You may recall a couple of months ago when we reviewed Retroware’s super-rad Prison Cityfor Steam, calling it one incredibly well done old-school game with a kickin’ soundtrack. Now, as the game prepares for its Nintendo Switch release this month, we’re talking to the man responsible for said soundtrack!
Matt “Radd” Creamer is the creator of many great game tunes, including soundtracks for Shakedown Hawaii and Retro City Rampage. He also works with all things related at Raddland Studios, working on everything from music composition to sound design/SFX to audio restoration.
We had a chance to sit down with Matt (or should we call him “Radd”?) about all things music composing, as well as what motivated him to go down this path of, ahem, rad chiptune creation. Let’s chat!
How did you approach creating the soundtrack for Prison City, and what were the unique challenges you faced in making it distinct while retaining nostalgia?
I’ve written so much NES music over the last 20 years, the only thing I really know was that I didn’t want Prison City to be *just* NES music, but I really didn’t know how to expand of that. Well, that’s not true, I knew how I wanted to expand on it, I just had no way to confirm if it was going to work until I dove in and started to do it. Sometimes you just have to reach in to the abyss and yank these ideas out before you can even tell what you are dealing with. But I knew I needed to do something different that all of my previous NES releases.
Can you share some insights into the protocols you developed to maintain the nostalgic feel while giving the soundtrack a more produced sound for the game?
The only thing I knew is that I did not want to separate the NES channels. That was the ultimate protocol. No matter what I did, I had to keep them in their entirety, almost like one instrument. The NES was MONO. Every non expansion chip track was straight down the middle with no stereo separation, and one easy way to start breaking the texture or nostalgia people remember is to start dinking around with the panning. If you pry apart those squarewaves, even with the best of intentions, it also tears apart the very unique and distinct detuning and cancellation that makes NES sound so in your face. It took me a lot of experimentation in my early years to actually understand this.
As for NES music, there are some protocols one should follow if they want to achieve an authentic nostalgic experience. One that I love, and use outside of chiptunes as well is that the triangle wave (which is most often used as the bass) can only ever be on or off. There is no fading of the notes like their is with the square waves. When you start writing a track with this protocol in mind, it will give you ideas you would not have had before, and can very directly result in more punchy basslines. Think like a slap bass player just going full ham. If you just let a bass not ring for a long time with no volume envelope or variation, it will drown out your track, so, you have to make the bassline move yourself with fast little notes that always accentuate your drums, etc. I was already very good at making NES music, but I had never experimented with adding to it.
So my rough idea was to write NES music in full using a tracker (OpenMPT), but then to add layers to it after the fact in my actual digital audio workstation (Cubase). I wanted to layer more sounds on the drums to make them hit harder on normal speakers. I wanted to fatten up the bass (triangle wave) with some grimy sub bass, and I wanted to toy with stereo field sound by layering on additional synth layers (usually using sounds from the actual NES expansion chips used by Konami and Namco).
The big what if was whether or not it would still sound nostalgic, or if I would ruin the whole thing. I am happy with the result, and I might be the most staunch defender of pure MONO NES music. So if this salty old barnacle can come around, I think it might be acceptable to the general public too.
What motivated your transition from creating NES chiptunes under the pseudonym Norrin_Radd to composing music for Prison City?
I love this question! I have been making chiptunes since 2002. It started as a hobby, and it eventually became the starting point of my career as a musician and sound designer in the game industry. Over 20 years I have written NES chiptunes using the same 4 sounds, and the same limitations, and I won’t say it got boring to me, but I have said almost everything I wanted to say with them. I had a project I worked on where I created what I thought were my best chiptunes ever, but it was never released, and will never be released, and I had to watch all that work, and potential and excitement just get extinguished. It’s a highly demotivating thing in the best of circumstances, but something about chiptunes made it feel so much more personal. In a lot of ways, that was the day Norrin_Radd died.
The chiptunes I write aren’t just about the music, it’s about how you solve a musical problem. The journey of the tunes I write is something precious to me because I know what my limitations are. A self-taught musician using the most archaic and unwieldy song creation tool out there, using only my ears to guide me, and having to agonize and re-agonize over the fine tuning of NES textures and techniques to create better and better sounding versions of the ideas I had in my head. That last project that was locked away represented, to that point, my most harrowing and impressive journey. One I was super proud of, and one I was so excited to share those with my fans, to show them how I had improved, and what I could do. (for an example of that project, check out my Portfolio page under the game name Grip n’ Rip: https://raddlandstudios.com/portfolio.html)
When you make music for a living, you often times don’t have a lot of say in the overall style or sound of your work. I have worked on many chiptune projects that was work I was happy to write, and work I understood, but it wasn’t what I would write if I was left to my own devices. Wasn’t the genre, or the technique or the sound I would write. For some reason, with chiptunes, it’s just so much more personal.
When Programancer asked me to sign on to Prison City, it truly did represent the NES music I had always wanted to write. Rocking, fast, menacing, melodic, heavy, powerful. Shatterhand, Contra, Double Dragon, Ninja Gaiden, Basewars, Rollergames, Mission Impossible etc. It was the first time I was given the chance to write a chiptune soundtrack that I *would* write on my own, and that proved to be hugely inspirational for me.
But I knew I was possibly done with writing NES music the way I had in the past. I knew I didn’t want to just show my fans that I could write ripping tunes with ultra clean techniques. I wanted to be able to reach further than just NES chiptunes and attempt to write something that could be nostalgic and new sounding all at once. I could look at the game and hear perfectly in my head what it should sound like. For a self-taught musician, to be able to hear that many steps ahead is kind of rare. It was just such a fun project to do.
How has your background in creating chiptunes influenced your approach to composing the game’s soundtrack, and what techniques did you carry over from your previous work?
The techniques themselves are so pragmatic and technical to really make for a good read but I will try. I will say that the philosophy for writing good sounding, highly textured chiptunes is to imagine you are working with a big rectangular cube of clay, and it is your job to carve bits away until you have a sculpture. Soundtracks on the NES around 1985-1987 did not have much in the way of texture outside of a wee bit of volume here or there. It is a testament to the composition of games like Mario 1, Zelda 1 and Metroid that those soundtracks have become so iconic, because there is almost nothing going on in the way of texture.
Compare that to 1989-1991, with Capcom games like Mega Man 3, Ultra Games titles like Rollergames, Natsume games like Shatterhand and Technos games like Double Dragon 2 and the Nekketsu games. These games used a variety of techniques that brought those soundtracks to life above just the compositions.
Capcom were masters of quickly carving away volume after a note had been struck to great a noticeable gap. Magnet Man’s theme does this very interesting technique where to note in the chorus is hit, and the immediately muted for a split second, and then echoed. Instead of leaving a note there to be heard, you can remove the note strategically to create texture.
Konami and Ultra games were masters at power chords and duty cycle shifting. Bloody Tears from Castlevania 2 has one of the best examples of shifting duty cycles at the start of the note to, in my approximation, simulate a pluck on a guitar string. If you start with the 12% duty cycle square wave, which is the most nasally sounding one, and then immediately shift the note to the 25% duty cycle square wave, which is the softest sounding one, you get this quick abrasive start to the note. Another sneaky way to achieve this is to have the first cycle of the note be an octave higher than the rest of the note. That little octave drop also simulates the pluck of a string really nicely, and when you combine it with the duty cycle shifting, you can a truly iconic NES sound, just like Bloody Tears.
Something all the composers of this era were doing as well was adding in as many echo notes as humanly possible. With a regular digital audio workstation you can just slap on a delay effect to have all the echo notes you want. But with the NES, you have to manually enter all the echo notes, and having only 2 channels to work with, you have to constantly be making decisions on what takes priority: the next note in the riff, or the echo note of a previously hit note. The end result is that your song gets crammed with echonotes in between notes. The secret is to turn up the BPM of your track to some ungodly speed, so that you have more places between the notes you can add a tiny, miniscule little echo. No one was better at this than Iku Mizutani of Shatter hand. The techno notes he create are so smooth it boggles the mind. But I am sure he programmed some crafty little sound engine to automatically echo whenever there was a priority for an echo note. Me, and many other chiptune artists have to do this by hand. Every note. Every channel.
But by far the secret sauce that started to take my chiptunes to another level was the detuning of the square waves. I had no idea that almost all of my favorite NES tracks had the squares detuned one tick apart. Detuning is a very common technique used on synthesizers to make two tones phase and chorus in a really pleasant sounding way. Like the main riff in the Blade Runner soundtrack. By default, all the NES tones are perfectly in tune, and as a result, if you hit the same note on both channels, they amplify and create a really unpleasant buzzing sound that is really loud. In real life, dual leads play the same note often, often enjoying some form of natural detuning to create a pleasant chorused effect. Not in NES music. In NES music, you sometimes can’t hit the note you want because it will create an unpleasant buzz. So you re-arrange and re-arrange and re-arrange until you have a compromise that gets your idea across.
It can be an absurdly iterative process.
Can you tell us about your comedy show and how it has contributed to honing your craft as a composer?
I have been experimenting in video content for the last 10 years. It started out as a way to share my music on visual platforms like Youtube, but it didn’t take long until my way of approaching creative projects adapted and found a way to do what I always do.
Something about the way I create is always the same. I joke with my audience a lot that I am a “brute force frickster”, because when I am presented with a problem I have no elegance. I basically just brute force things creatively until I have something that appears to be normal, when in fact it is usually held together in a completely unconventional way.
Chiptunes are the musical equivalent to this, hahaha! The iterative process of creating chiptunes for a musician that has no musical training is often times pure trial and error. Ever since I was a little guy, my go to approach to doing something creative is to find a simple texture I can do, and then to do it over and over again until it is massive and almost overwhelming. Like pointalism art, chiptunes is a very similar approach. You start out so close, making dots that you almost can’t tell what it looks like until you pan back and take an overview. I like to create with texture like this not only in music, but in video as well.
So it was my skills and approach to composing music that actually contributed to the show itself. I like to add details that can only be heard on subsequent listens. Part of that is the result of hearing the pattern thousands of times while I am writing it, and constantly iterating on it in the process until I eventually have to call it done. With the show, I wanted that same level of detail, only I wanted it to be graphic and comedic detail.
So I learned how to render backgrounds and how to alter pre-made content to be unique to my needs. And I found ways to create graphical texture and comedic texture that kept adding to the show itself. And every show I did I would also analyze and adapt. The process was very similar to writing a chiptune.
I have some very big plans for the future of the show, and it is now the longest running project I have ever worked on.
What are some specific elements or musical techniques that make the soundtrack of Prison City unique compared to other game soundtracks?
I think one unique aspect is just how adamant I am about the NES protocol. I know it’s really easy to just add square waves into a digital audio workstation and achieve some nostalgia. But I wanted a very specific nostalgia. One that can only be achieved if you understand and diligently implement the techniques of the NES composers. I have wracked my brain for years to find ways to do these techniques outside of NES limitations, and outside of programing my own audio software, it is as of this time, not something that can be done automatically. If you want to do it, you have to do it by hand.
Lots of NES chiptune artists know this and do this all the time, but to my knowledge, and my ears (I admit, I haven’t heard everything out there) very few composers attempt to combine authentic NES texture techniques with modern productions and digital audio workstations. The process of porting everything from one application to the next would be enough to deter most musicians who are not lunatics. Most chiptune musicians are lunatics though, so maybe there are others I just haven’t heard yet.
Could you elaborate on your experience as a composer and share some examples of your previous work that have influenced your approach to the Prison City soundtrack?
One crucial bit of experience I have learned over the years that I wish I could tell my previous self is that I alone need to be in charge of promoting myself. I used to think I just needed to write the best stuff I could and good things would happen, and it would lead to more work. And it kind of did for a long time, but when the work stopped coming in during Covid, I realized man alive, I have no online presence. I have no control over my own content, not really.
So that’s why I started to make my own comedy channel as well, just to make sure I had a community online that I was creating myself, outside of any specific project. It hasn’t necessarily worked out perfectly, but given the way the internet has mostly been divided up these days, I am pretty proud of the progress.
Aside from that, my approach to Prison City creatively was very similar to all the previous projects out there. The only unique part was just how in the hell I was going to merge my old style, raw NES chiptunes, with my new style of writing using a digital audio workstation.
One thing keeps rattling around in my head though. NES music is something that costs no money to make. I create the sounds and samples using NES hardware emulated software, and I create them in an opensource tracker called OpenMPT. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on professional audio hardware and software that would simply not be used at all unless I reached in to the abyss and force fed my brain to find a way to merge the two worlds, heh.
How can individuals and outlets interested in collaborating with you or conducting interviews reach out to you for further discussion or inquiries?
I am quite active on Twitter, Twitch, and YouTube, but I also do have an email for any professional enquiries.
Are there any particular tracks or moments in the Prison City soundtrack that you are especially proud of, and what inspired those pieces of music?
Preserve – Infiltrator
I am quite proud of this track mostly because of the journey it represented. It was without question the hardest track on the album to write. The reason being that I attempted to follow the Mega Man 3 style approach to writing, instead of the Konami/Ultra approach which I intuitively understand much better. When you write a little pattern of a track that uses all these super smooth Mega Man techniques (dual melodies especially) it gets so hard to write yourself out of trouble. I wrote one rad pattern, and then struggled to expand on it in a way that matched the same level of detail. Remember when I said with NES music if you hit the same note with each square wave it buzzes and sounds louder and terrible? That is what makes writing dual melodies so hard on the NES, because a more thorough understanding of music theory is needed to dance around the chord progressions understanding that the same notes can’t be hit.
In my head, I just kept hearing the one note for both melodies, and I was really having a hard time finding a way around it. Add on top of that all the echo notes and volume gradients. It really was a track that took about a week to make on its own.
Most of the tracks on the soundtrack used a more rock and roll approach. Two guitars, one bass, one drummer. And made liberal use of the power chord technique to create the song structure. Usually I would start by writing the power chords for the whole pattern, then start removing notes for the leads, and any power chord notes that were in-between melody notes could stay for some added oomph. With Preserve there are not power chords, so I am dependent on the dual melody for the entire track. Luckily I got out unscathed, haha!
You mentioned that you have a main website with more examples of your previous work. Could you tell us more about the website and the range of projects and music it showcases?
Yep, it’s Raddland Studios!
I just wasn’t satisfied with the templates on the website builders like Squarespace and WordPress, so I kind of applied that same pointillism approach in my writing and my creative works to learn how to create a website from scratch too. I watched one YouTube tutorial and extrapolated everything I needed to construct the website. One thing was certain though, I needed a website that housed my content so that I could actually promote myself competitively on today’s internet. Another thing I would tell a younger version of myself, for sure.
I am particularly proud of the portfolio section which features a track from every project I have ever worked on. That portfolio section is something I only recently put together and when I looked at all the projects I have worked on to date it surprised me quite a bit. I have worried if I was doing the right thing pursuing audio for as long as I have, and often thought I might have to just hang up the gloves and become a janitor. The idea of a steady income is quite intoxicating, haha. But when I look at that portfolio it motivates me to not stop, and to double down. I have an unusually eclectic and wide range of music styles, and projects that span really far in every direction, all the way from 8bit to orchestral. It’s surely going to culminate in to something special at some point.
The website mostly only promotes my audio services right now. I am a composer and sound designer for hire for any audio related project. Games, film, television, podcasts etc. But I am also just starting to offer my services as a video editor as well. Having had to do it for myself for the last 10 years I sort of accidentally became a professional at it. I am sure there are artists bigger than I who could benefit from the Brute Force Frickster working on their side!
Thanks to Matt for chatting with us! You can follow him on Twitter (X) here, and pick up Prison City now for Steam and on November 16th for Nintendo Switch!
