"After finishing the Frog vs. Fly OST redbeard_prime and I were off to create an action game about a loveable purple being with three little feet, three big emotions, and three flaming reasons to run like crazy: flaming boulders, flaming boulders, and flaming boulders. Like the Frog vs. Fly OST, the art for Hampton was first to be developed, so I had an idea of what Hampton and his happy island turned bad was going to look like. The happy part of that equation, of course, is exactly what 'The Corndog Shuffle' was written for, and was inspired by a little clip the bearded one strummed out on his guitar one evening. While the shuffle was born in the same approach I took for the frog and the fly, I decided to take a slightly less traditional approach to the in game music that you may not have expected to hear with such a cute character on the screen.

The inspiration actually came from the little guy himself as the beard showed me Hampton in action for the first time. As I sat there and watched his little feet blur beneath his body...er...head...er...you've seen him! Anyway, as his feet were blurring and he was whipping back and forth across the screen at 100 miles per hour, I thought to myself, "He looks like he's dancing!" In a John Wayne sense where someone is firing a revolver at your feet, I guess he really was, but when I played that 4-2-the-floor dance beat while he moved it fit just perfectly. It was hillarious, too. With that, I decided to play opposite the art on this project and write some mean grooves for the little guy. This worked pretty well not only for the fact that it gave Hampton a cool soundtrack, but it really reflected the fact that there were flaming boulders falling from the sky. Cool.

redbeard_prime and I decided that we'd start with three songs for in game play, and the first tune that came to me was 'On the Run.' The deep clav sound off my XP-30 that starts out the track was the nidus for the track as it gave that dark, almost evil feel to the air. The monotone rhythm that plays overtop of the low, long note from the patch came naturally from improvising with the sound for just a few minutes. Although I had the perception of Hampton dancing as his feet move a mile a minute, I didn't necessarily want to write a dance album for the entire soundtrack. For this reason I went with a breaks/break beat style percussion with a little funky flavor to get gamers warmed up for the tracks to come. I added in that phat square wave bass synthesizer and programmed a hard saw wave synth lead with the Scorpion VST synthesizer to round out the track, and then got busy with'm. The lead melody that the Scorpion filters into has that classic minor key vibe going on to add to the darkness of the tune. I had some fun playing out different variations with it throughout the tune in order to keep the song interesting and also to change the mood a little bit. The beginning of the track is almost laid back in a sense. This reflects the fact that the boulders are moving pretty darn slow. This part of the song gives the gamers a chance to emotionally warm up to the bedlam of boulders that starts falling by the time they reach the middle of the track. The music really picks up here a bit with that pulsating bassline at 03:15 and then goes into some pretty thick and jarring bassline rhythms with some mid range techno-style percussion at 03:42/43. That mid range percussion actually wasn't in the first cut of the tune, though,and actually at this point in the production I had another idea on how to enhance the game's audio even further.

Since the gameplay itself is designed to be one continuous, never ending challenge, I thought why not make a continuous, never-ending soundtrack, too. You're probably thinking I'm pretty crazy to think that it's possible to make a never ending soundtrack, and you're right in one sense; however, what if I make three songs and mix them together like a dance music CD, and then I make the ending of the last song continuous with the beginning of the first song? You tell the game to loop back to the first song when it's finished playing through the soundtrack and then what do you have? A continuous, never-ending soundtrack! This is exactly what I did for the game, too. It worked out wonderfully although the concept of 'mixing' three separate songs together did not go precisely as I had expected.

The prime and I decided on three songs for the game, and at first in my mind I had the idea to write three separate tracks. As I got to the end of composing 'On the Run,' though, I looked at all of the unused variations I had on the main themes in that track. This, of course, got me thinking back to my original style of composing. When I say original, I'm talking before Transmission 2 6 01 even when I was laying down the initial version of Synthergy and Rave me where I would just lay down variation after variation of themes to have a constant changing sound pallette in each song. I had a friend comment once that when you listen to my old tracks you get like 3-4 in one because they're always changing. To a certain extent I have kept that style, although now I try and limit the number of variations in each track to give a more cohesive song since many people, including myself, would get lost in my early works. As I reminisced about this old style of production and sat there listening to the 'On the Run' variations, I came up with an alternate to the 'mix three song' plan mentioned above. I would take these variations and turn them into songs of there own. The songs would be completely different styles but use the same instrumentation and tempo. The most important part to this new method, though, was that instead of ending 'On the Run' and then mixing in the next track, I would blend the composition of the former into the latter letting the sound of the preceding track inspire the composition of the next. In the end, it would sound as if I mixed two songs together, when in reality I actually wrote the two songs together! I took the same approach writing the third track, and in the end had really created one 18 minute song with three movements! Of course, I stuck to my guns and blended the outro of track 3 with the intro to 'On the Run' to keep song as a whole continuous like the game. Because of the additional composition ideas and continous looping of the song, I decided to go with the collective label 'Megamix' to try and encompass these new ideas into the title.

Being at the end of the 'On the Run' I knew I wanted to change styles for the second song that would eventually be called, 'Beyond,' and one of the variations that came up in composing the first song had hard trance written all over it. Lucky enough, the instrumentation used for 'On the Run' fit perfectly into the hard trance genre. The bassline is definitely one of my favorite sounds in 'Beyond' along with the scratchy fuzz sound that works its way back into the mix on the back beat at 05:46. The latter is one of the prime's favorites as well, and you'd know it by the number of times he has asked me since then to put it into other songs ;-). I think the pad that hits in at 08:34 really centers the track as a whole, though. This is why I spent the first half of the song really warming up to this part with slowly bringing the full rhythm of the Scorpion lead synth in and just ever so subtedly going from a monotone bassline cadence to matching the climb of the lead synth that starts at 07:36.

'Beyond' had a couple other nice features, one of which found its way into the third and final part of the Megamix. The kick to the song is actually produced with a very subtle special technique that my mentor, Steve Pendulum (a.k.a. Dirty Bass, a.k.a. Hard Funk), taught me. While it is not evident to the untrained ear, I think all the techno heads out there will appreciate it very much. The other feature that I started with this track had to do with the mid range percussion. Up until 'Beyond' I had always used percussion instruments that I would create with the Tomcat synthesizer in OrionPro for my mid range fills. I did this because I really wanted to have a unique sound compared to all of the bongos, congas, and blocks I heard others using. These more common forms of instrumentation were just not the sounds that I heard in my head when I created songs. I came to realize this with 'Beyond' while I beat boxed the percussion to the track. This was something that I commonly do for the percusion in all of my songs, but it wasn't until 'Beyond' that I finally decided to just record that with a mic and stick it in the song! After all, it's what I heard so I knew it was right. This worked great with 'Beyond' as you actually hear the percussion start up at the end of 'On the Run' at 03:42/43. That's me beat boxing. It took a little processing to get it to actually fit in the mix, but the end result was very effective. So effective that it actually inspired the percussion in the final track of the megamix called 'Inside Out.' This percussion starts at 13:15 and really inspired the funky groove parts of the track. I say parts because this last song has many faces. Let me try and tell you why.

Remember when I said that the whole inspiration for doing the Megamix as it's done was my nostalgia for my early production days? Well, when I reached the end of 'Beyond' that nostalgia hadn't left, not even in the slightest. In fact, it had really welled up in me by this point since I had still been structuring the first two songs into genre norms. At the end of 'Beyond' I just wanted to do a song, the final song of the game, in my style. A style without boundries or borders and without the worry of fitting a structure or genre. I wanted to bring all of the things that I loved in music without regard to structure, common practice or common form. This song was going to be me, inside and out. At that point a certain degree of freedom penentrated my spirit and I just started going crazy. You can hear me really warming up as I destruct the tidy 4-2-the-floor rhythm of 'Beyond' at 11:46 and continue to get loose at 12:13/14 with some major distortion applied to a phat 909 snare. The bassline in the background is again the same bassline used in the previous two tracks, but I bent the heck out of it like I did the Scorpion lead that starts to filter in at 13:49/50. I was pleased with these sound changes and the nice abrupt transition (f*#@ off chorus!) between my vary disparate ideas in this song that occurs after I twist the heck out of the bassline at 13:08/09. There was something missing to the track, though. I just felt like I needed a defining synth sound. One that would get inside your soul and stir you up deep down. That's, of course, when I knew I was going to grab my WASP analog synthesizer and create some meaness. It plays throughout much of the song, but really gets dirty at 15:01/02 when you see it in its low frequency glory. Ah.

The structure of the rest of the track followed the first half really with tons of hooks, stopping one type of rhythm and starting another, and just blatent disregard for musical traffic signals. It was way fun mixing in the break beat rhythms with the 4-2-the-floor rhythms in the track without long trance transitions or other genre norms. It gave the song the raw style I was looking for, especially at 16:51. That' my favorite part of the song. The ending was composed in the same light as I took a bunch of the sounds from the songs and destructed them with delays and detuning to produce that long, drawn-out feel that it has.

Looking back at the Megamix, I have to say that I'm very pleased with the results. It represented a brand new way of composing a game soundtrack, and really composing in general. At the same time it afforded me the freedom that I've always longed for in producing. All the while, I was able to create the first of many soundtracks for a little guy who has really evolved into the mascot of Toobix. Who knew a little purple being with three little legs and a big smile on his face could be so inspiring?"

e-effect, 01/18/08

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