My fiance was playing After Inc: Revival and I was kinda bored, so I started playing My drums along to the game music. Then I started changing up the beat to reflect what was going on in the game. Then I started associating game events with audio cues, and used the audio cues to guide My partner in the game and help it play better. My partner didn’t notice a celebration bubble, so I used music to tell it the bubble was there.
A well designed game soundtrack helps the player understand what’s going on and guides them to make good choices. Today I was a game soundtrack.
Yeah we were in a voice call in discord and My drum kit is hooked up to discord. I have a bash script that automatically hooks up My drums to My headphones with pipewire, puts noise cancelling on My mic but not the drums, and sets the volumes to My preferred defaults. Then I just have to attach the drums to discord’s rtc engine in Cable, which I haven’t been able to automate.
I’m still a beginner drummer and I don’t know what most of those fancy music words mean. I was able to match the game soundtrack pretty decently with a basic 4:4 beat. It was all electronic, it wasn’t designed to sound like live music at all. Lots of different samples designed to sound pastoral and ethereal and calming.
Holy moly! That’s quite amazing! I never thought I’d hear “bash script” and “drums” in the same sentence. 🤣
Oh, no problem! Do you have any role model drummers? 😊 I don’t do percussion AT ALL by the way. 😅
agogics - “unnaturally” elongated tones/beats (perhaps not applicable to/expressible with percussion? Unsure…)
syncopations - off beat accents that give the beat “swing” or a dance feeling
backbeats - with a 4:4 beat like the one you played, it’s the beat numbers 2 and 4. “Normally” you would emphasize 1 and 3, but depending on what feel and effect you want to produce, you can intentionally emphasize 2 and 4. Think reggae.
irregular time signatures - you better look this up, but basically “uneven” numbers. Say, 5:4 (typical emphasis: ONE two three FOUR five) for instance. It’s also worth pointing out that in some cultures and genres of music, times signs that feel unnatural or hard to keep to us can be perfectly normal, common or even the BASIC. Important not to judge. 😊
Thanks!
Yeah coming from a programmer background and going into drums, I guess I’m in a bit of an odd situation. I can barely hit a rimshot but I know how to program a Linux computer to automatically set up My drums for recording when I log in 😂
Unfortunately, My role models are fictional! I was inspired by Gwen Stacey in Across the Spider-Verse and Swampy from Love Handël in Phineas and Ferb. And one day I’ll be able to play and sing Ain’t Got Rhythm. I’ve also started watching The Drum Thing on youtube, I guess he’s kind of a role model. But I definitely don’t want to throw cymbals across the room like he does! He’s so mean to his instruments
I mean you can just keep hitting a crash cymbal and it’ll keep making noise. So if you gently but quickly hit your crash, you can stretch the sound out as long as you want. But I wouldn’t say it sounds “unnatural” to do so, it’s pretty common. If you load up Halo Combat Evolved, the main theme actually starts with this big rising crash cymbal sound that sounds super orchestral and atmospheric, where they’re doing the technique. Is that an agogic?