"With my fourth month of releasing a a free montly track at hand, I had a big decision to make. This was the first month where new game development had begun so time was limited. I had to decide whether to just start writing music for the new game and release one of the results, or write an additional track for the free montly post. When it came right down to it, though, neither of the options would work! We were too early in game dev to decide whether or not a track would actually even make it in the game, and my time was too limited to write an additional track. Rock / Hard Place. Then it hit me. I thought it would be way cool just to do a song that was inspired by the game ideas we'd come up with at this point. I decided not to worry whether or not the song would be used in the game or not. I would just get into the zone and see what happened. So away we go.

This new fighting game, we'll call it DPRN for now :-), is going to be a huge project for Toobix. It will be the first downloadable (i.e. executeable) game that we have produced and it will be in Direct X compatible code. It will be the first time that we tackle this particular game genre, too. For these reasons, I knew I wanted the music for the game to have a huge, novel impact on gamers. One advantage I had was that the different characters of the game and much of the plot had already been developed, so I also already had the musical themes in mind for the disparate aspects of this interesting world. I don't want to get into those details just yet as we're only releasing limited info about the game at this point, but let's just say that musically I knew how I wanted the game to sound. Now it was just getting that sound out of my head and onto some magnetic disc.

Getting into music-mode, I released the stopper that I usually have on that part of my brain and let the ideas run rampant. I came up with several short ideas that I recorded and buffed a little, but it wasn't until I re-loaded my JX220 VST soft synth on my newest studio computer that the throttle really went full-on. The initial preset in this synth is a whinny one, but if you're an electronic musician then it's just one of those old school sounds that speaks to you. And, boy, did it ever! It only took hitting two notes on my keyboard controller to take me off writing then ENTIRE melody line for the track! We're talking one sitting, which is a huge difference for the way I usually produce with tons of hard decisions between tons of melody variations. With "crusher" the vision of the track from start to finish was clear right from the outset. That felt GOOD!

With the unique sounding synth and melody line I added some drums that paralleled these themes. I went for some non-standard break riffs paying special attention to the hi-hat elements. I still gave it a big groove, though, so that you are propelled through the track by the kick and snare and crash.

For an instant, I was wondering if I would ruin the track by adding more to it since both of these first two elements came so naturally. Just to test the waters I played the track as is and generated a baseline rhythm in my head. I called up the Triangle II VST and programmed the line into this phat base-production synth. It sounded good, but I was still unsure if I had gone too far with the complexity so I decided to add another mid-high synth rhythm to it to see if it pushed the sound over the edge to chaos. I started with some presets off of Superwave's TrancePro, but everything just seemed to huge and analog. I did take one interesting sounding synth for a high pitched accompaniment, but the rest just would not do. When soft synths don't fit the bill, I always turn to my XP-30 for some inspiration. Fortunately, one of my favorite patches was already cued up and them minute I touched the first noted I knew I had a winner. Add that broken chord idea that plays at the end of the song and plays with the main riff right after the intro, and you have some serious accompaniment that I really think added to the track's personality and complexity nicely. Who says you can't write music while you walk your dogs?

In the end, the track really expresses everything that I want the music of DPRN to convey. It has some seriously harsh power and some deciptively complex soundscapes amid a moving, driving beat. Even more than that, though, I really see this song as a mile stone for me as a musician because it's the first time in a long time that writing music has felt different. I mean different in a good way, too. From start to finish, writing 'crusher' was fluid and natural. In just three sessions the song was 99% written with only one more sessions for tidying up, mixing and mastering. With a similar experience writing 'current' I feel that I'm really understanding what I want in a track more from the outset with less worry about exploring every variation possible or worry about which melody is 'right.' And finally, I'm also learning to leave well enough alone! That is, don't sweat minscule changes to a song that 99.9% of listeners won't ever hear anyway! In summary, really what this song has taught me is this. Don't think so hard about it! Just crush it!"

e-effect, 05/28/08 (1st edit on 05/29/08)