Making Ceres Station, a Super Metroid Tribute Album, Live on Twitch Using Only Free Software
It was winter in 2020. We had all been inside a lot. Like a lot of people, I was feeling isolated.
I was quietly making a lot of music. Working on projects remotely. But I was missing a back and forth spirit of collaboration. A lot of the stuff I typically do is collaborative. Lots of back and forth between me and other musicians or creatives.
So I figured, why not try streaming the process of writing a new album?
I had no experience streaming on Twitch. I was pretty self conscious about people seeing the flubs and mess ups and the boring parts that happen when you are making music. Also, I had to talk through every decision that I was making, which was a new thing to learn how to do.
I used free software, because I wanted to show people that making music doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. It seemed like an interesting challenge. There is another video which I’ll link to in the comments about the best software that I discovered.
Originally it was going to be an ambient/spacey/soundtrack type album. Lots of synth arpeggios and big reverbs. I’ve done a lot of that in the past professionally, and because I was using synths and it was Metroid, it just made sense.
But I remember getting very nervous to start adding drums. The moment you add drums, the vibe changes. You can instantly change the genre to feel more rock, or epic trailer, or in this case, hip hop.
When I was young, I started as a hip hop/electronic music producer. It was the first way that I learned to make music. As I grew up, my musical interests changed a bit, but somewhere inside of me was that knowledge that I gained early on.
I sometimes think about this quote from Steve Martin. He was talking to Johnny Carson who said . “You’ll use everything you knew”. Steve Martin was talking about little juggling tricks he learned as a child, and how decades later he did the same tricks in big movies.
While working on this project, I started to understand this quote. We aren’t limited by our childhoods. We can grow and become whatever artists we want to be. But those little tricks we learned? There always in there. You can pull from them when you need to.
I could feel myself dusting off some old tricks.
Sometimes I had a handful of people watching, sometimes I had two handfuls. People would give me suggestions, give me real time feedback. Even though making music is a slow process, I heard that some people enjoyed putting the stream on in the background while they worked. I hope some people felt a little less alone. And maybe learned something in the process.
I’m so happy that I took on this project, the music of Metroid was a joy to dissect. Hopefully people enjoyed watching it come together.