Serenades | Dev Diary: Experimentation
Today I will be discussing some experiments that I explored as part of this album.
New Workflow
Currently I primarily use notation software to compose. This allows me to produce clear sounds and crisp melodies, but also means my music tends to lack depth or atmosphere. I have plans to shift my workflow to something more complex, but at the moment I don't have the smarts and my computer can't handle the processing. However, that didn't stop me from trying a little bit anyway for this album.
As such, the music you will hear in this album is a blend of methods: most of the pieces have been specially developed and fine-tuned. The exception is Valiant, as my computer couldn't handle the large orchestration. I learnt a lot during the process, though not enough. Nevertheless, hopefully you will be able to hear a bit more colour and depth to the instrumentation (strings in particular); take a listen to the first part of the trailer to hear how different it is.
New Instruments
By virtue of not working for anyone but myself, I had the creative freedom to delve into some of the dustier areas of my sound library. The instrumentation of the album, for the most part, is no different to usual, but I want to point out the piece Memory, in particular. This piece stands out very different to the rest as I decided the experiment a little with some synthesizers. In the process of doing this I may have included a few basic bass drops in there.
Have a listen out for them!
New Audiences
As previously noted, I made this album with some intention of reaching new audiences and broadening the Utopia family. That's why I decided to focus on Cities: Skylines as the primary game for the music to fit into. C:S has a broad playerbase and a notable lack of music mods. This is one reason why the music is a lot more mellow than usual. Don't worry, the music also fits fine with EU4! (plus there's still some awesome eu4 mod music coming in the future!).
Hopefully this will lead to more happy Utopians around (plus, you may find it suits you better than my previous work when studying or working) as well as a wider fanbase so I have a bit more flexibility on the music I can produce and still have you enjoy.
But also, admittedly, I really enjoyed the different style and pace of music to fit C:S. I've always wanted to make a music mod for C:S and it's likely my past albums will be ported over in the future.
TL;DR
Basically, I wrote this album for myself, so I could do whatever I wanted with it. As such, I decided to experiment on a few ideas that generally are not available to me on larger projects. I extended my workflow to include more detailed editing of some of my instruments, to increase the depth of sound. I toyed with some synthesizers, with interesting results. I focussed on Cities: Skylines because it was a change in pace and will hopefully widen our fanbase!
Serenades comes out August 26 on streaming serves worldwide and as a music mod for all major PDX titles.
Enjoy!
- Utopia