How I Make Music

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called You Probably Shouldn't Trust Me. It's a villain theme song from season two of the audio drama Dining In The Void, a sci-fi podcast about sleuthing and secrets in space. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, we're 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 Ali Hylton. I'm a synesthetic podcast creator and composer located in South Texas, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 88. And you can trust me when I say this is the song You Probably Shouldn't Trust Me by me, Ali Hylton, who you can trust. Thanks for listening in. 

01:19 ABOUT

Dining In The Void is about six alien celebrities and they're all brought on to a space station for a dinner party. Upon arrival, they find out that someone has trapped them. And someone among them has trapped them there. Who trapped in there, why are they trapped? It's basically like Clue in space. And really gay...is like...a simple way of explaining it.

01:49 SYNESTHESIA 

So I have this thing, kind of a condition called synesthesia. So when I hear music or voices or just sound in general, my brain tells me what color that is. When I was a kid, I would sit on the bus and close my eyes and kind of move my hands and the gesture of how the music is going. And there's always been this color to it. And it's always like a black blank space like a black black background. And then this color moves in time with the music in different colors come in and out. And I paint a lot of podcast music, and I try to interpret the whole song into one piece, or at least the biggest part of the song and get kind of the feeling for that song in one image. One of my friends AR Oliveri sent me a superhero clip. And they're like "you're the superhero!" I don't remember which one - it was some Marvel superhero who turns sound into light energy. And I'm just like, this is so cool.

03:25 CHARACTER SONGS 

So it's telling stories through music, they'll have different themes for different characters and then those themes will come together to tell the story of who they are. I've used this song You Probably Shouldn't Trust Me to merge it with some other character songs. So we're going to play the first track Like Mother Like Daughter and fade it into the song I'm Here To Kill You. Let's see if you can figure out where one ends and the other begins.

03:51 COLORS IN THE WOODS 

This piece in the background is called Remembering. It's another song I wrote for season two, two of the characters in the show called Katie Bell and Waverly. It plays in the scene where Katie Bell and Waverly are talking about how they both grew up. They both grew up in these places filled with nature and forests and life. Picture the scenes going on in the background and those colors will come into play. Later, like when Katie was describing running in the woods away from the danger, I always pictured these blues and greens and some reds and yellows. And you can see bits of those colors coming into the song. 

05:08 GARAGE BAND 

I just started composing this year. When I compose music, I use GarageBand loops. I taught myself how to do this, I have no idea how to read music. jumped in feet first and we're still going.

05:40 AUDIO DRAMA INFLUENCES 

When composing music, I'm influenced by a lot of my friends within the audio drama community. James Barbarossa from The Orphans, who has also been on How I Make Music Episode 68, which you should listen to. He has played such a big part in being an inspiration because we often are talking about how we compose music and stuff and he's always so encouraging. And I love the music from T

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Dark Streets. It's one of the soundtrack pieces I wrote for The Lost Cat podcast. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You will 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 and how it was made. My name is A.P. Clark. I'm a musician and writer from London, England. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music episode 87, Dark Streets. by me A.P. Clark. Thanks for listening in. The Lost Cat podcast is a storytelling audio drama that details my continuing adventures and trying to find my cat, which is lost. It features monsters, ghosts, old ones, some cats, several ends of the world, and lots and lots of wine.

01:44 INFLUENCES

I've been a musician since I was a teenager, you know, started in rock bands. But then I discovered all of the 60s singer-songwriters. And that was just much more narrative driven. Ballad form and story and character and stuff. When podcasts exploded about five, six years ago, it was like Ah, I can do music and I can do storytelling and I can do spoken word stuff. I can do all of it in one thing. So that's what got me into doing the Lost Cat podcast. So one of my influences at the time was I was listening to a lot of Sigur Ros, which is that post rock minimalist atmospheric style of music. Take a listen. It's a beautiful sort of cyclical piano. Piano figures. It affected my practice as I plonked away at the piano. I was getting into all of the the like the minimalists, classical composers like Reich and Glass. And that obviously fits perfectly with the idea of scoring which goes underneath and doesn't take focus off of the talking. So another influence that I was listening to a lot was the Magnetic Fields, all of the works of Stephin Merritt. A very specific song that I liked was his side project called The 6ths. I think the album was called Hyacinths And Thistles. And the impossibility of pronouncing that does give you an idea of his sense of humor. It's called The Dead Only Quickly Decay. Take a listen to it. Obviously has that slightly Gothic but slightly funny but slightly dark but slightly warm and human. It doesn't undermine the morbidness with funniness All of the Magnetic Fields is fairly wonderful for this stuff.

05:06 WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE 

So as I was starting to make this podcast, Welcome to Night Vale was hugely popular is one of the first big independent podcasts, audio dramas to really break through. And so I was listening to it, and I was massively inspired by it. The fact that there is a song in the middle of all my episodes is just entirely because Night Vale did it. I was looking for a format, they had a format that was really good. And I really responded to so I just went with it. Because even Welcome to Night Vale, which is a famously sort of subversive queer podcast, still kept the Lovecraftian tone of fear of the other. So my unique input was to take the Lovecraftian tone, subvert the fear of the other and make it into a going towards the other, use what you got around you and make stuff. That's what I did. I needed a format. So I borrowed stuff from Night Vale. 

06:41 GOING DIY 

I was freelance at the time, which is to say I was massively underemployed part of it was just to like, give myself a project. You can't neurose about like, "is the idea ready yet? Is it good enough yet?" You just have to dive in and go with what you've got. I needed some music, it needed to be sort of dark and scary. So I just played something that sounded dark and scary moved on. The piece of music is improvised, it took 10 minutes. And I find that a very useful way of actually creating stuff. As an example, me and my friends made a feature length movie last

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Devil's Gamble. This is part two of a two-part break down. It's a soundtrack I composed for the horror, fantasy, audio drama, Dark Dice. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Steven Melin. I'm a music composer in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, Devil's Gamble by me Steven Melin. You can check out part one in the feed if you'd like. Either way, thanks for listening in. Dark Dice is a horror actual play DnD podcast that uses immersive soundscapes to create an added layer of intensity. The story is about six travelers who embark on a journey into the ruinous domain of the nameless God. They will never be the same again. Basically, what this means is, it's a tabletop game, which gets recorded while the actors and the performers are playing it. So it is a real Dungeons and Dragons game. But during the recording, we're using music to bring the story to life.

02:16 BOSS BATTLES

In the Dark Dice show, there are a bunch of boss battle moments. And this is when the intensity is increasing, there are stems. So they're separate instruments. The producers can actually throw in any combo of these instruments at any time to help up the intensity. Where the intensity is increasing, they might throw in the drums. They might throw in the cello. Things that will help make it feel more intense. We're actually working on a video game right now working on the soundtrack, which is going to be an extension of the Dark Dice universe. And we get to reuse some of those for actual boss battle moments in the games. So I'm really pumped about that! I'm a huge gamer. And that just fills my heart with all kinds of gladness.

04:03 HORROR HARP

So this is the this is the horror harp sounds like this. It's a one-of-a-kind instrument. It's over 100 years old. This is actually an empty harp passed down from my wife's grandmother, way back in the Great Depression in the 1920s or 1930s. They couldn't afford strings. So they put guitar strings on here. It's never been tuned for 100 years, just about, and now it sounds like this. But it's amazing. Ever since I used this for the first time on Dark Dice - it was actually this track - Travis just lost his mind and he thought that was the coolest thing in the world. Because it's so messed up. And you actually hear the rattling wood in it, and it's just creepy.

05:10 ALEATORIC VIOLIN

I'm a violinist, and I've been playing for about 20 years. But there are very cool times like this where we need these aleatoric random atonal sounds and so I'll just pick it up and go crazy. Let me grab it, why not? You don't have to be good an instrument to do that. You literally just you whack your instrument, whacking it with the wood, or just scraping it. It makes these glorious noises that have no business belonging in any soundtrack. listen out for glissandos and scrapes in sound effects that I've also recorded with the violin in the track.

06:07 PITCH BENT CELLO

Originally, when I was presented with this track, I wanted to have a low tension. So what I did is I recorded the solo cello. And I also asked them to record it a second time. And we did a pitch shift down an octave. So whenever you hear any of the cello, whenever it's really scrubbing as hard as they can play, it just creates the perfect, rich tone that's not muddy, but has the clarity that you get from a cello.

06:56 PERCUSSION BOX

So behind me in my studio whenever I work and have an inspired idea to add percussion, I just grabbed my percussion box. It's full of all kinds of goodies that I've collected throughout the years. But some that have made it into this track Devil's Gamb

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Devil's Gamble. It's a diabolical medieval battle track I wrote for the Dark Dice podcast. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You'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 Steven Melin, and I'm a music composer in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to how I make music Episode 85 Devil's Gamble by me Steven Melin. Thanks for listening in.

Dark Dice is a horror actual play D&D podcast that uses immersive soundscapes. The story is about six travelers who embark on a journey into the ruinous domain of the Nameless God. They will never be the same again.

1:26 Live instruments 

One of the requests from the team on this show was to use as many medieval historic timeless instruments as possible, and one of the top requests was to use a hurdy gurdy. Take a listen to how ancient it feels when put next to a modern orchestra. Medieval instruments are very hard to tune, and they're hard to play in tune with Western music. We decided to also add a lute to this project. A lute is basically a medieval guitar, take a listen to it. It's an ancient instrument that was traditionally used to kind of strum along, playing a little tremolo. And those are two instruments we use constantly. As much as possible, throughout this whole soundtrack, we really have tried to hire as many live musicians as possible. Because typically, when you get raw recordings, even from world class musicians, it doesn't sound good together. Even if it sounds out of tune, and it sounds rough, I think that's part of the charm. It's happening live right in front of you. And so as a composer, specifically for this track, Devils Gamble...This isn't just a one-time track that plays in the background. This actually plays on loop and we'll repeat five, six, seven times. And it can be cut off at any point. So in a way, it's almost very more similar to video game music than film music.

3:50 Creative Team

I think whenever you're working with a creative person, in this case, Travis Vengroff and the Fool and Scholar productions team, they're so creative, and they really don't repeat themselves. So they have a lot different IPs. They have a lot of different shows. And we're even right now working on a video game, which is kind of an extension of this world. And we're kind of trailblazing in a way. 

4:16 Hammered Dulcimer 

Another instrument that we have used a ton and this soundtrack is the hammered dulcimer. It's basically a giant harp but it sits on a table and you hold two mallets and you just play it kind of like a drum set. It's an instrument that like teleports you to that medieval stage. It has a very fantasy vibe to it. Be very pretty or also very, very evil sounding. If you whack it hard enough. We did record the live dulcimer. But well, here's the funny thing, we noticed that it sounded too wimpy, dainty and beautiful. But this is not meant to be a beautiful track we kept to the original. But then we also pitch shifted it down two octaves, to play unplayable notes. To play this earthy growl that you hear whenever the big drums hit, it's this BAAAHHHM! that helps bring all of this low end that you wouldn't get otherwise. We wanted to keep as much as we could live. But if you've ever worked with live musicians, you'll notice that there's always this lack of production. When you take a bunch of different little puzzle pieces and you throw them together. It's kind of like cooking. Sometimes you need to add a little bit of spice.

5:55 Recording the choir 

Travis asked me to write this piece of music. We had this final version, and I thought that we were done. And then

The piece of music we're listening to now in the background is called Discovery. It's a retrowave soundtrack from a fiction podcast called Gr8 And Terrible by A.R. Oliveri. Today we'll break it down and get into what retrowave is and how and why this piece was put together. You'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 Lee Rosevere. I'm a composer in Charlottetown PEI in Canada and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 84, Discovery, by me, Lee Rosevere.

01:12 Gr8 And Terrible audio drama

Gr8 And Terrible is a fiction podcast about a high school student that stumbles upon an ancient curse that grants immortality. But there's a catch: every full moon she must kill someone or she'll die. 

01:26 80s influences 

I was always a big fan of the 80s in general as being a child of the 80s and growing up and listening to all the pop music that was around at the time, including a lot of the synth artists. My first introduction to the synth world was probably Jean-Michel Jarre, the Equinox album that I owned on an eight track. Played it a lot. Then moved on to listening to pop songs that were hits at the time such as Axel F. Paul Hardcastle had a big hit with the song 19. Fly By Night by him was one that I listened to a lot. Take a listen.

02:17 Retrowave

The entire retrowave genre I rediscovered in 2012 or so by an artist named D/A/D. He put out an album called the Construct and one song on there particular called Love Will Make You Stay really caught my ear. What is this whole retrowave thing? I lived through this once already. So it's kind of cool to go through it again because it's just you know, firing all the nostalgia synapses. I was really taken with the whole sound and how it's changed and what it was doing in the current time, and how it can sound somewhere in between the past and the future at the same time. I really taken with that and started listening to a lot of it and then decided that I think I'm going to try making some of this music. So retro wave is a bit of everything the past and the future all brought together with the sounds of the 80s but a lot of them have been amped up for current times. They're mostly associated with movies from the 80s like the action, sci-fi or the horror movies. The Stranger Things soundtrack really brought the retrowave genre back and more recently in Kung Fury, which is actually scored by Zack Robinson, also bringing that sound even more into the mainstream than it was before. So some of the most common and instruments that are used in retro wave are a huge snare drums. Lots of reverb, which I am always a big fan of. Retro synths, like the ones from the 80s. I'm always drawn to spacey or ambient because that's where all the influences are. And like Brian Eno's music and other things all just kind of mush together.

04:46 Song breakdown

So I want to break down the song for you and show you some of the individual parts. It first started with this synth melody And then I brought some arpeggios into it. And there's two basses going on at the same time here. The strings are an instrument called Manitron that I have used on practically all my stuff. There's an organ pad that's doubling up the main melody and adding a little bit more texture. There's a synth called Futura, which is adding that brassy sound. The guitar is actually a sampled VST. I wish I could play guitar properly, I would have a lot more fun doing this kind of music. And there's a little bit of a vocoder in there, which is an instrument used a lot in Daft Punk or Kraftwerk's music.

06:41 Recording while composing

The bassline was played slightly differently each time because I couldn't remember what I h

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the theme tune to Hector Vs The Future, a comedy podcast about a cantankerous museum owner's battle against technology and obsolescence. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind the scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and share some of the musical insights into how it was made. My name is Óðinn Örn Hilmarsson. I'm a composer and sound designer living in London, and this is How I Make Music.

00:52 About the show

Welcome back to How I Make Music episode number 83. Hector Vs The Future by me, Óðinn Örn Hilmarsson. Now, this episode of How I Make Music features some stronger than usual language and our tech overlords demand that we label it explicit. You have been warned. Enjoy. Hector Vs The Future mostly follows Hector, a cranky old curmudgeon who curates a museum called the Obsoleteum, where all obsolete technology is collected for pointless posterity. Across the road is another museum in many ways its exact opposite the Uptodateum, run by Biz and her half-robot half-hologram assistant Phil. The show is about Hector's struggle to keep old tech alive in a world that is constantly updating itself. He himself has a clockwork pacemaker, that he constantly has to wind up with a turnkey sticking out of his chest. And we have planned obsolescence in the tech that we use. Even though Hector is this sort of kook, it's absolutely something that feels very real to now.

02:33 SID chips

I was definitely deeply influenced by what the 70s and 80s thought the future would sound like. In particular, old game sound generators, Commodore computers, SID chips. Arguably for Hector, even that is too modern for him. There's one synth, which is specifically a chiptune sound. And I knew that that would translate the tensions of old versus new in a musical way for the audience listening in. Hector is this bitter and combative character. He's always in conflict with the modern age. And it's Hector versus the future. So I knew that I wanted to approach the theme tune with this sort of battle music. Giving a boss battle where Hector is the unlikely hero.

03:41 Clockwork rhythm

So the time signature of the piece I felt had to be in an odd time signature. For me that has a lot of urgency. That was sort of my first building block and I built up from there. We have two drum layers. One sounds quite static and is mostly hitting all the straight notes. And then there's another track which has a more traditional modern action drum feel to it. And that was meant to sort of give a lot of power and a lot of oomph to the whole proceedings. And underpinning the rhythm section the sort of more traditional drum sounds is the rhythm of Hector's windup pacemaker. The pacemaker actually starts the piece as well it winds up and starts the whole episode. And I knew that once we were into the main section of the piece, the pacemaker should be there as a rhythmic element as well. I added a little noise gate to just add a bit of stuttering effect to actually make it feel like the ratchet was quite creaky and a bit worn

05:33 Rick and Morty

Funnily enough, Rick and Morty was very popular at the time and I do think there are quite a few similarities between the sort of dramaticness of Hector Vs The Future and the Rick and Morty one. Feels like it's aping Doctor Who a little bit. Doctor Who has that sort of theremin sound with the gliding synth.

06:03 Musical abacus

The kalimba is a sort of very old tech instrument in terms of music making. It's just metal prongs stuck to a resonant wooden box. It feels like a an old tech instrument. Hector would be very admirable of or admiring of. It's a musical Abacus. Yeah, exactly.

06:42 Li

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Riders In The Night. It's an Ennio Morricone fever dream from the supernatural cowboy show Grimwell County. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. If you're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. My name is Ben Valdmets. I'm a composer, musician and voice actor from Austin, Texas, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode number 82, Riders In the Night by me. Ben Valdmets. Thanks for listening in.

01:34 Grimwell County

This audio drama's called Grimwell County. It's a story about a bounty hunter and a vigilante who get roped into hunting supernatural threats in the old American West. Sort of X-Files meets cowboys. It's meant to give the listener strong cinematic vibes. If you close your eyes, maybe you can visualize, you know, not only just the characters in the situation, but the style too. It's awesome. I'm very excited. I'm excited for it to come out. Yeah. I work with Gabe Alvarez, who created Starcalled, a show where I do one of the voices, Captain Landris.

02:34 Spaghetti Western

This piece - Riders In The Night - is meant to be kind of a modern spin on a classic Ennio Morricone sound. Dry, cinematic Western. I always have enjoyed that kind of spaghetti western sound. And what he was describing sounded like that would fit but it also needed kind of another angle. Recently, I played a game called Disco Elysium. It's almost less like a video game and more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book or something. It's a lot of reading. It's all about this world-building. And as you're walking around in this world, one of the ambient pieces is a very stark just sort of lone trumpet to start. So I wanted to take that idea and run with it on my own track. I was inspired.04:01 Psychedelic trumpet I studied trumpet in school. So it's not like a high bright trumpet. It's naturally sort of dark. You know, I knew that I just wanted to reflect the melody from the whistling and I ended up just going crazy putting effects on it. It's got a chorus effect on it. Full of reverb with echo. It sounds very cool. It's like lonely but psychedelic in a way. Once I got kind of bored with that aesthetic, I thought, you know, I just sort of jumped ahead and said, Okay, I'm going to keep the key. I'm going to keep the tempo. Let me try to just take this harmonic concept and do it completely stylistically different. The more classic cinematic track grows and grows until we hit this apex We completely take the left turn, and that's when I got out the trumpet to keep the energy up. I got out the guitars and bass and wrote this sort of groovy drum track to go with it. And I thought, well, that sounded good, too. They both sound good. They're very different. So then the work, the real work was stitching them together. This track also includes a lot of instruments that you might not expect to hear on a spaghetti western, really anachronistic sounds. A cowboy would be shocked to hear an arpeggiated synthesizer! You're supposed to hear that and immediately be thinking like grainy film quality, like...I don't want to say cheesy, but maybe over the top cowboy action. You know, blood, six shooters, bullets whizzing everywhere, horses going crazy. Things like that. I wanted to move beyond those typical tropes and push it into some weirder direction.07:22 Trust the soundThere were some challenges. I tried re-miking and redoing some parts. And I took it back to Gabe, the show's creator. And he said, You know, I liked the old one better. I tend to put a lot of trust into just, you know, did it work or not, rather than that take was on the hundred dollar guitar and the other ta

Join soft-spoken ‘Unwell’ composer Stephen Poon in a gentle midwestern music composition breakdown. For fiction podcast 'Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery', Stephen’s influences ranged from Irish traditional music to the retro sound of Nintendo game cartridges. The Unwell Theme is a rollicking, foot-stomping soundtrack born of a nerve-wracking recording process with a host of live string musicians. An immersive listening experience. Headphones recommended.TRANSCRIPT00:00 INTROThe piece of music we're listening to in the background is the Unwell closing theme. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. We break apart a song soundtrack or composition and get into the insights into how it was made. My name is Steven Poon. I'm a composer based in Chicago, USA. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 81, the Unwell closing theme by me, Steven Poon. Thanks for listening in.01:30 MennonitesUnwell is a Midwestern Gothic mystery. It's about a young woman returning to her hometown, the fictional place of Mount Absalom, Ohio, where everything is a bit more spooky than it seems at first. And this piece is the outro theme, which also plays under the ending credits. I'm from Ohio and in rural Ohio, we have a lot of Mennonites, which are like Amish people. They don't use a lot of technology. Like it's kind of anathema. When I'm driving to Columbus, or Cincinnati, there's some stops where you might actually run into a horse and buggy and there are some religious communities that don't make use of modern technology. And so it was really at the forefront of my mind going into this setting to not include a lot of synths and digitized music. There are loads of real, actual instruments in the track. I've been far more used to sequencing music, and to be able to go into the studio with half a dozen musicians was really rewarding.03:15 CharangoTake a listen to this. It's not a guitar. It's not a mandolin. It's a charango. It's one of a number of instruments that we recorded live for the Unwell theme. A charango is a Peruvian stringed instrument. It's 10-stringed. And traditionally, it was made from an armadillo shell. This was an instrument that I had found when I was in Peru for my honeymoon, and really took to it. I thought it was a beautiful sounding instrument. And the first thing that I even wrote for the track was on the charango when I was in Peru, and I found a luthier, who was making these instruments. And you could still smell the sawdust in the air of his shop. And he didn't even speak English. So I think it was his daughter who was translating for people who came into the shop and only spoke English. And so this was a melody that I had been picking around on. And it got stuck in my head so bad that I'm like this...this has to go somewhere.04:49 InfluencesI've had a lot of influence when it comes to music over the years. So here's like a few things that came to mind as this track came together. First and foremost was The Chieftans. I really like Irish session music. There's really this tone of freedom and playfulness that comes from it. I'm thinking of a rural, less populated place. I had recently been watching Deadwood. So the Deadwood soundtrack by David Schwartz. That opening theme was also in my mind. I've always had a lot of inspiration from specifically Japanese RPG soundtracks to music from the late 80s, early 90s. There's not a lot of samples going into these songs. Very simple melodies that can very easily get stuck in your head. Because you're only working especially with the original Nintendo, there are only like four different samples that you could really fit in a cartridge. And I don't really want to go too deep into this because it's not a common game. It's like literally a visual novel. T

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the theme to the podcast Civilized. It's a regal intro theme with a vintage sci-fi feel and today we're going to break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song or a soundtrack or composition and get into how it was made. My name is Eli Hamada Mcllveen. I'm a composer, sound designer and writer from Canada, and this is How I Make Music.

01:12
Civilized is a dark comedy sci fi series that's also completely improvised. There's a small terraforming team who have crashed landed on a far-off planet, and they're doing their best to survive. And they're pretty terrible at it. So this is the opening theme to the show and introduces us to the world via this opening narration read by our actor Risa King. And kind of kind of builds the mood until Mike comes in with "Civilized".

02:11 Analog synths 

Early on, some of the influences we had for the feel of the show itself drew on science fiction. Both my partner Sean and I watched a lot of Doctor Who as kids. A big part of the sound of the music was the analog synthesizer of the day. Your Arps, your Moogs, your Polysixes. Here's the synthesizer lead to the Civilized theme. 

02:53 Larry Fast

I got really into electronic music in high school and used to raid used record shops looking for old records and one of them was Synergy. It's the project of a guy named Larry Fast, who was the synth player on a lot of Peter Gabriel's early stuff. Pure synthesizers. One of the best known tracks is one called Legacy. Here it is.

03:26
Peter Howell 

Peter Howell was the guy that did the The Leisure Hive in 1980. It sounds like this. It's got the same kind of military drums with its synthesized horns, but it's got the kind of feel I was aiming for. It's got that marching band kind of feel. So I wanted to capture a little of that. So that's that's why I chose this ensemble. It's two horns, tuba, timpani snare drum and synthesizers. Oh and piano. 

04:49 Quartal and quintal harmonies 

So I did what I usually do. I noodled around on the piano to create some interesting melodies and harmony under them, and I started playing with quartal and quintal harmony. Quartal and quintal harmony use the fourth and fifth. A stack of those. So right at the beginning of this piece, you'll hear the synthesizer. It's a I think it's a model of a Solina string synthesizer that's playing this big stack of fourths. And over top of that there's an arpeggiated synth that's playing those same notes. And that adds some motion and a little bit of glitter. They're like the stars twinkling in the distance or something like that.

06:06 Great leaps

The melody itself the main melody uses a lot of fifths and it has these great leaps that make it sound kind of heroic, I guess. You get those sounds typically in brass parts. I guess they evoke things like fanfares or bugle calls, because a bugle doesn't have any vowels. So it's pretty much limited to the harmonic series. So the bump, bump, bump bump up, up, up, up, up, up up. Those are the notes that you have at your disposal. So those big wide striding leaps, give it this big open kind of optimistic feel, I think. So as a composer, I lean on my very limited playing ability. I I know a bit of bass and enough piano to kind of be dangerous, but reality is I'm kind of like an author that types with like one finger on each hand. Yeah, I'm not sure where to go with that! So these big leaps in the melody give it this very forward looking feel. I I use the word heroic. Yeah, the opening phrase actually reminds me this one phrase in the opening titles to Deep Space Nine. Similar, I hadn't heard that theme a whole lot. Before I created the theme to Ci

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the main theme from podcast sitcom Wooden Overcoats. Today, we'll break it down and look at some of the insights into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and get into the insights into how it was made. My name is James Whittle, composer, performer and conductor from the UK, and this is How I Make Music.

00:46 About Wooden Overcoats

Wooden Overcoats is a podcast sitcom about two rival funeral directors. On the one hand, there's Rudyard and Antigone Funn, siblings who rival themselves at times! And then newcomer to the island Eric Chapman, who has a fantastic presence and everyone falls in love with him. They compete for funeral business and a lot more on the island of Piffling. It's kind of satire comedy of small island and village mentality. But also a very nostalgic and affectionate take on rural living and community. And lots of lovable characters too.

02:15 Leitmotif

The Wooden Overcoats Main Theme appears at the beginning and end of every episode. We hear the motifs from the theme throughout the show soundtrack to represent siblings Rudyard and Antigone. I had quite a lot of fun with the little jingle dum-dah-dum. It's often there, even under the surface. You might not always notice it.

02:44 Influence: Trevor Wishart

One of the influences on Wooden Overcoats Main Theme is a piece by composer Trevor Wishart called Beach Singularity that was written in 1977. The piece is actually a live performance that takes place on a beach with brass ensembles and electronic recordings all at the same time. Victorian musical songs all combined with brass playing at the same time. Quite a noisy, almost absurd sound, which I love. I was drawing on these leftfield, avant-garde experimental compositions to try and get that sense of the absurd of satire. Of something a bit off kilter. We have in Wishart's piece, even dogs barking! So there's a lot of humor. There's a lot of chaos in this piece.

04:08 Inifluence: ‘Allo! ‘Allo! British sitcom

Wooden Overcoats is set on a fictional Channel island. So one of the key musical influences was the theme tune from a British sitcom 'Allo! 'Allo! which is set in France and features lots of very bad accents. Very tongue in cheek, take a listen. The feeding tune has this dadadada rising fifth. Wooden Overcoats does a little quote of that.

04:48 Large melodic jumps

The Wooden Overcoats theme moves up and down in quite large jumps. It's that stuff which for me harks back to 1920s operetta, which is very expressive with these big jumps up and down. Here's an example from the 1920s operetta The Student Prince by Sigmund Romberg. Sounds very romantic. I kinda wanted to add a little bit of that kind of nostalgic feel in the tune.

05:44 Live performance recording

The Wooden Overcoats main theme was recorded live with a group of four musicians plus a conductor. And part of the challenge for me in writing the soundtrack is to get the most out of the minimal means. So even with just four musicians, how could we have, you know, a bass and some harmony and a melody, and make it all sound engaging? We wanted to work with live musicians, we wanted that raw sound that you get from live instruments. That's really the joy of music making for me is working with other people. It might not be a perfect sound. The drums are quite rough and ready. And that's maybe partly to do with how we recorded it anyway. But for me that makes the piece represent the show better. Because the Funn twins are not the most organized or necessarily straightforward of characters.

06:35 Odd ensemble

The ensemble for this piece is not your average, you don't often combine