Melody Mountain

Listen & Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/42-ChVBSv-w

¶ Track ID

¶ Credits

Composition/Arrangement/Production: Roger Clark (@rogerclark) https://rogerclark.org/

Steps:

• Single: Ben Madsen (@BenMadsenGaming)
• Double: -74- (@RI74TA)

Art: Roger Clark (3D + 2D graphics) & @CRANTIME ("Melody Mountain" lettering)

¶ Production Notes

rogerclark ("Ohayo Rivers")

Located on a forested hill in my home town of Ashland Kentucky, Melody Mountain was an outdoor concert venue, primarily hosting bluegrass and country music shows. Real estate developers purchased the property in 2004. After razing the forest and leveling the summit, they built a Walmart Supercenter on top, severely disrupting the local economy.

Melody Mountain is based on a sketch I composed in 2016 as part of a 1-hour music production competition. Over the past few years, I kept coming back to that sketch, trying to develop it into something that distilled my experience of growing up in Appalachia as a 90s gamer and DDR player. When we started Club Fantastic, it motivated me into finishing the song – Melody Mountain is the first track I've ever completed.

In classic game music, composers often used sampled instruments in cool ways that didn't reflect how the instrument would have really been played. Melody Mountain features a realistic sampled banjo, but without any traditional bluegrass strumming. Instead, it's used as a plucky melodic lead, and in the latter half of the song, it gets fed through a guitar amp filter to make something like an electric guitar.

Inspirations:

• Koji Kondo - Super Mario 64
• Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama
• Enya - Orinoco Flow
• Smiley - July

Special thanks to Brittany Forks, Dylan James, nanobii, Kyrandian, Xemogasa, TANUKI and maxx.