After looking at the three games we had for class I decided to score for the FPS game. I felt that scoring the RPG would be a little close to the more traditional orchestrations that I have done for the first two parts of the assignment.
For a genre I chose to do electronica/hardcore. My first step was to look for a few guitar samples. I was after something that was heavy and distorted but had a good metal riff. Not quite Djent, but also not 90s metal, I couldn’t find it so, I picked up my guitar and plugged it into my effects unit and dialled in a tone and came up with a quick riff.
I had in mind that I needed a cue for the main boss and at least two levels of different energy. One for the start room and one for the rest of the rooms. I wanted to have a break between the main rooms and the boss room.
I also wanted to include some glitchy, more electronic sounds, to make it feel game like. Think 80s video games on Commodore64. There are several 8-bit like effects when the music is going full-on. While at odds with the heavy guitars, but the synths being full spectrum support the guitars limited frequency range, so it works from a timbre perspective.
I used a 909 for the kick as I wanted this to be EDM-like. It didn’t feel aggressive enough, so I added a very distorted drum sample. It may sound like overkill, using both kicks resulted in a better attack but also had the aggressive distortion that I was after.
I’m going to revisit this in a few days’ time to make sure that it’s right, but overall, I’m very happy with it.