My workflow in making a Midi mockup track

Creating the Midi Mockup

There are multiple methods available to the modern composer when creating music. It all depends on the type of music and genre one wishes to compose in that will determine the workflow. In this blog post I will be focusing on the workflow I used for making a midi mockup for an RPG theme town set in the medieval ages.

In this video about the making of "Detroit: Become Human" the last section of the video delves into the making of the sound track for the multi faceted gaming. One of the key learning from watching the video is that instruments, sounds, tempo can be taken from our natural world and incorporated into music, for instance the flicking flames set the tempo of one of the themes for Kara. Phillip Sheppard the composer for Kara's theme then overlaid on top of the fast tempo the melodic theme inspired by Kara's name played as a two syllable motif through out.

Carrying the theme of a motif, this is a key element in story telling of piece which is better explained for Christopher Larkin who composed the music for Hollow Knight.

After taking reference from this I learned from listening to game music and themes in various games from Nintendo to PlayStation, there is an understanding when writing music for games/film you can attached an instrument or short melodic phrase to a character or place in the narrative.

Returning to the town theme, the breakdown of the reference track revealed that the structure of the song followed a pattern of (A - A' - B - B' - C - C' - D - D' - A' - B' - E - E) and was in 4/4 time. The first (A) verse being the start of the section and (A') part being the repeat of (A) with a slight added dimension like strings and chords or change in percussion to add interest, completed the 8 bar section.

From my experience in playing music for the recorder, most renaissance pieces of music were composed of Minuets and Study pieces and Variations which repeat the same melodic phrase just repeated twice or three times with a subtle change to the melodic progression. After listing to the reference piece again I decided to follow the structure exactly and compose my own melodic section.

The melodic section is shown below

Short melodic phrase to act as the light motif in this 4 bar phrase

For the melodic phrase I decided to use a bagpipe VST selected in Halion a VST and sampler plugin.

Halion is a VST and Sampling plugin - A standard drum kit is loaded here

The melodic phrase is added at the beginning of each section

The repeated phrase at the beginning of each section (AA', BB', etc.) is effectively the town theme. Later I will record over the top of each section with lived tracked instruments to give interest to the piece.

I also wanted the piece to be of a slow walking pace so I decided to follow a walking speed for the tempo. I walked slowly like as if i was browsing a store and remember the tempo, then tapped it out in ProTools with the "T" short cut and got somewhere between 105-120bpm. After listening to the reference track again I found that it followed 113bpm. Being the lazy person that I was I decided to tune the MIDI track to beat 113bpm. This is similar to how Phillip Sheppard took inspiration from real world events to compose the timing for Kara's theme. I applied this technique and found it worked for the for working out the walking speed for the town theme.

The rest of the track kind of fell into place. Within the reference track I heard that each new section was introduced with a cymbal crash. I did the same with a tambourine which introduced each section well.

Nearing the end of the track for the final section I decided to add extra dimension and a climax by adding a brass ensemble to add extra epic'ness but not too much since we are still just walking around town in the game. The extra brass layer kind of shored up the whole piece.

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