The picture for the jam reminded my team of the Studio Ghibli movie aesthetic, so we drew our inspiration from the music of those films. We aimed to make music that was dreamy, fantastical, playful, childlike. One goal I had for this jam was to experiment more with orchestral arrangements and make music outside of my rock/pop/electronica wheelhouse, so I emphasized variety in our OST. We decided we were going to use orchestral instrumentation and went for a breadth of different timbres. I tried to use a variety of drum sounds to fit the various moods, like jazz brush kits for the more downtempo tunes, some of the quirky drumkits in Ableton Suite like the water bottle kit, and taiko drum for the bigger sounding tunes.
My game compositions tend to be very melody and rhythm focused, so I usually try to get these components down first. I compose most of my music in Ableton’s session view. Usually I’ll start by creating a drumloop to establish the rhythmic feel of the song, and then I’ll try to come up with a melodic idea or a harmonic accompaniment that I will support a melody. Once I’ve built enough loops to establish different sections of a song, I’ll start copying and pasting those pieces into arrangement view and work on the layering of the instruments, transitions between sections, getting volumes and eq mixed properly, adding effects, etc.
I stream music production on my Twitch channel on the weekends, feel free to pop in to see what my process looks like!