I want to detail the process that I took to compose Code Red Theme for the iPhone game Tilt to Live. Hopefully this will shed a little light on the process a composer goes through when writing for a game.

This is what the guys at One Man Left told me they wanted:

A big band/jazz-ish piece that is similar to Classic Mode’s instruments but with a more 1950/60s Spy-theme with some pace. I’m sure that’s clear as mud.

Beach Bum: This is one that I really like for Code Red, like the tempo, drums, and guitar style, the piece just gets a bit too technical around the middle to be background music. It’s just before the halfway point, when they really start riffing that I’m not crazy about.

Snatchers: I like the wah-wah guitar, and pulp fiction/james bond feel. The tempo was just too slow for a gametype like code red. Prefer a tempo more akin to beach bum.







The info they gave me helped a lot in narrowing down what they wanted, but to prepare for what I needed to write, I needed to do a little more research and preparation. I studied the instrumentation of the James Bond theme, since this is the feel they were going for.



James Bond Theme

I wanted to make sure I could emulate the sound of the James Bond theme, so I did just that: I recreated a basic version of it. I spent a lot of time picking out the instrumentation (bass, vibraphone, drums, guitar, horns), recreating the drum part, and trying to get the perfect guitar sound (which I did by doing a lot of tweaking in the “Amp Designer” plugin in Logic Pro). This is what I came up with:



James Bond Theme: Recreated

Once I had created the James Bond theme, and it sounded pretty good, I knew I was ready to start composing. The song went through three main iterations until One Man Left deemed it suitable for use in the game. Here is the first:



Code Red Theme: Mellow

Personally, I was really happy with it, but it didn’t quite fit with what they wanted. These were some of the things said in response:

The song felt too mellow/not intense enough throughout the length of the track. The beginning was good, but it didn’t seem to build up.

The overall feel is spot-on to the James Bond-ish theme, but we were looking more towards the louder part (0:55-1:18) of the theme as a reference than the more mellow guitar theme.

With a more catchy hook/riff we would like the song to build up faster. We really liked the guitar part in your piece at 0:54. One thing we were thinking of as reference material is Pulp Fiction’s Miserlou [some NSFW language].

Drums are prominent themes in both Gauntlet and Classic songs

I liked the part in your piece at 1:47 where the it goes quiet and begins to build up again, but as noted before we felt the post-build-up isn’t as strong as we’d like.







So although I had a great start, I obviously had a lot of work to do. I tried to do everything they said while still maintaining the original feel of the song. I added Miserlou-style surfer guitar (which, if you’re curious, I created using this technique), added a more intense toms part to the drums, and just made the overall track more energetic. Although I took out some of the melody from the first version, you’ll see that I still kept some of it in the second half. Here is the second iteration:



Code Red Theme: Intense

Here were some of the things they said in response to this version:

We like what we hear, but there are a few things we’d like addressed if possible.

The layering of the several guitar tracks seem to interfere with each other at times and it becomes difficult to distinguish the sound. Could this be balance adjusted, tweaked, or simply remove some of tracks in certain places?

Playing the song on higher end headphones/speakers alleviates this problem, but we’re ultimately playing this on iPhone-grade speakers. When played on iPhone speakers, some of those sections come across messy, and it seems some of the highs on iphone speakers don’t come across as cleanly and sound more grating.

Most notably, when played on my sennheisser’s the guitar solo sounds great, but on the iphone the highs are more grating and the culmination of all the guitar tracks sounds too busy. I can see it becoming annoying for some players. Maybe finding a way to simplify those portions may help?

We liked the progression and overall feel of the track much better than the previous one.







Although I struggled with it, I ended up taking out the original melody from the mellow version altogether. I really liked it, but it just didn’t fit right with the game mode. As you can also see from their response: making the song sound good on iPhone speakers is important, and it was something I totally forgot to consider. I composed the song using high quality Bose headphones, but when I listened to the song on iPhone speakers, it sounded pretty bad and annoying, like they said. I made a few other adjustments to the song, sent it to them, and they were satisfied. At its third iteration, it had become the track you all know today:

Listen or buy the full Code Red Theme here.