native funk
"One of the best parts about writing music for video games is that you never know what genre you're going to be into next. Heck, you might find yourself genreless sometimes, which is a personal preference for me! Since video game music is often driven by the characters and themes (I say often because sometimes the music itself brings the inception of the game, characters, and/or themes. See the stories behind the Mages OST and Inside the Box for examples!), the boundaries and styles afforded by certain genres sometimes do not apply. Instead, the images of the characters, the attitude of the antagonist, the portrait of the background, the battle with the end boss, the love of the heroine, and all of the other great concepts that find their way into video games inspire melody and rhythm that eventually become the song. 'native funk' was one of those tracks.
The whole idea started with a set of ancillary characters for a platformer thought up by redbeard_prime. These characters were lab rats that had taken on a tribal societal form. Don't believe me? Well, you asked for it!
Now you are a believer! Before I started writing the song, I believe I had a few different natives to look at, and a concept for a minigame had already been thought up by the prime involving these characters. What he needed from me was to come up with what this tribe sounded like.
While acoustic percussion instruments were a given starting point based on the drawings he had sent me, in my head I also saw kind of a DJ Native behind some turn tables spinning thumping jungle beats. Hey, I'm an electronic musician. What do you want? :-) For this reason I thought I'd do like a jungle house style, albeit loosely jungle house. I knew I wanted percussion to drive the track so I started out by recording a triangle patch off of my XP-30, mapping different types of strikes to my sampler and then getting busy with some rhythms. I was pleasently surprised that the mainy melody/rhythm for the track came right out, and that's what you hear during the intro and throughout the rest of the song. The key to that sound was really making sure the closed triangle sound cut the open triangle sound. Once you do that, things just automatically get pretty funky!
The remainder of the intro and first half of the track fell into place with an acoustic ensemble of bongos, congas, guiros, wood blocks, and other native sounding percussion instruments. I just tried to make an amalgamation of rhythms that gave a nice jungle feel, but I tried to stay a little layed back for the first half of the track. This was, of course, a total setup of things to come.
In the game music I had written prior to 'native funk' vocals were noticeably absent. For this track though, I couldn't get the voices to stop in my head! They sounded like some long drawn out female chants followed by some powerful manly grunts. Now, the manly grunts weren't a problem for me, but making my voice sound female was an entirely different issue. What I did to get the female vocals for the track was record myself singing the chants falsetto. Then I put them into my sampler and pitched them up. Using multiple instances of the sample, I tried to pitch a few of them off of the tonal to get a little chorus going on. Add a few effects and some reverb and BAM! Instant female natives! The approach to the male vocals were done similarly except I used a wider range of samples and pitches on my voice. Gave it a little bass boost as well in order to make sure you really felt those things drop. The only thing left to add to the jungle hypnosis was the beat.
Having a completely acoustic track was a possibility, but I decided that the track would have a much cooler sound if there was an underlying 4-2-the-floor beat going on. I decdied to further contrast the first and second halves of the track by using a light, punchy kick for the former and a deep buzzing thumper for the latter. It really helped bring out the grit and funk of the second half of the track along with that faster conga/bongo rhythm that is playing. Add that guiro on the up-swing and you've got some body movin' stuff!
Looking back at the track now really makes it hard not to go through and mention each instrument of the song in detail. The reason being is that in this particular case there was no single instrument that was the star or that made the song, but each individual instrument was so essential when placed in the group. Really, the sound that this song brings out is completely dependent on the interaction of the instruments together. This is a running theme in my music for sure, but when you mute an instrument in the track you can really hear the emptiness of sound that it leaves. The good news is that we'll put this theory to the test in the minigame that this song was written for! Look for it soon in the Toobix Arcade! Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed the track and that you now know what 'native funk' sounds like!"
e-effect, 01/02/08
