"Okay, You Two", again
It’s the second day of NaCreSoMo, and I…ended up just working on “Okay, You Two” some more. But I did have one breakthrough…
I’ve been suspecting this for a while, but 4/4 isn’t really the right time signature for the original (“Okay, Everyone!”). It’s got that swung rhythm, “one and two and three and four and”, and the simplest way to model that is by counting triplets:
| ONE and two and THREE and four and :|
| one-two-three two-two-three three-two-three four-two-three :|
…which by Least Common Multiple gives us 12 beats we’re cramming into a measure, which music people usually represent as “12/8 time”. And now suddenly I’m not fighting GarageBand, which has been trying all along to get the notes to line up with 4/4 rhythms.
The other change for today is that now that I’m confident in the backtrack part, I’ve switched the chord progression over to match the song I want to use as the melody.
The little woodwind flourish from the original doesn’t fit in quite as well anymore, though. I’ll have to decide what I want to do about that.
I didn’t really go into why I was doing these arrangements last time, besides just that it’s “clever”. But the reason I think it’s particularly valuable for me is because I’d like to be a better composer than I am—I don’t really know how to put together a song from scratch. Projects like this give me an already existing structure to work in where I can apply my existing musical knowledge and feel things out: “oh, that’s how it all fits together”. And the original Doki Doki Literature Club soundtrack is simple enough that I can tell how it all fits together.
It’s often been said that limitations spark creativity, and this is just another form of that. The same was true of my chiptune experiments from the NaCreSoMo two years ago.
Posting WIP and progress reports isn’t as fun as posting completed projects, or even tiny but complete experiments. But I have a good idea for tomorrow’s post, and even apart from the posting this is reminding me to keep making progress.
Part of NaCreSoMo 2018. Join us!