This playlist is a bit different as it features a lot of actual filmscore music – most of the tracks have actually been used in films, but I’ve snuck in a few that fit with the filmscore feel, but haven’t been used in film to my knowledge.
What film soundtracks would you recommend?
I’ve been making a few playlists on Spotify of work by artists that I discover, especially independent artists – we need all the love we can get! So I’m going to do a series of blog posts so each of these playlists gets their spot in the limelight and you will get the chance to hear and enjoy them too. (In the interests of transparency, I admit I’ve snuck one or two Stoneygate tunes into each list, however nearly all the tracks are from other artists!)
They each cover quite a lot of music – it would be too much for anyone to listen to if I posted them all in one go, but if you’re a music listening super-hero, you’ll be able to see all of them on my Spotify profile.
This list covers acoustic guitar to latin jazz to electronica but the emphasis is firmly on relaxation, and maybe even dropping off to sleep in the process as the list goes on. (Just don’t sleepwalk, OK?) Let me know your favourite tracks in the comments section!
The Way of the Bubble (Beta), Menu Screen
The last few weeks have been a bit intense at times. I signed up for a game music composition course on Udemy in June – maybe not the sanest thing to do during a 30-day composition challenge, but I doubled up and used the homework as Tune-A-Day June tunes, which helped me crack on with it.
It’s the first Udemy course I’ve studied and it is going well. I wanted to write about what I’m learning for Code Like a Girl, because it involves Unity, a very popular game development ‘engine’*. With the games industry being so buoyant it would be good to encourage more girls to get involved. But I needed to write a long-overdue article first to complete the story about making video using Processing 3 to write basic animations, so I ended up writing two articles quite close together. The first article is about making the music visualiser used in the Silver Bird video; the second is about what I’ve been up to on the game music course, which teaches you to make your music adapt to what is happening inside a game and trigger music cues based on events occuring. It’s been really interesting so far and I feel like I’m much better prepared for making more music for games.
I’ve also spent some time trying to learn a little more than is covered on Unity by the game music course by looking at Unity tutorials and just playing around with it. (If you read the second recent article for Code Like A Girl, you’ll see I had some fun body-modding the player character and giving his glasses a makeover). I definitely want to learn more about using Unity, as I’d like to create a simple game that I can use for making video footage from. This will involve learning to code in C#, however, so that will stretch the old grey matter more than a little when I get to grips with it properly. I’ve only really scratched the surface so far. (Unity can also take Java scripts, but the tutorials look like they concentrate on C#, so I’ll just follow those – the two languages seem very similar from my perspective, anyway).
Unity gives you a fantastic platform to work with for making animations, from what I can see, and you can almost treat it like a filmset once you’re proficient, setting up camera angles, getting the camera to follow a character’s movements, or to zoom in to the action, etc. I’m not sure how I’m going to fit in all this learning though. It may be quite a long time before I can make something really decent – if I get that far.
New Game – Way of the Bubble
Meanwhile, I’ve had my first glimpse of the Way of the Bubble game, the first game in the TrickJazz chillout mobile games series, which I already mentioned a few times. The game I was originally scheduled to be in, Dreamwalker, has been delayed, so they’ve included my tune Sunset Landscape as one of the tunes in Way of the Bubble. The game is now in beta testing, and I’ve had a go at playing it already, which I’m naturally quite excited about.
Footnotes:
*I’m not sure how they started calling these things engines – Unity is a development environment where you pull together and organise all the different elements that go into making a game and test it. It has built in elements, like a ‘physics engine’ so you can apply gravity to your objects and make them bounce back from walls, etc. You can also buy additional items to extend the possibilities, particularly of the graphics elements available.
Apologies, I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog front* – I’ve been focussed on getting through the Tune-A-Day challenge. Last night, arriving at the completion of Day 30 was almost an anticlimax – although I did try and write something a little triumphal sounding to go out on, as I’ve never got to Day 30 before.
After the first couple of weeks, I expected it to feel like a physical battle to keep going, as it has in previous years, but it didn’t really get that bad, thankfully, apart from a wobble early on, around Day 8/9. Maybe the previous years’ ‘training’ is starting to pay off, or maybe I was just that bit more accepting of the ideas not being 100% finished. The battle this time was more about ‘this is starting to feel a bit mundane’ or creating more than just a nice sounding intro riff.
Knowing that there was a small but dedicated bunch of people who would be waiting to check out the next tune was very good motivation to keep going. Not letting people down… So thank you if you’re one of those who followed along, commented, liked or retweeted: couldn’t have done it without you.
Enjoying a nice cuppa at Studio Steady
Day 26: First Stoneygate Co-write
A highlight was co-writing with Matt Steady for the first time on Monday (although I was ridiculously tired from a road trip to a family get-together the day before). Co-writing has been a mixed experience in the past: I co-wrote several songs with a friend at Uni, then there was a long gap. It was the first time I’ve co-written as Stoneygate, and I wasn’t sure if I should be using the electronics or the guitar. It is also the first time doing a co-write as part of Tune-A-Day. In case anyone is wondering, it is definitely not cheating – co-writing uses a whole extra level of skills that I need to work on, as well as the composition & lyric-writing, so it was more challenging than sitting down to write alone.
On the day, I didn’t think I’d keep pace if I tried to go with the electronics during the songwriting – I was rather low on brainpower, even after a large dose of Matt’s real coffee. So I stuck with the guitar, to focus on chords, melody and lyrics and not slow myself down worrying about sound design and hitting all the wrong notes. Just as well, I think we were in a funny key (a technical term, honest)!
The song felt like a proper joint effort, and once we’d got past the we’ve-never-worked-together-before shyness, and worked out what we were going to write about, we were challenging each other’s ideas and throwing in our own. There was also the important matter of being made acquainted with the most curious of the Steady cats. The song, being essentially a blues piece, didn’t feel like a Stoneygate song, though, until I’d put it into the computer, messed around to get a bassline that contrasted with the chords, then put some trip-hoppy drums in, and then it all made a lot more sense.
July is looking very busy already. Plus, I’d like to try to get to grips with Unity, the games development platform, as I’d like to try and make a video using it. (I’ve no idea if this is a realistic goal yet – it could turn out to be too big an ask, but I don’t think it will hurt to learn more about it). I’m following a games music composition course at the moment. And, I’ll be doing cover-song swapsies this month with one or two of the other musicians in a Facebook group I’m in. There’s also the small matter of progressing the album(s)! With more than an hour of additional material, the Tune-A-Day exercise gives me a lot more leeway selecting what makes the final cut for the next release.
*Not to mention the email and Twitter fronts.
It’s 20th June, which means two things for me: first, it’s release day for Manipulant’s Eclectro album. It is also Day 20 of the Tune-A-Day June challenge, so once I’ve written a tune today, I’m 2/3rds of the way through.
Tune-A-Day
I am quite surprised to still be going with the challenge. Knowing that there are a bunch of people waiting for the next track has helped enormously! The Tune-A-Day 2017 playlist is currently on Soundcloud. I’m going to run out of space on Soundcloud before I finish the challenge, though, so I’m going to need to do a bit of reorganising of some of my older tracks, starting with removing the ones that I didn’t make public.
Eclectro
Late last night, Manipulant, aka David Speakman, got in touch to let me know that Eclectro was already ‘live’ in Japan, and that it would be available on Amazon and iTunes at the stroke of midnight. Exciting stuff for me, as I’m on the album’s lead track, Run.
Keeps Me Alive reviewed the album along with a great interview with Manipulant, which you can read here.
As well as me singing, the album features contributions from astrophysicist Dr Fiorella Terenzi, who made an album in 1991 called Music from the Galaxies. The music on that album consists of the radio-wave signals from planets and stars and sounds like an eerie sci-fi movie. Who knew that space would already have the best sounds for its own film sound effects?
I thought I’d write a quick update for you on Tune A Day progress (etc). It’s already Day 11 of the challenge, more than a third of the way through, and amazingly I am still going. You can hear the tunes so far via the playlist, above.
I feel more confident of making it to the end of the second week now. That is usually when it suddenly starts to feel like a total uphill struggle, from past years’ experience. This time around, I was quite rusty to begin with, so I had some days in the first week where I really didn’t feel like writing. Added to that, there was the distraction of a UK General Election on Day 8. I normally follow election results online or on the radio overnight, as they come in, so I worked late, when I was already tired, and then caught up on what had been happening in the news whilst I’d been concentrating on writing Tension. (In case you’re wondering the tune was a deliberate reflection of the feeling of being on tenterhooks that I’d had all day.) With the results going the way they did, with no-one winning outright, I didn’t get to sleep until a little after 6am and the late night messed up my body-clock, which didn’t help me with the next day’s task. The election has provided some inspiration towards making the tunes as well as being a hindrance, so it balances out.
Last year, someone stuck a referendum on Brexit in the middle of June, but it didn’t affect the Tune-A-Day June challenge because I’d, ahem, given up by then (gasp!), having decided I wanted to write more songs with lyrics. I was finding I was just rushing to write *something* to meet the targets and not making real progress. This time around I’ve only written one song with lyrics so far, but one of the earlier tunes, Day 6, keeps suggesting odd fragments of lyrics to me. I kind of know what it’s about, but haven’t got the words yet. Because I was so rusty, writing instrumentals is good for me, even if I don’t manage to write many songs.
I’m not 100% happy with everything that I’ve made, of course. There hasn’t been time to mix most of the tunes properly, and there are loads of things I would want to change if I had longer to work them out more. But I’m very pleased to have lasted longer than the first week, and I’m delighted with having made so much new music in so little time after a long hiatus.
Looking at the progress so far, I would want to develop at least some of the tunes further. Reviewing the tunes also showed up various really annoying things I hadn’t picked up on earlier, but that’s pretty normal – you always need to take a break and listen again, and that’s not possible with the Tune A Day timescales.
With the Kickstarter sitting at 72% of its funding target, and 5 full days to go, I’ve received the news from TrickJazz that the Kickstarter is going to be cancelled, because a new source of funding has emerged which will set the project on a stronger footing going forward.
What happened?
Last month, after the Kickstarter had begun and a significant proportion of its funding had been raised, TrickJazz (aka Christian Facey) took part in a hackathon organised by IATA, and unexpectedly won one of the major prizes, for an idea unconnected to the mobile games Kickstarter. This win has brought him into contact with a group of software engineers, who want to progress both the chillout games and the idea that won the hackathon prize. This will mean the Kickstarter campaign is now no longer needed to bring the chillout games to market.
The chillout games are still going to be made, and my music and those of the other artists that have been featured will still be included.
The games are actually going to be available sooner than previously, as the team will be able to concentrate fully on these rather than generating Kickstarter rewards. The first game, “Way of the Bubble”, should become available either later this month or early in July, and the games will now be available as free downloads, so anyone can access them.
As soon as I’ve got more news about this and the Dreamwalker game’s release, which is scheduled to have my Sunset Landscape in, I’ll let you know.
The announcement from TrickJazz can be seen on their Kickstarter updates page.
Quite possibly against my better judgement, I’ve decided to have another go at the Tune-A-Day-June challenge this year. I don’t honestly expect at this point that I will last above a week, as I have just recovered from a nasty cold and am still getting tired more quickly than normal. But I might just surprise myself and get beyond a fortnight.
The Tune-A-Day-June challenge is basically exactly what it sounds like – the idea is to write a new tune every day throughout the month, publishing the better ones on Soundcloud. My first year at this challenge was a couple of years ago, when my friend Max mentioned it, and I decided to join in. I lasted almost the whole month, with a bit of cheating on a few days where I made two tunes to catch up for the odd lost day. Last year, I managed to keep going for about a fortnight, if I remember right.
The challenge tends to start off OK then begins to feel more and more like an endurance test. I actually did a couple of warm up writing exercises this year, ahead of June, because I was feeling a bit rusty, having spent a lot of time trying to promote my work and not so much time writing of late.
There seems to be a lot of psychology involved, as during the challenge, almost everything you make feels like it is below par, because of the rush to complete something each and every day and the difficulty of maintaining creativity over a sustained period – discipline not really being creativity’s most obvious friend. I don’t have the time to produce more than a working demo of each track – sometimes, I don’t even get that far. It can feel unsatisfying to not reach a finished arrangement or mix.
But, looking back over what I’ve produced during June in the last couple of years, it has been a very useful exercise and pushed me out of my comfort zone. With hindsight, it has given at least the beginnings of several of my album tracks and some that will very likely be included on future albums, so it has been incredibly worthwhile, even if it has felt rather painful at the time. Several of the tracks I made last year have received quite a promising reception on Soundcloud. The most surprising response being to Toil, which I posted rather reluctantly at the time, feeling it wasn’t really good enough to upload.
So, on the basis that it will be good for me, I’ll likely be driving myself a little bit crazy over the next few weeks as I scramble to meet the daily deadline, probably stretching it into the wee small hours before I go to sleep. The first tune of the month, Dystopia, is now up on Soundcloud…. more to come!
I’ve spent quite a bit of my time the last week or so trying to raise awareness of the TrickJazz Kickstarter campaign I already mentioned. Nearly a week in, and the Kickstarter is at almost 25%, with 30 backers, which looks fairly healthy at this stage of the campaign, but by no means ensures success – the way Kickstarter works is all or nothing. You have to get to 100%+ by the deadline (8th June), otherwise all the pledges made so far become meaningless.
Why would I spend so much time working for free? Well, this is an opportunity for me to have one of my best tunes used in an actual mobile game which will be downloadable from the App store (for iOS devices) and Google play (for android devices). That is a good thing of itself (especially as I haven’t had to devise and write a game to do it).
On top of that, the TrickJazz Chillout Series games are designed to help players find the music in them. My tune is scheduled to go on the Dreamwalker menu screen, which means that it should be played for a short while every time a player starts the game. So, if the Kickstarter fundraising is successful and the game gets launched, this could mean I find some more people who appreciate what I’m making.
I’m also finding that there are other benefits to putting the effort in promoting the Dreamwalker Kickstarter. As well as learning more about how Kickstarter campaigns work, I’m discovering the existence of a lot of other game developers, so my knowledge and understanding of the sector is improving, too, which could, potentially, be useful in the future.
I’ve spent quite a bit of my time the last week or so trying to raise awareness of the TrickJazz Kickstarter campaign I already mentioned. Nearly a week in, and the Kickstarter is at almost 25%, with 30 backers, which looks fairly healthy at this stage of the campaign, but by no means ensures success – the way Kickstarter works is all or nothing. You have to get to 100%+ by the deadline (8th June), otherwise all the pledges made so far become meaningless.
Why would I spend so much time working for free? Well, this is an opportunity for me to have one of my best tunes used in an actual mobile game which will be downloadable from the App store (for iOS devices) and Google play (for android devices). That is a good thing of itself (especially as I haven’t had to devise and write a game to do it).
On top of that, the TrickJazz Chillout Series games are designed to help players find the music in them. My tune is scheduled to go on the Dreamwalker menu screen, which means that it should be played for a short while every time a player starts the game. So, if the Kickstarter fundraising is successful and the game gets launched, this could mean I find some more people who appreciate what I’m making.
I’m also finding that there are other benefits to putting the effort in promoting the Dreamwalker Kickstarter. As well as learning more about how Kickstarter campaigns work, I’m discovering the existence of a lot of other game developers, so my knowledge and understanding of the sector is improving, too, which could, potentially, be useful in the future.