Artist’s Statement
It’s a rainy afternoon at 3 PM and you are playing an NES action/adventure game. You’re in the marsh outside the castle. What are you even looking for out here?
DJ Tent Mode’s Mysterious and Eerie new track drops now!
You can download an mp3 of “Three is Spooky” here.
You can download an NSF of “Three is Spooky” here.
The NSF is a ROM that will execute on NES hardware, in an NES emulator, or in an NES music player. I like to use GaMBi on my phone.
The Mysteerious Prompt
If you force yourself to write a song in ¾ time, you’re 75% less likely to plagiarize yourself from last month inadvertently. I also wanted to use long slow attacking notes that rise and fall in volume. Feel pretty good about how the mood matched the prompt this month. Bonus points are being awarded to DJ Tentmode for setting the color scheme of DefleMask to October orange.
This Month’s Mystery Song Process
For the rhythm section I reused the drum samples from last month’s song which were intentionally versatile. The noise channel is used exclusively for the brushed snare hits. I also wanted something that was a bit more minimal to match the mood with more silence. No drum fills or solos. They are there to quietly keep time.
The measures are sub-divided by the walking bass lines which help with melodic motion through the piece and also helps keep time when the melody has long notes.
The Eerie Instrumentation
I ended up using more instrument definitions than I usually do in my compositions. The instrument voices are mostly for texture and timbre. The piece is a bit repetitive with only a few different melodic ideas. They are varied by changing out the instrumentation.
The “pluck” notes are octave jumps that are defined in the instrument. I noticed that you frequently hear this in GameBoy music specifically as a way to provide some percussive texture. When the note is struck, it plays the first note for a few clock ticks and then jumps up an octave. I used the same kind of note macros back in March in “Together on the Next Screen”, but used them as arpeggios to build chords rather than to make the melodic voice distinctive.
The big bassoon lines at the end of the song are just long held notes at 25% duty cycle which sound nice and fat and buzzy in the low registers.
I’m in my learning to write chord progressions story arc
My biggest challenge as a composer is having harmonies and chords that lead somewhere over multiple measures and land somewhere other than back at the root of the key. This was pretty noticeable for me when I was trying to resolve the bridge back to what I think is E-minor (not really good at music theory everyone!) for the loop.
Melodies and rhythms and an overall song structure comes much more naturally to me than chord progressions and anything that harmonizes on anything more complex than a major chord or one of its inversions.
See you all next month. Make sure you have your waterproof boots equipped.
