Victoria

With Halloween coming up, I've been working on a graveyard tileset for a hypothetical top-down 2D game. When thinking about a game's visual design, I often like to write music that's thematically related. I find it helps to set a consistent direction for what I want to create.

So I wrote this Halloween-ish song.

It took awhile to arrive at an aesthetic that worked for me. I started by hunting for bells, music boxes, and the like, and found the Victoriana patch. That worked for a time, and I wrote the first half of the song with it. I later grew weary of the music box vibe, and eventually decided on a harpsichord patch, FullHarpsi 1, one of the few available on the INTEGRA.

Harpsichord turned out to be hard to write for.

First of all, a harpsichord do not offer dynamics in the way a piano does. You just get one note volume. This meant that the instrument could not communicate dynamics, and I had to rely on the composition itself.

Second, the harpsichord sound itself is pretty harsh, which I attempted to solve with effects. I decided to make the track sound like an old vinyl record. My theory was that this would remove some of the unwanted harshness, but also complement a spooky graveyard or haunted house. In any case, it was a chance to play with some audio effects in Ubuntu Studio, so it was worth it. Steve Harris' ViNyl plugin is awesome and so is the x42 EQ plugin.

Overall, I think it came out okay. Happy Halloween eventually!