Project Rage DevBlog #2

Here is the breakdown of my work on Project Rage from 2/20/2022 to 3/6/2022. This week my main assignment was the level 1 downtown music.

Level 1 Downtown Music (25 hours)

Experimentation (5 Hours)

In order to get the correct vibes for a cyberpunk world. I listened to a lot of heavy electronic music (3 hours). Some of the things I listened to includes playists such as Monstercat Uncaged Vol. 10 and Cyberpunk based Synthwave. I also started reading a lot of cyberpunk media such as graphic novels like Transmetropolitan and The Surrogates and looking at a lot of art to get a better feeling of the world we are trying to design.

From this I started to think about many of the sounds that may appear in such a cyberpunk city full of neon lights and chaos. I thought about the feelings that are invoked in this sort of environment. I was able to create and find sounds that are robotic and heavily modulated and processed to make it sound very futuristic such as bouncing sweeps and vocal vocal chops ab (2 hours).

Creating the Song (20 hours)

I started out by making an intial draft. I started off with a more relaxed and warped sound as the melody to reflect the cyberpunk environment (3 hours). I added a bunch of audio effects like equilizer, pitch bends, autopan and compression. Then I added the harmonies and bases (2 hours).

However, the next day, I looked at the audio guidelines again and realized that it wasn’t “rage” enough. So I started over, this time focusing more on the rythmn and ambience surround the sound and taking into the account of the vibes of a beat em’ up. I was able to finish the intro section in 2 hour and then I got to work on the build up section which took around 13 hours in total over a series of a few days. In the build up section, I worked on adding more tracks and sound effects to make the sound more full and worked on the fine details of automating the audio effects over each and every track (6 hours). I got stuck on the drums of the build up section (5 hours), as I thought that the drums weren’t “strong” enough. In the end I mixed together many different versions of the kicks and resampled, froze, and flattened many different snares and high hat sounds.

I also worked on cutting up and processing voices a lot to make them sound harmonic with the rest of the piece (2 hours).

After that I worked on the breakdown section adding even more sound effects and the old melody from before to spice up the sound(3 hours). This helped to make an very exciting and busy sounding atmosphere in the music. I also redid the drum beats to a more drum and bass style beat(1 hour). However the biggest problem I had was finding and creating the right sounds for the bass (3 hours). I wanted the bass to be the focus in the breakdown as the music is supposed to be rythmic but I had trouble creating the correct “melody” for the bass. In the end I was able to create something that repeated, so not super exciting, but fell really well with the beats and I was able to layer a lot on top of that to make it sound exciting. The images below shows the final product. I broke it up into multiple images because there really was a ton of tracks!

Overall, I learned a ton from this experience as this is my first time experimenting with so many tracks and so many sounds!