Hey there! Tomas "the audio guy" here! This time I want to talk a little bit about what I have been doing with the music of
Ethereal.
First of all a quick description of my background as a musician:
I’m primary a
drummer. I play drums since I have 12 or 13 years old. I think a lot in terms of
rhythm, that’s why it’s the drums the instrument that allows me to get the closest to express myself.
Maybe that’s why I was into progressive rock since always. I played in a
Dream Theater tribute band at my 15, and played
Genesis songs,
Deep Purple,
Planet X (not very well though), etc. I think the rhythm doesn't have to be regular or excessively basic to help to express an idea (I don't undervalue simple but well executed rhythms either). In fact in the bands I just mentioned the rhythm has a very active part in the narrative of the lyrics or the feelings the composers wants you to experience. The rhythm it’s always evolving, always
pushing forward.
To exemplify this check this video of the drummer of Dream Theater. Look how intricate the signature times are and how the drum beats are constantly evolving. Maybe the progressive rock it’s not of your taste (and I know Portnoy maybe isn’t my favorite drummer) but still check this out! At least watch it for a minute. Imagine how fun is it to play that stuff. To feel that evolution of the rhythm within yourself.
The point I’m trying to make with this is that for me the rhythm means a lot. This has a lot to do with how I thought the
Ethereal music process.
So… as I was saying...
I play a little bit of guitar, bass, keyboards and maybe sing a little bit too, but those aren’t my strengths at all.
In high school and college I studied harmony and counterpoint (but never finished my degree in musical composition).
The thing I think helped me A LOT in what making music concerns was that at the age of 14 I started to record my own songs. VERY crappy songs. But that helped me to build a certain notion or
musical intuition. Yes, I studied theory but not that much and I kind of like it that way. This doesn’t mean that I won’t be studying musical theory in the future or that I think harmony knowledge is a bad thing. But makes me feel like I’m discovering the things I’m composing, and I have no rules that limits that discovery.
This is totally a personal thing. I’m not saying that musicians doesn’t have to study musical theory.
Please don’t interpret that! Okey. Going a little faster:
In 2013 I published a solo album called
Claroscuro (
http://tomasbatista.com/album/claroscuro). In that same year I started to make music for games in a more serious way, kinda. Also won a little music composition contest here in Argentina. In 2014 I launched with my friend
Nacho Puccini a minimalistic arcade game called
Colourless.
In that same year I met
Nico and started working on several tiny games till he showed me the prototype of
Ethereal and I
INSTANTLY fell in love with the game.
Ethereal Trailer here:
So the thing that matters: The tests I made for the music in Ethereal.
Test I
It was clear to me from the start that the music has to be relaxing, not mentally demanding or
too charge of things going on. It has to evoke a feeling of
meditation. In counterpart, in my experience, inside game development always is expected that the musicians has to make a
really-cool-non-repetitive-a-minute-long loop that help the game feel “not boring”. So in this case I was very scared at the beginning because if you want a “meditation” mood you kinda need repetition and “slowness”, but you can’t be boring, and
repetition and
boredom are very related somehow in the collective mind of the game developers.
Maybe “repetition” isn’t the right word. Maybe “iteration over the same idea” sounds better.
This is the very first try I made. Very simple, too simple maybe, and
not that interesting. The project’s name at that time was “Poem”. We used it as a placeholder though. It has already a quiet mood, also a little bit of nostalgia, but a very electronic sound that I think doesn’t fit with the game. (At first we had not have the visual style and the game itself was very different than what it is today, but that’s another topic).
Test II
Here’s another iteration I made. It’s not the second I tried but here you can see an evolution. This track is a lot more “quieter” than the first one if you want to call it that way. The only
rhythm you hear is an indian percussive instrument that I played in the Vst that comes with Logic Pro but with a low pass filter on it to put its presence a little more far away from the listener so it’s not taking away the player’s attention. You can still feel the pulse with the low frequencies. I took this idea from a track of
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth Soundtrack in which the drum beat has a low pass filter on it and it’s so damn good I wanted to try it out. Can’t remember the level of the track though.
Notice how the rhythm is steady and there are instruments on top of it that comes and goes
building the atmosphere and tone of the game’s environment. There are a couple of “mystic” sounds as I call them because in one point of the game there was like a god that speaked to the player.
Test III
Okey here the thing get’s a little bit
complicated. I wanted to try to build a system to do some aspect (ANY aspect) of the music... well…
procedural. This means that
the player would affect how the music evolves dynamically. I wanted to try this because it blows my mind to do something like that. And at the end of the day I didn’t want to make loops that were steady or solid things that just plays in the background of the game. In the gameplay I feel a sensation of “flow”. A streaming of ideas, of visual effects, of possibilities and
I wanted the music reflect this in some way (if it's possible).
So this is one attempt to make dynamic music. The thing I tried is to combine several “
blocks” of harmony that can change if the player uses different
mechanics. This “blocks of harmony” are made by a tonal note or a couple of tonal bass notes, so you can have only a chord or two chords in the same “block”, a pad that brings the character of the chord is currently playing, and a lot of different instruments doing little melodies in the background and in the front of the music.
I like the mood of this one a lot. And some of the melodies are cool ideas to keep exploring I think. At the end I felt like the player has a little bit of control over the music but we felt that
it’s not quite there yet.
Test IV
This one is a little more complex because I did a lot of layers but I’ve never could apply this to the game. Like... I had no idea what to do with all this layers. Do you remember all my rhythm rumbling? Well, at some point of development I asked myself “
hey, I’m a drummer, why can’t I use my instrument in a weird way to make music for Ethereal?”. I never knew how to do it. But I made this test that involves actual drumming.
There are like
5 layers of
just drums. One with Brushes hitting the ring of the snare and doing like a “shaker” sound. One with a swing and a little bit of comping. One with only brushes in the snare. One with the subdivision of the swing. And one with random hits. All recorded quite nicely I think. Then there’s like
3 layers of different very simple harmony but with different melodies on top. And for last there’s I think
3 layers of different “riffs” as I called them, that is a tonal pattern that repeat itself at some point.
So you have a lot of rhythmic layers. 3 riffs and 3 harmony + melody layers. The Riffs layers change based on if the player uses a particular mechanic. The Harmony layers are played randomly one after another. And the drum layers… I don’t know… This was a
complete failure. I mean, it sounds nice I think, but is very different from the mood that I was building with the other tests, and the thing that doesn’t fit the most is… well
the drums…
To add more complexity to the situation I was learning how to use
Fmod to do this without
bothering Nico so much.
So I was learning how to use Fmod, trying to put real drums on the game, and trying to come up with a system that dynamically changes the music. All at once.
Wrong Wrong Wrong.
In a way I love that this project makes me leave my instrument almost completely. I could say that
rhythm it’s not even vital in the music of
Ethereal. I can have a couple of rhythmic elements sure, but it’s not essential or really needed in this context.
The game developed to a point I felt this is a portal to a
new world. A different distorted reality, or dimension, or whatever you wanna call it. So it has to sound
strange,
mysterious,
uncertain, yet
calm,
meditative,
quiet. It has to sound like a
real place. In that process I had an idea for the implementation of the music that could work. It kind of did in a way, not completely though. But I think we are there. It was the product of a happy accident and of thinking differently the sound design too.
I’m not gonna develop this now because the post is too long already. That would be for another day. But here’s the
Main Theme for
Ethereal. It came up playing with different samples and thinking in the game like a real place with all the words I mentioned above.
Hope you like it! =D
Please feel free to ask, suggest, comment. If there's something that you're interested in discussing with us, please let us know!
Also if you want to check my music, here you can find it:
tomasbatista.comThanks for reading and Happy Holidays!
Tomi...