How To Make Animal Crossing Music

recently I came across crossing tide me I thought ah that's nice it's minimal and simple songs were calming and put me at ease and as the next installment new horizon was just around the corner I thought of take a look at the music and what makes it tick it was either this or doom for those not in the know these are the songs that play while you're out and about during things in the world there's a different song each hour of the day because these songs play for an actual real life owl because these songs play for an actual real life hour they need to be able to play over and over again without making you want to take your shovel and get up so that's what I'll be focusing on the first Animal Crossing game was originally made for the Nintendo 64 in Japan before being released on GameCube internationally like another unknown gem for the n64 that I talked about in this video a lot of sounds came from recording an instrument or synth most likely an FM synth then with that short recording of a note you could change the speed of it and play higher or lower notes and thus you could write a song this way this would save on a lot of space nowadays you can find collections of these instruments samples in the form of sound fonts which can be opened in a sampler like direct wave or s4's and oh so that's what I'll be using but I'll also be making stuff from scratch too also I'm making this video before new horizon comes out so if the musical style does a 180 then I can be like I can't hear you I made it before some of these songs go as slow as 70 beats per minute and others up to 123 whoa that's fast but the vast majority seem to be around 100 bpm for that nice easygoing tempo most of the drums you'll hear while wandering around are these little short drum machine hits kind of like a baby 909 or closer to a six or six nothing is overly loud and there aren't any huge snare tails is all just short and compact so you either do a simple kick on the first and third beat and a snare on the second and fourth with upbeat high hats maybe change the kick a little to make a little more interesting or you have time it so that it feels even slower the composers really weren't afraid to just have a bar of a simple drum machine loop all on its own like look at this song it's a hi-hat loop with the occasional blip Bravo Animal Crossing I tried making some drums for the kick I used just a sine wave with a pitch envelope on it it goes quite high and comes down low so you get that punchy kick sound you can change the pitch envelope just give the kick a different feeling I've also set the attack and randomness to zero which can make some clicks depending on where the phase is set but actually wanted a little click in this case just a little bit as a snack I also made a snare if you look at this snare from the soundfont you can see two distinct areas there's a lower peak which is poorly just a sine wave and then this area higher up which looks like some bandpass noise so I made those two elements and put them together the Hyatts are also probably just some bandpass white noise - I was too lazy to make them so I'll leave you to figure out how to do that as a challenge some checks don't even have a baseline I I wasn't done while there is diversity in the bass sound from acoustic bass to fretless bass - some tracks just straight up not having any bass the tracks in wild world seem to really like this sawtooth bass it's literally just a sawtooth with a filter the basement will often just bounce between the root and the fifth of the courtesan so let's say we have a track in G major then our bass line is just moving around G and the D maybe was the odd few embellishments here and there carrying on with the theme of small and minimal you'll hardly find much melodic content that is sustained not all but most of the sounds just play for short little blips which leaves a lot of openness in the music and doesn't make it sound too busy what I also hear is a lot of what I'll call split chords basically you're just playing the root note first with the bassline or maybe with the chords and then the rest of the chord higher up [Music] really it's just to ensure that not everything is playing at the exact same time so there's a bit of rhythm between the chords and bass quite frequently the cords are also played along with the snare to some songs will just stay on the one chord possibly doing that fifth base motion but of course you can use more than one chord how about often you can just transpose the whole section up and down and that will work good enough the type of course you use really just depend on what you want to go for there are some jazzier tracks but overall the mood is quite joyful and positive and a lot of time you can just stay in a major scale and use simple major minor chords adding sevenths and ninths as you please is really just up to you here are some common sounds that your here electric guitar acoustic guitar electric piano [Music] the squeaky thin sense mallet sounds the accordion accordion is actually one of the few sounds that will slowly fade in and out not just playing a short blips [Music] so now we have two jumps bass encores last thing we need is a melody there are two tricks you can use to help write them first one is using : response have two different sounds and let them take turns every bar so like they're having a conversation hence call-and-response [Music] the sound check for city folk and wild world basically just an accordion and a mallet talking to each other the second trick is the chai harmonizing your melody usually to do this I'll start with a regular melody and then just put the exact melody a third down it doesn't have to be a third but I think that works well your pulley have to change some of the notes just so they stay in scale interestingly there are a bunch of tracks with bossa nova grooves [Music] the secret here is the polimedia groove watch my deadmau5 video if you want to have a bit more information on poly meters but each snare plays a dotted quarter-note a b and a half until it gets to the end of the second bar and then it repeats then the bass does that v movement we talked about before but with this particular rhythm often the chord hits will play at the same time as the snare but you can also offset it from the snare occasionally to make it more interesting bossa nova does tend to have jazzier chords so you might be doing trickier things like using cores from outside of the scale you're in this video isn't going to go down the rabbit hole of Latin jazz music theory and honestly I don't even know it super well I just make a baseline and then find the note set I'm happy with and then write a lead you can use the techniques I've mentioned earlier - I didn't mention this but besides from having a song change each hour they also change depending on the weather if it's rainy or snowing fortunately you don't need to write an extra 48 songs just take an existing song drop out the drums and change some of the instruments to a high-pitched glockenspiel add a sleigh bell sound to make it snowy ok well that's basically it of course there are songs that break the formula thank you 11:00 p.m. track I'm talking about you specifically but that's fine if every check was exactly the same it would be boring now before I leave you with a handful of animal crossing inspired tracks I just want to say a few words thank you to my patrons and my students who I give music production lessons to and just everyone out there supporting me here are some of my favorite songs you can also download the project file and take a look at them each in there to enjoy [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Dylan Tallchief

Views: 117,719

Rating: 4.9756417 out of 5

Keywords: Free, FL, Studio, Remake, FLP, EDM, Dance, Dubstep, Trap, House, Future, how, to, make, tutorial, animal crossing, animal crossing new horizon, doom, doom eternal, animal crossing music, animal crossing 9pm

Id: DuLHEThoShY

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Dungeonmaster8992]

Thanks for sharing! This was a very chill watch. I've always loved the music in these games, cool to see how it's done.