The song I am making for my game is going to be short and will loop hopefully without becoming too annoying. I am using Garageband but have decided to try and refrain from using the premade loops available and to create my own using the software instruments.
The first thing I did before recording anything was consider what type of music would best fit my game. Since my game is a point and click set in the Victorian times, I decided that the instruments used would probably be ochestral or associated with classical music. My intial idea was that the music would be ambient, so there would be no promiment melody or beat. However I realised it would be more difficult to produce a music track like that as it would involve making a longer song.
In Garageband, before I started recording I tried various instruments and experimented with the actual melody. I quickly got a rough idea of how the music would sound an what instrument I wanted to use, which was a plinky sounding piano.
This piano in itself didn’t quite sound right, so I messed around with the effects for a while...
I found that the bit crusher effect works very well in terms of making the piano sound more plinky, while still retaining the classical sound.
The settings for effects can be modified by clicking the icon, which brings up the settings menu. There are usually several presets available which can be selected by clicking the menu that says "Manual" under the name of the effect. I also added reverb after adding the Bitcrusher effect as the sound seemed to lose its fullness.
To record the instrument I used the “Musical Typing” window. This allows the computer keyboard to be used like a non-computer keyboard.
After recording a few notes I opened the piano roll window by double clicking on the item in the track and modified the notes by changing the pitch and timing to be consistent.
I did that by dragging the grey bars. The length of the notes can be changed by simply grabbing the edge and dragging which expands/shrinks it. In this window you can also copy and paste notes in the same way you would usually copy and paste anything in any other programme. You can also copy and paste the sound in the track, which is what I did for the next part of the song.
I added extra notes to this part by holding ALT and clicking on the grid. I lowered the velocity of the new notes by selecting them and using the velocity slider.
After I had the piano track down I added a new track by going to Track -> New Track…
I decided to add some bass as the music seemed to sound a bit shallow. Using the same methods above I made and finished the bass track.
I decided against adding any more instruments as it would over complicate the song and could make looping it more work.
To loop the song I clicked the cycle region button and then dragged the yellow bar so it stretched from the begging to the end of the song, so the entire thing loops.
