Exclusive Paralives Music Demo and Making Of (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Andrei here from Paralives Studio reporting for duty to do my very 1st patreon post! 😁 I’m here to show you all a music demo I made for Paralives and my creation process! This exclusive preview is for Patrons only so please don’t share! And by the way, yes, this is only a sketch and it is not confirmed to be in the final version of the game (Ha!) We still have a long way to go before that happens! We are now in the brainstorming phase of the music so this track was purely made to explore and try to find our musical direction (I’m basically the one in charge of that as well as the direction of all sound effects). So without further ado, here is the musical creation of a song I called “Intertwined” (listen to it in the above video).

Finding references

Story time! Not long after I joined the team, I started doing a bunch of short 40-second demos to brainstorm as many musical approaches as possible for the game. I was doing all sorts of crazy stuff that I had never explored before. In the meantime, I was listening to a BUNCH of different artists to get some inspiration going in my system. 🎧 I was checking stuff like the album Human by Dodie, Hablame de Ti by Josean Log, Musica de fondo by Zoe and Ruins by First Aid Kit. All of those albums really influenced the making of Intertwined.

Feeling inspired (the demo)

I had just gotten my hands on some new sounds I bought from Native Instruments (a music production equipment developer) when I started doing the 3rd music demo for the team. I actually didn’t have the intention to do the 3rd demo (whoops) 👀 I was just goofing around with the new sounds and having fun! I tweaked, edited, layered, erased and explored all these new sounds I had never used before.

So, I took a break for the day when I went out to visit my parents. They were listening to a song called Ultimos dias from the Zoé album which featured a banjo. And that’s when it hit me: A BANJO!!! I was so struck by the revelation that I immediately went back to my little home studio to test this new idea. I added the banjo that you hear at 0:17 and layered it. I was super happy with the result. Right after that I felt that something was missing by the end. Like a very lyrical melody to make it the theme. So I tried a bunch of stuff until I ended up putting the synth theme that plays at 0:25 and would influence the rest of the track.

Feeling stuck (the sketch)

As the team decided to feature Intertwined in a Patreon post, I needed to work more on it and add a second part. However, I had no idea what to do. I had a vague vision of maybe switching dramatically to an orchestral section, but it didn’t work very well… So I erased the whole 2nd part and started from zero again. Then, I ended up making something that still had too much going on at the same time and was too abrupt.. But I still wasn’t aware of that yet (foreshadowing!) and left it in the demo…😪

Turning critique into improvement (the corrections)

Right after finishing I was feeling confident it worked and sent it to the team to make corrections! And to my surprise there was quite a lot of stuff that needed some change 😅 The bridge was too abrupt (Ha!), the cello and violins felt out of place. I took the critique as motivation and went on for round 2!

So to keep it short, I replaced the strings (0:25) with the synth in Home (the song in the chalet video). I also completely changed the bridge section (0:48) for something more rhythmic and that made sense with the rest of the song. It took a lot of feedback and corrections to turn the track into what it is now. I went on changing things and editing/mixing them (by the way, mixing is the music production stage of balancing out all the sounds in a track so that it sounds as clear and good as possible) until at one point I stopped… I heard it one more time and there was nothing else I wanted to change. So I sent it... and they liked it!

Here are some screenshots I took of the progress of my Logic Pro X project (Logic is the MacOS software I use to create music):

By the way, if those images don't tell you anything, the little rectangles contain music notes. These rectangles called regions are in horizontal music tracks that are basically different instruments! 😮

Screenshot 1: The initial idea. There’s very few instruments and it's very short in length. You can see the fundamental instruments of the song like the banjo and the synths

Screenshot 2: The expanded idea. There are many more instruments and the song has tripled in length. The brown, blue and red regions are orchestral instruments while the green and yellow ones are all just non-organized random instruments like synths, drums, bass, effects.

Screenshot 3: The corrected version! I organized it in the following order: Percussion & bass (yellow), Transition sound effects (purple), Keyboards and Synth pads (green), synths that play the melody (pink), banjos and anything that supports them (orange), orchestral instruments (red and blue).

But wait, there’s more! (the alternative)

By the way, you may be asking yourself right now “Ok cool story! But what about the other version that played after the first one?” Well that is the acoustic version of Intertwined that I did this week! I made it to show you guys that all these songs that we are making for the game are flexible enough to have different versions for different game contexts! Nothing about this is confirmed at all but I thought it would be a cool feature to show you guys for this post! This version features only an acoustic guitar, a cajon, a shaker and a string quartet 🎻 A little screenshot of the project:

Final tweaks and conclusion

So there you have it! That was the creation of Intertwined 🎉 I was super happy that the hard work paid off and I didn’t realize that the song was getting better and better every time someone gave feedback about it. It was awesome! It took a bit longer than expected to finish but it was honestly worth all the effort. Especially doing the crazy stuff like blowing into a mic and adding reverberation to make transition sounds between sections, playing the cajon or imitating a shaker with a bunch of condiments I found in the kitchen (didn’t work so well but it was fun tho!).

To conclude, I did some last little changes like editing and mixing to finally be the track you listened to in this Patreon post! Midway through the production, I knew that this could be a potential Title Menu song or as Anna suggested, a song for when you're creating your Parafolk family? Let us know what you think about it, where would you see it fit, and if any of you guys have any questions, I’d be more than happy to answer them! Hope you guys enjoyed this post and have a really awesome weekend everybody!! ✌🎶

Andrei