In this short bonus episode, Woe.Begone creator Dylan Griggs delivers the lyrics of his composition &apos;Painted Glass&apos; in a poem, with an underscore of original music by John Bartmann. This bonus episode is a companion to the full episode "104 - Woe.Begone - Dylan Griggs - Painted Glass". Listen to it in the How I Make Music podcast feed. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.ABOUT THIS SHOWDiscover new fiction podcasts in an immersive, sound-designed listening experience with their music composers. In this show, we challenge audio drama music makers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made. Headphones recommended.View transcript, credits and show notes https://howimakemusic.comSubscribe https://pod.link/howimakemusicView perks for patrons https://patreon.com/howimakemusicHow I Make Music is created by John Bartmann https://johnbartmann.comSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

How I Make Music

BONUS: A poem by Woe.Begone creator Dylan Griggs

Join Woe.Begone creator and composer Dylan Griggs as we explore composition &apos;Painted Glass&apos; and take a trip into the mind of the sociopathic fictional series character Mike Walters. With influences ranging from The Postal Service and Bon Iver to alternate reality games, &apos;Painted Glass&apos; is a rich and varied indie love song which musically conveys the inner workings of a troubled mind. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.TRANSCRIPT 00:00 INTRO The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called Painted Glass. It&apos;s a narrative intermission song, which I wrote for a time-travel mystery story Woe.Begone today. We&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart the music of a fictional podcast and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Dylan Griggs. I&apos;m a showrunner, actor, writer and musician from Kentucky. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, Painted Glass from the audio drama Woe.Begone by me, Dylan Griggs. Thanks for listening in. 01:40 ABOUTYeah. So my name is Dylan Griggs. I am the, I guess showrunner is the appropriate word because I&apos;m the actor, writer, soundtrack, artist, editor, all of that stuff for a show called Woe.Begone. Woe.Begone is the story of this guy named Mike Walters who discovers a mysterious and violent online game called Woe.Begone. Mike is a danger to himself and others to put it lightly, who is in love with someone and is very concerned about that and what that can mean for their relationship. Horror sci-fi mystery with some comedy, roughly in that order. The show isn&apos;t for everyone, there are some violent moments. There are some moments that might cause discomfort in some people. I record the whole soundtrack for that episode, from front to back in response to the things that happened in the episode. I&apos;ve been doing indie music since I was like 13, 14. I just have this workhorse mentality as far as getting songs done. I really like breaking format. I wrote a whole bunch of electronic music as a teenager. And then I put it away for a long time and became a de facto rock musician. Bere&apos;s a rock track from my band Sadloaf. I started playing around with Ableton as a way to write the show. I feel like it sets me apart a little bit to have so much music and so much focus on music. It&apos;s a very fast paced...there&apos;s a lot of ‘go with your gut’ story writing and songwriting. Honestly, everything is written in a week. It also became a way to trick people into listening to my music because in order to listen to the episode of Woe.Begone, you have to listen to my music.04:27 INFLUENCESThere is an immediate comparison to be drawn between Painted Glass and The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service. They are the same tempo and in the same key. That was totally on accident. I like the sort of organ-y sounds that The Postal Service song has. We&apos;re going home at the end of every bar, essentially. Yeah, going home. It&apos;s like a full release of tension. It&apos;s what you imagine as the last note of a song where everything is completely resolved and there isn&apos;t any tension to glean from it. You&apos;re completely at rest. There&apos;s a pedal tone of like the F the whole time. We&apos;re very grounded.When I grew up, I didn&apos;t have anything but a computer for the first couple of years that I was making music and I got really into Telephone Tel Aviv, where they&apos;re doing these sort of, I guess, simple melodies, but they&apos;ve got these drums that are sort of IDM. And they&apos;re not afraid to be abrasive with the drums. Like the drums are the key instrument in the song. It&apos;s almost like a breakcore. And so I love that whole album Fahrenheit Fair Enough.Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

104 Woe.Begone - Dylan Griggs - Painted Glass

Okay. The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called Pandemonium. It&apos;s a theme from Among the Stars and Bones, an audio drama about a team of xeno-archaeologists investigating alien ruins on a distant world. Today we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. I love doing voiceovers. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart the music of fictional podcasts and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Oliver Morris. I&apos;m a composer from Bedfordshire. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, Pandemonium from this audio drama Among the Stars and Bones by me, Oliver Morris. Thanks for listening in. 1:36 ABOUTAmong the Stars and Bones is a xeno-archaeological horror show. Chris, the writer, he was like you did the theme for Modern Fae and I was like yes I did. I didn&apos;t know a lot about it other than the fact that it was a xeno-archaeological horror show, which was just the best combination of words that I had heard in a pitch document ever, because you’ve got xeno for aliens and then archaeology. So I was very excited to make this piece of music that was going to build and grow along with the show. The show itself is about a bunch of xeno-archaeologists who get together to go investigate this ancient dead alien civilization. They find relics from it, and then they start to get convinced that the relics are controlling them in ways and it goes to some wild places for sure. Take us to outer space! Chris Magilton is the writer of Among the Stars and Bones. Oh no, wait, hold on. I&apos;ve mispronounced that already. Go me. Chris Marlington Chris McClinton. Hold on. I feel really bad. Chris Magilton. Magilton. Magilton. Chris Magilton. Chris Magilton, the writer, and he also plays Ben on the show. I only know him as ‘ungodly hour’ because that&apos;s the time that he always contacts me. Sorry Chris.4:13 GETTING STARTEDI own approximately 27 guitars. I play keys. I do at all. My intro into composing properly was for my podcast Kane and Feels, Paranormal Investigators. Kane and Feels, Paranormal Investigators, a horror noir audio fiction show. Which is just very funky from beginning to end. That&apos;s how I kind of got my start in composing. I&apos;m a fiend. I just I make music. I can&apos;t stop. It&apos;s nicotine and music. Those are my two vices. 5:20 HALF LIFE GAME INFLUENCEWhen we started kind of composing, I asked Chris if there&apos;s anything he wanted it to sound like and he was like, well I do really like the Half-Life video games. I love the soundtrack of Half-Life, which are these wonderful, industrial synthetic beats. Play scientists with a crowbar, it&apos;s one of the more bizarre opening concepts to a thing. You&apos;re like hitting undead zombies with a crowbar. Delving into the back catalogue of that was joy. Doing that sort of initial kind of figuring out of what the sort of the timbre of the piece was going to be like. I&apos;m a big fan of an Australian band called Pond, who wrote a song called Giant Tortoise. Huge, soul-evaporating baseline. And I was like, how soul-evaporating a baseline Can I come up with?7:10 MARIMBA BITCRUSHER The piece itself is a waltz. So it’s in 123. So we had these piano lines. One of the piano lines we eventually switched over to a marimba. We used bit crushing on it until it sounded like something that a servo could sing something that a piece of machinery could sing. You can get like orchestras of servos now. Somebody will play Smells Like Teen Spirit on 50 dead hard drives from computers. Were sort of building up the rhythm section, trying to make it sound as digital as possible, trying to make it sound as kind of inorganic as possible. without actually succumbing to a boom clap. This hi hat that&apos;s just going to and a couple Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

103 Among the Stars and Bones - Oliver Morris - Pandemonium

Discover new audio drama by music. How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Visit https://howimakemusic.com and subscribe in your podcast app. TRANSCRIPTThe piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called The Trial. It&apos;s featured in the soundtrack from the fiction podcast Marsfall. Today we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart the music of a fictional podcast and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Sam Boase-Miller. I&apos;m a composer, producer and voice actor from the US and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, The Trial by me Sam Boase-Miller. Thanks for listening in.1:06 ABOUTMarsfall is a sci-fi/fantasy story about the first colonists to settle on Mars. We follow them starting in the year 2047. So maybe 2047 is actually the year that we’ll get people on Mars. Mini helicopter that&apos;s flying around from the Perseverance lander. And yeah, it&apos;s pretty incredible the strides that we&apos;re making. Life imitating art!The scene takes place in the trial for ANDI, our colony AI. It&apos;s his trial for closing the door on a particular colonist who was about to create havoc for the rest of the colony. That philosophical debate, the trolley debate: should you pull the lever and try to avoid most people knowing that you&apos;ll kill one person? Or should you just let the trolley kill all five people to save the one. So this was the trial that we&apos;re all of our main characters kind of come together for the first time. And in this scene, we hear interjections from several of our characters.2:52 CELLOI started playing cello in school. Sort of like a string music petting zoo. My good friend at the time was playing viola. And so I thought, I really want to play viola. So I expressed this to the director of the orchestra and she was like, “no, you don&apos;t want to play viola. Your hands are big. You should play the cello.” So I was already at nine years old being told what to do! Like what musical instrument I should be taking up. It&apos;s actually the closest instrument (other than the trombone) to the range of the human voice. Both really, really low and it also gets into that high coloratura kind of soprano end of things4:38 P-FUNK & INFLUENCESI&apos;m a big George Clinton fan. And part of what I love about Parliament Funkadelic is that they’re very imaginative harmonically and melodically and rhythmically. Yeah, I just I love that era. funk music from the 70s. Right around, you know, ‘75, ‘76. The orb is an electronic music group, I really got into their ethereal and ambient music where you&apos;re just like taking on a whole journey. The place where you end up is certainly very different from where you started.6:03 ERIC SARASMy co creator and music editor, he&apos;s director extraordinaire, Eric Saras. He&apos;s also one of our writers of the show, he and I first connected through music, we both went on an orchestra tour to China together. And as you can imagine traveling to another country and touring and performing music brings people close together pretty quickly. And so I met him and we realized that we were very similar in our outlook on music, and that just got a lot of things kind of kicked off creatively. We wanted music to be featured really heavily. He kind of realized that there was more or less these like kind of pillars or buckets that the majority of our music was falling into. And we called them a numbering system essentially like one through six being silence to total music taking over and being the focal point of the scene. So going through that and knowing that ahead of time helps me really plan. Okay, Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

102 Marsfall - Sam Boase-Miller - The Trial

Discover new audio drama by music. How I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Visit https://howimakemusic.com and subscribe in your podcast app. TRANSCRIPTThe piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called A Chance To Be Free. It&apos;s one of the themes for the audio drama soundtrack from Hood: Noble Secrets, and the whole series by Spiteful Puppet. Today, we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers gets to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart the music of fictional podcasts and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Samuel Pegg. I&apos;m a composer from London, United Kingdom. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, A Chance To Be Free from the audio drama Hood by me Samuel Pegg. Thanks for listening in. Hood was the first audio drama that Spiteful Puppet had ever put together. So we were all learning really what to do. But at the same time, we didn&apos;t have any conceptions of how to do it. So maybe that was a good thing. And it&apos;s a story of while Robin Hood, but in a way that you&apos;re probably not used to hearing it. Robin Hood is not the character you expect him to be. There are quite a lot of twists along the way.2:06 ABBEY ROADIn London, there are just a plethora, you know, there&apos;s just a huge pool of fantastic musicians, and especially at the moment, there isn&apos;t a huge amount of work going on. So people are keen to come and record. I&apos;m sort of classically trained, you know, playing in orchestras. But really, most of my training actually came through working with live musicians in the feature film world recording scores, the top studios in London and abroad. Next week, I&apos;m going to go to Abbey Road to record something for an album I&apos;ve written, got a string orchestra, and we&apos;ve got some interesting baroque instruments as well, which will be quite fun. Oboe da caccia and oboe d&apos;amore. They&apos;re both period instruments from I guess, the baroque period of music, so they&apos;re very old-sounding instruments. Here&apos;s a snippet of how it sounds. Yeah, it should be really fun day.03:22 DREAMING OF ANOTHER LIFEThis piece, a chance to be three plays between a poignant dialogue between Little John and Will Scarlett. John is dreaming of a different life - an alternative life - and Will is unsure, you know, maybe we need to play it safe and keep doing what we&apos;re doing. There are three sections to the cue. But the major shift is when they decide they want to take as they put it "one last roll of the dice". And they&apos;re going to pursue a rather daring and sort of risky plan, with the aim that they might get a royal pardon and finally have a chance to live a free life with their families rather than being outlaws. Little John is really looking for this alternative life where he can be with his family. He could be dying.04:54 SOLO CELLOSo the cue needed the emotional heart, but all honesty to it as well. It&apos;s hard to beat a solo cello. Gives it a sort of sense of gravitas. My friend, Lily Thornton just gave an absolutely beautiful performance here. Redemptive type theme. I suppose it&apos;s them just dreaming of another life. And then when there&apos;s a shift in the narrative, we bring guitars, drums and energy. Because the decision has been made that they are going to pursue this risky course of action. It&apos;s easy to write music when you have fantastic performances and an expertly written script.06:17 FELT PIANOA felt piano does sound a little bit different to a typical concert grand. It&apos;s basically any piano where you put a layer of felt between the strings and the hammers. Here&apos;s how it sounds. It gives you a level of intimacy you wouldn&apos;t normally get. Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

101 Hood - Samuel Pegg - A Chance To Be Free

The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called Hood Theme. It&apos;s a main theme for the soundtrack from the audio drama Hood: Noble Secrets and the whole series by Spiteful Puppet. Today we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. My name is Samuel Pegg. I&apos;m a composer from London, United Kingdom. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, Hood Theme from the audio drama Hood by me Samuel Pegg. Thanks for listening in. Hood is a historical audio drama with a sort of fresh twist on the Robin Hood stories that we all know. He&apos;s this kind of lone figure against his better instincts. Well, I grew up in Oxford, and I played cello and piano growing up. Played in orchestras. At the moment, I&apos;m doing quite a lot of things for a historical theme park in Spain and France. Take a listen. It&apos;s just been really nice to record a couple of them in London and two of them in Vienna and one in Prague. Big orchestral stuff. Doing a few things at Abbey Road next week. All the musicians are so grateful for the work. 2:39 IDEAS ON HOLIDAY I was holidaying in Cornwall right at the tip of Cornwall. It&apos;s a very kind of atmospheric place very windswept with craggy cliffs. So just walking around the coastline, exposed to the elements. And the writer of Hood sent me the script. A friend had introduced us. I basically spent the entire holiday kind of trying to form themes in my head as I walked around the Cornish coast. But it was a good place to have some headspace. Quite rare for me nowadays to have a chance to think about something like that.3:47 INFLUENCES I suppose one of the influences at the time was the Game of Thrones main theme, with its kind of rustic sort of, I don&apos;t know very sort of war-like feel. Another influence would have been How To Train Your Dragon with the Celtic feel. That&apos;s what I was trying to do is try and find my own fantasy world for this story. 4:48 BREAKDOWN For the Hood theme, I wanted to convey a sort of rustic seriousness with the adrenaline of running through the forest evading the law and I came across a sound palette that I thought was interesting with various masculine and muscular brass...strings...heroic. Then lots of guitar, mandolin, ukulele, and they were performed by my friend Andrew Simmons. With lots of percussive elements. Tuned metals to give you this sense of, I guess the countryside really. What you&apos;re listening to now is a waterphone. It might be surprising to hear it&apos;s a percussion instrument. Very spooky sound. I found it really conveyed a sense of being in the dark woods with the shadows closing in. 6:22 CELLO My good friend Lily Thornton, who&apos;s a fantastic cellist now based in Melbourne, came over to my place and recorded the theme. Absolutely phenomenal player. And it gives it a real unique character and a sort of soul. 7:20 AEOLIAN The Hood theme is rooted in Aeolian mode, which gives it a Celtic rustic sound. Rooted in D. The tune itself just keeps rising up until it gets dragged back down to its root key.8:18 MARION I don&apos;t think any of these parts I&apos;ve sent you will have Marion in them. Because she&apos;s actually like an anti-character really. As you learn more about her, she&apos;s actually not a good person.8:46 STRANGE TIME Here is another piece from a different episode of the same series. This has a sort of lilting time signature in 5/8. Take a quick listen. This was my first audio drama that I&apos;d worked on my background having been in feature film, I really just treated it much like that.9:43 OUTRO That&apos;s about it for this week&apos;s episode. We&apos;ll listen to the full composition in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for lisSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#100 Hood - Samuel Pegg - Hood Theme

The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is the outro theme music from the historical audio drama 1865. Today, we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where the musicians of audio drama get to tell their own stories. This show will break apart a song soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. My name is Lindsay Graham. I&apos;m a composer, sound designer and podcast host and producer from the United States. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, “1865”, by me, Lindsay Graham, thanks for listening in. "1865" is a historical audio drama that tells the story of the aftermath of President Lincoln&apos;s assassination. The protagonist is largely forgotten in American history. He was the Secretary of War at the time. He really rose to the occasion, and tried to put the country back together in this fraught period of American history that still reverberates today. 2:28  INFLUENCES When I was thinking about a civil war themed show, you immediately think of the Ken Burns documentary and those in those fiddles. And while violin is the lead instrument, I wanted the rest of the score to sound nothing like what you would expect a civil war documentary to sound like. And I was inspired by Cliff Martinez. His score for The Knick, their use of modern dark synthesizers was really not something you would expect.. Conflict. Tenseness. So I wanted to borrow that methodology. I think what was striking about Cliff Martinez&apos;s score was how anachronistic he was. He just went very far in the direction that he sought. And I think you can hear that. At the same time, I also wanted to nod to the the era and and so there&apos;s a recording of an old song Shenandoah by Bill Frisell that, that - I really enjoy Bill Frisell in general - I enjoy and it speaks to, you know, kind of a very Americana feel to it. It&apos;s got a lot of open, wide intervals in it. And that&apos;s where my head was when I started writing this and so it went in that direction. I wrote this as I do most things on guitar first. Starting on the guitar keeps me honest, I suppose. And it&apos;s where I feel most helpful. trouble.5:07  BREAKDOWN Harmony usually comes to me first before melody although one can lead to the other. Like I mentioned, I wanted a synthesized sound. You spend hours and hours auditioning sounds and sometimes you create some. I did want to bring period acoustic instruments into it, but mangle them. They&apos;re time-stretched and distorted but it&apos;s violin and acoustic guitar and mandolin. Take a listen. 6:17  OUT OF TIME I had gone too far with a modern synthesizer sound became too close to a Stranger Things kind of feel. So I needed to back off and do something else lest I be compared to this very popular thing. And it wasn&apos;t the right feel, anyways.6:55  PEDAL TONE In this instance though, I can pose the entire thing over a low A pedal tone. And the song is mostly in D. But it felt too static this time. And so I was surprised when I moved away from the low pedal tone to a more standard base that followed the harmony that had suddenly opened up a great deal. I remember the shift from you know, there&apos;s a B flat chord and the A underneath a B flat chord was just not working. Once I went to a regular harmony, then then it just opened up and felt a lot better. You want to be complex and clever but sometimes you can outsmart yourself Pedal tone or drone. The name comes from the organ when the lower register is played with your feet on pedals. And so oftentimes in organ music, an organist will just plant their left foot on a very low octave note and hold it even though the harmony above it moves. And it has a routing effect. And, you can reverse it and have a high pedal tone, which you will hear very often Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#099 1865 - Lindsay Graham - Theme from ‘1865’

The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called Fear For The Storm. It&apos;s the theme song from The Strange Case of Starship Iris. Today we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition from a fiction podcast and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Erin. I&apos;m an audio editor, sound designer (and sometimes vocalist) from San Francisco, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 98 "Fear For The Storm" by Jess Best, S.E. Winters and me, Erin Baumann. Thanks for listening in.1:38 INTROSo Starship Iris is an outer space mystery shows that then evolves into a really great found family romp. All the while, it&apos;s still in outer space. Within the world of the podcast, there is a mysterious band called Birdy and the Swan Song. No one has ever seen the lead singer of this band, but they do have a hit song and the song is called Fear For The Storm.2:32 BEDROOM DEMODiegetic music is music that is actually taking place within the world of a story. So stuff you&apos;d hear on the radio, stuff a character like actually sings, things like that. Today, we are going to listen to three versions of Fear For The Storm - a demo version, a full cast singalong, and the third version is fully produced as the theme song. Jessica best - Jess - is the writer of Starship Iris and one of the founding members of the Procyon Podcast Network. She writes songs, so she&apos;s the original composer. She was just casting around going "does anyone know a vocalist? I&apos;m just trying to record a demo of the song real quick so we can throw it into an episode." And I was like, "if you just need someone to record a demo, I can bang that out in probably an hour." I recorded that first demo version just sitting in my bedroom, sent it over real quick. They&apos;re like "it&apos;s great! We&apos;re gonna put in an episode" and I was like, "oh, okay, I guess I&apos;ll have to listen to my own voice a little longer!"4:16 SINGALONGFear For The Storm started out with this demo version, just me on vocals, just on guitar. And it ramped up from there to - delightfully - a full cast singalong. They all recorded it separately, actually. They were never all in one place. The cast is very widely scattered. They all have lovely voices. We love to hear them. Brittony LeFever, who plays Krejjh and Jamie Price, who plays Brian Jeeter, are both actually vocalists in real life. They were instrumental in kind of building it out. They gave everyone else something to really hang on to, including me. 5:55 INFLUENCES I&apos;m not really - you know - a folk style singer. When I was recording Fear For The Storm, I was drawing on a couple of different references. One of my biggest influences was Laura Marling, specifically a track of hers called Night Terror. Give it a listen. At the time, I was listening to Lera Lynn&apos;s cover of TV On The Radio&apos;s "Wolf Like Me" so that was another big influence in the tone I was going for. Give it a listen.8:33 FULL VERSIONJess just got in touch with me and was like, "would you still want to record vocals for this full version?" and then I was like, "Sure." I had just moved into a new apartment I found myself recording in a closet surrounded by boxes. Kind of like scrunched in next to my jackets. The instrumentals were provided by Chiron Star. He provided a really great instrumental track and honestly an awesome guitar solo that I think is the best part of the song. 9:43 OUTROI think that&apos;s the awesome thing about podcasting  - the barrier to entry is really so low. If you have a good concept and you have good ideas and a decent setup, it&apos;ll carry. It&apos;ll read That&apos;s about it for this week&apos;Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#098 The Strange Case Of Starship Iris - Erin Baumann - Fear For The Storm

Alex : Dude, so like, it&apos;s gotta at least be like - I was thinking about it the other day - it&apos;s gotta be like 15, 17 years at this point.Andrew: Probably Yeah.Alex: Holy shit.John: That&apos;s Alex Aldea speaking to Andrew Joslyn. They&apos;re part of the Paragon Collective, the network responsible for audio dramas like Darkest Night and The No Sleep Podcast.Alex: Andrew and I do compose a lot of podcast music together but Andrew is also a music luminary. He&apos;s done string arrangements for Ke$ha to compositions from Macklemore to literally everything.Andrew: Yeah, even film stuff with like Corbin Bernsen and Denise Richards There you go!Alex: Andrew plays every single string instrument. So even like in Darkest Night, a lot of the strings that you hear are real strings.John: The audio quality in this episode is a Zoom rip. Sorry about that. But I got some great conversation with these guys. My name is John Bartmann. I&apos;m the creator of How I Make Music. I&apos;ll let these two audio drama stars. take it from here.Andrew: The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called The Opening of the Oyster. It&apos;s a dystopian soundtrack from the psychedelic audio drama The Oyster. Today, we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I make music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song or soundtrack or composition and take a trip - a wild trip - into how it was made. My name is Andrew Joslyn.Alex: And I&apos;m Alex Aldea.Andrew: I&apos;m a composer from Seattle, Washington. And this is How I Make Music.1:58 INTRO Alex: The Oyster takes place 30 years in the future, where humans basically don&apos;t have as many resources and they have to figure out whether they want to plug in and just feel eternal bliss in the machine or face the harsh reality. The basic premise of the show is a philosophical argument on utilitarianism. This show came about really quickly. I kept thinking about this idea of "do we plug in?" Or do we not know what happens if you invent something like this and how it kind of goes in society for months and months and months? Definitely psychedelic. I knew we had something with the show. You never really know if you have anything, let&apos;s be quite honest! The point where you can work on a project and you&apos;re like, "oh, this isn&apos;t terrible. I don&apos;t feel so delusional about it." I don&apos;t know if you&apos;ve heard about the philosopher John Stuart Mill. If something feels good, then it&apos;s good. There&apos;s the great argument against that has always been like well, what if you were an oyster and you felt nothing except for bliss, but you never could have really any experiences? Is that not the ultimate life? That monologue "choirs of crickets fill the sky with a cascading cacophony"... we actually had her record that monologue on top of Love On A Real Train by Tangerine Dream. 4:34 SUBTLETYAndrew: These episodes are so musical because it&apos;s an audio drama. The music has to ... not foreshadow and give away too much, but it has to help guide the audience. Emotionally. On the journey that, you know, we&apos;re taking them on. I usually like to think of it as like breathing. You know, if the VO allows room to take a breath, let the music take a breath with the VO as well. So sometimes what that means to me is just add a longer reverb. So you can&apos;t hit them over the head and be like super aggressive, but you also got to give them enough guidance. So I would, I would choose something really subtle. You know, just drones, some other stuff. Make sure the chord progression isn&apos;t anything too aggressive. Make sure that none of the harmonies go a little too far up in the spectrum. You know. Never Never, never, never never step on the vocal no matter what you do. I come from the pSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#097 The Oyster - Alex Aldea and Andrew Joslyn - The Opening of the Oyster

“When we first got into doing the audio drama thing, it was very clear immediately how supportive the community was. Made us feel a lot better about getting our feet wet and just like diving into this madness.”0:21  ABOUT The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is the main theme for the audio drama Spacemerica!. Today, we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Ian McGowan. I&apos;m a speech and language therapy student and musician from St. Louis, Missouri, now based in Scotland, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 95, Spacemerica! by me, Ian McGowan. Thanks for listening in.  Spacemerica! is a space opera sci fi comedy about a group of people - a ragtag motley crew - that ends up going on the hunt for a treasure. And when you set things hundreds of years in the future, high jinks ensue. And there&apos;s some pretty good comedy in there. So I guess the goal for me is to put the audience in the room with with whatever&apos;s happening.2:27  INFLUENCES The piece that we&apos;re hearing now is called Panoramic by Atticus Ross, who composed the soundtrack for The Book of Eli. I was always interested in it because they use a lot of electronic stuff. And they create these really beautiful soundscapes these textures with a lot of really simplistic individual parts that build on each other. Pretty dystopian. There&apos;s a little bit of grunge, a little bit of distorted guitar. I think I was probably always gonna pull from that. Another influence is the soundtrack for Oblivion, which M83 had a heavy hand in. Because the story that we set out to tell in Spacemerica! is pretty epic. I wanted to make sure that the intro the outro really set up that kind of feel for the audience. Those two were main influences and building the space for a theme that really takes you on a journey, rather than something that&apos;s kind of tight together and makes you feel like you&apos;re kind of in a closet.4:59  ELECTRONIC TOYS On a whim I purchased this Akai XR20 beat development machine, whatever the full name is. So when I was starting to work on Spacemerica!, I knew it was going to be epic futuristic. To me that sounds electronic. You think robots you think cyborgs you think electronics. I was always going to start there. And so I kind of messed around with a few beats. It took me a while to come up with the backing beat that you hear. I turned off all the lights in the room, I shut the blinds. The Akai has a three by three pad grid and they glow. I just sat there and just kind of let that run to get this feel of drifting through space. I purchased a Mother32. A Mother32 is an analog synth. I don&apos;t actually know a ton about analog synths and so when I recorded, I hooked it into the Akai and played the the melody part of the Akai melody through the Mother32, there&apos;s just a slow legato, an ethereal melody in the background. And that&apos;s courtesy of the Mother32. Almost a ghost like feel like you&apos;re kind of drifting, which I loved. I might not ever be able to recreate this exact thing, but that just makes me appreciate it that much more. 8:46 BASS GUITAR I needed to create a bigger boomy sound behind everything. The bass on it just wasn&apos;t quite enough; it wasn&apos;t round enough. I that&apos;s when I got out my my bass guitar - my Fender five string - and I just added those notes which ended up actually being an octave lower to make to really kind of fill it out. I then added some distorted guitar chords in a slow build. I added an airy synth sound like B-movie, sci fi kind of stuff. 10:04  FLOOR TOM I searched desperately actually for a good sample of a booming drum. My friend DSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#096 Spacemerica! - Ian McGowan - Spacemerica! Main Theme

In today’s episode of How I Make Music, we drench ourselves in reverb once again to recap the highlights from the first five episodes of the show. Take a trip into the work of respected and acclaimed audio drama composers. Join David Devereux (Tin Can Audio), Gabe Alvarez (Starcalled), Nate Fisher (Observe and Report), Randy Greer (The Culling) and Erik Jourgensen (Heroics) in a 5-star musical expose! DAVID DEVEREUX, TIN CAN AUDIOScottish composer David Devereux runs Tin Can Audio and has produced the audio dramas Middle:Below, The Tower and The Dungeon Economic Model. In this short insight, he reveals how imposter syndrome can make us feel dishonest for using software versions of instruments. https://tincanaudio.co.ukGABE ALVAREZ, STARCALLEDTexas-based composer Gabe Alvarez writes and composes for Starcalled, an action space sci fi audio drama with an epic cinematic score. Gabe shows us that creators need to write and make the content that they themselves want to hear. https://starcalled.spaceNATE FISHER, OBSERVE AND REPORTNate Fisher composes epic music for the sci fi audio drama Observe and Report, which tells the story of an earthbound alien called Zuri. He shows us how limiting it can be creating from templates to avoid compositions from all sounding the same. https://www.observeandreportpodcast.com/RANDY GREER, THE CULLINGThe horror genre relies more than most on the interplay of tension and release. Composer for audio drama The Culling Randy Greer shares how the balance between them is required to make emotive music. https://www.randygreermusic.com/the-culling.htmlERIK JOURGENSEN, HEROICSHeroics is a comedy podcast about superheroes who pivot to become evil. Composer Erik Jourgensen was given a budget to record live musicians for the theme, and repurposed the live recordings to create his own sample pack. https://www.erikjourgensen.com/ABOUT THIS SHOWHow I Make Music is where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In a dramatically edited sound experience, we challenge composers to break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into why and how it was made.Subscribe to How I Make Music https://pod.link/howimakemusicSupport How I Make Music https://patreon.com/howimakemusicVisit How I Make Music https://howimakemusic.comFree music assets for audio drama creators https://johnbartmann.com/music (coupon AUDIODRAMA)How I Make Music is created by John Bartmann. For audio experiences that keep people listening, visit https://johnbartmann.comSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#095 Five audio drama composers share their insights

The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called The Kinesigraph. It&apos;s the solo piano soundtrack from a short film called The Kinesigraph, which is tied into the universe of the audio drama Brass. Today, we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to how I make music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Amanda Laven. I&apos;m a composer and sound designer from the capital region of New York. And this is how I make music. I&apos;m Amanda Laven, I&apos;m a composer and sound designer living in Schenectady, New York.0:52 INFLUENCES I was the composer for The Kinesigraph, which is a short silent film set in an alternate steampunk version of 1885 known as the Brass Universe. The same universe in which the Brass audio drama and several stage plays and short films are set. My work is primarily chamber orchestral and electronic pop stuff for video games and audio dramas and films. I was basically born with a Nintendo Entertainment System controller in my hand. My dad used to be a hardcore gamer so I spent a lot of time playing video games growing up. I played a lot of Mario, played a lot of Legend of Zelda. So Koji Kondo, definitely one of my formative influences, and one of the reasons why I got into playing music and why I wanted to start writing music. And then Yoko Shimamura, as well, very big Kingdom Hearts fan. I played a lot of it growing up, and the music was definitely one of my favorite parts of that game. Yeah, so basically, I grew up listening to classic rock. It&apos;s what my parents listened to. So it&apos;s what I listened to. And then as I got a little bit older, became more of an angsty teenager, I started moving more into heavier stuff, hard rock, punk rock, nu metal. Still listen to it today, I&apos;m still a sucker for nu metal. 3:33 PIANO SCORE I was specifically asked to write a solo piano score for The Kinesigraph, which was great because I only had about a day to produce the score. The Kinesigraph stars the Brass family, who live in an alternate version of 1885, in which technology has progressed, and King Albert is still alive. They are approached by an inventor who has created a device that produces moving pictures, and he&apos;s looking for an investment from the family. And they agree to invest in his device provided that they get to choose the subject that is filmed. The problem is, none of them can agree on what they should be filming! So I wrote a theme for each of these very different characters. So we have Lord brass who is an inventor and scientist. Lady Brass, a Sherlock Holmes-level detective. Gwendolyn Brass, a grade A con artist and master of disguise. And Cyril, Brass, master of martial arts and weapons. So in the end, we did it all in such a short amount of time. But it was kind of nice the way it worked out because at least it was done. And it was just a matter of finding someone to play it. And the producers did find a very lovely pianist named Jung-Sun Lee. And she was able to turn the score around in a really short amount of time, get us enough recordings that we were able to edit together a really good sounding score. And I was really happy with how it came out. If I recall correctly, it was recorded on an acoustic piano using mics rather than played directly into a DAW. 5:53 SOUND EFFECTS We live across the street from three sets of freight train tracks. They cause a lot of disruption they interrupt phone calls. Trying to record anything has to be done around both the trains and the traffic. I&apos;ve got a couple of cats, so when it&apos;s close to mealtime, they&apos;ll start meowing or coming in wanting attention. And my partner plays electric guitar. So sometimes he&apos;ll start playing that while I&apos;m tryinSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#094 The Kinesigraph (from Brass) - Amanda Laven - The Kinesigraph

The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called In The Timestorm. It&apos;s the theme song from Timestorm, an audio drama about two kids who get the chance to preserve their history. Today we&apos;ll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Michael Aquino. I&apos;m a composer, musician, sound designer and podcast producer from New Jersey. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 93 by me, Michael Aquino. Thanks for listening in. Timestorm is an audio drama about two twins Alexa and Benny Ventura, who are yanked into another dimension by their cousin who gives them this crazy mission: to travel through time to preserve their culture&apos;s true history. Throughout the the series, they visit three different continents across the span of five centuries. And they&apos;re meeting people who have left their mark on Puerto Rican history.2:32 INFLUENCES So a big influence on the theme song was the theme song for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Every time I watched Buffy, and I heard that theme song, man, I was ready to watch the show. And I think that&apos;s what I wanted to create with this theme song was this this energy and excitement about getting into the world of times. My next big inspiration was Saturday morning cartoons and cartoons in general. The creativity and imagination of Fraggle Rock, that theme song has always struck a chord in my heart. The Smurfs were another one. You can tell I&apos;m 80s, 90s kid. Saturday morning cartoons really tapped into my kid imagination and inspiration. They didn&apos;t speak down to the kids. We wanted something that felt like you were talking to the kids. And also hopefully engaging the parents because you know the parents are listening to this too. So we want to share it. They&apos;re having a good time. Dan Zanes is a performer of kids&apos; music. And I watched when Dan Zanes was performing, the kids were jumping around and having a good time, and the parents were jumping around and having a good time! And I always think about that energy when I&apos;m creating music for this age group, which is tweens, typically.4:44 THE HOTEL Timestorm is created by me and my partner in crime, Dania Ramos. Dani and I decided that we were going to take a weekend and hole ourselves up in this inn and write the theme song. "We&apos;re going we&apos;re getting out of our comfort zone and just going somewhere and and we&apos;re gonna create this." So we traveled four and a half hours north, in our in our little four cylinder car. It was the middle of February, and it was frickin cold. And if you know Vermont, it&apos;s cold! Bumpy roads, it was crazy. We got there. We were the only ones The only other ones in this inn, so it was the innkeeper and us. And because it was so empty, he upgraded our room to this really wonderful suite with this fireplace. I went into the other bedroom, closed the door. And this is what I started on guitar. This whole theme song started on guitar. Dania gave me some lyrics that she had written. And I went to work on trying to compose the song. I wanted it to be energetic, so I kept it to two three chords and finally got it to a point where I came outside of the bedroom, opened the door. And, and I was like, Okay, I think I&apos;ve got something and I played it for her. And, and she was like, and this happened a bunch of times. So like I would just come out, work on some things. She gave me some notes. I we&apos;d hash it out. I go back into the bedroom, close the door, worked on it some more and came out and it was just a lot of fun. And by the end of Saturday, we had the the first version ready to go. And we had another day so we just kind of enjoyed the laSupport the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#093 Timestorm - Michael Aquino - In The Timestorm

The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called Mars Patel Season Three Main Title. It&apos;s the theme from a podcast I co-created called The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel. Today we&apos;ll break it down, get into why and how it was made. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Chris Tarry. I&apos;m a musician, composer, writer and podcast producer from New York City. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 92. Mars Patel Season Three Main Title, written by myself, Chris Tarry. Thanks for listening in. The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel is sort of like a Stranger Things-esque podcast about middle schoolers who start to go missing. And Mars Patel and his gang of friends try and get to the bottom of the mystery. 1:40 INFLUENCES I come from a real jazz background and I&apos;m a jazz musician primarily. I came up with Weather Report, there&apos;s a great, you know, what&apos;s that one doo doo dah dah dah dah dah dah - Black Market! It&apos;s a great track. So I&apos;m really big into like 80 synths and 80s pop music and all that sort of stuff. And that has a big influence kind of on the sound of the music from Mars Patel. Spacey, and so sort of like, retro a little bit, I guess I would say. A lot of jazz influences whatever I&apos;m doing so so for me, it&apos;s all about melody and sort of vibe, you know. Tangerine Dream is very much an influence on this. The Risky Business soundtrack. And that individual track. You know, when they&apos;re on the subway, they&apos;re like making out on the subway. That Tangerine Dream track comes on. I hear so many influences and so much film music just based on that one track. Take a listen to it. I just brought it up to my wife. Like two nights ago we were watching a show I&apos;m like "this is a ripoff of that Tangerine Dream track! Everybody&apos;s doing this!" And she&apos;s like "yeah, whatever, I&apos;m going to bed." Return to Forever, that&apos;s another one. You know, when I was a kid just listening to tons of Return to Forever and, and just crazy fusion jazz guys. Stuff that nobody who ever had a girlfriend would listen to. I play in a lot of jazz groups, obviously here in New York. And we always - especially with the fusion stuff - we say everybody in the audience is just guys with ponytails who still live in their parents&apos; basements.4:48 DIFFERENT VERSIONS So this theme, which is called Season Three Theme - I did a version for each each season and kept the same form and harmonic structure, but produced the song differently every time. Here, I&apos;ll play you all three versions of the theme in a crossfade. So you can hear the difference between season one, season two and season three. And hopefully you&apos;ll be able to hear the similarities in the melodies and the harmonies. What changes is the vibe or the production of of the tune. You know, if you listened to season one, it has a very sort of very, very indie kind of feel. And see some two uses a lot of the same instruments, my bassline. You can hear me singing the melody. I&apos;m not a great singer. So there&apos;s a lot of auto tune on this! And then in season three, again, the same harmonic structure but a completely sort of rewrite and shift to a new kind of sound. This version took a lot a lot a lot longer. There&apos;s an arp that goes throughout. More synths. I played synth bass instead of my Fender P-bass. 6:47 DRUM PATTERNS The melody&apos;s in three. But in this version, the drums are in four. And a bunch of the arps are in four as well. So it has this weird sort of feel to it, where it like flows over on itself.7:49 VIOLIN I brought in my friend Zack Brock, who is a well known jazz violinist who just happens to live down the street from me and had Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#092 The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel - Chris Tarry - Main Theme

The piece of music we&apos;re listening to in the background is called King Arsen Approaches. It&apos;s this regal fantasy theme, which I wrote for the audio drama, the LaFresian Chronicles: Arsen. Today, we&apos;ll take a very quick look at the behind the scenes of why and how this track was put together. You&apos;re listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers tell their own stories. My name is John Bartmann, and I&apos;m a music composer from South Africa. And this is a little show called How I Make Music.1:02 ABOUT So today&apos;s show is a little bit different. As you might know, I usually speak to other audio drama composers and then edit my voice out entirely. But to be perfectly honest, I was dropped by a few contributors this week and I had to plug a gap so I&apos;m forced with the happy task of interviewing myself today! I&apos;ll keep it shorter than usual, and hopefully I can convey some of my own passion for the music of audio drama. The LaFresian Chronicles: Arsen is a full cast fantasy audio drama written by Nicole Tuttle and edited by Mariah Clawson. A fantasy fairy kingdom where a young orphaned woman seeks to find the truth about her parents death. Writing for the show has put me into the space of cinematic composition. I&apos;ve had to come up with numerous themes throughout the series, which is now 12 episodes. Themes like this one, which is got an action and tension feel. I do love the team that I work with. Brad Holbrook does the sound design. It just feels like I&apos;m basically a part of something that&apos;s really working. That&apos;s what I love most about this job. 3:18 SLOWLY MAJESTIC The piece that I wanted to look at today is called King Arsen Approaches. And it&apos;s a moment where the Royal Guard is confronting the king, having found the young Fae woman Aurelie. It&apos;s all set up the palace, and the scene is described as having &apos;floors of white marble that you can see your face in.&apos; This really royal atmosphere. It&apos;s at this moment, that we meet King Arsen for the first time. And he proceeds down the set of stairs to stand right before Aurelie. To convey this feeling of majesty, I knew it had to be a really slow composition. This is 40 BPM which is way slower than a heartbeat (unless you&apos;re Bruce Lee). The percussion does a lot for this piece because they start to like field drums and timpani drums convey a military field. And the king obviously being the head of the kingdom comes with that authority.5:00 ORCHESTRAL ELEMENTS I have a bias towards strings because I am an amateur violinist. I play violin every day. Paying attention to melody and bow articulation and things that can be done with the software instruments. The library that I use is sort of an entry level library. It&apos;s called Native Instruments Symphony Essentials. It&apos;s a good starting point for me, I mean, I&apos;m actually fairly new to the world of, orchestral composition. Aside from the percussion and the strings, this piece, King Arsen Approaches also contains a wind section. Here&apos;s what the wind and the brass sound like together in this piece. Those little brass flutters are called triple tongues. So next time you watch a movie, and you hear Ba Ba Ba, it&apos;s usually like action or something significant happening. And right at the outro here, we&apos;ve got a beautiful, pretty oboe. Just carrying the final notes of the cadence. 6:22 TENSION I want to play a piece now from a different part of the series, which has a much more tense feel. And I&apos;ll include the narration too, so you have a sense of what&apos;s going on. We immediately start with the action. If you want to create tension in your cinematic music, use brass swells like this. Another great trick is the use of tritones. Tritones are the flat five interval. Sounds horrible. So if you don&apos;t resolve it, then it creates an ongoing sense of tension, a super useful tool. And that&apos;s better. Feels like Support the show (https://patreon.com/howimakemusic)

#091 The LaFresian Chronicles: Arsen - John Bartmann - King Arsen Approaches

A weekly podcast for the musically curious to go behind the scenes of composition in a digital age. Each episode is a new audio experience, featuring creative musical reinterpretation of original soundtracks in an audio collage of separate stems and soothing vocal narration. Close listening required. Every Wednesday, we break apart one of my own compositions and investigate the stories and insights into how it was made and its effect on listening ears. My name is John Bartmann. I’m a music composer from South Africa and this is How I Make Music. New episode every Wednesday! Subscribe to How I Make Music for principled insights into the human musical experience.

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