Starting Settings | Random Music Production Table No. 4
Roll a d6 and let fate decide!
You’ve watched plenty of shows and movies. You’ve played tons of tabletop games, and video games.
When I ask you what a scene’s environment sounds like you should have a well of inspiration to inform your music, if you have collected an internal library of media over time. When you think of a battle-weary horseback rider racing to deliver a message before all is lost, I bet you think of sounds and rhythms that reflect the intense pace of travel while amplifying the rider’s highly emotional state. Maybe something adventurous and swashbuckling, or maybe something dark and serious.
Listen to what I came up with for OUBLIETTE below.
It is nice to have lots of tools at the ready for your creative endeavors. Setting up environments in the mind’s eye is one of my absolute favorite ways to write a new track.
An icy wind drone to reflect the dragon’s lair at the top of the mountain’s peak? Check. Battle music roaring through a scene of three armies clashing flesh and steel? Check. The soothing sound of a bonfire being lit as you make camp to heal your wounds and regain your humanity? Check.
This table and future posts like this come from a place of wanting to explore environmental sound, ambient soundscapes. The pursuit of creating breathing, living textures for a game scene or ttrpg campaign setting led me deep into synthesizers, and modular synths in particular. Even when I’m writing for fun I love starting with an environment so that I know what synths, sounds, and textures I want to reach for right from the start. If you take the time to develop your tastes and work on an audiovisual language of your own, you’ll understand how powerful you can become.
The table and a d6 roller are below.
In order to keep things simple and get you started on making music, there are six choices for you on this table to start a new song with. There are more options lying around the dungeon, but those are for another time. For now, you should roll a six-sided die and let fate take the wheel. (You can also use the d6 roller below.)
Random Music Production Table No. 4 | Starting Settings:
A mountain's peak, covered in snow.
A meal outside of the camp's tent at night.
An oubliette.
A small village's market square at dawn.
A watery world at the bottom of an old well.
A castle hidden in fog in a forest.
Result: -
I Played This Game Too | Example Music
Time has been precious lately and I haven’t been able to work from one of these tables since before releasing this series. Today I wanted to change that and am going to roll on the table, record something, give it a rough mix and master, then share it here. I’ll write about it as I go? This is a first for me so let’s just get to it.
This is nice. I rolled a 3. AN OUBLIETTE! How cozy.
Well I think of a couple of directions immediately. The word ‘oubliette’ has always reminded me of the movie Labyrinth, and that movie makes me feel of sparkly, magical, and 80’s fantasy sounds. That could be a great direction to try and go in. It’s not what I think “Oubliette” needs.
I think it needs the other direction I’m thinking of. It needs a dark fantasy vibe heavily mixed with loneliness, despair, and dread. If an oubliette is where someone would be imprisoned and forgotten about, we can meet those expectations. This track could be a drone with some earthy sounds (thinking dirt, stones being scraped, the metallic clanking of chains and pipes, dripping noises, odd screams from the darkness, etc.)
The next step is opening up Logic (use your DAW of choice, they are all pretty amazing at this point) and maybe sample something from my modular synth or VCV rack.
For the sounds I went with a mixture of presets I knew would work well here, getting drones from Kontakt 8 and Arturia Pigments (my favorite softsynth right now).
Then I moved on to creating a couple of quick granular synth sounds in Pigments. For the sake of time I used samples that came with the plugin, and if I had the luxury of really diving into this I’d be recording my own foley and vocal sounds for these patches.
This example track was more about atmosphere and less about melodic structure, so after getting my sounds picked, I worked on lightly randomizing when certain sounds were playing, and then did a basic balance (I mean BASIC BASIC) mix.
During the balancing phase I took some time to just listen to the loop on repeat, and it was cool but lacked flavor. It wasn’t dreadful or scary enough, so the hunt for another element began. I found what I was looking for in a preset that uses scraped cymbal samples. It was just enough for me to want to call it finished. In the future I may decide to flesh this into a whole song but for now this felt like a victory.
This is the Oubliette project file in Logic Pro. Took a break from finishing the music to create quick single artwork.
Want to hear what I ended up with? Listen below.
This was a fun exercise! I hope you’ll give it a shot. If you roll on this or another one of the random music production tables please send a link, Instagram is the easiest for me but you can also use the contact form on this site to send a link. I may not respond but I’ll get around to listening to them all.
If you enjoyed that post please check out some of the other blog posts. You know, stay a while, and listen. Or something like that.