Making the campfire song

In the VR project, there is a scene where the player is sitting at a campfire as someone plays a campfire song with just their voice and an acoustic guitar. For this composition, I was extremely limited in instrumentation as I could only use what the character in the game was using.

I’ve never made a song like this or recorded an acoustic guitar and I’m not too confident with lyrics/vocals so this was quite a difficult project for me.

I firstly started with what I could do, play the guitar. I wanted to make a melancholic song to reflect what the protagonist has gone through in his journey, using mainly minor chords and discordant notes to accentuate this. when my chords were ready I structured it like a normal song and that was done. To record the guitar I tried three methods: a microphone close to the soundhole, a microphone set up half a meter away from the soundhole and a microphone set up by my ear. in the end, I settled with having the microphone be slightly further away from the soundhole, as it hides the pick sounds and picks up the warm tones of an acoustic. I recorded the guitar part once and sent it to three tracks, two panned on each side with an EQ accentuating the low frequencies and one mono track accentuating the high EQ. This gave the overall guitar sound a warm, rich texture with no compromise to the overall EQ.

With the vocals, I chose my own vocals as it was easier to record and it’s a voice that’s not familiar in the story. I balanced the vocals normally. For the lyrics, I tried writing about the adventure that the protagonist has been on and referencing what he’s looking for with “I’ve found my love again” which is also the last line before the game ends.

The reverb at the end is just to make the transition to the next scene easier, also giving the song a more dream-like feel or a memory.