Music is an essential part of the CodeJoy experience, and Bryce Rabideau is the creative force behind it. From the catchy theme song to the nuanced background tracks, Bryce's musical touch brings a unique vibrancy to every episode. Join us as Amanda Jeane sits down with Bryce to explore his creative process, his favorite CodeJoy tunes, and how his passion for music translates into the world of educational entertainment.
Amanda Jeane (AJ): Tell us about yourself.
Bryce Rabideau (BR): I’ve been making music as my career for a long time. I grew up in the Boston area and moved here to Pittsburgh to go to school for jazz guitar. After graduating from Duquesne in 2015, I stayed in the Pittsburgh area. So, I've been here for I think going on 12 or 13 years now and have developed a lot of skills beyond jazz guitar. Home recording, performing, and teaching are my three primary jobs in the music world.
AJ: What instruments do you play?
BR: My primary instruments are guitar, mandolin, and fiddle. I play quite a few other instruments somewhat poorly, but I can make them sound good using modern technology. So, it's deceptive, I think, listening to some of my recorded music. It's like, wow, he can play the banjo. The answer is I can't really play the banjo. but I can edit myself into some good banjo playing.
AJ: How did you get to know Matt and Kelsey?
BR: We had a mutual friend - someone I knew from my alma mater (Duquesne University) who was also their coworker. At some point, that friend had a party and we all were in the same room. I immediately noted their enthusiasm for their own work, as well as for the art that I was making. Shortly after that, we found each other on social media. During the pandemic, once we were all confined to our houses for a while, I started putting snippets of my original compositions and arrangements on the internet. They saw some of what I was doing and decided I might be a good fit to write the theme for CodeJoy. I was very excited to get that email from them and spent a whole week just, like, playing wood blocks and kazoos in my room, trying to match their cardboard robot aesthetic perfectly with what I wrote. They were really happy with what I did and hired me to be the musical director for the company.
AJ: Your first project was CodeJoy's theme. What was the process like for you to design that music and how did your initial relationship with Matt and Kelsey feed into that? What was the process with them?
BR: I really like our workflow together - it's pretty much the same now as it was in the beginning. For that first assignment, they gave me some loose parameters and reference tracks, but I was given a lot of leeway as to how to create something with a compatible vibe. I spent a lot of time just wandering around my house humming stuff, looking for something bouncy and fun that also had a little bit of sophistication to it. When composing for a visual medium, I think it's best to sometimes let your brain just do the work passively and let something come to you rather than sit down with an instrument and brute force your way into the right kind of energy. I think it was in the shower that theme melody popped into my brain. Once I get a melody in my head, I put it on an instrument that feels like it suits it and then build the rhythm and the harmony and everything else around that melody.
AJ: Your main instrument or your love language instrument is the mandolin. Can you tell us more about that instrument? Where did that relationship stem from?
BR: I first stumbled across the mandolin when I was in school learning jazz guitar. It gave me a foil for the jazz guitar in a sense. It's a very different sounding instrument than a guitar, even though mechanically it's a little similar to play. I fell in love with the timbre of it, the sound of it. So while I was at school learning John Coltrane, I was also playing Bill Monroe tunes on the mandolin and it gave me some nice contrast.
Then, shortly after graduating, I joined a folk band and traveled the country with this scrappy group of folk musicians and found I really loved that. At this point in my career, I like to merge those sort of two parts of my musical personality. I find it's all very interesting, but the mandolin definitely has grabbed me very deeply since my late teens. It's what I tend to teach the most and play live the most these days.
AJ: How does the mandolin feature in CodeJoy music?
BR: It often takes a fairly prominent spot in the recordings I make. Mandolin embodies a lot of the same sort of sounds that CodeJoy naturally brings out of me. It can be very springy and sort of bouncy, which is how the CodeJoy visual style makes me feel. There's so much guitar music in the world, especially television theme songs or radio hits. So, the mandolin sets what I record a little bit apart and gives it its own special personality.
AJ: Let's dive into some of the songs you've made for CodeJoy. Do you have one that is a favorite?
BR: It's hard to pick a favorite. It does feel a little bit like picking a favorite child. Although I probably have a few not-as-favorite compositions, so that's not a perfect analogy. One I really got attached to was Robot Haunted House - it was a blast writing spooky carnival music. Another was a blue-grassy track that I wrote for Robot Rovers, which felt very different from the rest of what I was doing. Most of the time, I'm trying to instill this calming sort of workspace environment type music for the kids in this show, but Robot Rovers was kind of meant to be frantic and overwhelming. My all time favorite tracks might be the ones I’m working on now for an upcoming episode, which I’m modeling after animated movie soundtracks from the early 1950s.
AJ: Were there any tracks that were particularly challenging for you to make? Maybe it took longer or it just didn't land?
BR: One set of songs that I really ended up liking but that were kind of a challenge were for Robot Memories. Matt and Kelsey wanted nine slight variations on the same recording to give each memory a slightly different energy. And that was an amazing creative exercise that I struggled with at first. To take one track and to slightly change it and have it still feel good and work with all the others was a little hard. I ended up using little parts of each memory incorporating each of those themes into the track somehow. I remember one of them had this yodel sound that was my own voice pitched up to give it a corny country sound. Another had clicky-clacky spoons in the background because the memory featured tap dancing. Good creative prompts like that episode make me a better writer and recording engineer.
AJ: Something I think our audience doesn't realize is that when we ask you to make music that often isn't just one track or one song. When you're working on a project, especially for CodeJoy, how does the music come about and get you to your end product, which isn't always just one song?
BR: I very often send Matt and Kelsey eight different sound files for the same moment in the show. And that's because I want to give them an option to use a 15-second sound bite or a minute long sound bite of each or any track. Sometimes I'll send a track without a particularly noisy foreground element so that they can play it behind them talking. And then I'll send them the same track with something strong and forward that they can play when there's action happening and they want the track to take up all the space of the show.
This is enabled by modern technology and it's certainly not a novel thing. I mean, many people who create music for television do this. I find it very satisfying to take the same track and sort of shape it in a couple different ways and give them different options to use. Almost everything you hear in CodeJoy has at least a couple different versions that you're maybe not hearing at all or that they're using for a different part of the show that are kind of hidden in the machine.
AJ: What are you working on for CodeJoy right now?
BR: I am so excited about the latest CodeJoy joint. Most of the time, I'm using my own instruments and my own voice and sculpting it into what I need, but this upcoming episode really called for a strong female vocal arrangement. I enlisted the help of my bandmate Margot Jezerc from Buffalo Rose, who’s got a really amazingly precise voice, full of character. Matt and Kelsey wanted a vocal arrangement that felt like the score from a 40s or 50s Disney animation. I arranged a four-part vocal harmony song that I played all the parts on piano, and then I had Margot come in to sing each part. She did an amazing job. The final result is so whimsical and cute, which is totally what I think Matt and Kelsey were looking for. Margot's voice really carries the whole track.
AJ: Is there anything else you’d like to convey about the work you do with CodeJoy or the work you want to do moving forward?
BR: I spent a lot of time in my formative years bumping up against this feeling that being a working artist is impossible under capitalism and it's never going to happen. It is true that this is a tough time to make a living as a creative person, but I’m feeling increasingly like there are outlets out there for everything if you search for them hard enough. This brings to mind a quote from this composer Mason Bates who did some work with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, who came to Duquesne for a clinic shortly before I graduated. I remember very distinctly him saying, “You need to be as creative about your delivery method as you are about creating the art itself.” I think about that a lot. I’m very grateful to feel connected to all the work I do, and grateful to Matt and Kelsey for giving me a really great delivery method for my art.
Learn more about Bryce on his Website and be sure to check out his music on Spotify.