How I Make Music (John Bartmann)
Explorez tous les épisodes de How I Make Music
| Date | Titre | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 02 Mar 2022 | The Godshead Incidental - Irene Zhong - So So Much To Hold | 00:19:07 | |
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. The Godshead Incidental audio drama https://godsheadincidental.com/ MUSIC CREDITS Music: Clipping - Shooter Music: Sylvan Esso - Hey Mami Music: Dessa - Children’s Work TRANSCRIPT http://howimakemusic.com/episode/ ABOUT THIS SHOW Discover 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.com BECOME A PATRON Patrons 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/howimakemusic | |||
| 29 Mar 2022 | Forgive Me! - Adam Raymonda - Forgive Me! Theme | 00:14:06 | |
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. Forgive Me https://roguedialogue.com/fm-about Adam Raymonda http://adamraymonda.com/ MUSIC CREDITS Music: Jon Brion - Knock Yourself Out Music: Blink-182 - All The Small Things Music: Radiohead - Creep TRANSCRIPT http://howimakemusic.com/episode/ ABOUT THIS SHOW Discover 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.com BECOME A PATRON Patrons 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/howimakemusic | |||
| 22 Apr 2022 | The Program audio series - Christien Ledroit - The Match and the Fire | 00:17:47 | |
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 SHOW Discover 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.com 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, 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/howimakemusic Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic) SHOW NOTES The Program audio series home https://programaudioseries.com/ Christien Ledroit home https://cledroit.wordpress.com/ | |||
| 28 Sep 2022 | Stone Island - Marcus Bagala - A Storm Is Just A Storm | 00:30:30 | |
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. Stone Island audio series https://open.spotify.com/episode/3ka100351RGSDxA1LuXejH Marcus Bagala home https://www.marcusbagala.com/ Youth In A Roman Field band https://www.youthinaromanfield.com/ MUSIC CREDITS
Music: Townes van Zandt - Lungs Music: Gustavo Santaolalla - The Last of Us soundtrack Music: Mark Korvin - The Lighthouse soundtrack 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/howimakemusic ABOUT THIS SHOW Discover 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.com | |||
| 11 Nov 2022 | Dice Tower Theater - Mike Atchley - Dark Journey | 00:26:03 | |
Join composer and showrunner Mike Atchley in a musical trip into the skies of fantasy tabletop roleplaying game audio drama Dice Tower Theater presents: Dawn of Dragons. Young heroes bound in love and kinship are forced on a quest to discover the truth behind the magic of dragons and seek those that stole it. In this episode, hear how the epic fantasy music of Dice Tower Theater is inspired by re-constructed DnD gameplay recordings. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended. SHOW NOTES Dice Tower Theater audio series https://dicetowertheatre.com/ MUSIC CREDITS Music: Glenn Danzig - Retreat And Descent BECOME A PATRON Patrons get bonus episodes, early access, 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 and support the composers of audio drama! https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Discover 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 | |||
| 29 Dec 2022 | 111 Where the Stars Fell - Newt Schottelkotte - Here With You | 00:21:03 | |
Join Nashville-based singer and audio drama creator Newt Schottelkotte in a musical trip to a small town with some big secrets. Where the Stars Fell is a semi-serialized audio fiction supernatural fantasy and part of the Fable and Folly network. In this episode, hear touching stories about how Newt wrote and performed the country-folk song ‘Here With You’ as an outro theme for episode 18 of the series. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended. BECOME A PATRON Patrons get bonus episodes, early access, 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 and support the composers of audio drama! https://patreon.com/howimakemusic Discover 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 | |||
| 09 Feb 2022 | Thirteen - Caleb Ritchie - Barrier Islands | 00:17:34 | |
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. | |||
| 11 Jun 2021 | Hood - Samuel Pegg - A Chance To Be Free | 00:10:45 | |
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 a | |||
| 05 Aug 2020 | Three-Months Forevers from ‘The Orphans’ by James Barbarossa | 00:13:40 | |
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
MUSIC CREDITS
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.
How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com | |||
| 16 Dec 2020 | Dark Dice - Steven Melin - Devil’s Gamble (Part 2) | 00:15:05 | |
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 | |||
| 02 Sep 2020 | Casual Magics - Jacob McNatt - Colin | 00:12:24 | |
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
BONUS
MUSIC & SFX CREDITS
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.
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| 16 Sep 2020 | #074 This Planet Needs A Name - Trace Callahan - Within Gravity | 00:11:22 | |
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 repr | |||
| 09 Dec 2020 | Dark Dice - Steven Melin - Devil’s Gamble (Part 1) | 00:14:40 | |
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. A | |||
| 23 Sep 2020 | The White Vault - Unsealed - Brandon Boone and Travis Vengroff | 00:12:32 | |
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 | |||
| 21 Jul 2020 | Palimpsest - Ian Ridenhour - Anneliese | 00:09:16 | |
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
MUSIC CREDITS
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.
How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com | |||
| 18 Nov 2020 | Grimwell County - Ben Valdmets - Riders In The Night | 00:11:45 | |
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 soundThere 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 o | |||
| 17 Feb 2021 | Timestorm - Michael Aquino - In The Timestorm | 00:13:51 | |
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 havin | |||
| 07 Oct 2020 | Entropy - Aaron Weatherford - Deneer Death Experience | 00:16:40 | |
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 orchestrat | |||
| 10 Jun 2020 | Starcalled - Gabriel Alvarez - Back to the Berenian | 00:18:08 | |
An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended. Join audio drama creator and composer Gabriel Alvarez in a climactic rollercoaster soundtrack for an epic space action scene for fiction podcast Starcalled. Gabriel’s influences included 90s Australian TV series Farscape, Batman Returns and, of course, Star Wars. Let’s break it down!
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. | |||
| 14 Apr 2021 | Hood - Samuel Pegg - Hood Theme | 00:12:08 | |
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. C | |||
| 23 Apr 2019 | Welcome to How I Make Music. Where are episodes 1-58? | 00:01:45 | |
WHERE ARE EPISODES 1-58? Hey, this is John Bartmann, creator of How I Make Music. How I Make Music is a weekly show which features short, dramatically edited chats with the music composers of audio drama. The first episode launched in April 2019 and featured only my voice talking about my own composition and process. After 58 of these weekly episodes, I decided to pivot and start including other voices on the show. I've since unpublished the first 58 episodes, and the show now appears to begin at episode 59. If you'd like to hear Episodes 1-58 to get a sense of the roots of the show and how we got here, they're available exclusively at https://patreon.com/howimakemusic. Thanks for listening! To support the show, visit https://howimakemusic.com and share it with other people into close-listening and musically sound-designed human interest audio experiences. | |||
| 27 Oct 2021 | Among the Stars and Bones - Oliver Morris - Pandemonium | 00:16:34 | |
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 the | |||
| 12 Aug 2020 | The Big Loop - Daniel Birch - The Fugue | 00:17:54 | |
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
MUSIC CREDITS
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.
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| 08 Jul 2020 | Darkroom - Ryan McGowan - The Interrogation of Carol Shaw | 00:13:00 | |
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
MUSIC CREDITS
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.
How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com | |||
| 19 Aug 2020 | #070 What’s The Frequency - Kurt Nelson - After The Darkling Thrush | 00:16:05 | |
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
MUSIC & SFX CREDITS
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.
How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com | |||
| 31 Mar 2021 | The Strange Case Of Starship Iris - Erin Baumann - Fear For The Storm | 00:12:04 | |
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 th | |||
| 11 Nov 2020 | Unwell - Stephen Poon - Unwell Theme | 00:17:03 | |
Join soft-spoken ‘Unwell’ composer Stephen Poon in a gentle midwestern music composition breakdown. For fiction podcast 'Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery', Stephen’s influences ranged from Irish traditional music to the retro sound of Nintendo game cartridges. The Unwell Theme is a rollicking, foot-stomping soundtrack born of a nerve-wracking recording process with a host of live string musicians. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.TRANSCRIPT00:00 INTROThe 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. 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.01:30 MennonitesUnwell 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 in 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.03:15 CharangoTake 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 InfluencesI'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 n | |||
| 02 Dec 2020 | Gr8 And Terrible - Lee Rosevere - Discovery | 00:16:05 | |
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 w | |||
| 23 Dec 2020 | The Lost Cat Podcast - A.P. Clarke - Dark Streets | 00:18:29 | |
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 mov | |||
| 27 Jan 2021 | Windfall - Adam Raymonda - Windfall Main Theme (Part 2) | 00:17:37 | |
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 ra | |||
| 30 Sep 2020 | The Hidden People - Katharine Seaton - Shaylee Meets Black Annis | 00:20:23 | |
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 Iri | |||
| 04 Nov 2020 | Civilized - Eli Hamada McIlveen - Civilized Main Theme | 00:15:12 | |
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 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 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 them | |||
| 06 Oct 2021 | Marsfall - Sam Boase-Miller - The Trial | 00:19:08 | |
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 s | |||
| 24 Jun 2020 | The Culling - Randy Greer - Rupture | 00:16:25 | |
The piece of music featured in this episode is called Rupture. It’s a heavy and dissonant horror-inspired action soundtrack that I wrote for the choose-your-own-adventure audio drama The Culling, a story about a research intern who discovers some disturbing experiments happening at a remote space colony. My name is Randy Greer. I'm an audio drama writer and composer and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:12 I played in a metal band for years, and I’m pretty sure I lost some hearing. My influences include cinematic horror, specifically Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky (1867), The Deadspace 2 soundtrack by Jason Graves and Joseph Bishara’s soundtrack for Insidious 02:35 Rupture is a soundtrack for the audio drama The Culling. The aim is to convey chaos breaking out at a research facility when they learn about the outbreak of a viral contagion. It accompanies a crowd stampede sequence. I wanted people to imagine what music would be playing if they had to run for their lives. The main character in the series is a character called Harker. She flown out to a quarantined remote planet. The accompanying music is textural and primal. 04:38 Atonality is when the music has neither discernible ‘home base’ note. Rupture begins as an atonal sequence. As the action of the scene develops, the music gains coherence and clarity and takes on more structure, mirroring the events in the story unravelling. Rupture begins with an atonal choir hum. 05:39 There’s a transition which I wanted to feel like passing through a membrane. Up until this point, there’s been no rhythm or meter. I wanted the listener to feel like there was nothing to hold on to. The greater the tension, the greater the ultimate resolution. 06:18 A rhythmic pulse emerges. I used distortion to play C, B and C#. It’s a chromatic motif that appears throughout the whole series. 06:51 One of my favorite instruments is called Mysteria, a choral instrument with an XY axis that allows you to drift between vocal articulations. 07:42 Synthesizers are associated with science fiction. I find them vital for carrying a sci-fi atmosphere into the score. To create a raw and primitive sound, I rely on percussion. A percussive rhythm is introduced which gives the listener some traction. The choir begins to sound almost like a swarm of bees. 09:15 To further reflect unpredictability, I use a 5/4 pattern. It feels wrong, almost as if you can’t quite get your footing. 09:50 Throughout Rupture, I use a bowed software instrument called Frendo. It’s a long, hollow wooden surface with metal strings and a lead pipe which can be freehanded to create wild, creepy and even bizarre sounds that suit the horror genre. Magma Synth is a sound design element I used to create the feel of something hatching from a fleshy membrane 11:03 Col legno bowing is where string players use the wood of the bow instead of the hair to create an aggressive snapping sound. To me, it communicates a sense that the events in the story have already snapped. The horn clusters sound wild. SHOW NOTES
MUSIC CREDITS
ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made.
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| 07 Apr 2021 | 1865 - Lindsay Graham - Theme from ‘1865’ | 00:16:36 | |
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 hi | |||
| 04 Jan 2022 | Woe.Begone - Dylan Griggs - Painted Glass | 00:27:52 | |
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 ABOUT Yeah. 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 INFLUENCES There 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. So, yeah, I don't know how to | |||
| 14 Oct 2020 | The Museum At Tomorrow - Jeffrey Nils Gardner - Five Twenty-Three AM | 00:14:26 | |
Join accomplished sound artist and ‘Unwell’ audio drama creator Jeffrey Nils Gardner to explore a disorienting ambisonic violin recording sound installation which toured both Burning Man and the streets of Chicago. 'Five Twenty-Three AM' was adopted as an unsettling and arty exploration of sound and used as the soundtrack for fiction podcast 'The Museum at Tomorrow.’ In writing the piece, Gardner’s influences ranged from Pauline Oliveiros to John Cage. Immersive listening. Headphones required. TRANSCRIPT00:00 Intro The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Five Twenty-Three AM. It's an instrumental track used in The Museum At Tomorrow, an abstract audio fiction collage miniseries. Today we'll break it down and experience 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. My name is Jeffrey Nils Gardner. I'm a sound artist, director and designer from Chicago, Illinois. And this is How I Make Music.01:50 Beat scriptFor each episode, I write out what I call a beat script laying out each moment of the show. And then I conduct interviews with friends or colleagues or interesting people I run into, along with music and other audio elements to fill in that beat script. We create this collage that tells the story in a very different way.02:45 Great grandmother's violin I've been playing violin since I was six years old. This instrument was actually my great grandmother's. I have a very sharp memory of as a very small child, finding this instrument in my grandparents' attic. And that was how I went down the path of becoming a violin player.03:31 DisorientationDisorientation is what I would say one of the main goals of the piece. Kind of like with a magic eye puzzle. If you unfocus your ears and kind of let them follow where they want to go in the overlapping sounds, I find that the listener often creates a fascinating story alongside the narrative that I'm telling. Adds a certain element of chaos. So Five Twenty-Three AM was originally a part of an eight channel sound installation. This installation toured both to Burning Man and also around Chicago. So the experience is you walk into this octagon and close it behind you and lay in the space and are surrounded by this huge number of speakers and the walls block out the city around you. And so you're hearing this fascinating array of experimental music in multi channel sound. And you just see the sky airplanes crossing your sphere of vision. Laying in the octagon it really effectively blocks out the city, which is not something that we get to do very often. Here in Chicago. It's a cool installation.05:35 InfluencesPauline Oliveros is is a big influence for me, and you can hear some of her work with the Deep Listening Band. One of the other really interesting things that Oliveros has done is create these text scores that are that would stand in for a musically notated score. A text score is a set of instructions for creating a piece of music, something like find an object in the room. Begin manipulating it to find a sound that interests you. Make that noise for five minutes. The piece ends. John cage also works extensively in text scores. Pretty fascinating. He calls them (without prevarication) music. I think he would be deeply offended to hear them not described as music. So I will try not to what you're hearing now is one interpretation of John Cage's a dip in the lake. And I want to be really explicit, this is challenging, strange art. And that is totally okay. It doesn't have to be for everyone.07:37 Recording processI recorded the material for Five Twenty-Three AM while I was in grad school at Northwestern University. I woke up very early in the morning, went down to the studio. I set up an array of these eight mics scattered throughout this large open studio facing different ways. I began to | |||
| 17 Mar 2021 | Spacemerica! - Ian McGowan - Spacemerica! Main Theme | 00:15:08 | |
“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 ha | |||
| 28 Oct 2020 | #079 Wooden Overcoats - James Whittle - Wooden Overcoats Main Theme | 00:13:28 | |
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 c | |||
| 13 Jan 2021 | Dining In The Void - Ali Hylton - You Probably Shouldn’t Trust Me | 00:16:51 | |
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 | |||
| 03 Feb 2021 | The LaFresian Chronicles: Arsen - John Bartmann - King Arsen Approaches | 00:13:58 | |
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 RAPI | |||
| 24 Mar 2021 | The Oyster - Alex Aldea and Andrew Joslyn - The Opening of the Oyster | 00:14:46 | |
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 | |||
| 29 Jul 2020 | Theme from 'Confessional' by David R. Simpson | 00:17:55 | |
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 r | |||
| 10 Feb 2021 | The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel - Chris Tarry - Main Theme | 00:13:54 | |
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 | |||
| 03 Mar 2021 | Five audio drama composers share their insights | 00:11:30 | |
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. 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. 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.
How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.com | |||
| 25 Nov 2020 | Hector Vs The Future - Odinn Orn Hilmarsson - Theme From Hector Vs The Future | 00:13:38 | |
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. 0 | |||
| 14 Jul 2020 | We Fix Space Junk - Hedley Knights - Theme from We Fix Space Junk | 00:11:13 | |
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
MUSIC CREDITS
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.
How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com | |||
| 03 Jun 2020 | The Tower - David Devereux - The Fog Clears (Interlude) | 00:17:38 | |
An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended. Join Tin Can Audio's Scottish creator and composer David Devereux in a gentle ascent into the clouds of audio drama. For fiction podcast 'The Tower', their influences ranged from a family love of the Wurlitzer organ to games like Hyper Light Drifter. This piece 'The Fog Clears' was written as an interlude which bridges the story of Kiri, a young girl who climbs an infinite tower to escape the drudgery of her life down below. The Fog Clears is a gentle and expansive soundtrack which musically describes the moment Kiri achieves clarity, peace and the strength to continue her journey. TIMESTAMPS 02:12 The Fog Clears was written for a narrative audio fiction series. Influences included Pink Floyd, Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds and the classic ‘Studio Ghibli’ sound of Ryuchi Sakamoto. 04:30 A Wurlizter electric piano sound serves as the basis for the entire soundtrack. It can feel a bit dishonest saying you used a Wurlitzer, when you’re really using a software emulation of one. A Wurlitzer keyboard is difficult and expensive to acquire! 04:56 With this piece, I wanted to pay homage to one of my favorite pieces of music, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence by Ryuchi Sakamoto. 05:47 Breakdown of the chords and melodies 07:00 I grew up with my uncle playing church organ. Such presence and majesty! It gives the sense that something big is happening. The thickness of the Wurlitzer sound creates a feeling of thick fog. At this point in the story, Kiri is alone on the tower, covered in fog. I was trying to create the impression that the fog is starting to shift. I used a ghostly lead synth, and a second synth which emulates the beeps of a Sega console. I also used an organ sound. I grew up with my uncle playing organ, and it really adds presence and majesty to music. I included a chiptune-sounding Nintendo synth, which was influenced by a game soundtrack called Hyper Light Drifter by Disasterpeace. 10:02 I wanted the crescendo to be really big, with the clouds clearing and the world spreading out in front of her. Very dramatic! I went for a cinematic string sound, using cello, violin. I also used a mellotron, an early prototype of the sampler which allowed tape loops to be played on a piano keyboard. For the finale, everything is revealed to Kiri and all the instruments from the bridge play together in harmony. A slow decrescendo represents a calming of Kiri’s emotions as clarity, peace and strength are achieved. SHOW NOTES
MUSIC CREDITS Jeff Wayne - The Red Weed (Part 1)Pink Floyd - Great Gig in the SkyDavid Devereux - Waking the TowerDavid Devereux - The ViewRyuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas, Mr LawrenceDisasterpeace - A Chorus of Tongues ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Discover new fiction storytelling podcasts by their music in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience. In this show, we challenge fiction podcast music composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Headphones recommended.
How I Ma | |||
| 26 Aug 2020 | The Amelia Project - Fredrik Baden - Theme From The Amelia Project | 00:17:39 | |
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
BONUS
MUSIC & SFX CREDITS
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 | |||
| 01 Jul 2020 | Heroics - Erik Jourgensen - Halftone Comics | 00:14:20 | |
The piece of music featured in this episode is called Halftone Comics. It’s a light and cheerful comedy soundtrack that I wrote for the superhero audio drama Heroics, a story about a group of superheroes who decide to pivot and go evil. It contains a lot of live woodwind instrumentation and serves as a leitmotif for the story’s comic shop. My name is Erik Jourgensen. I'm a composer from Los Angeles, and this is How I Make Music. IN THIS EPISODE 01:13 Influences included Ennio Morricone’s score for Once Upon A Time In America and Jon Brion’s score for Lady Bird. 02:20 On Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, there’s a comic shop called The Nerdist. I used to go there to watch comedy. I wanted this piece to capture the feel of just hanging out in a cool comic shop like The Nerdist. 03:43 We were fortunate enough to be able to have live players on the Heroics score. Bassoon, sax, trombone, strings and guitar were included in the lineup. 05:11 I wanted to avoid using sample libraries if possible. One of the challenges was creating a live sounding full series score without the budget for an ensemble on every track. 07:26 The energy you put is the feeling the listener will get out of your music. 08:16 For one of the basslines, I used a Fender Telecaster and pitched it down an octave because I didn’t have an electric bass at the time. 08:34 I also pitched the bassoon up until it sounded like a flute or clarinet 09:16 There’s a cool trumpet moment which I achieved by first sketching the part by singing into an iPhone to see what comes out. This part was the first thing that came, and I immediately thought a brass section would sound exciting, fun and a little kitsch. 10:02 To me, the rising chord progression has the quintessential superhero tone to them. 11:02 I use a lot of analog gear. Listen to how the bassoon and winds sound through tape echo and spring reverb. 11:36 When it comes to music, there’s a fine balance between repetition and variation. The Beatles, Beethoven all had this fine balance. SHOW NOTES
MUSIC CREDITS
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.
How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.com | |||
| 17 Jun 2020 | Observe and Report - Nate Fisher - Title Theme | 00:16:15 | |
The two versions of Title Theme from Observe and Report covered in this episode are soundtracks for the sci-fi audio drama Observe and Report, a story about an alien that gets stranded on earth. My name is Nate Fisher. I'm a writer and composer from Washington. I wrote the two versions of this piece to express the loneliness of an earthbound alien. The first version is a gentler solo piano piece while the second incorporates big orchestral elements for a grand cinematic feel. Let’s break it down! IN THIS EPISODE 01:33 My favorite score is Steve Jablonsky’s score for the first Transformers film. I’m also influenced by Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori’s score for the Halo games. And, of course, Howard Shore and John Williams. 02:26 I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better to start with a new project instead of a template. Templates save time, but end up making your music sound the same. I sit at the piano and just noodle around until something comes out. 03:00 Today we’ll look at two different versions of the same song. The first version (in C) is a solo piano with light orchestration. The second is bigger, with an epic cinematic sound (in G). One of my main goals with season 2 of Observe and Report was to take everything to the next level, including the theme song. 04:05 There’s a current trend in film trailers - slowing down familiar themes and giving them a big, epic sound. Listen to the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker and hear how the recognizable melody is played back in half-time and reharmonized. 04:58 When music is made to sound really big, it creates a dimension of space that dovetails well with the sci-fi idea of space. 06:55 What is epic? Some examples of how I do it include having layering melody instruments, big brass and drums, a wide dynamic range, melodies that span multiple octaves. I love the way the french horn adds a sense of adventure to my music. 08:10 There’s a nice chromatic descending line at this moment in the piece. 08:45 I avoid common pop progressions when writing for sci-fi. There’s nothing wrong with them but they don’t generally lend themselves to sci-fi themes in my opinion 09:11 In the season 2 version of the theme, I decided to use the clean electric guitar to convey the loneliness of space. And also to have an instrument that could bring some meat to the song when needed! 10:20 I had been avoiding the use of the theremin and its classic spooky sci-fi sound, but I decided I’d been staying away from it for too long and it was time to give it a spot. 10:58 There’s a nice big Hans Zimmer ‘drop’ moment where all the instruments hit together and the energy kicks in. It serves the purpose of being musical ear-candy. But it also allows a pause for when the credits begin to play. It was a balance between artistic and practical. SHOW NOTES
MUSIC CREDITS
ABOUT THIS SHOW How I Make Music is where behind-the-scenes musicians tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made.
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| 09 Sep 2020 | 073 Mockery Manor - Laurence Owen - Are You A Memory | 00:17:19 | |
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
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| 20 Jan 2021 | Windfall - Adam Raymonda - Windfall Main Theme (Part 1) | 00:15:21 | |
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 o | |||
| 24 Feb 2021 | The Kinesigraph (from Brass) - Amanda Laven - The Kinesigraph | 00:13:00 | |
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 | |||