Making of "BLACK BOX" StP's Main Theme (Patreon)

Munisix here. I've been busy finalizing the main theme song of StP called "BLACK BOX" for the past month or so and I figured it might be interesting if we shared process of how we tackled this song. (We're almost done!!)

First off, I immediately wanted something that wasn't reminiscent of Japanese Pop music for this track. I wanted something that had a lot of Western cinematic influence (as usual), but at the same time have a familiar sense of "fault" to it. I also wanted a track that could be used in promo videos and sound epic AF. 

This was quite tough.

In order to achieve this, we hired someone that has basically no ties to the Visual Novel industry and very little familiarity to Japanese culture in general for the actual music itself. It took about 7 different iterations... but we finally came up with this track:

BLACK BOX - Instrumental 

Then we hired another Japanese artist to make the vocal line (because our vocalist is Japanese) and ended up with this result:

BLACK BOX - Melody Reference 

Then comes the next headache: 2 weeks of writing lyrics that's relevant to the story of SILENCE THE PEDANT. I almost went insane.

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曲名：BLACK BOX

囁き　掠れる　優しい日々の　喧騒

心に　棲み着く　闇が照らされていく

これが僕だと　自分騙して　受け入れる

鏡に映る　わたしの顔は　凛としていた

様変わりしたこの笑顔に気づいてくれるかな？

この手の平も、血まみれで、もうわからないかもね

楔で繋げ　掟打ち付け

戒めのように　生きるよ

逃げ出さぬよう　四肢ももがれて

でも、謳うよ、笑うよ、 

あなたの（ハモり：この目が）

笑顔戻るまで（ハモり：開ききる日まで）

あまりにも静かで、酷

愛すればいいと　思ってたのに

いずれここで　また出会って

受け止めて　くれるのかな？

僕たちの　小さな　絆さえも

無に還り　消えるのかな

歯車さえ　等しく

愛も　無駄に　なるのかな

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Then we had Hare-san do a sample vocal track... and we finally were able to send it off to our vocalist Aaya Midorizaka! All this took about a month and a half...

To be completely frank, with the amount of funds we currently have, we probably could have just thrown money at some semi to straight up "famous" musician/singer here in Japan and called it a day (we finally have a tiny bit of clout) but  we wanted to be hands on and participate in the alchemy as much as possible. I also want to keep pushing boundaries with so called “no-named” people as well. It’s more interesting that way isn’t it? “I’ve never heard of any of these motherfuckers but they consistently make the best quality shit in the industry” is the attitude I want to keep pursuing. 

It was a long and tedious process but I think we came out with something unique and emotional that fits in with the rest of the fault series quite well.

Anyways, thats how we worked this time around to get the main track done. Hopefully it will be of help to someone out there making their own game.

We'll be posting the result of the vocal track when it comes in to a Patrons only article too, so stay tuned!

-munisix