Location Themes & Leitmotifs

Location Themes & Leitmotifs: The use of specific instrumentation for certain areas (like deserts, snowy landscapes, or volcanoes) is a common technique for producing adaptive gamemusic and soundtracks (also for filmmusic btw) and makes sense. But I also like to combine melodic motifs with places, and I often do so: The advantage of this is that you can work with two levels: you can, for example, deliberately change the instrumentation (e.g., when night falls) and keep the melodic theme - so the player still recognizes that it's the same musical motif, even though the established instruments are no longer available. As always, there should be a reason for doing so.

When writign a soundtrack concept for games and composing the OST it's a quite hard to learn balance act between "adding nice and complex adaptive elements" and simply overwhelming the audience. Because if you try to establish 172982376 musically and instrumental leitmotifs, there won't be any effect. Most of the times i try to go for a max of 3 strong melodic leitmotifs, where i make use of a lot of techniques and functiosn that motifs offer & meanwhile focus on establishing more instrumental motifs.

And with things like this, one thing is particularly important: continuity. If you establish a certain instrumentation for (for example) the night, you should implement it consistently. That means: for every musical motif of a city (regardless of the main instrumentation) there is a version of the theme with the "night instrumentation" - otherwise, you wouldn't be able to create links in the player's subconscious. #gamemusic #vgm #soundtrack #instrumental #gamedev #indiedev

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