Behind the Scenes: Music Special + A New Build Mode Track (Patreon)

Hello everyone! It’s Andrei, ready to talk music 🎶 As the team gets ready to start working on the Live mode and as I finish all the Build mode sounds, I had some extra time to make more music again! In the last post I showed (which you can check here), we saw some of the creation process of the sound effects for the Build mode. And since I’m feeling audacious, I’m going to do the same thing in this post 🥴 Only this time with the new music I’ve made! 😁

⬆️📽️ In the video above, you saw part of the recording process as well as the end result of a new Build mode track called “Little Trinkets”. As we stack layer by layer (with some weird occasional bloopers) you can get the idea of what the final version of the track is gonna sound like! In this post, we’re going to go through the recording process of most tracks that I’ve done for the soundtrack so far! 🥁

Setting up the Studio

The first thing that you got to do before recording audio is making sure there’s silence 🤐 As a home studio owner, it’s so easy to have noise sneak into your recordings; whether it is someone’s footsteps, the AC hum or, in my case, Kurama barking to every single life form outside the house. Once that’s checked, I then set up the mics, tune my instrument, and a lot of other technical things that take over all my attention span. Once I hit the recording button I realize: I have no idea what to play 😂So like anything in life, I improvise!

Recording Takes

I think that one of the things that characterizes the Paralives’ music direction is that I try to record everything myself with my limited abilities instead of using samples or many virtual instruments. As I brainstorm on the spot, usually an idea that I recorded on the banjo or mandolin gives me another idea on another instrument and, before I know it, I’m already vibing to a song that doesn’t even exist yet 🕺 So I record for hours and hours all while listening back to the whole thing. This process is very much like getting a train going: at first it’s hard but once it’s rolling, it goes faster until you can’t make it stop 🚂

Comping and Tweaking

In the end, I usually end up recording too much and everything sounds like a bit of a mess 😅 So I have to polish the song by choosing the best parts of every recording I did, removing some instruments, balancing volumes all while watching a gameplay video of Paralives to make sure the music fits the vibe! The music's most important goal is only to enhance the experience of the game. To feel like a warm hug 🫂

Here’s a screenshot of the Logic Pro project of “Little Trinkets” I know it’s a bit messy 👉👈

Even after “finishing” a track, the best part comes when I put it into the game and notice all the little things that I couldn’t have heard if I wasn’t a player, and proceed to note down all the corrections to do 📝 I’ve always been too much of a perfectionist so there’s really no end to the amount of things I want to add or change in my music 🥸 Somebody once said “A music producer never finishes a song, they just give up on it or run out of time”, just like me with this post’s text ✨ 

What was your favorite part of the video? What has been your favorite track of the whole soundtrack shown so far? Thank you all for everything, it means a ton 😁 Can’t wait to show you the next post!

Until next time,

Andrei ♪♩♩ ♪♩♩♩

Edit - January 23rd, 2025: This post is now public, feel free to share it!