Making Anime Music Ft. Kevin Penkin And Hiromitsu Lijima

Kevin Penkin and Hiromitsu lijima had a list of amazing soundtracks for series like Tower of God, Made in Abyss, and The Rising of the Shield Hero on its resume.

The joining guests of the list at Crunchyroll Expo, Penkin stood out with its “university lecture” for his panel.

The composer-producer are the duo were eager to show their special secret sauce that literally goes into making of music for the animes.

This duo had been reflected for their 7–8-year relationship, and Penkin joked about it like how he is now a little more successful but a lot more tired.

He had promised to make the discussion easy to follow for those students who aren’t have much knowledge on music.

Overview:

Starting with the Made in Abyss, Penkin had explained that how descent and the ascent from the Abyss works as well about the dark theme and twisted aspects of the series.

But due which the true beauty of anime comes forth to their audiences.

He had prescribed word has painting, a technique where the music and the lyrics will be working in parallel.

With the idea of making the musical metaphor with the visuals that of show, Penkin had thought of recording a small number of musicians at large room.

He had showed picture of the Synchron Stage Vienna, which is the house of 135 musicians at once.

But he had been contemplating how he could shape it to more closely fit Made in Abyss.

The actual recording place had been ended up being about the size of the Crunchyroll Stage, but with a very small number of musicians, and the microphones all over the room to capture the sound.

Hences it will create an echo-y effect that makes it seems like there were more musicians than actually present.

He showed an aerial map of how the mics and musicians should be arranged, explaining the array mirrors that how he believes the Abyss would sound like.

He was grateful that the lijima had allowed him to do that, but lijima illustrated that the “costs are very high”.

For the case of TV anime, he had explained with the music- music based on a concept that- you write music that doesn’t synchronizes with the anime itself.

Penkin had thanked lijima for the encouragement given him to look into analogue sources on the reflecting the characters themselves.

When they were creating a piece that would represent the physicality of Reg, lijima suggested a combination of acoustic instruments and it will be synthesized with the instrument called as Luminist Garden.

He used 50/50 electronica and 50/50 acoustic flute and the clarinet to the show the character’s human and the robotic-likes.

Second music in list was of TV anime Tower of God, the Penkin had been envisioned for a watercolor art style from the concept art- in contrast to Made in Abyss, the visuals for the Tower of God were much simpler.

Third music in list was of TV anime The Rising of the Shield Hero music.

Unlike abovementioned animes, shield hero takes references to the real-life cultures and countries.

Lijima and the other anime staff requested Melromarc to give Spanish influence to their work.

Conclusion:

Lately because of time limitations, Penkin had to skip through many slides covering various musical themes and characters.

Although the session was short Penkin and lijima hope to be able to conduct a panel again and have quality time for the Q&A session for the next time.