Remixing Chris Breen's beautiful 'Space Theme' podcast music
Liftoff is a new podcast on the Relay FM network that has a delightful theme tune written by Chris Breen. The subject matter of this podcast is 'space, the universe, and everthing'.
If you listen to episode 1 of the podcast, you will only hear about 20 seconds of the beautiful theme music, and only 8 seconds without any spoken interference. This is a great shame because Chris Breen recorded a full minute of music. It is delicate, quiet, and yet expansive and deep. It is therefore perfectly suited for its subject matter. Chris — who has written many podcast themes — provides some insight into how he wrote the theme on his blog and provides a link to where you can download the music (titled Space Theme).
I found myself listening to this piece over and over again. As Chris notes in his post, this is not your typical podcast theme. In my opinion, the most amazing thing about it is the level of restraint that Chris has wielded. It would be so easy to maybe overdub a ringing electric guitar solo, or add all manner of additional tracks to fill out some of the 'space' in the music.
After I had listened to the track for a day or two, I found myself wanting more. So I took it upon myself to make a remixed version of the theme. The main reason was just to give myself more of this lovely music. So using GarageBand, I made some edits to effectively double the length of the track. Because the track has a natural ending point, I had to duplicate material just before the end, and play around to find a natural cutting point.
At this point, I felt the new second half of the song needed something extra to help build the song just a little bit more. This gave me the opportunity to add a few bars of 'Breathy Vox' to partly mask the join I had made. I then added some simple strings and a few other effects. When I saw that GarageBand had a synth sound called 'Sea of Tranquility', I felt that this had to be added.
I tried various other additions, at one point adding a quite sweet clarinet track, but I kept on coming back to the restraint that Chris had shown and felt that I had to honor that as much as possible. The screenshot below shows my final set of additions and edits in GarageBand (click to enlarge):
You can hear my version here. Thank you Chris for making a truly beautiful piece of music. I hope that the Liftoff podcast can do it more justice in future episodes!