Grimwell County - Ben Valdmets - Riders In The Night
The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Riders In The Night. It's an Ennio Morricone fever dream from the supernatural cowboy show Grimwell County. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. If you're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and investigate the insights into how it was made. My name is Ben Valdmets. I'm a composer, musician and voice actor from Austin, Texas, and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music Episode number 82, Riders In the Night by me. Ben Valdmets. Thanks for listening in.01:34 Grimwell CountyThis audio drama's called Grimwell County. It's a story about a bounty hunter and a vigilante who get roped into hunting supernatural threats in the old American West. Sort of X-Files meets cowboys. It's meant to give the listener strong cinematic vibes. If you close your eyes, maybe you can visualize, you know, not only just the characters in the situation, but the style too. It's awesome. I'm very excited. I'm excited for it to come out. Yeah. I work with Gabe Alvarez, who created Starcalled, a show where I do one of the voices, Captain Landris.02:34 Spaghetti WesternThis piece - Riders In The Night - is meant to be kind of a modern spin on a classic Ennio Morricone sound. Dry, cinematic Western. I always have enjoyed that kind of spaghetti western sound. And what he was describing sounded like that would fit but it also needed kind of another angle. Recently, I played a game called Disco Elysium. It's almost less like a video game and more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book or something. It's a lot of reading. It's all about this world-building. And as you're walking around in this world, one of the ambient pieces is a very stark just sort of lone trumpet to start. So I wanted to take that idea and run with it on my own track. I was inspired.04:01 Psychedelic trumpet I studied trumpet in school. So it's not like a high bright trumpet. It's naturally sort of dark. You know, I knew that I just wanted to reflect the melody from the whistling and I ended up just going crazy putting effects on it. It's got a chorus effect on it. Full of reverb with echo. It sounds very cool. It's like lonely but psychedelic in a way. Once I got kind of bored with that aesthetic, I thought, you know, I just sort of jumped ahead and said, Okay, I'm going to keep the key. I'm going to keep the tempo. Let me try to just take this harmonic concept and do it completely stylistically different. The more classic cinematic track grows and grows until we hit this apex We completely take the left turn, and that's when I got out the trumpet to keep the energy up. I got out the guitars and bass and wrote this sort of groovy drum track to go with it. And I thought, well, that sounded good, too. They both sound good. They're very different. So then the work, the real work was stitching them together. This track also includes a lot of instruments that you might not expect to hear on a spaghetti western, really anachronistic sounds. A cowboy would be shocked to hear an arpeggiated synthesizer! You're supposed to hear that and immediately be thinking like grainy film quality, like...I don't want to say cheesy, but maybe over the top cowboy action. You know, blood, six shooters, bullets whizzing everywhere, horses going crazy. Things like that. I wanted to move beyond those typical tropes and push it into some weirder direction.07:22 Trust the soundThere were some challenges. I tried re-miking and redoing some parts. And I took it back to Gabe, the show's creator. And he said, You know, I liked the old one better. I tend to put a lot of trust into just, you know, did it work or not, rather than that take was on the hundred dollar guitar and the other taSupport the show