy with both of those. 09:31 Accolades The White Vault has won one our second Webby honoree for music this year - 2020 - for the songs you've heard, as well as our musical episode. We've actually been collaborating for a number of years on a couple of different projects such as Liberty Tales From The Tower, Vast Horizon and Dark Dice. Here's another piece of music that Stephen and I worked on with the Budapest scoring choir called Weaver Of Fate for our podcast, Dark Dice, which Brandon Boone is also a part of. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama The White Vault https://thewhitevault.com/ Check out other work by Brandon Boone http://bbcomposer.com/ Check out other work by Travis Vengroff https://travisvengroff.com/ Check out other work by Steven Melin https://www.stevenmelin.com/ BONUS MUSIC & SFX CREDITS Ennio Morricone - Title Theme from ‘The Thing’ Jeffreys2 - Wind_Heulen_Wind Howling_.mp3 Grez1 - Scream14.mp3 ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music we’re listening to in the background is called Within Gravity. It's a relationship theme for Quill and Mandry, two characters in the hopepunk sci-fi audio drama This Planet Needs A Name. Today, we’ll break it down and look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is Trace Callahan. I'm a composer from Florida in the United States, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:39 Evolving The piece Within Gravity begins in one of the prologue episodes for the show and evolves into its full form over the course of several episodes as the relationship between the two characters evolves. Within Gravity has its roots in American folk song, especially music of Aaron Copland. Very simple violin motives and melodies. Here's a section from a piece called Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copeland. Take a listen and see if you can hear how it influenced Within Gravity. The idea of hope and exploration and openness that his music tends to evoke. 02:45 Sing along So Within Gravity begins with a pulsing, slow rhythmic, not even quite melody, just a feeling that's based on the idea of a radar or some kind of instrument in this ship. The feel of the piece is intended to be something like a lullaby. When I sat down to write Within Gravity, I played the scene that it was going under on a loop actually continuously while I played the keyboard along with it. The first layer of Within Gravity that was written was this set of floating, morphing chords that are very gentle and slow and soothing, kind of like the lullaby with a pulse on the root of the chord acting in a rhythmic radar like fashion. Sort of to emphasize the spaceship aspect of where their relationship takes place. While the scene was playing while the dialogue was playing, I would play the scene and plug my keyboard into my DAW and just sing different ideas along with what I was playing until I found something that I liked. 05:06 Viola for Quill Once I was done singing my way through the melody and I was happy with it, I took it and transcribed it into sheet music which became the viola part for Quill in Within Gravity. In Within Gravity each separate piece of the music represents something the viola melody is quill. The radar pulse is the character of Mandry who is our pilot. The floating chords are gravity itself binding the piece and the melody and all of the other parts of the song together, like gravity binds us to the ground. 06:09 Dialogue clashing One of the challenging things for me is that the instruments that I like to use tend to live in the same area as the vocal ranges of our actors. To demonstrate what I mean by the music and the dialogue clashing, here is me speaking in my normal voice against the melody of a viola. And here I am speaking against the same melody but in the range of a cello. So you can hear how much easier it is to hear me and understand me when I'm speaking over the cello. 06:50 Keep it simple It would be very easy for me and it is my natural tendency to overcomplicate music and so keeping it simple and something that can exist peacefully in the background, while the scene is happening was something I definitely had to work on. 07:04 Wet keyboard This Planet Needs A Name is a pretty emotional show. We sometimes say that it's very effective free therapy for people who listen to it! And audio drama tends to be pretty emotional anyway, so the dialogue is already emotional and the story and then you're adding the music. There is a lot of catharsis. There is a lot of crying. Sometimes happy tears, sometimes not so much. You have the occasional wet keyboard! 07:58 Layers The background parts of the song are happening over several layers. You'll hear several different instruments combined to create each part. But when you have a melody that's representing one of the characters, that melody is always a solo instrument and the reasoning behind it being that space is big and made up of many, many things. And humans are very small. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama This Planet Needs A Name https://pod.link/1487283992 Join over 200 patrons supporting This Planet Needs A Name https://www.patreon.com/needsaname Check out other work by Trace Callahan https://tracecallahan.com/ BONUS MUSIC & SFX CREDITS Aaron Copland - Appalachian Spring Tomattka - Thunderstorm.wav

The piece of music featured in this episode is called Are You A Memory. It’s a traditional jazz piece which I wrote for the comedy/horror audio drama Mockery Manor by Long Cat Media. The show tells the story of an amusement park set in Britain in the 80s with a dark and thrilling history. And furry mascots. This week we’ll look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is Laurence Owen. I'm a composer from the United Kingdom, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:23 I was a child actor when I was a kid. It all came together recently when I thought actually, I should be making audio dramas! 01:37 This song, Are You A Memory is from the podcast Mockery Manor, which is set in a theme park in 1980s Britain. There’s a lot of music in the show, including songs by fictitious pop stars of our own invention. In reality, they’re all just me singing in different voices. 02:21 The piece was designed to sound like an old scratchy jazz shellac record on a gramophone. It’s a weird thing to do in the 20th Century using computers and software. It’s formal and influenced by British jazz performers like Henry Hall and Al Bowlly 03:51 Mockery Manor is influenced by the horror films of the 80s, particularly The Shining. There’s a lot of the same territory, with a creepy haunted hotel and jazz pouring in through the foyer. We also pay tribute to the Tower of Terror rides from The Disney theme parks around the world. 05:00 Are You A Memory often plays in the background of scenes in Mockery Manor. We wanted it to be unclear whether or not the music is diegetic. 05:51 The first step was to write out all the chords on the piano. It has a straight, deliberate functional rhythm. Then I added drums and double bass, both software instruments. In the spirit of the recording practices of the day, there’s very little expression to the rhythm section. 06:47 The violin is the Spitfire Audio Solo Strings software instrument. Tasteful, and not as bombastic as the Hollywood sound. Sounds realistic! I added live guitar and lead vocal. 07:46 I added vintage orchestration in the form of brass, a small string section and a sax choir. Then I aged it by applying gross EQ to make it sound boxy and horrible. Originally, the whole orchestra would have been crowded around a single microphone. 09:06 A major challenge was making orchestral instruments sound live. Jazz is hard to do on synths! Another challenge was imitating the sound of playing. I had to add fake vibrato to the saxophones. I was trying to remove any aspect of the digital. 09:45 I’m a singer. This was still out of my comfort zone because I had to sing in this polite, flutey voice. If you feel like you’re taking the piss, you’re probably doing it right. 10:23 The guitar wasn’t sounding right. I had to hammer it because the guitar is one of the quietest instruments in a vintage jazz ensemble, and that’s how they would have had to have played it in the early days of jazz. 11:18 In the B section, the piece modulates. The harmony is super simple. No Herbie Hancock or Jacob Collier chords here! Towards the end, the piano does some flourishes. I imagine that to be the fictitious bandleader Alfred Mockery taking liberties on the piano that the others can’t. 12:59 I play the theremin. Here’s a piece I wrote called Sonate D'Une Autre Epoque. SHOW NOTES Want merch? Get the (physical) pop magazine from inside the Mockery Manor universe https://longcatmedia.bandcamp.com/ Listen to audio drama Mockery Manor by Long Cat Media https://pod.link/mockerymanor Visit Long Cat media https://www.longcatmedia.com/mockery-manor Check out other work by Laurence Owen https://www.laurenceowen.co.uk/ BONUS Laurence Owen plays George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue on the theremin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rt8vxHAZJ0 MUSIC & SFX CREDITS Henry Hall - The Teddy Bears’ Picnic Al Bowlly - Midnight, The Stars and You Thaighaudio - Concert Applause 4.wav ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music featured in this episode is called Colin. It’s a genre-bending piece which I wrote for the fantasy audio drama Casual Magics by Inside Fictions. The show tells the story of a young mage who must discover his identity as a freshman at The Weisz Institute, a college for mages. This week we’ll look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is Jacob McNatt. I'm a composer from the United States, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:23 Casual Magics is about young mages at a college for magical beings, and they quickly get swept up in danger beyond their abilities 01:52 The writer and producer, Steve Spalding, came to me with the idea of listening to Darren Korb as an influence. Darren Korb is an American game composer 02:28 We knew we wanted there to be an element of jazz. I always want to incorporate the orchestra. In my head I kept hearing elements of hip hop, even though I have no experience in it. The result was a total genre mashup outside of my comfort zone. But original! 03:08 The tune plays whenever the character is narrating the story. He’s not as adept at magic as some of the others, and quickly gets taken advantage of by a barista that casts a charm spell on him. We wanted the music to reflect a ‘fish out of water’ feeling of naivete. 03:53 We established a jazz combo timbre with trumpet, trombone, saxophone. These instruments are used throughout the whole soundtrack. 04:23 I love imperfection. Because everyone uses the same sample libraries, music can become very samey. My goal is to use the samples in a different way. I intentionally detuned the trumpet alongside the saxophone. You don’t really notice it until it’s isolated. 05:07 To write a melody, I sit at the piano and begin playing. Colin’s theme needed innocence, so I centered it around a nice C minor ninth chord. I started writing an uplifting version in the relative major (Eb), but it drove me insane. I think the minor key still retains optimism. 06:15 Colin’s theme uses traditional orchestral instrumentation. It was a challenge to tie it in with trip hop and jazz! Woodwinds, strings, low brass. The Cm9 chord really brings it all together and ties Colin to the story. The flute arpeggio represents magic. The tuba fulfils a comical role which suits Colin’s dorky side. 08:37 Near the end, a distant piano plays the melody, which ties Colin to the secondary protagonist Kim. There’s also a swish effect which I made by recording my voice and running it through some weird guitar effects. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama Casual Magics by Inside Fictions https://www.insidefictions.com/ Check out other work by Jacob McNatt https://www.jacobmcnatt.com/ BONUS Check out a video of Jacob doing a trombone/hip hop cover of the TwoSet Violin roast challenge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEx6vBqwWw8 MUSIC & SFX CREDITS Darren Korb - Old Friends The Pebble Shaker Jazz Band - The Jumping Jive Lil Miss Beats - Just Let Go Ludwig van Beethoven - 7th Symphony (2nd Movement) Bernard Hermann - Vertigo Theme ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music featured in this episode is called The Amelia Project Theme. It’s a fun and eccentric piece which I wrote for the dark comedy podcast The Amelia Project, which tells the story of a mysterious agency which helps its clients fake their deaths. This week we’ll look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is Fredrik Baden. I'm a composer from Oslo, Norway, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:18 I still choke up when I think about my high school graduation composition. Take a listen. 02:10 The Amelia Project, which tells the story of a mysterious agency which helps its clients fake their deaths. Clients feature scientists, politicians, cult leaders and even an AI. The only way to get in touch with The Amelia Project is by having a really interesting story to tell. 03:09 Today’s selected soundtrack is version 7.6 of the musical theme. Over time, I’ve written many versions of the musical theme for different contexts. 03:30 My girlfriend and I searched for the Dirk Gently opening theme but accidentally stumbled on the BBC version of the show. I kept it in mind and would consider it an influence, along with the theme tune for the TV show Dexter. Ominous and weird, I guess! 04:45 I was approached by the show creators to write the theme. The first few drafts were considered too serious. My family has a cabin with a pedal organ. I came up with a really silly ‘oom-pa-pa’ sound just to find an extreme for them to counter against. But it turns out they really liked it! Big sound, big melody, big drums, big bass offset with plucky chords, honky strings and a piccolo flute fanfare! 06:32 I’ve made a few versions of this theme to suit different stories. A metal version for an episode set in a funfair park called ‘Hell’. There’s a mafioso Italian version and a Frank Sinatra Christmas version. There’s a Scottish version. 08:10 For World Audio Drama Day in 2018, we collaborated with four other audio dramas. I ‘frankensteined’ a whole bunch of themes into one theme. I butchered it, but it was a load of fun. 08:58 The opening of the track is a simple beep which creates suspense. I set the beep on the dominant (C over Fm). 09:35 There are five keyboard sounds: strings, rhodes, accordion, dream piano and a harpsichord. A mellotron joins in the B section for dreamy feeling. 10:35 The drums use subdivision emphasis to keep the momentum going. Everything else is very ‘oom-pah-pah’. 10:59 I have a habit of trying to make sense out of weird things. I try to find out what kind of chords these weird sounds have. The chords progression for this piece is a mix between phrygian and locrian. There’s a tritone interval which creates a sense of oddness that suits the eccentricity of the audio drama. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama The Amelia Project by Philip Thorne and Øystein Ulsberg Brager https://ameliapodcast.com Check out other work by Fredrik Baden https://fredrikbaden.com BONUS Listen to The Amelia Project’s sound design special ‘Liquified Marzipan’ https://art19.com/shows/the-amelia-project/episodes/79ff5b6b-66b4-4735-b340-9f60ac715d47 MUSIC & SFX CREDITS Juan Cristobal Tapia de Veer - Theme from Dirk Gently (US) Daniel Pemberton - Theme from Dirk Gently (UK) Rolf Kent - Morning Routine from Dexter ZeSoundResearchInc. - Vinyl Backspin and Beat Scratch.wav ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music featured in this episode is called After The Darkling Thrush. It’s a chamber piece which I wrote for a performance in New York City in 2015. The piece was later adapted to the psychedelic noir audio drama What’s The Frequency, which tells the story of Walter “Troubles” Mix and his partner Whitney as they search for a missing writer and navigate through a city quickly falling into madness. This week we’ll look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is Kurt Nelson. I'm a composer from New York, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:04 About What’s The Frequency and the backstory of how I got involved. 02:55 The work was inspired by European composers from the second half of the 20th Century, including Witold Lutoslawski, Alban Berg and Luigi Dalapicco. 04:44 I draw heavily on the symmetry of the octatonic scale in this composition. The flute solo demonstrates this in a very clear way. 06:47 This atonal type of music is a good match for a show like What’s The Frequency. The inconsistency of the tonality reflects the meltdown in reality that we experience when we listen to the audio drama. The tonality of music by Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven provides a stability. In an atonal composition, we experience a kind of freedom from that. 09:18 I use identifiable motifs to bind the piece together. One example is the dotted rhythm first heard in the piano, then the piccolo and repeatedly throughout the composition. 09:48 In a dramatic flourish, I use the piano and the vibraphone to separately play the eight notes of the octatonic scale, which I find to be a brilliant instrumental effect. 10:38 The original inspiration for After The Darkling Thrush was a poem by Thomas Hardy. The poem depicts a bleak view of the arrival of the 20th Century. The thrush in the poem is a bird that sings, oblivious to the cynicism of the poet. The flute takes a solo role to depict this innocence. 12:24 Many composers who write concert music have just one performance before they have to move on to the next project. With podcasts, I find a wonderful opportunity to give the music some life after its initial performance. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama What’s The Frequency by James Oliva https://wtfrequency.com/ Check out other work by Kurt Nelson https://kurtcnelson.com/ Bonus video: watch ‘After The Darkling Thrush’ being performed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgoN2nUnrLk MUSIC & SFX CREDITS Witold Lutoslawski - Five Songs Alban Berg - Violin Concerto Joseph Haydn - The Creation The Darkling Thrush (by Thomas Hardy) - read by Tom O’Bedlam) Thaighaudio - Concert Applause 4 (CC0) Artemis R Swann - Song Thrush (CC0) Victor Herbert - The Prima Donna ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music featured in this episode is called The Fugue. It’s an atmospheric piece which I wrote for the sci fi season finale of the audio drama The Big Loop, which follows a ship’s peace officer sent to investigate strange visions haunting the crew. This week we’ll look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is Daniel Birch. I'm a composer from Somerset in England, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:59 For this episode of The Big Loop show creator Paul Bae wanted a mix of ambient drones and haunting sci fi horror themes. 02:33 Influences include the score for Ex Machina by Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow. I’d heard they used a plugin called PaulStretch, which influenced me to create ambient tones of The Fugue. I retained certain childlike qualities using an instrument called a celesta. Clint Mansell’s score for Moon is another influence, and uses sparse instrumentation to create a powerful score. 04:43 Show creator Paul Bae sent an email requesting [quote] “Something beautiful, ambient, reflecting the vastness of space and human sacrifice. I want to bring the listeners to tears with this one." I only had a few weeks, but I find having a short deadline really helps. 05:09 I subscribe to the YouTube channel of Christian Henson, the co-owner of Spitfire Audio. I was inspired by his use of various pedals to resample and manipulate audio, turning them into sampled instruments. I thought “I could do that!” 05:21 I ran some of the sounds through my pedals. I ran my Arturia Microbrute through the AMA’s AC Noises pedal, which is a spring reverb with a bitcrusher and oscillator. By the end of it, I had a totally new skill. 06:37 I am also a vocalist. I included vocals into the compositions by singing along without a clear melodic line, just capturing my emotional response to the story. It’s definitely an organic sound, with some granular digital static. 08:09 During the intro to the track, you hear a combination of a patch called the ‘unstabler pad’ with the celeste and vocals to create a nice mellow bed. 09:16 There’s a heartbeat-style sound which plays throughout parts of the track. The sounds are a sampled instrument called Native Instruments’ “The Grand”. It sounds like the side of the piano is being tapped, drenched in reverb. I wanted this to symbolize the humanity of the lead character. 10:23 The synth lead was a mangled, distorted version of a simple saw lead. I used a plugin called Reels to provide tape emulation. 10:57 Another influence was Mica Levi’s score for Under The Skin. Very dark and atmospheric. 11:47 In episode 59 of How I Make Music, David Devereux cites Disasterpeace as an influence, and I also love his use of ambient washes and synth darkness. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama The Big Loop by Paul Bae https://www.thebiglooppodcast.com/ Check out other work by Daniel Birch https://www.danielbirchmusic.com/ Follow Daniel Birch https://twitter.com/iamdanielbirch MUSIC CREDITS Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow - Skin (from Ex Machina) Clint Mansell - Welcome To Lunar Industries (from Moon) Mica Levi - Lipstick To Void (from Under The Skin) Disasterpeace - A Chorus Of Tongues (from Hyper Light Drifter) ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music featured in this episode is called Three-Months Forevers. It’s a slow and steady post-rock influenced piece which I wrote for the sci-fi audio drama The Orphans, which follows a group of survivors who crash land on an alien planet. The soundtrack aims to convey a yearning feel as the characters feel the loss of one of their own. This week we’ll look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is James Barbarossa. I'm a composer from England, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:37 The piece was influenced by the Dr Who theme. The bass and drums captured the emotion I was trying to convey. There’s a certain amount of ‘aping’ when it comes to imitating your influences. 03:42 I used a chimes patch as a leitmotif for the character Nora Evers. The chimes play whenever she is present, physically or otherwise. 05:01 In Batman Vs Superman, the Wonder Woman musical theme is a distorted electric cello. Strings are traditionally female instruments, especially in opera. But the power of this theme is the fact that it’s an electric cello. 05:55 I used Garage Band to compose this piece. Take a listen to the piece-by-piece breakdown of the rhythm section, the Nora Evers chimes, rising piano melody and the clean electric guitar leitmotif. 07:18 A major challenge in writing for audio drama is to avoid overwhelming the sound in the scene. Another challenge is knowing when it’s done! Art is never finished, only abandoned. 08:29 The electric piano, a jazzy instrument, is used to represent the unrefined nature of the human characters. The clean grand piano is colder, more cruel and represents the artificiality of the society in which they live. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama The Orphans by Zachary Fortais-Gomm https://www.orphanspod.com/ Check out other work by James Barbarossa https://open.spotify.com/artist/7velnaC7HmpMcK0OuUWNmf Follow James Barbarossa https://twitter.com/barbarossaphone MUSIC CREDITS Murray Gold - Doomsday (from Dr Who) Hans Zimmer & Tom Holkenborg a.k.a JUNKIE XL - Is She With You? (Wonder Woman Theme) ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music featured in this episode is called Confessional. It’s a menacing and grisly piece which I wrote for the historical audio drama Confessional, which tells the story of a 15th century French sadist called Gilles de Rais. The soundtrack aims to convey a dark and viscerally evil feel. This week we’ll look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is David R Simpson. I'm a composer from Scotland, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 02:37 Inspirations for the piece included the drone-based music written by Mark De Gli Antoni for Werner Herzog’s documentaries ‘Into The Abyss’ and ‘On Death Row’. Another influence was Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Oscar-winning score for Joker. An ugly drone with a beautiful string line speaks to me of two sides of humanity - both the monstrous and the sublime. 04:03 When I write for chamber music, I inevitably end up listening to the album ‘Handwriting’ by Rachels. It came out at the time of instrumental post-rock in the era of Scottish band Mogwai. 04:59 I chose this piece for How I Make Music to get across the sense of foreboding and evil, an unusual avenue for me. ‘Confessional’ aims to establish a strong mood immediately. 05:52 I wanted to keep the composition drone-based but not rely on anachronistic electronic sounds. I am a self-taught double-bassist and cellist and multi-tracked them to create a rasping low sonority. The physicality of playing them worked with my vision of this barbaric central character. I wanted to take advantage of my lack of technique on these instruments, which brought across a rawness suited to the setting. 07:52 The foundation of the piece is a pedal tone on G. The term ‘pedal tone’ comes from organs, which are played with the feet to create (usually low) drone notes over which other harmonic motion takes place. 08:20 My friend is the guitar tech through the noise-rock band Sonic Youth. The band is known for the use of microtonal tensions to really amp up the discomfort. I wanted to explore the use of microtones with the fretless instruments to create an unsettling feel. 09:16 An early version of the piece began as an iPhone demo. Take a listen to how it sounded before I started developing it. 09:46 There are a number of cello articulations in this piece, including drone, pizzicato, staccato and legato. I took advantage of glissando, sliding between notes in a way that you can’t really with a keyboard instrument. 10:31 I wanted to emphasise the melody of the piano and retain a forward motion in the left hand. The studio piano had a lovely warm tone but because it’s so old I couldn’t get it in tune in context with the rest of the instruments. I ended up using a software piano. Take a listen and see if you can spot the difference between the two! 11:52 I chose to voice the chords in root position to keep the feel unobtrusive. I love the way Tori Amos rolls her chords right down to the lowest octave. 12:38 The tempo shifts up and down by 5bpm. It’s barely noticeable, but listen out for it. I used this technique to add a sort of subconsciousness disjointedness. I wanted the whole piece to feel like it was being dragged into existence. The combination of certain cello parts sounds like a heartbeat quickening. 13:35 The software we use tends to divide music up into unnatural parts. Four bars of this, then four bars of that. I try to avoid those types of blocks and rather employ musical foreshadowing. 14:05 There’s a textural layer in the piece, a set of noises using extended techniques and time-domain effects. I automated the feedback and volume to create a crescendo, a technique I used when scoring the short film ‘Magda’. 15:13 The Phrygian mode is a dark mode of the major scale which starts on the 3rd degree. The first two notes, a minor second, always remind me of a silly sitcom I grew up watching called The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. The minor second is echoed in other parts of the composition and introduce ambiguity. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama Confessional by Jill Korn https://www.jillkorn.com/audio-drama Check out other work by David R. Simpson http://davidrsimpsonmusic.com/ Follow David R. Simpson https://twitter.com/DavidRSimpson_ MUSIC CREDITS David Whittaker - “Beyond The Ice Palace Title Music” Mark De Gli Antoni - “Into The Abyss Theme 01” Rachels - “Southbound To Marion” Mogwai - “Take Me Somewhere Nice” Tori Amos - “Pancake” (Live) Ronnie Hazlehurst - “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin SFX CREDITS "Metronome, 168BPM.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music featured in this episode is called Anneliese. It’s an off kilter piece which I wrote as the character theme for the psychological fantasy/horror audio drama Palimpsest. The soundtrack conveys a quiet and contemplative feel. This week we’ll look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is Ian Ridenhour. I'm a composer from Asheville, NC, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:56 I was influenced by Gregorian chant music. Gregorian sheet music was written without barlines, and I wanted the feeling of flowing seamlessly without a fixed rhythm. 02:54 The first electronic artist I listened to was Deadmau5. I’ve cited him as an influence because of the idea that Anneliese should use a palette of purely electronic sounds. Other influences include Moses Sumney, who is from my home town of Asheville. 03:38 The rhythm in this track is complex. It’s a core 6/8 and I’ve added a bizarre 2+5 meter over it. Listen as I count along. There’s a word for this type of polyrhythm: it’s called hemiola. 04:55 The harmonic structure pushes the boundaries of typical pop harmony. I wanted to convey a lack of permanence by using odd shifts. Noteworthy influences include Gabriel Kahane. I use a circle of 4ths (plagal cadence) modulation to destabilize the listener. Every chord sounds like the root. 06:47 There’s a low and subtle wind sound throughout the piece. You only really notice it at the end. It changes pitch and pans back and forth. It’s my favorite piece of the composition. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama Palimpsest http://thepalimpsestpodcast.com/ Check out other work by Ian Ridenhour http://www.ianridenhour.com/ Follow Ian Ridenhour https://twitter.com/ianridenhour MUSIC CREDITS Monks of the Dark Abbey - Derek Fietcher and Brandon Fietcher Strobe (Club Edit) - Deadmau5 Cut Me - Moses Sumney Empire Liquor Mart (9127 S. Figueroa St.) - Gabriel Kahane Gleam - Covet ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact Composers: host an episode of How I Make Music https://bit.ly/host-an-episode How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music featured in this episode is called Theme from We Fix Space Junk. It’s a playful and futuristic piece. I wrote it as the opening tune for the comedy sci-fi audio drama We Fix Space Junk, a story about two female repairmen who travel space fixing things (and trying not to get killed in the process.) The soundtrack conveys fun, adventure and an overall positivity, and this week we’ll look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. My name is Hedley Knights. I'm a composer from London, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:53 Influences for the piece came from Tim Souster’s theme for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV show and from historical 70s depictions of the future. 03:32 The piece was written entirely in MIDI, using no live instrumentation. This gives it a more digital, futuristic feel. I used a deliberately fake-sounding string patch from a program called Reason and layered it with a more realistic sample-based string library to give it both the retro feel and extra emotion. 04:52 For the drums in this piece, my free trial expired! I had to replace the drum sounds with a different patch, resulting in slightly different versions of the piece over time. 05:41 I use a technique called portamento to glide smoothly between notes. This roughly emulates a theremin, a really common instrument in vintage science fiction. 07:05 The drums and bass groove well together. The song is in 6/8, but at a faster tempo than most compositions in that time signature. The bass, kick drum and ride cymbal groove well together to really create a fun atmosphere to kick off each episode. 07:41 I wrote the piece in C major, which is usually attributed to happy and bright sounds. I included a Bb to give the melody a darker, almost bluesier feel. I feel this conveys the tone of We Fix Space Junk pretty well, being a comedy with a dark side. 08:31 The brass layer is a synth patch which has a triumphant fanfare sound. 08:58 Once I’d written all the instruments, I reamped them by running them through my Midas 80 analogue mixing desk. The random imperfections give the piece a real, retro feel. SHOW NOTES Listen to audio drama We Fix Space Junk https://pod.link/1360406263 Check out other work by Hedley Knights https://BattleBird.productions Follow Hedley Knights https://twitter.com/hedley_k MUSIC CREDITS Tim Souster - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV Theme Music ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact Composers: host an episode of How I Make Music https://bit.ly/host-an-episode How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com

The piece of music featured in this episode is called The Interrogation of Carol Shaw. It’s a dark and menacing horror-influenced soundtrack that I wrote for the psychological thriller audio drama The Darkroom Podcast, a weird fiction story about an amateur photographer and the mysterious photographs he discovers on old rolls of film. The soundtrack was conceived with a cobwebby basement in mind, and created live on a Korg MS20. My name is Ryan McGowan. I'm a composer from Steep Falls, Maine, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 At the point in the story where this track plays, the audience is beginning to realize that some of the creepy, supernatural deductions made from viewing the antique photos might be true. An elderly woman, Carol Shaw, experiences an existential dread upon seeing them. 03:38 John Carpenter’s Halloween theme was one of the influences behind the track, particularly in the arpeggiated piano. Other influences include Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score for Gone Girl and the 70s TV show Night Gallery. 05:33 I wrote this piece with the aesthetic of a cobwebby photographic basement darkroom in mind. The narrator feels a compulsive need, a dangerous curiosity. To create this music, I imagined myself in the same space, surrounded by analog gear. 06:28 Most of the track is a realtime performance of a sequence I came up with on the Korg MS20 synth. I’ve added wow and flutter to augment the pitch, and a triple-octave synth melody composite. 07:35 I’ve used dissonance to create uneasiness. I start with a sustained drone, and bend it in and out of tune to create horror and unease. I don’t use a lot of sound effects in the series, and so wanted one of the musical parts to sound like a terrifying scream. 08:57 After the big climax, the chords start to include major notes. I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore! I wanted the outro to be mysterious, but free from the existential dread. SHOW NOTES Listen to The Darkroom Podcast https://www.thedarkroompodcast.com/ Download ‘The Interrogation of Carol Shaw’ https://soundcloud.com/r-u-s-e/interrogation-of-carol-shaw Check out my other music https://crookedskies.bandcamp.com/ MUSIC CREDITS John Carpenter - Theme from ‘Halloween’ (Halloween) Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - What Will We Do? (Gone Girl) Billy Goldenberg - Bits and Pieces (Night Gallery) ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/1460793686 How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.com Contact How I Make Music https://johnbartmann.com/contact Composers: host an episode of How I Make Music https://bit.ly/host-an-episode How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com