Making the CORPO soundtrack with Suno

Music beyond the game

I want the music to be something you enjoy beyond a game session. Making the CORPO soundtrack is part of building a world I want to share.

I use Suno to make music for CORPO, and one of the best decisions I've made on the soundtrack was keeping a song exactly as it was. The track is called Onboarding. It was already in the V1 soundtrack, and I wanted to see whether I could improve it for V2. After the comparisons, I chose the original. Same recording. Same name.

I had something I loved, and the new versions weren't better. Calling the soundtrack V2 didn't give me a good reason to replace it.

What I wanted to keep

With Onboarding, I liked the strings, the groove and the way the string accents worked with the beat. There was atmosphere in it. When the new treatment became too aggressive, all that activity started getting in the way. I wanted clearer layers and electronic detail, but I still wanted the song I liked.

Then the correction went too far in the other direction. It got smoother and lost the edge. This is the awkward part of giving creative direction: you can identify one problem, fix it, and remove something else that was holding the whole thing together.

I tried different Suno treatments and direct production variations. Some generated attempts also shortened the recording, which was a separate problem from whether I liked the sound. Eventually I said the original was superior to all of them. That closed the comparison. Onboarding stayed Onboarding.

The theme and Already Moving

The CORPO theme took a different path. Its selected version came out of the Circuit work, with a bigger electronic character and specific arrangement changes. I compared remasters afterward and kept the original selected take. One of those remasters lost richness and introduced a texture I didn't like. The newer file didn't get a free pass.

Already Moving went somewhere else again. I wanted energetic pop, a beat you could move your head to, and enough separation to hear what the different layers were doing. In that song, I specifically wanted to get away from the cyberpunk tension. Putting every track through the same dark electronic treatment would have missed what I was asking for.

I selected the Pop B2 version of Already Moving for a remaster comparison, then chose its first Subtle + Clarity remaster as the final recording. That remaster worked for this song, even though I had kept the earlier recordings for the theme and Onboarding.

The words matter too

Already Moving also needed lore corrections in its lyrics. I wanted to protect the chorus and the existing song structure while fixing the parts that needed to agree with CORPO's world. A line can sound good and still be wrong for the game. That is worth catching before it becomes the line everyone remembers.

For that track, the requested rhythm changed between the choruses and the other sections. That was a direction for Already Moving. It wasn't an instruction to make the entire soundtrack follow the same arrangement. I want to carry useful lessons into the next song without accidentally making the next song a copy of the last one.

Knowing which version I chose

There are enough versions in this process that keeping track of them matters. I keep the original source, the changes I asked for and the exact recording I selected. Once a song is approved, the exports and stems need to belong to that recording. A similar title is not close enough.

The approved Already Moving recording has been archived with its exports and stems. That gives me the selected material to work with as CORPO develops. It doesn't mean every possible use of it in the game is finished.

I'm keeping the selected recordings and the development history together as I work through the rest of the soundtrack. If I revisit a song, I want to know which version I chose and why I chose it.