“When we first got into doing the audio drama thing, it was very clear immediately how supportive the community was. Made us feel a lot better about getting our feet wet and just like diving into this madness.”

0:21   ABOUT The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the main theme for the audio drama Spacemerica!. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart a song soundtrack or composition and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Ian McGowan. I'm a speech and language therapy student and musician from St. Louis, Missouri, now based in Scotland, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode 95, Spacemerica! by me, Ian McGowan. Thanks for listening in.  Spacemerica! is a space opera sci fi comedy about a group of people - a ragtag motley crew - that ends up going on the hunt for a treasure. And when you set things hundreds of years in the future, high jinks ensue. And there's some pretty good comedy in there. So I guess the goal for me is to put the audience in the room with with whatever's happening.

2:27   INFLUENCES The piece that we're hearing now is called Panoramic by Atticus Ross, who composed the soundtrack for The Book of Eli. I was always interested in it because they use a lot of electronic stuff. And they create these really beautiful soundscapes these textures with a lot of really simplistic individual parts that build on each other. Pretty dystopian. There's a little bit of grunge, a little bit of distorted guitar. I think I was probably always gonna pull from that. Another influence is the soundtrack for Oblivion, which M83 had a heavy hand in. Because the story that we set out to tell in Spacemerica! is pretty epic. I wanted to make sure that the intro the outro really set up that kind of feel for the audience. Those two were main influences and building the space for a theme that really takes you on a journey, rather than something that's kind of tight together and makes you feel like you're kind of in a closet.

4:59   ELECTRONIC TOYS On a whim I purchased this Akai XR20 beat development machine, whatever the full name is. So when I was starting to work on Spacemerica!, I knew it was going to be epic futuristic. To me that sounds electronic. You think robots you think cyborgs you think electronics. I was always going to start there. And so I kind of messed around with a few beats. It took me a while to come up with the backing beat that you hear. I turned off all the lights in the room, I shut the blinds. The Akai has a three by three pad grid and they glow. I just sat there and just kind of let that run to get this feel of drifting through space. I purchased a Mother32. A Mother32 is an analog synth. I don't actually know a ton about analog synths and so when I recorded, I hooked it into the Akai and played the the melody part of the Akai melody through the Mother32, there's just a slow legato, an ethereal melody in the background. And that's courtesy of the Mother32. Almost a ghost like feel like you're kind of drifting, which I loved. I might not ever be able to recreate this exact thing, but that just makes me appreciate it that much more. 

8:46 BASS GUITAR I needed to create a bigger boomy sound behind everything. The bass on it just wasn't quite enough; it wasn't round enough. I that's when I got out my my bass guitar - my Fender five string - and I just added those notes which ended up actually being an octave lower to make to really kind of fill it out. I then added some distorted guitar chords in a slow build. I added an airy synth sound like B-movie, sci fi kind of stuff. 

10:04   FLOOR TOM I searched desperately actually for a good sample of a booming drum. My friend Daniel is a drummer, and he ha

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