Last year I got the opportunity, thanks to Super League Gaming, to create and produce a custom song for a metaverse experience. They were creating a custom virtual world on Roblox for MTV centered around the 2022 VMA Awards. There were so many cool virtual activations to explore in the metaverse experience, and one of them was a music studio. That’s where the music I created came in. Players could explore the music studio and remix the song that I created for it. It was so fun to produce a custom song for the game. Not only did it give me an opp to create a song outside of my typical artist genre and sound, but it also let me play with structure in a new way. I had to think beyond basic pop song structure (verse, pre, chorus, bridge). In traditional music production projects, I typically add new elements every four bars and have clear transitions between various song sections.
However, that approach didn’t work for this piece of music. There were no distinct song sections or vocal melody line, just one short instrumental. Yet things had to keep changing and building in an organic and obvious way so that the gameplay was interesting and engaging. And each of the stems needed to be unique and prominent enough that if they were muted, the song would feel completely different and remixed. It was such an unusual (and cool) way to think through a song and how to give the player a good experience. And SO different than how I would approach a standard pop song.
To make things even sweeter, I found out yesterday that the whole experience won a Webby Award in the Entertainment, Sports & Music Metaverse, Immersive & Virtual category. So just super grateful to have been a small part of this project. I love making the music I release as an artist, but there is also something so fulfilling about working on a project like this. I’ve recently become really inspired by merging music with other art mediums, like cinematography, gaming, etc., so there will be lots of that in the future. And a cherry on top is that the project has been recognized the way it has been.
I want to thank Super League Gaming for the opp to be involved and sending a big congrats to them for all their hard work on building out this experience. They are such an amazing team. I want to send another big thank you to Ryan Lipman for mixing the song and to everyone that voted to help make this award happen. And of course, a huge thank you to MTV and Roblox.
If you have any sync or music production needs, please feel free to reach out. I love creating custom music for projects and finding placements for my previously created songs. And if you want to see the experience for yourself, here is a reaction video I made when it first came out: youtu.be/Mg9YwrDOqEI
