Last weekend, my mom asked me to write some background music for a video that she made that starred our family’s cat Darci. The video showed Darci stealing something off of a dresser and playing with it after, and she specifically wanted a suspenseful feeling during the heist and happy music when she was playing with whatever Darci stole.
I first looked at some references for heist music from movie soundtracks and tried to find some similarities that I could use. After I kind of got the general idea of what I wanted it to sound like, I put some things together in Logic using the software instruments that were already there. I used a piano, strings, guitar, trumpet, drums, and synth for the entire thing. A low droning synth or ambient sound was something that most of the movie soundtracks had in them, so I went through some of the things that Logic had in its sound library until I found something that sounded similar.
Another thing that was quite common was a piano intro playing a bassline over some quick hi-hats which wasn’t too hard to put together. Later when things started to buildup I added a heavier drum beat with Logic’s “drummer” feature and the rest of the instruments. Since it was something I wanted to finish pretty fast, I didn’t really focus on the chords and what harmonies worked well together. I kind of ended up just putting in a bunch of random notes until they sounded okay.
The one thing that I had a lot of trouble with was the transition from suspense to cheerful since transitions have always been something that I’m really bad at writing. In my opinion, the transition sounded like it was from a video game where you beat the boss and a short victory jingle played. I used the exact same instruments from the previous part because I wasn’t trying to make it any more complicated than it was.
I also ended up using the feature that my theory teacher showed me and put the video inside Logic as I was working on the music. It helped with knowing when the transition should start, but because I had the video inside along with the music, I had some trouble figuring out how to export the whole thing.
Overall, it was a fun little thing that I threw together in around two hours, but it was interesting to try and write something in a specific theme that I’ve never tried before. In the future, I might try and do something else in a different style but spend a bit more time working on it.