I have music!

I’m not sure if it’s done, I think I want to mess with the EQ of the tracks a bit, but it doesn’t make my ears bleed so I think it’s okay.

I actually wrote the melody in 2020, then got writers block for the harmonies. A big part of the problem was that I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to create a “brilliant” piece for a background, after all I’ve been playing music for over 30 years so surely I could come up with something great?

But playing isn’t writing, and my feeble attempts to compose music have been short lived and quickly given up. But with the release of the game coming up I knew I was going to have to actually finish this soon. So I made myself sit down, picked a midi instrument, and put down some notes. I started with the bass line because it’s the easiest, and I didn’t hate it. So I added some upper harmony – and didn’t hate it. I added some lower harmony – it needed some adjustments but for the most part I didn’t hate it.

It isn’t a brilliant piece of work, I don’t expect people to want to listen to it when they aren’t playing, and I’m sure it will get muted. I also need to write some more game play music, at least one more and I’ll alternate song A in Level 1, B in Level 2, etc. Or maybe even a third. I also need menu music, death music, level complete music… but getting one piece actually done is huge for me.

I’m working in Waveform 9 because I bought an audio interface years ago that came with Tracktion and I upgraded while my OEM version still qualified for the cheaper upgrade price. I know a lot of indie devs use Reaper, but I already owned Waveform and it’s working for me. I wrote the melody by recording some plinking on the piano, then cleaned it up into a nicer version, and did all of the harmony and percussion by manually clicking and filling out the tracks. At some point I’ll do more live recording, I just have to get over my “I’m being recorded” nerves first.