Tickling The Ivories

I don't know if I've talked about this on Patreon before but back in my yoof I was a "musician". I put it in quotes because I was a bassist for a couple of pop-punk/metal bands and the extent of my musical ability was that I could keep a beat and play fast. Thankfully that's all you need as a young bassist and so I got to play a few gigs around Glasgow through my late teens/ early twenties.

As I've grown older, I've been getting nostalgic for making music and have been taking drum classes at a local non-profit called Music Broth at the insistence of my partner who has always had a better ear for music than I have*.

Learning a new instrument as an adult has given me a lot of confidence though, especially playing one that is unavoidably loud. I had chosen bass out of a sense of shyness and a belief that I could sort of fade into the background with it. I wanted to perform but I didn't want people to look at me which is a difficult situation to resolve.

Over the years, Shanice and I have discussed our desire to make music but for some reason, assumed it was completely out of our reach. We thought it would be prohibitively expensive. That it would require college courses or complicated software or, I don't know. I guess part of it was my age old worry that I'd have to show people what I'd made.

Thankfully, Shanice decided one day to just take the leap. She bought a cheap-ish midi keyboard, downloaded Reaper, and taught herself how to work it out of nowhere! Since that sudden revelation she has been using the planets from For Small Creatures Such As We as practice. And you know what? I love what she's came up with! Her first track is a stomp heavy industrial funk piece that you can use as a background for the shipbreaking planet Grave. It's got a real Ratchet & Clank feel to it and a sense of character that I always feel is lacking in modern sci-fi which seems to fall back on synth/pad/orchestral stuff.

Her enthusiasm is infectious and she's been showing me how the software works and how to find new instruments, loops and samples. Together we'd like to create tracks that can be listened to while you play our games :)

Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy!

*I swear I've got a sort of musical aphantasia as I cannot picture music in my head. Shanice made a game of this by getting me to acapella various film and tv themes and laughing like a hyena when, for some reason, I would always get them wrong and do the Relic Hunter** theme instead.

**I have only ever seen 1 episode of Relic Hunter. I have no idea why its theme stuck when literally no others did.