Breakdown of my Hubcast music... Pt2!
The next song I did was a chiptunes song. Now, my biggest influence for this was the plain and simple fact that I'm a gamer. I've always loved the chiptunes genre, whether it be music inspired by that time period and sound or actual 8-bit game soundtracks. I try to avoid using 8-bit because I feel like it's a poor descriptive term and it's not factual at all. Musicians now don't actually make 8-bit music, they make stuff that sounds like it, and even back in the day the term was wrong as well, but this is another topic entirely. I've always enjoyed this style and have never written anything for it, and I figured this would be as good a time as any to get my hand...

Breakdown of my Hubcast music... Pt2!
The next song I did was a chiptunes song. Now, my biggest influence for this was the plain and simple fact that I'm a gamer. I've always loved the chiptunes genre, whether it be music inspired by that time period and sound or actual 8-bit game soundtracks. I try to avoid using 8-bit because I feel like it's a poor descriptive term and it's not factual at all. Musicians now don't actually make 8-bit music, they make stuff that sounds like it, and even back in the day the term was wrong as well, but this is another topic entirely. I've always enjoyed this style and have never written anything for it, and I figured this would be as good a time as any to get my hands dirty. When I was growing up, gaming was a big deal in my house. My mom and I used to play NES together, with her guiding me along while I played. We beat a LOT of games that way, and one of my favorite was Mega Man. I had them all, I played them all, I loved it. One thing that I always loved was how much attention the music in that series was given.... each character had their own themes and such and it was just so well done. I've always been really inspired by those soundtracks, and I really tried to make the chiptunes song feel like it could've been in an old Mega Man game. I started by laying down again a very basic drum track that I had been working on for a while for other projects, and tried to avoid using guitars and synths as it wouldn't fit the overall theme for this song and for this genre. I again was also using FL Studio, so I had a wealth of electronic plugins available to me as FL is mainly a DAW for electronic artists. I started with a basic melody for a lead part, and found a preset in a plugin that modeled old Moog synths and 80's sounding synths and messed with the effects a little bit until I had a really good sound to it without being too guitar like. I also wrote a very simple note progression that would be played by a bass in a regular band and used a bass preset that sounded appropriate for a chiptunes style song from a plugin (I don't really remember any of these plugins very well... sorry ) and made sure to bring down the volume on the bass so it wouldn't be noticable, more of a low end boost really. I used the basic midi drumset sound as it had that perfect sound for the style I was going for, and with a little bit of eqing and using (very lightly) a reverb effect I got the perfect drum sound for this track. I then dug around until I found a plugin that had a good preset for the lead synth part (the held, single note lead) and I found it in the Toxic Biohazard plugin. I went through a lot of tough decisions with this, and then eventually decided on a really high pitched preset that I had tweaked and removed a lot of the effects the preset currently had on it. I then gave it some chorus, reverb, and put a slow moving flange in the mix and the mixture of all the effects gave it that nice chiptunes sound. Overall, VERY proud of this track and my first stab at this genre, you'll probably hear a lot more of this from me!

And the last track for now was... very difficult for me lol. I made a rap song, and let me tell you it was hard. I don't enjoy rap and I certainly never pictured myself writing one! I started with the lyrics, which kinda flowed out. I was thinking in a style kinda like the early '90s Tupac, Biggie Smalls, and Snoop Dogg/Dr Dre, and I think that's really reflected instrumentally. The lyrics were hilarious and a lot of fun to write, and it was a lot of fun to try to be this big "manly" gangsta, which is SOOO not me! The lyrics also came out semi-sexual and womanizing, which was especially hilarious to me seeing as I know it drives Goose nuts and that's TOTALLY not me again. After the lyrics were written, I felt around for the beat that I had written them to and determined that a really bass-y thumping drum part would fit really well with the structure of the lyrics. Again, it's an entirely different writing style that went into this as rap isn't really about instrumentals, the lyrics are the spotlight and you really have to try to keep the music in the background. I used the EZdrummer plugin again, this time using the Number 1 hits expansion pack. This one emulates a lot of drum machines that are used in rap/hiphop production. I wrote out the beat using a low tom and a clap track in the Number 1 hits kit, and then eq'd the tom so it had a really full low range, and eq'd the clap so it wuld be somewhere in the middle with a little bit of a high-end bite. I then recorded the vocals and added that very Tupac-like delay, chorus, and reverb to it. I also dug around again for a plugin that was a good fit for the synth. I found a preset in the same plugin I used earlier for the chiptunes song that had a good sound, so I added a thin chorus with a really fast moving flange. I'm suprised I managed to pull something like this together, it was quite a bit of work and I was definetly out of my element here!

So, I hope you've enjoyed this, as I said I really like when artists give details as to how they made stuff or what they use. I'll be a guest on the Hubcast June 1st, and if you want to download anything I've made it's all on my Soundcloud account here. I want to give a shoutout to Goose and Kal, two of my awesome friends at the Hub (and my Grifball teammates!) and remind everyone to check out my Soundcloud account for more music. And who knows, maybe I'll make a few more to test drive!