MMOM 025 - I Love Pivvot

Originally posted on June 12, 2014In this episode, I talk about a video game, Match Em that I designed, developed and published. I talk about my debut album, Major 7ths and Minor 9ths that I released on Bandcamp. I talk about how I put together and mastered the album. I also talk about my song “I Love Pivvot.”In May I got a bit of a “coding bug” where I was really enjoying doing computer programming, and I created my own video game. It is called Match Em and you can play it at https://tomsnively.com/games/matchemwebgl/ Match Em is a fun but somewhat frustrating game where all you have to do is find matching items. During gameplay, there are two rows of pictures and images. There are five pictures and three words in each row.The first row and second row will have exactly one item that matches. It might be two words, two pictures, or one word and one picture. Find the match, and click on one of the items. You must find 10 matches to complete the game. Find the matches as quickly as possible. There is a 3 second penalty for incorrect clicks. Click ‘skip to the next one’ if you just can’t find the match and want to try again. There is a 1 second penalty for each one skipped.I released my debut album, Major 7ths and Minor 9ths, which is named after my two favorite chord types. I talked about the song order with regard to keys and styles.I talked about small mix changes I made to six of the songs. I talked about how I mastered the album, using Graham Cochrane’s three-part series on mastering with stock plugins, EQ, compression and multi-band compression, and limiting. I got the stock plugins from Reaper which worked really well. I also got Voxengo SPAN spectrum equalizer.I talked about the Loudness Wars, and how much dynamic range the final album should have. A really good resource about this is Dynamic Range Day. I had to go through my process a couple of times, lessening the limiting until the dynamic range, according to the Offline TT Dynamic Range Meter was 10.I talked about the reference tracks I used for many of my songs to make sure the volumes were similar. I talked about the fades and the gaps between songs.I published this album on Bandcamp at tomsnively.bandcamp.com. You can listen to the whole album for free. To download it, click “Buy now, pay what you want” and choose $0 or more to “purchase” the album. (This has subsequently been published to Spotify and other places; see https://tomsnively.com/music/.)I next talk about my song, I Love Pivvot. I bought the chipsounds synthesizer from Plogue. I stretched the Zaxxon audio using Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch.I then played I Love Pivvot.I was hired this month to write three songs and make sound effects for an archaeology game. The developer will probably be launching a Kickstarter in the next month or two. I will let you know when that Kickstarter is running and I will talk about the game and the work I did on it.Send me your feedback by emailing tsnivelymusic@gmail.com