Amy’s Room: In Depth

What went into creating Amy's Room remix from Chao Bytes? Read on to find out!

Conceptions & Considerations

Normally, before working on a song, I can hear the finished product in my head and deconstruct what I’m after. As such, I had a rough idea of what I wanted all of Chao Bytes’ songs to sound like. For Amy’s Room however, I became deeply inspired by Chao Bytes’ debut song, Homecoming and decided to rework some ideas I had for Amy’s Room using Homecoming as a base.

In particular, I liked some of the chord progressions from Homecoming which was more bright, fun, and had more movement. This contrasts Light Dash’s style very well!

Creative Decisions

Una’s piano solo as the intro was one of the original ideas that I kept as it does well to highlight Una’s Mirco Element talked about in their band profile. The idea was to create a “sudden explosion” of intensity to mix Chao Bytes’ cutesy style while circling back to the intensity of fighting. The tempo change at the beginning was kind of an accident. On top of the usual slowness I felt coming back to the original soundtrack, I had a hard time deciding on a tempo.

When the intro’s tempo was fine, the hook was too slow. When the hook’s tempo was fine, the piano solo was too fast. The plan was to have a barely noticeable tempo change but an accidental mis-click made me explore quickly ramping up from a slow tempo. On the back end, this led to roughly 5 tempo changes, starting from slow to pass the desired tempo and then to the tempo of the hook. Another thing I did was recall the intro motif within the loop. This is a trick I picked up from working on games.

The chord progressions is another thing I changed up. I really liked the “notegistic” type sound I got from Homecoming and thought it meshed well with Chao Bytes’ backstory as well as separating it from Light Dash. This was highlighted in the Chrous and cooldown after it with the falling chromatics.

Due to the chord progressions and some rhythms changing, I had to adjust the parts of the bass, Organ, and guitar from the original. I specifically adjusted the Organ to avoid playing 4ths which is one of Les’ defining Micro Elements.

The bending pads in the Verse was something I came across while looking for patches. I’m liking this spacing kind of sound representing chao as it creates a subtle nod to the new revelations we got from the Sonic Frontiers lore.

In the final drum solo section, I thought having the members clapping along to the beat would be cute. This was a very random decision that sprang into my head, but it kinda sounds like “cheering on” the scene, so I kept it.

Struggles

The first big challenge came from representing the right channel guitar layer found in the original. No one in the band plays guitar so I wasn’t sure how to approach this. Tari was the only solution through her meta instrument’s presets available to me.

While researching possible sound designs for Tari’s instrument, I came across a collection of presets of Xeno Sound works featuring a premade guitar. I layered the sustain and mute presets into one patch and tweaked them together. The sound was a bit more faithful to that classic 16-bit Sega Genesis sound so I made it work.

Similarly, finding instruments for RiRi and Bam Bam was difficult as well. When writing Homecoming, I played around with the many toy flutes, recorders, and whistles in my arsenal, but when it came to writing Amy’s Room, only the recorder from Homecoming was flexible enough to serve my needs. This is why RiRi’s representation is a bit lacking in melodics. In exchange, came the siren in the intro and the blow horn in the verse.

With Bam Bam, I really wanted a collection of toy drums or toms playing the drum solo at the end of the loop, but the ones I had were pitched too low. I could’ve pitch-shifted some of them but not enough to get the tone I was after without introducing artifacts in the source, so I had to rely on Tari again for the part. I instead tucked Bam Bam’s drum solo a bit beneath these toms. Because this didn’t come out too well, I also put Bam Bam back on the toy Tambourine in a few sections to ensure he had more auditory representation.

During the mixing phase, I knew I would have an issue with the bass tone, which I struggled with in Homecoming. During the production phase, I selected 3 different types of bass sounds and layered them as Low/sub, Mid, and High. Even with this, I struggled on how to blend these together. Side chaining the Low bass tone to duck with the kick and the Mid bass tone to select instruments playing the melody helped provide clarity.

This brings me to the bulk of my struggles in writing this song. The entire song was tough to mix. Nearly all instruments from all members had frequencies around the mid and high ranges of the spectrum. I had to explore a repeatable solution for the other tracks planned. My solution was centered around Side Chaining. Simply put, this allows an instrument to be lowered in volume (or duck out) automatically when another instrument is playing.

If you are familiar with this concept, I wasn’t using a compressor but a multi-band compressor in tandem with Tone Booster’s Equalizer Pro. Specifically, I grouped tracks together and dynamically side-chained their groups to make sure the center instruments took priority over the other.

The last struggle came from the singing Chao parts which had to be completely redone at the last minute. I draft the Chao Troupe’s parts in MIDI using a simple choir patch for sketching. When it was time to produce their singing parts, it didn’t sound right. RiRi was singing too high and KeKe sounding like he was being forced to sing higher than what he could. Not only did I redraft the parts but I also readjusted the parameters so they’d sound more natural. This meant shifting the original notes from what was initially planned.