Game Audio Network Guild

How are you doing folks?

I hope all is well, soon we have the christmas rush upon us. yey! =)
Last week I produced a couple of new themes (as usual), some pitches and I'm also working on the third AZURE album with my friend Robban Kanto.
5 new songs are currently in proces, I've wrecked some of my drum-gear so I have to buy some new stuff this weekend.

Ahh, and I also just got the heads up from CDbaby that the two EMBRACING albums we produced in 1996/1997 will be released on digital distribution in the coming weeks. iTunes, Spotify etc. So check them out when they are available.

 Don't forget to check my twitter and webpage www.morningdewmedia.com
for new music themes and mp3 demos.

Have a nice weekend my fellow audio artists!

Cheers,

Mattias Holmgren
MORNINGDEW MEDIA
http://www.morningdewmedia.com

 

 

 

Hi!

 Just wanted to share a trailer.  It´s from a small game we´re  doing all audio for, thought would be cool because it´s very fun and it´s Hallowen!  ;-)

Cheers,

J & G

 

Pro Zombie Soccer Trailer 1

Music Teaser 1

Music Teaser 2

MCV PR Note

 

[video:http://vimeo.com/5620902 400x230] 

 

On July 9th - I attended the GANG/GRAMMY summer summit at Pyramind in San Francisco.

It was an amazing and VERY inspiring event.   As I work to learn about the intricacies of Game Audio I'm constantly seeking advice from industry pros.  This event did not disappoint.   

One thing nearly everyone I spoke with suggested I do - create demo material for critique/feedback - and eventually, for gigs.  

So - to start - I pulled a minute of gameplay from the EA game -Dead Space and re-did all the audio.  

All the sound is "designed" - so there's no direct rips from library stuff.   I recorded a large amount of the raw material myself.  

I recorded small appliance like coffee bean grinder, a cuisinart (which has an amazingly warm hum) a blender, spice choppers, microwave, the creaky oven door from outside and inside the oven, a wood stove (outside and inside), a garage door opener from various perspectives, a metal file cabinet opening and closing from outside and inside and dragging it across the  concrete floor of the garage from inside and outside.  And on and on.  

The result is the video demo linked to below.  

I'm passing it around to people I respect for feedback and critique.  I would really appreciate any thoughts or advice game sound pros would be willing to share.  

 

Here's the 50 mb QT file movie.

http://jeff-schmidt.com/noize/DS_TITLE_01_04.mov

Any good constructive criticism is appreciated! 

thanks much

--jeff

 

UPDATE: 7/21/09

 

Based on the advice given here, and a few others I contacted personally, I remixed the demo.  

 

[video:http://vimeo.com/5737377 400x230]  

 

I changed many small things - but the large issues were to tighten up the verbs, rebalance the elements and increase the dynamic range.

 

Thanks guys!   

(As always, click above for the anthem! :) )

Hey, all.  Sorry I'm a little late with this update.  Due to some unexpected things happening at work (and finishing up my first review for Music4Games), this update came about a day late for me.

At any rate, the idea for this update is bring forth a little project I decided to work on.  Many of you should know the name Jonathan Coulton, the guy who did the well known ending song for Portal titled 'Still Alive.'  In looking  through some other songs of his, I came across one that I really enjoyed, and is probably one some of you have heard as well - Code Monkey.

After listening to the song enough times, I decided to try my hand at building up an arrangement of it.  What I have to show you all now is the work in progress, basically the first verse through the first chorus, featuring a few techniques, including mono-sweeping chords, and monophonic noise drums.

Code Monkey ('NES' Arrangement)  (Work in Progress)

 Feel free to give feedback, suggestions, or simply ask questions about how I'm doing some of the sounds below! 

Hey all, Skitch here with a small update for Famicom Fridays this particular Friday. It's a bit small due to various things that I had to deal with in the past week, like the A/C going out, and the work schedule being a bit packed.  

It's been a pretty hectic week at Full Sail, but one thing I always like to do is listen to various students working on their own music for our producer's showcase that we do monthly.

One of the groups was working on a catchy little song, so I decided to transcribe some parts of it by ear, and make a little 8-bit rendition of some of the parts they had, and added a little bit of my own flair to it (namely experimenting with the drums to some degree, plus mixing the timbres of the synths together in a balanced fashion).  The students in the group seemed to like it, and I hope you all like it too. :)

I'll try to come up with a more involved topic for next Friday's main update, but feel free to throw suggestions of what you'd like to hear/see/learn either about this style of music, or simply if you want to hear some other transcription/arrangement of a song!

"Get Away" - August Lab Group 22, transcription/arrangement by Skitch 

Please post impressions/ideas/feedback below, and have a great Labor Day weekend, everyone! 

(Click the logo for Contra-Inspired Anthem music!)

Well, it's not quite Friday, I know, but I decided to at least make a secondary update to this blog to show some things from my past in doing game music in this particular style, namely in showing two tracks that have been favorites, and giving a little perspective some of the techniques that lead up to the creation of those tracks.

My first foray into doing music tracks in this style began while experimenting in Propellerhead's Reason for various purposes (coming up with techniques to teach, for fun, etc.), and one thing I stumbled upon was doing older video game sounds using the synthesizers built into the program.  Thus, with some experimentation, I realized how to do some basic NES-ish sounds, in addition to my introduction to the concept of using a noise generator solely as a means of creating percussive sounds.

 Every example that is shown in this blog were all created within Reason alone. 

To test this, I did a basic transcription/rendering of a very well known theme from the NES era by the great Koji Kondo as a way to test the concept -

The Overworld Theme from The Legend of  Zelda 

After hearing how the results turned out, I then decided to explore specifically the technique of using noise to create a drum track, as the Zelda theme allowed a very rudimentary basis for the concept.  This lead me to a very basic test song that I entitled my Blanc Etude.  Namely, I was practicing in how to manipulate how the noise generator could change in tone and response to get different kinds of hits for different types of drum sounds.

Alongside the noise practice, I was also experimenting with how to recreate the sound of monophonic synths being used to create chords in the music of various NES games, and several Commodore 64 titles out there using nothing but sequencing in MIDI, trying to get juuust the right balance out to make the result convincing. 

About another month or so of practice later, I then put those techniques together into creating my first major track demonstrating these techniques, one simply known as:

The Blue Bomber

The key here was that I was restricting myself to only 4 channels (2 Pulse Wave, 1 Triangle Wave, 1 Noise), all monophonic, and trying to stay strictly in that style for the track in an attempt to be as 'authentic' technique-wise in the process as possible.  The results made me very happy, and it was as fun to write as it is to listen to (even though it was very tedious at some points to pull off some of the nuanced sequencing initially).

I kept on working on this technique in general at times, typically from either doing little simple tracks that didn't lead anywhere, or trying my had at taking tracks that weren't 8-bit style to begin with, and reducing them down to that format. My favorite example of this was one I did of a track from the soundtrack of Killer7 by Masafumi Takada:

Rave On 

At this point, I was getting pretty comfortable with the idea of doing things in a 4 channel sense, and doing drums fully with just monophonic noise.  So a bit later on, when I wanted to do another original track of a reasonable scale, I decided to do things a little differently, especially regarding the drums.  Furthermore, I had read into how various Japanese iterations of games for the NES/Famicom actually had more than just 4 channels of Tone Generators/Oscillators to work with.  One title in particular that stood out to me that had such a feature was the Japanese version of Castlevania 3, or Akumajo Densetsu (Demon Castle Legend), by Konami.

Upon reading into this, I decided to do a bit of a less 'authentic' styled 8-bit track, but one that really tried to capture the sound/feel of the music of that particular franchise in the NES/Famicom era.  I appropriately named this track:

Hunt for Dracula 

The difference in this track, regarding the drums, is that unlike The Blue Bomber, which only used a single noise generator for all the drum sounds, this one featured several tone generators/noise generators that were individually being triggered by a separate device within the workspace.  This allowed for a bit more ease in the sequencing side of things, as I didn't have to draw as much automation to get all the sounds I wanted...but I never was quite as happy with the results as I was with simply using a monophonic noise generator, and simply putting in the work to get all the sounds out I needed.

Otherwise, I really liked how the track turned out, especially in the timbres I got from using different phase settings on the pulse waves to get varying timbres throughout the song.

At any rate, I hope you enjoyed reading over some of my background doing this sort of music, and if you have any particular questions about specific techniques I used for some of these tracks, feel free to ask them in the comment section.  I'll gladly answer as much as I can in the comments section myself, or I might take a bunch of questions, and field them with some examples in a future Famicom Fridays. :)

Thanks, and have a great week, everyone! 

(From the October, 2006 issue of Game Developer Magazine)

The Video Game industry is nomadic by nature and no field more transient than Audio.  As a result, every audio professional is forced throughout their career to prove and reprove their worth solely on the strength of their résumé and the first 30 seconds of their demo.

Freelance audio folks rarely get to see the demos of their competition and Audio Directors don’t have time to give critiques on the demos that end up in their “No” pile.  So how do you know if you’re a “No” or not?  More importantly, how can you ensure you’re in the “Yes” pile?

PRESENTATION IS EVERYTHING

No demo exists in a vacuum.  To the contrary, every demo will almost always find itself sitting in the middle of a stack of demos.  Before any tracks can be heard, the first impression your demo will always make is a visual one.  As such, presentation is everything.  Imagine an Audio Director staring down a stack of CDs without any idea of what the audio on them sounds like.  At that moment, the selection of one demo over another is almost completely arbitrary.  The only advantage your demo has is its ability to stand out from the crowd.

This means that CD- and DVD-Rs that have been written on with a Sharpie marker are automatically at a disadvantage.  At their best, they look sloppy.  Far too frequently, however, they contain illegible or incomplete text.  No matter how attractive you may think your handwriting is, it can’t compare to a printed CD label.  But what do you print on the label?

First and foremost, always include your name and contact information on every part of your demo – whether it’s the case, the disc, the résumé, or a business card you tossed in for good measure.  Discs and cases are easily separated and if there isn’t any clue as to whose audio the disc contains, that nameless disc just lost itself a gig.  

Secondly, if you’re looking to stand out, avoid the standard cliché images common to the industry.  For composers, this means never cover your demo with pictures of sheet music, treble clefs, noteheads, violins, etc.

 

 

So many composers use these images as the easy way of saying “This is a music disc.”  The problem is that hundreds of composers are all using the same imagery.  For sound designers, stay clear of pictures of waveforms, speakers, or screenshots from Protools as they’re all overdone.  Both disciplines are also guilty of another common cliché.  If you include a photo of yourself, don’t take it while sitting in front of your gear.  Take a picture of yourself anywhere else.  You’re looking to stand out and be different.  Trust me.  Audio Directors will still believe you know a mod wheel from a pan pot if they don’t see you beside one.

If you don’t have the graphic design or Photoshop skills to design something other than the clichés for yourself, hire a graphic designer to do it for you.  It’s that important.  You’re creating a brand of yourself that you’re then marketing throughout the industry.  You owe it to yourself to do everything you can to ensure that your disc stands out from the pile of unknowns.

 

FOCUS YOUR EFFORTS

Once your demo has been yanked from the pile, your audio chops are finally on display.  There are a number of different schools of thought regarding how best to present your work, and unfortunately no clear answers with which everyone agrees.  Should you make a single montage piece or a series of smaller, separate tracks?  As someone who reviews demos, I find that I prefer to see separate tracks since I can easily skip back and forth through the demo to hear tracks again.  Should your demo vary widely stylistically or should it be most representative of your strongest talents?  That depends on the specifics of the job for which you’re applying.

Without a doubt, the most important aspect that is often overlooked with demos is the ability to focus it specifically to the job for which you’re applying.  An all-purpose demo is great for GDC, but if you’re applying for a specific job you should submit a demo that speaks directly to that position.  A sound design job does not warrant a music demo.  A company that only makes racing games does not want to hear a sweeping fantasy soundscape.  Your demo should be flexible enough that you can select from a pool of available tracks that are appropriate at different times for different job opportunities.   

BACK TO BASICS

Never forget the basics.  Make sure each disc works on both Mac and PC platforms, as you never know what the listening environment on the other end will be.  Listen through your demo to make sure all of the tracks play through to the end of the file.  Make sure your demo is short – no longer than ten minutes, preferably closer to five.  Unless specifically requested, don’t send data discs with anything other than audio and video clips.  Word documents and Excel spreadsheets are not the stuff of demos.

There’s a certain element of Alchemy to crafting the right demo.  Listen when people give you feedback, update your demo frequently, but mostly don’t feel too stressed by demos.  Our industry is full of dream jobs and you’ll have plenty of opportunities throughout your career for fine-tuning.