Technical Post - PBH Music Development (Patreon)

Hello patrons, how are you all! It's adi. I hope you're doing well. Somehow we've made it all the way to May - it's honestly scary how fast time is going past! As well as how close the end of 2021 feels sometimes. But nevertheless, we must march on and at our team, continue making games!

This month I wanted to take y'all through the process of PBH music development (from my perspective)! My audio... music skills are a bit too lacking to go into a ton of depth, but I thought it would be exciting to show you how one of our tracks developed over time. After some deliberation... I decided on Juliet's Theme, The Keeper of Memoirs!

You should go listen to it. It's really good. Our OST is so beautiful!!!

For Please Be Happy, all the music development began from a document. I did write-ups for each track, linked examples of sounds I wanted to hear or songs with similar vibes as well as a general write-up for the whole OST. It's kind of casual, so you'll have to excuse my casual language - I mostly just wanted Sarah to read it and didn't actually think about sharing this with all of you!

Actually, I just remembered the original write-up for Juliet's theme was... terrible. It was a comment, but I've gotten rid of it because it was so, so bad. A lot of the themes I referenced were from the Aria anime OST as well as various visual novel OSTs! I also put in a lot of Kensuke Ushio tracks, but I'm not totally sure if those influences ended up in our OST.

Amanchu OST / Baroque Music Collection / Warm Wishes 

Random side note, but we went with different instruments for each of the three main characters to make them feel a bit more distinct! I wanted to highlight Miho's carefree, breezy nature in her track, Aspen's more reserved, but soft nature in hers and Juliet's more confident, elegant nature in hers.

So with this write-up, Sarah started to do some sketches and send us WIPs of the tracks!

WIP 1 | WIP 2 

Wow!!! It's been so long since I've heard a relatively unfinished version of this song. While sometimes it takes a little while for a song to really find it's place, most of the time Sarah posts something and it's just right. I wanted the strong melody to appear much quicker, which you can hear in WIP2.

WIP 3

There were a couple more iterations between 2 and 3, but 3 is when a lot of the rest of the track was starting to be made.

I forgot exactly when it was discussed, but at some point Sarah mentioned that she was worried about relying on violin too much because it was a bit more obvious when it's a synth violin compared to a real one. After talking to Josh, a fellow-violin-stan, we decided to hire a violinist, Michaela Nachtigall! Notably, she's also done strings for the Steven Universe OST. We're so incredibly grateful to her for giving such depth to our soundtrack.

Pre-Live Violin | Post-Live Violin 

Isn't it so beautiful! Thank you Sarah for creating such a lovely track for Juliet!

- adi

P.S. Did anyone notice the general book theme to the OST track names? It's hard to stick to it for every track, but it's something we're conscious of when naming the tracks. Speaking of, we need to workshop some names for some not-yet-revealed not-yet-named tracks!

I hope you enjoyed reading! If you've listened to all of the currently revealed PBH OST, would you like to share your favourite so far?