A Day In The Life

A Day In The Life

Welcome, and thank you for sharing some your time. This is my submission for the Alternative Soundtrack Music Jam #2, and I hope you'll enjoy listening to it.

The Theme

Compose a track for: Animal Crossing - New Horizons (2020, Switch) Sunny Island Area

Informations on the game

Listen to the original soundtrack by Kazumi Tokata (and others) here

The Process

I started by listening to the original soundtrack a bunch of times, and taking a few notes. First, what's the instrumentation of the piece? Then what's the arrangement like, where does the part A finishes, where does the main theme come in, how is it modulated later on, where are the calls and answers ? And so on. Finally, I tried to make a mind-map of the kind of emotions, ideas, colours, places, memories, etc... this soundtrack evoked in my head.

Then I jumped on my piano and quickly decided on a key and a chord progression, to start writing down a "Part A". I first built the whole song on piano (as you can hear, since it's the main element entering at the begining and finishing the piece), my part A and its variants, my brides and my part B. And once I was done with that, I started working on the arrangement and adding instruments in and out.

I tried to keep it light and happy-sunny-dubidy-moody, but it quickly became a challenge for me ; it's definitely not the kind of creation I usually make. So I went out of the path I was following a tad, and added some sound design elements, glitchy things, a bit of dissonance here and there that resolves home on a happy-major feeling.

I think that's pretty much it, the rest is just adding and taking out, experimenting and not feeling happy with things so changing them again and again until I felt satisfied with what I had.