I’ve been refining some compositions for an upcoming disc of groovy ambient mostly electronic music, and the feedback was to make it more positive and happier. Part of the job is deciding what specific musical changes are needed in an arrangement, the instrumentation, key or mode, timbre, etc., in response to perfectly valid non-musical feedback. Turns out in this case it was a simple matter of removing the distorted guitar from the front end of the piece.
Here’s the version with the guitar:
And here it is without the guitar:
Pretty subtle, but those distorted guitars really stand out to some people, especially when there’s a voice-over using a male voice (same frequency range), so I get it. I’m glad the change was so simple (mute the guitar tracks and bump the EQ of the groove in the range that the guitars used to occupy, then re-bounce).
Here’s a 30 second ad piece blending more live parts with sound design and synthetic parts. It starts in A minor then moves to A mixolydian mode, which is the same as a major scale but with a flattened (dominant) 7th instead of a major 7th.
I recently scored an indy film by working entirely remotely — me in my East Coast studio, filmmakers on the West Coast — and this is a recap of what went right and wrong about the project, along with some audio cuts of a few music cues.
Creating loops involves some simple but important production techniques, and composition which does not draw attention to the loop point. Here are a couple of tricks and examples to make it work.
I responded to a request from MTV to deliver a “happy, bouncy, 2-minute instrumental” (no vocals) piece of music for a TV show in the style of old school hip hop, ala Run-DMC, Kurtis Blow, et. al. Remember hip hop back in the day? Fat Boys beatboxing, early 80′s breaks on two turntables? Anyway, here’s what my take sounded like.
After all the heavy orchestral stuff I’ve done lately, it was nice to switch gears and write something quirky and odd — like this early draft of a short theme for an iPhone game. Requirements were 1:30 length, loopable, with a quieter solo section toward the end. I looped it in this draft to show how the loop restarts (the entire thing is 1:30, restarting at 1:31 in this version and fading after a few secs to illustrate the loop point).
Here is a suite of themes I recently composed for a fantasy game.
In the game, you wouldn’t hear the full suite and you would rarely hear exactly the same arrangement of the themes each time you played the game. This is because the themes and motifs were written to be split into multiple sections and mixed in real time by the game’s audio engine.
This tactic creates a few hours of different music from about 30 minutes of actual linear theme material. This is fairly common to game audio now, and there is middleware and a few tools (FMod, Miles, Wwise, etc.) to assist. Being a developer as well, I’m just as comfy diving into the code and using the middleware SDK’s and API’s directly vs. using a tool, as it seems that none of them does everything you may need on a given job.
There are some limitations to the modulations that make sense in real time gameplay (for example, the 5/4 sections are not meant to be blended with any of the 3/4 sections), but it’s mostly written with those limits and technical capabilities in mind. For example, the sections in Eb major can be blended well with the sections in D minor (and F maj, its relative major), because although such changes were not written in the linear version of the music, the modulations make good musical sense when wedded to actions that the player takes in the game, and if I’d selected key centers a little farther apart, it would have made less musical sense and put a strain on the audio engine’s pitch-shifting capabilities.
For the sake of this rough mix I did some rough panning to put the instruments where they’d be in a proper live orchestra, but the musical sections (stems) are panned dead center, as they are placed in 3D space relative to the game player by the audio engine as well.
Quick game cut scene video from some of my work with Jeanine Cowen, the grand mistress of game audio at Berklee: a Robocop humor cut scene scored as comedy (which is a lot tougher to write than are dramatic pieces) with my sound design and dialog production as well. Main thing I like about this is that while still a mockup, it turned out reasonably well with only a very tiny amount of time available (I’m busy).
Here’s something I am asked occasionally, almost always by people who seem bashful about asking, though it’s a perfectly natural question: “What is an orchestra, exactly, I mean what do all those people up there really do?”
I decided to write a very quick primer to answer this question and to try out Squidoo at the same time. My answer, with a couple of selected videos, is here:
There’s an article in November’s issue of Musician, the AFM’s magazine, about the scoring and recording of the video game score for Gears of War 2. The score was composed by Steve Jablonsky of Transformers fame, and it was tracked at Skywalker Sound in San Francisco in July of 2008.
The session conductor was Tim Davies, who reports this view of video game orchestral music:
The music is more rhythmic, and everyone is playing all the time. There are no quiet moments or romantic love scenes to fill the time, and it can be a challenge for the musicians when they’re playing so hard. As a conductor, my job is to foster a different attitude, to encourage them to let their hair down and play like rock musicians for a bit.”
I don’t think this is entirely true (check out the score to Bioshock, one of Jeanine Cowen’s favorite game scores), but it’s probably as good a generalization as any generalization can be.
Along these same lines, the arrangements typically employ a great deal of doublings and unisons, and you won’t often find sophisticated harmonies, or single sections split into multiple parts. I recently split a flute section into four parts for a subtle pianissimo phrase and the feedback was that it was too classical music -ish and not game music -ish enough, so I changed it (the client is always right). Also, doubles and unisons tend to work better, of course, on the heavy brass themes that dominate a lot of the games.
So the music will change and there are plenty of exceptions today, but generally I tend to agree when the article’s writer states that orchestral music for video games is “often closer to that played by a rock band than the classical music most orchestral players are used to.”
