Hello again, my good friends! Hope you all had a great week (yeah, I know, we live in crazy times...)!

Today I will be walking you through my approach to compose the second track in this game music pack - "A Memory to Forget". We will be talking about the use of repetition and one of my favourite elements in music - ostinatos! Once again, for the purpose of following this episode, a little bit of music theory knowledge would not hurt, although I will make sure you are able to follow this just as well if you don't know much :)

I will be giving a short introduction below to the themes we will be discussing today. For your reference, I uploaded a video with my DAW session and the main comments on it for your easiness of following through.

[Musical repetition]

The power of musical repetition is one that cannot be over emphasized. Repetition is a principle that connects every culture on the planet. And I am not talking about songs that repeat 30 x in a day on the radio, but repeating patterns, such as harmonies, melodies, drumbeats, rhythms and so forth. Take for example Pachelbel's Canon - its repeated patterns and bassline are almost hypnotic. Or closer to us in the game dev community and in my opinion one of the best examples of well used repetition in modern media music, take Hans Zimmer score on Interstellar - the main theme is full of repetitions and it remains one of the most critically acclaimed scores of the last 10 years (in film music, that is). 

But there is another thing that Hans Zimmer uses so commonly, that it has almost become almost associated with him: ostinatos!

[Ostinatos]

Let me save you the effort of Googling this - ostinato is a phrase or motif that repeats persistently, frequently in the same pitch. Now, this repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a track, or a complete melody in itself. A great example is Chopin's Prelude op. 28 no. 2 - although the harmonies of the left hand’s ostinato do change gradually, the rhythmic pattern remains very much constant, which greatly defies the rhythmic freedom of the right hand’s melodies. 

Or, much more relevant to us, check out the video below by 8-bit music theory (I am a fan and long time follower of this guy!), where he analysed David Wise's techniques on writing the score for Donkey Kong (one of my favourite OSTs of all times). David uses a lot of repeated phrases on his super ambient scores! Particularly in "Stickerbush Symphony", one of the greatest ambient VGM themes of all times in my humble opinion (right up there with Aquatic Ambience!).

 8-bit music theory channel and his work are a love letter to video game music and I highly recommend everyone checking him out!

Speaking of 8-bit music theory, we discussed very briefly the use of modes in music in Devlog #2. If you want to see how it works in practical terms, I highly recommend the video below as this concept of writing modally was masterfully implemented by Persona 5's composer, Shoji Meguro, and analysed very well by 8-bit music theory:

Now let's get our hands dirty and finally start our process on composing this theme - "A Memory to Forget".

[Initial plan]

As usual, let's start our brainstorming process first! What is it that I want to achieve?

I was looking for a darker and more serious track this time. The feeling I wanted to evoke was of a somber memory from the past. So, straight from the get-go, we are looking for a mood that is very, very different from our Town Theme.

[Instrumentation]

Right, so based on our initial plan, let's start choosing the instrumentation. For the melody, I wanted a darker sound, so I strayed away from lighter and higher instruments of the woodwind family (although flutes are playing harmony in the B section). I opted to keep the melody on a steel string guitar. A piano is playing repeated phrases and ostinatos, while strings along with a french horn and a trumped are playing the chord lines/harmonies. As you may have realised by this point, I am a fan of light percussion. So I went with tambourine, castanets and shakers. We will dissect how all these connect really soon.

[Composition]

Following the same line of thought introduced on Devlog #2, let's start with choosing a key. A major key would be very unlikely to fit on this specific atmosphere we are looking for. Hence, I decided to use the Phrygian scale. This is a very exotic sounding mode which fits perfectly with the steel string guitar. To keep things more interesting, I modulated to a minor key in the B section.

Important note: For comparison, listen to another track of this game music pack (https://soundcloud.com/tacgmusic/sets/fantasy-rpg-music-pack) - "Clashing Rapiers". This also uses the Phrygian mode. Can you hear how exotic it sounds? Now listen to "A Childhood Love" and try to hear how it sounds way more romantic/happy. For that song, I used a major key (D major if I recall correctly). Now listen to both the track that we discussed on the last Devlog, "Home Town" and also "Moving Forward". Can you hear how ethereal, floaty and nostalgic they sound? That is because it is written in the Lydian mode, one of my personal favourites - this mode introduces a raised IV, which has a very characteristic sound. Does any of that make sense? Let me know if you would like to discuss more about modes and modal mixture/interchange in the subsequent Devlogs.

Structure-wise, I went with an 8-bar intro, a 16-bar A+A' section and a 16-bar B+B' section - so, the structure I chose was AA'BB'. In regards to timing, I chose 4/4 (4 beats/measure counted 1,2,3,4) and a slow tempo of 70 bpm.

Now let's talk about composing per se. Remember the ostinato thing? I love to start tracks using a repeated element and this is what I did here. The intro is just a piano playing an ostinato, with a french horn and celli playing the harmony. It's as simple as that! OK, but can you use the same unchanged repeating phrase during the entire track? You surely can - that's what David Wise did in Stickerbush Symphony! The way I prefer to use it though is to bring the ostinato line when I want to add interest to the track when there is not much going on, or to connect two different sections of the song as smoothly as possible. To make things more cohesive, when the piano line stops and the A section starts, I decided to keep a repeated E note high in the keyboard as a drone note sounding throughout the track. This technique was used by Hans Zimmer in the main theme of Interstellar. 

The A section starts by introducing the guitar playing the melody, a tambourine and some shakers in the percussion, while the piano and double bass are playing the bassline, with the aforementioned repeated piano figure (high E note). If you remember, on Devlog #2 we talked about keeping the listeners interested through the entire track, right? A common way to do this is to add a new element every 4 measures or so. Well, there is not much going on our A section, so what I did was to increase the frequency that the drone high E note is playing - from alternating beats to every beat on bar 14. Super simple, but works and adds to the construction or the feeling of development through the track.

On the A' section (~00:56 mark on the video), I changed the melody a bit on the guitar (but not much, remember, repetition and familiarity are good things), introduced celli playing a counter melody, a solo French Horn playing the harmony together with the basses (an octave apart of each other) and added a new percussive element, the castanets. Also added some super slow and quiet marimba rolls for some extra flourish. 

On the B section (~1:23 mark in the video), flutes and trumpets are introduced and playing in 5ths, while the solo French Horn, basses and Celli are playing the basslines one octave apart of each other - super simple stuff, really. Melody-wise, the guitar and a solo violin are now complementing each other to the point where it may get hard to define which instrument is playing the melody and which is in the counter-melody. Again, the track ends on a chord that returns very easily to the tonic chord E minor (for reference see Devlog #2), so the loop is completely seamless. If you edit this in an audio editing software (like Audacity - free and one of the best and most user friendly I have tried so far) and cut the wave file accordingly, it will loop so well, that not even you will notice where the loop is located. We will talk more about that in the next Devlog!

Important note: There was a tiny modulation to the parallel mode/key of E minor (or Aeolian mode if you wish). It is almost unfelt, as the only difference between the minor key to the Phrygian mode is the flat 2nd (bII), which is raised in the minor parallel key. Also, the tonic center is the same, which means we are still playing with E being the tonic. This is a very useful way to modulate and very widely used by media composers (particularly for films and TV), as it allows for very fast and easy change in the mood of the cue, while still preserving the same tonic note that we got used to listen in the rest of the track.

[Articulations]

Last thing I wanted to address today is the concept of articulations. I will be merely touching the surface of this subject, but we can certainly address this further - leave a comment below and I will be more than glad to help. 

A live human player can do so many things with his instrument. Listen to a classical guitar or a violin virtuoso and try to replicate what you hear on your sampled orchestra. There is so much more life to an actual live player, right? He can play vibrato, tremolo, staccato, spiccato, pizzicato, marcato, legato, crescendo, decrescendo, in a more lyrical way and many more. Hence, to "replicate" (at least the best we can) a live player, we also have to use different articulatons.  The so called virtual instruments are, in the vast majority of cases, either sampled instruments or recordings of actual players (hence the immense sizes of orchestral VSTs that can span over 100 GB).

You can hear on my composition that the guitar "player" is doing slides, harmonics, hammer-on and so forth. I did that by using keyswitches, which are a way to change the articulation that is being played, for example, from a violin playing a short spiccato to a long crescendo and so forth. Most of the famous VSTs use keyswitches or other ways to change articulation (such as entirely different patches). This is another subject I aim to address in subsequent Devlogs.

Phew! That was a lot of information. From the bottom of my heart, hope you guys enjoyed it! This is a series of Devlogs designed from a Video Game Music Composer straight to you, Game Devs. After working with many devs, I have seen how hard sometimes communication may be. I hope these series of Devlogs increase your awareness when listening to our work as composers and facilitates our communication in the future (and who knows, you might even try your hand on composing in the future!)

If you like what you read, consider listening to my new album, A Game Composer's Pilgrimage Vol. 1 (released this week!), with my best work in 2020 and, should you wish to, leave a comment/feedback/follow in my Bandcamp page - it is much appreciated and a way to support my work and allow me to keep doing this in the future (and it is completely free too)!

On the next episode, we will be talking more about creating seamless loops and choosing good VSTs. Can't wait to tell you more about it!

Talk to you really soon!

Geek & Uke

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