Settings and listening experiments for battles, exploration, towns and events.
Decide what the music should do
A short encounter and a long boss battle need different development. Decide whether music should create urgency, establish a place or support dialogue. These suggestions are starting points to try in PicoSketch, not genre rules or a list of built-in presets.
Starting points for six scenes
Scene
BPM range
Direction
What to listen for
Normal battle
160–190
Rhythm focus; tense
Leave rests and room for sound effects.
Boss battle
140–180
Drama; weight
Listen for a theme returning after a quieter passage, not speed alone.
Dungeon
90–120
Dark or tense
Keep energy lower with small unsettling changes.
Field
110–150
Melody; epic or bright
Check whether the theme becomes tiring over repeated loops.
Town/village
80–110
Gentle; light
Leave room for dialogue and ambient sound.
Event
90–130
Story focus; reflective
Align the curve’s peak with the scene’s emotional high point.
Selecting an additional scene in step 2 can change the recommended BPM and mood. Choose the scene first, then adjust step 3 to your intention.
Normal and boss battles
A normal battle benefits from a theme heard early, even if combat ends quickly. Try 16–32 bars. For a boss, try 32–64 bars with a quieter section and a return to the peak. Increasing BPM alone can make both tracks sound merely busy.
Exploration and towns
An all-high dungeon curve can make exploration as dense as battle. Combine lower points with a small peak and try 3ch. In a town, check rests in the melody and movement in the bass, not brightness alone. Listen for three loops while reading dialogue to judge distraction.
Match duration to the event
PicoSketch does not automatically synchronize to video or game events. In four-beat bars, duration is approximately bars × 4 × 60 ÷ BPM seconds. 32 bars at 120 BPM lasts 64 seconds. Establish scene length, choose bars and BPM, then adjust the curve.
Compare one choice at a time
Save the settings JSON of a song you like and fix the seed.
Change only BPM to distinguish speed from note density.
Then change only the curve and compare the saved WAV files.