The Music of Shindig: A Work In Progress
Hello again, friendos.
Today we're going to take a brief tour through the weird and wonderful process of making Shindig's soundtrack – which right now is about halfway there, but not the half you might think...
Let's talk about our tone...
The importance of sound really shouldn't be underestimated, because sound defines the feel of a thing on a completely different level than art or animation can. Music and sound design can independently set a scene's tone, and induce or heighten emotions like nothing else – and this doesn't just apply to scary movies. For a cheery, colourful game like Shindig, the sound side is key to building a safe, cosy place for our players to enjoy, stress-free. On top of that, we hope (at least a few of) the melodies are catchy little bops that make people smile, and maybe even hum along.
We can only dream, right?
Compose yourself!
I'm Fay, one half of Imaginary Friends Games, and the de facto composer for Shindig. There are just two of us making this game, and neither of us are artists, coders or music producers, but we’re donning all the different hats indie developers have to wear to make something we believe in – and that means we’ve gotta be a little scrappy…
I'm not a properly-trained musician, just someone with a pretty good ear, fair relative pitch, and who's lucky enough to have access to an instrument. A few years back I started teaching myself ukulele, and now I write songs for myself, have a YouTube channel where I post covers and demos of my little songs, and sometimes sing at open mic nights when I feel brave enough. Just like this is the first game we've made from scratch, this is my first time composing a soundtrack, and it's a pretty wild ride so far.
I penned the songs for Shindig as scraps here and there over the last ten months or so, grabbing my phone to make a voice note whenever a cool melody came to mind out of the blue, or when I was noodling around during ukulele practice. I can't really read or write musical notation, so I've got dozens of voice notes of myself listing the main chords I'm going to play (which I know as finger positions on the fretboard) followed by playing those through and singing the melody. Thank goodness for modern tech, or I’d have lost many melodies to the mists of time.
Some of the themes were written with a specific place or character in mind, whereas some were pretty little ditties originally intended for one location that found their forever home in another scene entirely. To us now, they all fit just right. Altogether, Shindig has about 20 locations, with a little song each, but (given that the game only takes about an hour to play) each theme is quite compact, clocking in at under a minute before it loops.
Going digital
Voice memos on my phone won't cut it for game audio, so I've spent the past week transcribing those memo tunes into MIDI files in FLMobile, working on my tablet's touchscreen. I can't play piano, and I don't know my way around the notes of the ukulele fretboard without having to Really Think about it, so for me the process involves:
Figuring out if the song is in 3/4 or 4/4, and making a track file (I have some very basic music theory that I taught myself)
Creating a MIDI channel of an instrument that sounds okay for now (more on that later)
Slowly, painstakingly finding the notes I'm playing/singing on the piano keyboard
Tapping those onto the MIDI roll by hand, or tapping them out at a looooow tempo on the on-screen piano keyboard, once I've practised it through a few times, and flubbed it up a few more
Listening back to the MIDI melody I just made
Dragging notes up 'n' down, left and right, shortening or lengthening as needed, to make it sound like what I wrote in my voice memo
Listening again, dragging things around again, repeat 'til it's right
It takes a while. I’m working with what I’ve got, to do the best I can.
Many of the tracks have several melodies going on at the same time, which were either written already in voice notes (or in my noggin) or which were composed directly into FLMobile once the main structure of each theme was in the MIDI file. (This is where having fairly good relative pitch really helped.) Right now, every track has some kind of digital version, even if they do all use the same six or so instruments from FLMobile that sound sort of "Shindiggy".
Want to hear some? Here are a few samples of the WIP themes from the game as they currently stand:
The next steps
The final game soundtrack will be a mix of MIDI and live recordings of ukulele/guitar, to give it a more rounded sound, and to get some good chugging strums in there...and that all happens in Cubase. Now that the MIDI files are created, a lot comes together really quickly.
Once the files are in we’ll:
Assign different (nicer, even more "Shindiggy") instrument sounds to each MIDI melody line
Redo the drums
Record live tracks of our chugging rhythm guitar/rhythm ukulele chords
Sync it all up
Attempt to 'master' the sounds so they don't take up the exact same aural space, and automate the velocity a little to make them sound more natural
Export the final files for use in the game, and make sure that the file format loops nicely
Wish us luck! There's a lot of work left to do before Shindig is done. We hope you'll come along with us on the rest of the journey.
Love always,
Imaginary Friends Games
