Gr8 And Terrible - Lee Rosevere - Discovery

How I Make Music

The piece of music we're listening to now in the background is called Discovery. It's a retrowave soundtrack from a fiction podcast called Gr8 And Terrible by A.R. Oliveri. Today we'll break it down and get into what retrowave is and how and why this piece was put together. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories Every Wednesday, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Lee Rosevere. I'm a composer in Charlottetown PEI in Canada and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 84, Discovery, by me, Lee Rosevere.

01:12 Gr8 And Terrible audio drama

Gr8 And Terrible is a fiction podcast about a high school student that stumbles upon an ancient curse that grants immortality. But there's a catch: every full moon she must kill someone or she'll die.

01:26 80s influences

I was always a big fan of the 80s in general as being a child of the 80s and growing up and listening to all the pop music that was around at the time, including a lot of the synth artists. My first introduction to the synth world was probably Jean-Michel Jarre, the Equinox album that I owned on an eight track. Played it a lot. Then moved on to listening to pop songs that were hits at the time such as Axel F. Paul Hardcastle had a big hit with the song 19. Fly By Night by him was one that I listened to a lot. Take a listen.

02:17 Retrowave

The entire retrowave genre I rediscovered in 2012 or so by an artist named D/A/D. He put out an album called the Construct and one song on there particular called Love Will Make You Stay really caught my ear. What is this whole retrowave thing? I lived through this once already. So it's kind of cool to go through it again because it's just you know, firing all the nostalgia synapses. I was really taken with the whole sound and how it's changed and what it was doing in the current time, and how it can sound somewhere in between the past and the future at the same time. I really taken with that and started listening to a lot of it and then decided that I think I'm going to try making some of this music. So retro wave is a bit of everything the past and the future all brought together with the sounds of the 80s but a lot of them have been amped up for current times. They're mostly associated with movies from the 80s like the action, sci-fi or the horror movies. The Stranger Things soundtrack really brought the retrowave genre back and more recently in Kung Fury, which is actually scored by Zack Robinson, also bringing that sound even more into the mainstream than it was before. So some of the most common and instruments that are used in retro wave are a huge snare drums. Lots of reverb, which I am always a big fan of. Retro synths, like the ones from the 80s. I'm always drawn to spacey or ambient because that's where all the influences are. And like Brian Eno's music and other things all just kind of mush together.

04:46 Song breakdown

So I want to break down the song for you and show you some of the individual parts. It first started with this synth melody And then I brought some arpeggios into it. And there's two basses going on at the same time here. The strings are an instrument called Manitron that I have used on practically all my stuff. There's an organ pad that's doubling up the main melody and adding a little bit more texture. There's a synth called Futura, which is adding that brassy sound. The guitar is actually a sampled VST. I wish I could play guitar properly, I would have a lot more fun doing this kind of music. And there's a little bit of a vocoder in there, which is an instrument used a lot in Daft Punk or Kraftwerk's music.

06:41 Recording while composing

The bassline was played slightly differently each time because I couldn't remember w

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