Two songs inspired by Stardew Valley.

I've been playing this game a lot. Mostly because I've been moving around and I can play it on Switch - and because it is precisely a game about displacing oneself.

If you don't know, Stardew Valley is a game made by one man: ConcernedApe. He designed it and made all the artwork and music himself. I think more recently he's accepted some help with coding, to make stuff like multiplayer possible, but it basically IS one man's idea of what a game should be. So I've always admired it and its score, especially.

If I had to complain about something that keeps it from speaking to me fully in the specific way I want it to, I would say sometimes it feels a little naive. There is this quality that is missing, something to do with what it would actually feel like to give up everything you know and move to a farm. It's a fantasy many people probably have, but I think there is a sinking feeling that would come in real life from satisfying that fantasy. A feeling of loss. I don't have any right to be talking about this, of course, but I felt a personal desire for this kind of modification to the music so I made it. Out of love. To further knot into myself this thing I've been obsessed over.

I started by tracking down the exact instruments used in the original score. This was pretty easy to do, as ConcernedApe documents the game's development on his blog. He wrote the original music with Reason, which is a music program that comes with a set of stock instruments to build songs with. So I got a 30 day trial of Reason (I think I have a few days left). I, again, pretty easily figured out that the instruments he's using within Reason are just the stock preset sounds, without much done to them. So I used my favorites: the harp, banjo, pan flute, melodion, strings and drum kit sounds I use all come from that.

Stardew Valley is a game that borrows visually and thematically from older games, so I wanted to go beyond Reason sounds for my music; I thought the music should represent those older games texturally, too. Here's everything else I used to achieve that:

Plogue Chipsynth MD (which emulates a Sega Megadrive soundchip)
PC-98 drum samples and wavetables (these are real hard to find)
Roland D-50
Casio CZ-101
Yamaha VSS-30


xAntimo