Carpenter's Mark Music

The Theme Song

Circle Of Light (link to play at soundcloud.com)

I got Garageband for my iPad a few years ago. I like to make short songs, about a minute long. For me, working with Garageband is a combination of writing music and solving a puzzle. There are loops that you can drag into a song and digital instruments with some musical riffs, so finding and combining them is as much of a puzzle as it is composing.

Still, you can select the chords, progression, and add your own melodies with the piano role or by tapping keys and guitar strings.

I worked on the Circle of Light song over Christmas break 2021. I was sitting in the office chair, dragging piano role notes one at a time, up until 2am, and I loved the way it all came together.

The main melody sound is a combination of Garageband's Soft Analog keyboard, Sustain Strings from the keyboard instruments, and the Chinese Erhu instrument from one of their extension packs. Much fun.

Character Melodies

The novel is written in third person, with shifting point of view characters. I decided early on that it would help the audio presentation to include scene markers. The idea of adding a special melody for each character as part of the scene introduction came from that, and it turned out to be a lot of fun.

You might notice that I added some small explosions to the characters that can use magic. The melodies are also similar for characters who are close. Carmen's melody is a major key version of Estus's strings. Peter and Hanna's themes are also very similar. Gareth, of course, has a bit of Drunken Sailor homage, and the three Sailors have a three-part melody that I borrowed from Chapeau.

When I did the Truth Hackers podcast, I used a different equalizer setting to highlight what in print would appear as a quoted paragraph. I liked that idea for the podcast, to separate speaking from narration, with the point of view character always panned left, and other speakers panned right.

Other Music

My Truth Hackers ten episode podcast also has some Garageband music that I wrote, along with other loops and sounds from Apple.

I have three albums uploaded to soundcloud.com. This song is part of the Waterfall album, so named because I had a picture of a waterfall from Tahquamenon Falls State Park. If you visit the Soundcloud site, you can listen to the other songs from the album. One of my other favorites is Under Cover (I love that flute part!) There's another album of Garageband electronic songs and a collection of songs I wrote when I was much younger and then recorded in 1994, just me singing and playing guitar.