Insert Credit December 2022 Art Jam Artist Statement
Your significant other got you a homebrew NES game for Christmas. It’s a Santa-themed Konami-style shooter. It’s kind of a ripoff of Lifeforce (though this audience will probably know it by the name Salamander), but you don’t even care because the first level’s music goes so hard!
DJ Tent Mode’s Big new track drops now!
You can download an mp3 of “Big Santa Energy” here.
You can download an NSF of “Big Santa Energy” 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 Big Prompt
What do we want? Sleigh bells! What key do we want them in? It doesn’t matter because I don’t think I want them to be too tonal. But we also want this piece to be in 6/8 time because Yuzo Koshiro said the following:
I don’t think I actually wrote a song in 6/8, I am pretty sure it’s in 4/4 with triplet sub-divisions. Still sounds cool and different from what I’ve written in the past.
I also literally do not know what key it is in. I intended to write something in B♭ but I think it’s in some kind of G mode. I’m hoping someone who is better at music theory can look at my notation and tell me what mode or scale it’s in.
Sleigh Bells and 6/8 Time
I’m a sucker for 6/8 time and wrote the arpeggiated intro pretty quickly. I had a hard time with the math for how many notes I needed per pattern and ended up with a 10 measure patter rather than a 4 or 8 measure long which is the disadvantage of only doing your hobbies late at night when you can no longer do fractional math and your brain is like, “60 is what you want!” instead of “Uh, no, you want 12-divisions per measure times 4 measures so 48”. Neither of them are a power of 2 - which is what we mostly work with in music that’s in 4 or in 2 - and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to play around with it and figure out what my pattern size needed to be. This is important because it sets how many measures you have and it’s musically awkward to our Western-music ears if measures aren’t grouped in 4s or 8s.
I also wanted to bring in a few samples again and quickly overdid it with the bass and snare hits I’ve used in the past which were fine, but sounded ironically to “big” for the piece. Then I didn’t find a sleigh bell sample in my kit, so I stuck a cowbell in there and it just sounded bad. I went back to just the noise channel for percussion and thought I’d come back to it later.
A fascinating discovery I made when I was kinda-sorta doing research by listening to the Mega Man 3 soundtrack is that Bun Bun (et al.) don’t really use any kind of bass drum/kick drum at all in that game. The beats are all subdivided by fast treble-pitched snare proxies in the noise channel without a specific voice to set apart the down beats. Yes, I realize that’s a Capcom house style rather than a Konami house style that I said I was intending to emulate, but I thought it was an interesting thing to notice.
For much of the song’s life I was only using snare patterns on 1346, and I didn’t develop more complex time-keeping until the last few hours or so of work on it.
Santa’s Melody and Music
All of the Big Santa Energy is coming from the sleigh bells. It’s symbolic and I didn’t want to reference any other holiday music beyond that thinking that the bells themselves will style the song with plenty of holiday cheer.
I started with the intro bass line and expected to have that track throughout the whole song to help subdivide the beat, but it’s just too much volume to have it all coming out of the triangle channel. I ended up using the 6-note arpeggio pattern for the intro and the transitions and wrote a very simple bass line with repeated notes and an octave jump to accent the beats.
I was talking last month about how I wanted to try to specifically work with more chords and I did that with intention this month. I do think I ended up with a bigger and louder sound than I normally get because of it. I can’t say I wrote the chords themselves super intentionally beyond writing a simple harmony of the melody on 3rds and 5ths but I think it works out well. The instrumentation with more sustained instruments rather than decayed instruments that I tend to work with also contributed to a fuller sound.
I’m probably the happiest with the interlude in the middle of the piece. I like the chime-like instrumentation and the triplet feel. It seems to be the strongest reference to a Salamander-alike shooter in the piece. I also think I’ve got a personal affectation of large slow chord swells. I did that last month too. But hey, at least I didn’t plagiarize myself this month!
Is DJ Tent Mode on Hiatus?
I have a large life change that begins next month. I’m returning school to do a graduate degree in addition to keeping my full-time job to keep the lights on. I’m proud and excited about it, but I don’t think I’ll have as much time to be such a prolific composer.
But as long as I’m talking about being proud, I’m super proud of what I contributed this year. I went from not really having written any NES music to having composed about an album’s worth of music. I think that’s pretty neat and it’s certainly not anything I had on my list of goals for 2022.
I hope that all of you are also proud of what you contributed this year and feel like you developed in whatever you were working on. I’ve enjoyed everyone’s work.
Hope to post semi-regularly if not monthly.
