PixlBit

I've decided to do Blog a Day but BaD doesn't count the weekends (right? Right...right), so my first official BaD blog will be Monday but I did want to give a shout out to Pirate Code, the indie game I wrote the soundtrack for, because it's on Mac now. That means I actually get to play through it now (woot!) and YOU, dear reader, should too! I also put up a blog on the Circuit Hive website a while back about writing the soundtrack for the game. It covers things like how I got involved in the project as well as how I addressed the question of what makes a song sound piratey. It gets a little bit into nitty gritty music stuff and I try to relay my thought process behind some of the songs. Here's a preview:

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The story of Pirate Code’s soundtrack actually begins with Super Cell, Circuit Hive’s first game (although technically released by Circuit Hive’s parent company, Green Fire Software). Peter, my older brother, was telling me over the phone all about the game, which was nearly done, back in the spring of 2008. I decided afterwards to write him some boss music…but I didn’t tell him. Just didn’t think to. So when the song was finished a couple weeks later (the demands of my sophomore year of college didn’t leave me a lot of time), I discovered that the game was already done and out – too late for my song. Still, Peter liked the song so much that he bought it from me so that I wouldn’t use it for anything else. (That song, Deadly Trial, is still unused because its orchestral rock stylings really didn’t fit Pirate Code. The music Peter wrote for the gameplay in Super Cell, though, is actually based on a piano song I had written years before, so indirectly I did have a hand that game’s music as well.)

Pirate Music

When work commenced on the next game, Peter asked me to write the music for it, which I was happy to do. As Peter said in his yearly retrospectives on Pirate Code’s development, he had never managed a large project like that before and I had never written a game soundtrack, so neither of us really knew what we were doing. We never made a list of tracks that we needed, so I just wrote things as the need arose. That’s definitely not the way to do it. We also didn’t have a schedule for when I should try to submit things, so literally years separate some of the compositions. I also got married in the middle of the development cycle, which further divided my free time but was ultimately good for the project. My wife is my biggest fan and constant source of ideas.

The first thing I tried to do was simply write a piratey song. What I ended up with is what now plays when you’re at an island. I called it Piratical Adventures (and yes, “piratical” is actually a word). It’s something of a pirate waltz and is definitely the simplest song in the soundtrack. It got the ball rolling and gave the team something to listen to. It also made me grapple with what a piratey song sounds like. I didn’t really have a lot to go on other than some movie soundtracks like Pirates of the Caribbean and Cutthroat Island. What I eventually came to was, first, the instrumentation. The songs would be orchestral at their core but certain instruments like accordion, organ, and flute could really help give it that seafaring flavor. Second was a sense of adventure. All the best piratey songs make you want to jump on a ship and sail the oceans blue. The third thing was the use of modes.

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That's about a third of it and I hope you'll pop over and read the rest, especially if you're at all curious about what modes are. Just click here. And if you wanna try the demo, click here. It's free and will run on whatever OS you're using (well, unless you're one of those odd Linux folk). Thanks for reading, guys, and I'll you see you Monday for BaD #1!