The Glitch Soundtrack

A soundtrack can play a major role in films and TV shows. But did you ever think about the impact of music in a video game? A multi-talented Toronto musician can lay claim to being the composer of a beloved online adventure game called Glitch. And he’s just released a compilation album of the music featured in the game.

Years after multiplayer online game Glitch ended, players remain a tight-knit group online. Spark contributor Tomas Urbina finds out why, when players from around the world descend on Toronto for a soundtrack release of songs from the game.

Happy New Year!!!

I've held off on updates because I wanted the next one to be: "We're ready to ship!!" I can't say that but I can say that the "Soundscapes of Ur" comprising of 2CD's and gorgeous 20 page booklet by Brent (Kukubee) has gone off to the printers! Once we get those back we will be doooone!!!

The release party is coming up very quickly (Jan 24) and you can't make it you can watch it live here on ConertWindow. We'll be using some cutting edge iOS technology that will allow us to cut from four different cameras. There's a crew of enthusiastic Glitch players who are planning on decorating the room for the event and will be close to 20 musicians there to interpret the music of Ur! It's all very exciting!

I have some exciting news to share: the date for the Glitch Soundtrack release party has been confirmed as January 24, 2015 in Toronto, ON at the Tranzac!!! I'll be gathering many of the musicians who played on the track to form a Glitch Orchestra and play the music live. We plan on streaming it live for those of you who can't join us in person. 

We hope to involve as many people as possible to decorate the room and make the night as Glitchy as possible. If you think you'd like to be involved, than email us at [email protected] and well get you an invite to a Slack (Tiny Speck's current endeavour) channel so we can plan together!

Hello fellow Glitchens! Two exciting pieces of news: 

1) Both Kukubee and I are planning on shipping the Soundtrack and Book so that they will be arriving in time to commemorate the 2nd anniversary of Glitch closing down (early December)! There have been delays in the mastering process so it puts me on a fairly relaxed and realistic schedule to consolidate all of the perks and organized shipping.

2) I am planning on going ahead with a release party and live performance of the music in Toronto for all of you that can make it. We will also be doing our best to make a live stream available for the rest of you! I'm hoping some of you will use it as an opportunity to gather in other cities.I was thinking the anniversary of Glitch closing down would be the perfect time, but I've been told more than once that December is a terrible time to be planning events. I'm aiming for the weekend of January 24/25. 

Now, some housekeeping: 

Please review the feats poster, and make sure we spelled your name properly etc. Let us know of any mistakes at [email protected] by Oct 14 (two weeks). 

Note: We weren't able to accommodate people who wanted more than one name on the poster due to space restrictions. We tried but it just made everything look suuper crappy! Where both real and avatar names were requested, we defaulted to your avatar name. If you prefer your real name in these cases, let us know -- but just pick one! If your requested name is too long we'll have to bump down the font size and it will be illegible. Ok!

[Click for Large Version]

I've been putting off an update, cause the next thing I wanted to tell you was that I was ready to ship. That's not the case, but it's been a while since the last update. I can tell you that I'm really on the home stretch!! Feels surreal!

My family took off for a vacation without me, so I'm totally in gear to wrap this up! Today I've been working on the final order of the songs on Soundscapes so that Kukubee can start with the layout for the album art so that it's ready to go by the time the music gets shipped off to be mastered. I've been listening to the music on my phone, in the kitchen, in the car and have been making final adjustments to the songs and getting feedback from others. 

I was hoping to be shipping by early September, but the two mastering guys I have been considering are booked up till then. So, I hope to pin one of them down for the beginning of September, or if I'm lucky -- just before then. The printing process takes 8-10 days by which time everything else (T-shirts, music blocks, and prints) should be ready to ship!

I wonder how many of you are in the Toronto area... It would be great fun to have a release party and get a bunch of the musicians that played on the recordings to perform it live. 

I spent a day in Mark's shop recently The carving process for the musicblocks ended up being a lot more involved than he had imagined, but they're all carved out, sanded and stained. Now he's begun production on the brass knobs. I plan on doing a marathon hole punching session while the Album is being printed, so that everything is ready to go at the same time. 

Here are a couple more arrangements for you to listen to!

I've reached a milestone in the project by having arrangements for all the of the tracks that will appear on Soundscapes of Ur (IX is still way to long but I'm almost there!).The rest is fairly straightforward with not as much decision making involved: final polish, merch, ordering, mastering, packaging and tada!  

I'm about to head to Alberta to celebrate my father's 80th birthday and to give my partner Colleen a break from our kids for two weeks. I won't be doing much, but I will have a chance here and there. I'll post some more music while I'm out there. When I get back, I have a date with Mark Kett to do a last push on the Music Blocks. 

The first ambient music I made for Glitch was for Groddle Island. I've been saving it for last, but I was struggling with a couple of the other tunes, so I finally switched to what many glitchlings referred to as the "frantic banjo" music. Indeed, there is a lot going on here! My roots are in folk music, so I didn't have much background making ambient tracks. This was one of my first stabs. I think, though, by the end of my three years working with Glitch I had a better grip on spacing things out and using tempo to do that. 

For the longest time the Groddle music was the default music that played for new hubs if there wasn't new music already made. I often didn't find out about new hubs until they were already in, so everybody heard this music a lot.

The Groddle Forest made me think of the forest in the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia where an annual fiddle festival is held. It's not a festival based around performances, but of people playing music together. The music is Appalachian and it can be trance-like. It's is common to zone out on a tune for 20 minutes straight!

The inspiration for the Groddle music came from the experience of walking around in the forest and listening to an orchestra of loud insects blend in with the different jams echoing through the trees and mountains into the wee hours of the morn. If you were moving around the blend was constantly changing but almost always harmonious. 

This was the basic template for the music of Ur: painting an aural landscape. 

It's amazing how organic and lifelike old analogue synthesizers can sound. I spent an afternoon with my friend Chris Stringer recording him fooling around on an old Arp Synth of his. You can hear that animal/insect-like sounds throughout the track. 

I try to include instruments that can't be replicated by midi or samples as much as possible. Pedal steel is one of them. I recruited arguably one of Canada's most respected players to play on this track: Burke Carroll. 

My apologies for not giving you an update last month! It’s hard to believe it’s approaching a year since I thought I would have this project done. Aaaaaghghgh!!! I’ve got the bulk of the work done for Spry Fox’s “Road Not Taken” so I’m going back into high gear on the Soundtrack.The good news is that I’ve also turned down a couple projects this month so that I can really focus on this (wuuut?!!). It’s so hard for me to say no to things, but I’m learning! (oh so slowly..) Just wish I had that sense a year ago!

I feel like I’ve made it through my biggest hurdle which has been the ambient tracks: distilling all these short two minute sections into coherent songs. IX and Kajuu have been so hard because there’s soooo much material them. I can’t wait till I’m just punching holes for the music box strips!

Here’s a taste of what I always called Kajuu music. This includes less than half the music I made for those hubs like Kajuu, Andra and Salatu, but flows so well together that I might have to make a different song -- perhaps for the "out-takes".

Some background on this track: It happens to be in 5/4 and is part of the lore that I was trying to build around the music of Glitch. The music from the Ancestral Lands and the Ancient Caves to the North East was written in 11/8 (just like the trailer), which makes sense since this is where the music of Ur originated (don’t you know?), and the easiest way to count in 11 is 5+6 or visa versa.

Soooo even though the hubs that surrounded the Ancestral Lands maintained some elements of the ancient music, it was diluted somewhat: whereas the coastal highlands gravitated towards the six feel, the rocky outcrops to the southeast gravitated towards the five. Some nerdery for you!

I wanted the music of Ur to feel like it was it was the folk music of the land much in the same way that traditional music exists in our own world.

P.S. Are you keen and want to have some input on one of the tracks!? Download these sections from the IX music and put them in a playlist. Listen to them, mark down the sections that you love the most, and then let me know! [email protected]. 

Hello Most-Patient-Supporters. As many of you know I've been side-tracked, working on a new project with Glitch's head artist Kukubee. I couldn't pass up another opportunity to work with him! It's a game by Spry Fox  called Road Not Taken that will be released on Playstation and Steam. Sony recently published a post that I wrote about making the audio for that game on their blog. I'm close to wrapping that project up and have vowed not to take on another project until your perks have been shipped!

I'm still enjoying going through all of the music that was created for Glitch. The biggest challenge has been going through the ambient music that will appear on the Soundscapes album. Now that I've got a pretty good grip on most of those tracks, it's a pleasure to turn to some of the more succinct tracks that will appear on the Variations portion of the Soundtrack. Here's a peak at some of those (these embeds might not work on your mobile device):

One of the most fun things about making the music for Glitch was getting to work with all of these great musicians you hear on Rainbow Run and Game of Crowns. I'll take the time to tell you all about them in a future post. 

I think the last hubs that were created before the announcement of Glitch's imminent shut-down might have been Nottis and Drifa. It wasn't on purpose, but it seems like the music that was made for those snow covered lands was foreshadowing it. 

I thought this would be a good tune to send out to you all during all of these celebrations that seem to cluster around the Winter Solstice. Fitting music to be working on during the big ice storm we had in the Toronto area as well. Put it on as background music as you enjoy family, friends or quality alone time. 

Hello Glitch Soundtrack supporters!  Glitch is very much on our minds on this anniversary of Glitch shutting down for good.  It’s been too long since my last update. You know when you want to write somebody a letter, but you want to sit down and take the proper time to do it, so you put it off, and then the longer you put it off, the more important it seems that it should a good one, so you put it off even more… Yeah..

It’s also been a year since the Soundtrack campaign was successfully funded, and I did not imagine it taking this long! Thank you so much for your patience!  Every day that goes by with this unfinished project weighs on me. Projects with hard deadlines have been hogging my attention (dammit!), but progress is being made!

It is still a joy to going through the ambient music and solving the puzzle of making succinct songs out of long meandering sections. Check out the music blocks in progress!

In honour of this anniversary I thought I could give you an inside look into the making of the “11 Giants” song that I made for the 2010 Glitch teaser.

It began with this little demo that Stewart Butterfield (stoot) sent me, which the Tiny Speck team ended up adding as the super rare SB-1 musicblock as a prank.

Stewart is a great musician. We used to play a lot together in the 90’s, which is how I ended up working with Tiny Speck. This teaser is probably the one thing I got to collaborate with Stewart the most on, and it was lots of fun.

I wanted to develop a melody, so I fired back a couple of ideas like this:

and ended up with this:

I’ve always learned from Stewart to keep thing interesting so I decided to write the song in 11/8 since it was about 11 Giants.  It’s not a common division so I had to figure out how to make it sound natural. I started listening to a lot of Kopanitsa -- a Bulgarian music and dance -- where the 11 is divided like this: 2+2+3+2+2. It goes by so fast though that you can't learn it by counting, it’s more like pulses, or a feeling. I tried but I couldn't make it work.

Here’s one of the first sketches I did in eleven. It’s pretty square and didn’t move as well as the final version.

Then my friend and Saturday Saints bandmate, Kristin Cavoukian, reminded me about the syncopation that you can hear in this famous jazz piece in 5/4 by Dave Brubeck, who loved to mess with different time signatures.  That’s basically what you end up hearing in the trailer, except the 11 is divided as 5+6, so it’s kind of like you add a beat every other bar.  You might be able to hear Kristin singing the doo wop stuff with me at the beginning. 

Kristin

We really wanted the music to move quickly with the visual changes, so I focused on finding as many different sounds as I could to introduce as the piece progressed. There were about 60 tracks in this song, (!) and that’s minus the other 30 or so that I dropped like flamenco guitars, fiddle, jaw harp, alternative vocal parts (I found a version where I was doing all the accapella stuff singing “glitch” instead of “doop”). 

When Stewart sent me the lyrics, there were a couple of verses that told the back-story of glitch that we didn’t end up using for the teaser.  I think I was expected to change them or use them as a starting point, but I couldn’t come up with anything better.  

Kim

I had this idea to get my friend Kim Sedore to sing the song.  You might get a kick out of listening to some of the music that she writes. She's got a unique voice and it's great for story telling. When I sent this version to the team with her singing, it was decided that she should be the official narrator of all things Glitch.  

You can hear another verse in this timing reference that wasn’t included in the final version:

I needed to get a bunch of people to sing the chorus in the end that helped express that got the idea across that we were all in this together. My friend Kristine Schmitt was having a birthday concert in my neighborhood, and I knew I was going to know everybody there, so I asked if she would me mind forming a choir after the show. It was the end of the night and there were a lot of drinks being had and it’s not normal to sing in 11/8, so it was a bit like wrangling cats, but we got it done!  Most everybody there had never heard of Glitch, and after singing the chorus over and over again, people were joking that they felt like they were unwittingly participating in some secret cult. 

It took a couple stabs to get the part where we introduce the giants right. You can hear in these versions that I was initially planning on doing the whole first section with just the doo wop section doing the back-up:

I think I knew all along that it needed to be Jed Clampet styles, so it was perfect that my friend Jesse Corrigan who was doing the piano part at the end had a perfect super-low voice for the part.

Jesse

Jesse did a great job of imitating a piano stride style over 11/8 which is challenging because the main character of stride style is the 2/4 feel.

The saxaphone part is played by a Shimon Diamond I first met as a bluegrass guitar player, but turned out to be a smoking horn player as well.

Shimon

First we came up with a horn section kind of thing and then he just improvised over it.  What ended up in the teaser were just all his passes, unedited and all together. It turned out to be perfect for the chaos.

Listen to this unedited improvisation.  Wish I could have used the whole thing. It’s so good.  You can hear Shimon laughing in the end “I can’t think of anything else!”

Last, but not least, I have to say that one of my favourite things about this was working alongside Kristel Ottis (sugarQb), who edited the teaser and ended up as Product Manager at Tiny Speck. She had a keen sense of timing and took a lot of cues off of the music, as well as some surprising ones (my favourite is the blender at 1:14).   

It’s really rewarding when someone edits well to your music, and when you get to be involved right from the storyboard stage! This song was also a great example of the rich musical community in Toronto that I was able to draw from while making music for Glitch.