Making Music the Wrong Way

In the last few weeks or so, I’ve put out a live soundtracking mod for the post-apocalyptic action-RPG, Fallout 4. (The modding system is currently in beta, so it might be available to everyone yet, sorry!) It’s gotten more traction than expected and I’ve been pretty happy with the project so far, but this time around I kind of took a big risk by basically throwing everything I knew about music-making out the window.

Ambient Jams Radio is basically a mod that you download for Fallout 4, which adds an in-game “Radio Station” for the player to listen to.

By throwing things out the window, I mean, mostly the sorts of things they tell or teach you to do in music schools:

1. Most of the tracks were improvised via live video streaming on either Facebook Live or Periscope. (This livestream turned directly into this track for example.)
2. No cuts or edits, for the most part. There’s still a lot of mistakes left inside most of the tracks.
3. Pretty much no mixing or mastering work was done post-production.
4. I didn’t practice or plan ahead of time for any of the sessions, just a general idea of what the atmosphere of the game I imagined to be.
5. The instrument I was using — the Seaboard GRAND — wasn’t supported for PC but I rigged it up anyway.
6. Each key of the Seaboard was mapped to a different sound patch because it wasn’t suppose to work with the PC yet. Also sometimes the patch changes randomly, so sometimes I had no idea what sound would come out next. I used it anyway and just adapted to it on-the-go.
7. Everything was recorded and rendered in MIDI. No microphones or even any audio inputs.
8. Recommended song lengths (even for soundtracks) are usually 3–4 minutes for most music tracks. Mine are 15–20 minutes at minimum for a total of about 4 hours.
9. There is no album for this project. Only a YouTube playlist that I’m trying to drive traffic to.
10. I’m promoting my tracks as videos, not with YouTube’s Music ContentID system. (The music tech space is a legal nightmare right now, unfortunately, which I don’t want to get involved with.)
11. Since YouTube tends to reward viewing time over views, consistency over “hits”, I’m going for a routine-based, volume-heavy approach. (Which suits me just fine, since that’s what I do anyway.)

The nice thing about putting your music on YouTube is that people in the industry consider it “evergreen” content, meaning that it tends to attract views over longer periods of time, resisting the ups and downs of hype cycles and short-term trends. In that spirit, I’ll be targeting high-quality games that have strategic depth and replayability since that’s most likely where I’ll be able to gather the most amount of fans. (Over time, slowly.)

Time will tell whether how successful this project will end up being in the long run, but it’s been an interesting experiment so far. (And if nothing else, it keeps me practicing and performing on a regular basis.) If you‘d like to support the project, please consider subscribing and liking the videos that you enjoy! It helps a out a lot.

Tangerine Music Labs YouTube Channel