Development team calling!
A couple of weeks ago, we introduced you to the composer of Kingdom Eighties, Andreas Hald, and gave you a peek into how his mind works when creating the music for the game. This week, Andreas takes us even deeper into his process and nerds out about synthesizers!
How do you achieve the sound of the 1980s?
I think the most important elements of ‘80s music are the synthesizers, arpeggios, gated reverbs, sequencers, drum machines, tape echoes, cassette recorders, and something called FM. It stands for frequency modulation, which is a type of sound that you can get out of synthesizers. It was extremely popular in the early ‘80s, so that’s why you hear a lot of FM sound in the music of that era.
Furthermore, and I don’t mean this in a demeaning way, a lot of the music from the ‘80s was somewhat simple harmonically. I have a degree as a jazz musician, but bringing in some of those complex chords and structures just wouldn’t make sense for this soundtrack.
So the interesting stuff happened in the textures and the sounds. Maybe back then you were limited by, for example, a drum machine with mediocre samples because it only had a small memory buffer, as well as somewhat basic sequencers. Or maybe that sequencer or the synthesizer was difficult to program. So I wanted to keep that in my music by limiting myself by using the same gear from that era and trying not to cheat.
My not-so-secret weapons are delays and echoes. You can take the most boring and basic synth sound but if you run it through a delay, you instantly get magic. And then you use the delays and the echoes like instruments. You play with them, you move the knobs around or you touch the tape with your fingers to do small pitch things.
I’ve done a lot like that to get that ‘80s vibe, but at times it’s actually kind of modern-sounding as well. In order to create the darker side of the score - for example the Blood Moon cue - all the textures that I can’t create on a limited classic ‘80s synth, I’ve used a more modern, modular synthesizer.
What were your main inspirations when composing the Kingdom Eighties soundtrack?
I’ve honestly tried to steer away from listening to music for direct inspiration because I try not to be too colored in my choices. That’s a really difficult thing to do. But I’ve listened to this kind of music my whole life and I am an ‘80s guy at heart, so if I had to name some inspirations it would be Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, and John Carpenter, tv shows like He-Man and Knight Rider, as well as pop music by artists like Cyndi Lauper. The wailing, crying guitars that play in harmony in rock music - I love that, so I have that in there as well.
I also had the early graphics and storyline in front of me when composing. I like to darken my studio and only have lights from my gear, a few soft lamps, and maybe even turn some lava lamps on. It’s just something that gets me in the mood - the dark environment and the pictures in front of me.
But the main inspiration comes from my gear. I’ve been collecting synths for a very long time and I have a huge range of classic synthesizers from the ‘80s, but I’ve never really quite gotten to use them as much as I really wanted in my film composing work. Then this project came along and it felt like something I couldn’t let slip away from me because it was just up my alley.
I very quickly decided that this was a project where I wanted to record everything outside of the computer, through hardware synthesizers, hardware recording equipment, and tape recorders, and keep it analog, organic, and human. I’m playing everything myself. And I’ve tried to do that for as long as possible before committing it to tape and recording it on the computer.
Of course, I bought a new synthesizer for this project alone - the Oberheim OB-X8. It’s a new synth based on a very old synth from the ‘80s which money can’t buy. The Oberheim is known for its voice panning, which means that the synthesizer alternates between the speakers for each note. So when you play a note, it first plays in the left speaker, and then you play another note and it plays in the right speaker, spreading the synth across the stereo spectrum. It makes many people go “oh, I can hear it’s an Oberheim”. It’s kind of weird, but it’s something that I really, really dig about it. I’ve used the Oberhiem extensively throughout Eighties and there is one track where you can hear it prominently - during foggy days there is a song played with only that synthesizer.
So I would say that the music in Kingdom Eighties is an homage to those artists as well as to the classic synthesizers from that era. It has to be the most enjoyable project I’ve worked on so far. I’ve been given so much trust and in return, it has boosted my ambition for this project through the roof. It’s really nice to have that freedom.
Thanks for reading part 2 of Andreas' interview! We’ll be sharing more info about the Kingdom OST further down the line. See more of Andreas' work here: http://andreashald.com/
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See you next time!