Video game music is one of the main reasons why I make music today. My teenage brain was literally wired and shaped in the 90's by Nobuo Uematsu's music (Final Fantasy series). Even in the late 80's, on the 8-bit Nintendo, I already had a thing for video game music and it played a big part in my immersion in a game. Search for Final Fantasy soundtracks (FF7's Sephiroth's theme for example) and get blown away. Also, Castlevania Symphony Of The Night soundtrack. One of the best ever.
Uematsu's music has had a huge impact in my life. I'll never forget the emotions and memories I have associated with so many of those Final Fantasy songs. I aspire to reach that level of composing.
Uematsu's and the rest of Square's music in the 90's is absolutely fantastic. Before voice acting existed music was the only way to convey aural emotion in a game and thus, soundtracks were so important. Those OST's are all in my daily listening.
I don't know how they did it but they made some good music for those NES games, both Nintendo and other developers. Some of them weren't even professional composers, like Miyamoto.
You and me both. I was born in the 90s but my musical heritage is your strongly to the games you mentioned, especially Uematsu's work. I don't make game music (although I would love the opportunity someday) but my playing and working has been heavily influenced by gaming.
One of the best implementations of music in a video game is Banjo Kazooie on N64 - in the overworld there's a main theme but as you go to each different area the instrumentation crossfades. You can sit halfway between areas and hear both versions and whatnot. Changes the feel of the game seamlessly.
Even Diddy Kong Racing did it, starting from the character select screen. Fading in different instruments and melodies on top of the same beat on the fly is such a cool touch.
Same dude, so emotional and rich. I always find myself so inspired by the muisc, but I never know how to write stuff like that. I think its mostly that the songs dont really have a formulaic structure, any tips?
I still remember the exact moment when it occurred to me that the soundtrack of a game had been steering my emotions through the experience. I was in nearing the end of Silent Hill 2 and it was a really jaw dropping moment, and also one of the primary reasons I enrolled in my local colleges music recording technology program. Akira Yamaoka is a genius.
Silent Hill 2s soundtrack is one of the best! There is a really interesting PDF you can find online regarding the musical sound design on a scientific level, it's called- A spectral analysis of Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill 2 original soundtrack
Glorious interview Rick! Thank you so much for doing it. Brian Schmidt provided in depth and thoughtful answers to each question. There is so much to learn from him. I became interested in video games after doing a few scores for some small games. It opened up a whole world of music for me that I'm still exploring. I came into games from a film scoring point of view. It was an eye-opening challenge and extremely exciting. It's not my main job, but I'll always take on a game score if I have time. I'm jealous of those who do it full time!
This is absolutely fascinating! I first got into computer based music because when I was younger all I wanted to do was write music for computer games. I loved seeing those old arcade boards with the synthesiser chips - they evoke so much nostalgia from my youth. I'm still in awe of some of the music programming that was done back in the day, that had to be written to such precision in order to fit within tight memory restraints and take up minimal CPU cycles. It's great to hear from someone who's been there from the beginning and can share how each new technological advancement has shaped the approach over time.
These concepts just set my brain in a frenzy over the creative potential, imagining linear motives for different characters and villains and convertible counterpoint possibly combining them in permutation fugues during battles, with subsequent events in game leading to different episodes and so on. Ground bass forms such as passacaglia and chaconne are perfect for changing textures over time to increase or reduce tension also.
@@GabeWilliams I started at the Indie level and worked my way up and attended a lot of events until I became a speaker myself. I never did music for free, though! Not even once...
@@walzmusic how’s your job going? It’s also my dream job but I’m not sure how the whole business works exactly. Like where do you find games to compose for?
@@Pmf95k going great! I am in house these days at Riot Games. Attend conferences, meet people, be great and easy to work with, amass clients and relationships!
Two words, Akira Yamaoka. If you never played Silent Hill 2, do yourself a favor and play it immediately. Some of the most incredible use of sound design and composition in creating immersion and atmosphere.
I used to agree until I found lots of the sounds he used in Omnisphere. I thought he spent lots of time creating those amazing pads and modulating effects from scratch, but nope - they're premade patches. Now don't get me wrong, Yamaoka still did a lot of beautiful work in Silent Hill (especially in SH2) and I still love those long, repetitive (meditative) tracks like White Noiz - but holding down one key on your midi controller for 3 minutes isn't the hardest thing in the world to do ;)
I certainly noticed the smooth change of background music even back when I was a kid playing Monkey Island 2. But now knowing the effort that went into it, I am simply amazed.
Horizontal and Vertical re-sequencing were things that I knew the concept but didn't know the name... You made it so much easier to research now! Thanks so much for this!
I recently saw the Legend of Zelda road tour with the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap. Amazing. If you haven't seen it, you should go if they're still touring. Video screen with gameplay and full live orchestra soundtrack. Gobsmacked.
Wow! You've been reading my mind! This is amazingly helpful, and exactly the reason I'm studying composition/orchestration so I can learn more about it and (attempt to) get into this field.
On the matter of active tempo sweeping, its possible to automate tempo in some daws, and programming hooks can take advantage of that in a program called modplugtracker which is like a sampler / sequencer program
The problem is that if you do the tempo sweep in your DAW, then it's 'baked into' the music. That is, you can't change the tempo at an arbitrary point in time by an arbitrary amount during the game. Ideally, you'd like to change the tempo as the user does various actions--but you don't know when (or if!) they player will do those actions. You're correct in that if you use something like modplugtracker, you can change the tempo at arbitrary points in time. However, now you are back to 'synthesized' music, being generated on the fly, as opposed to pre-recorded orchestral (or other studio-produced) music, so generally your production values will be lower. That's currently the tradeoff we have to make in games. We can have great production values (live orchestras, vocalists, etc) with a kind of coarse interactivity or we can have high-interactivity scores, but with lower production values. That said, people have been experimenting for some time with mixing and matching-- for example, using a live orchestra as the music 'bed', but than having some melodic or rhythmic elements synthesized on the fly laid on top.
Video game music gets seriously underrated. The Phoenix Wright series has some awesome jazz tunes and obviously a lot of games have great orchestral scores with Journey's soundtrack almost winning a Grammy. Chrono Cross is my all time favorite though.
Thank you for the video. I wish it could have been longer. Can you get Brian to give some hands-on advice and examples of actual game audio work using FMOD or a similar tool, and to elaborate on horizontal and vertical resequencing etc? Those of us who work on video game music, on indie video games etc, need every bit and snippet of advice we can get. Especially how we can get away with limited resources and manpower and do the best with what we have. Really good video! Huge respect and gratitude to you both! Awesome channel! Maybe Rick could analyze one of the popular video game scores and compare it to film music etc? It is such an interesting field.
I’ve already loved music and been playing for a long time and I thought I wanted to become a session or touring musician. Went to Musicians Institute and realized I don’t wanna do that. However, 28 Days Later soundtrack, Little Birds, and especially The Last Of Us soundtrack made me realize that I really want to write music for videos games or even film.
You should see if you can get Yasunori Mitsuda from Japan, composer of CHRONO TRIGGER, (widely regarded as the best VGsoundtrack Of All Time To The Best RPG of all time) He founded Procyon and he just finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Maybe you can get do something. It’d be major.
That was really awesome, Rick! Thanks for bringing Brian here for some enlightenment! Also, i would really like to meet Jessica, she seems to be incredible at what she does, hahaha
Thanks for the comment. It depends on what the meaning of 'surround sound' in games is :). PS2 (which came out before Xbox) had optical out, so it supported Dolby Digital 5.1 on non-interactive content, typically non-interactive 'cut-scenes' in games (as well as normal DVD movie watching). A cut-scene is a term we use for little linear movies that generally provide some story elements, played between game levels. But they don't let the user interact with what's on the screen--it's just 'sit and watch.' What Xbox had was interactive Dolby Digital (called "Dolby Digital Live")-- this allowed all the audio for a running game to be encoded into Dolby in real-time, letting it be fully interactive, and not limited to cut-scenes. Dolby Digital Live was invented during Xbox's development, in conjunction with the Xbox team.
Incredible interview -- funny that I was able to follow conceptually what was going on but if you sit me down in front of a console I'm lost. Please do more vids on this topic.
Here’s what you need to know about making a living composing music for anything. Buy a lottery ticket. Your chances of striking it rich that way are far far better.
Gotta love the "Jessica" explanation ! :D Fun and nice guy, also really interesting ! I was just about to post some ads to local AV and game design schools !
Hey Rick, I know this video is like already 1 year old but there is music from a game called "Chrono Trigger" which has Ost's with Non functional harmony in it, would be amazing to see this being covered in a video by you. Thanks for all content!
Apollo Project used that kind of 'core-memory' because NASA's people were afraid that outer-space radiation would wipe out the spaceship computer memory and 'kill' the mission... It was knit by women, due to their attention to that kind of handcraft.
Brian Schmidt is a lucky guy. How awesome is it that you make music for a pinball machine for one of your first jobs and you have been making music for games for such a long time? Indeed, anywhone who works on a game should be a gamers himself, it shows if these people aren't, then you get weird disconnects between the gameplay and whatever they do. Though he explains a lot of advanced concepts of music for games there also is a lot which should be improved, '3D'-sound might be on the top of that list. Learning how to make sound change due to collissions with materials inside the gaming word, much more advanced than just putting a reverb on the sound for a cave. AMD uses TrueAudio for this, Nvidia later created its own proprietary technique for it. Unfortunately it is not being utilized a lot yet, possibly because you would need to use two tools to make it work for all PC gamers.
Yes, a lot of the cutting edge in game audio has to do with 3D sound using "HRTF" technology, especially with Virtual Reality being so big. VR--even 'linear' VR (like a VR movie, as opposed to a VR game) uses a lot of the tools, technologies and techniques that games use, and 3D audio and "Object panning" is certainly one of them And games have relatively recently started using DSP effects inside the games themselves to have the sounds change based on what materials they are made out of, or what they bump into, etc. Or in some cases, there is research in just doing away with recorded wave files altogether--and use physical modelling for sound effects, much in the same way that there are some great physical modelled instrument libraries.
It is a fascinating field. I have a bit of a background in engineering (academic, electromagnetics, fourier transformations, digital signal processing...) myself, I can imagine how complex it is and how much work still can be done for research and development in this field and how rewarding it can be to gradually approach better results by improving the models and implementing these in software and hardware. It must be exciting to these people that the increasing capability of hardware makes it possible to use better models. As a viewer I agree with Rick, the two of you should definitely talk more about this another time. The first time that I played a 'modern' game on the PC and I heard how the sound changes based upon the material you walk upon (small stones, wood...) and how the sound changes from left to right and back to front depending on your position and how you turn the 'camera' (mouse) I was immediately impressed. It is a small detail but it makes a world of difference for the game, especially if you use high quality speakers. It amazes me that some people spend $100 each year on a graphics card on average but they never buy good heapphones and a decent DAC + amp while sound adds as much as graphics to a game. The added value is large but many people seem to not notice it, until it is not there or it is bad. However, because sound is so powerful you also notice screwups immediately and that can be annoying, the effect is the opposite of demersive. In some AAA games you hear that the direcdtion of the sound is wrong or the volume doesn't make any sense.
"Whatever you use, Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Sonar..." Wow, as a Sonar user, I've got to say that it's not a DAW that we hear about that often. Mabe it's used a lot more in games than elsewhere ?
FSBass From what I've heard, Sonar has a pretty good reputation with MIDI, which can be very useful in video game work. I've been tempted to start using it myself! I assume you use it; do you use it for MIDI, and if so, what editing features do you enjoy?
Hi ! I've been using it for almost 3 years, currently with SonarX3. Just so you know I've previously worked on Cubase 7, Pro Tools HD 10, and I was using Adobe Audition 3. when I first started recording myself 6 years ago. I literally do everything in Sonar : - recording :the take lines and comping system is quite nice. - mixing : quite usual features, but I really like the "send" system, also trim gain on each track. - mastering - editing : I don't do time editing a lot, and I admit Pro Tools' Beat Detective is really better for that, but you can get decent results with Audiosnap, it just takes more time. Still with the auto-crossfade and easy time stretching you can do some little adjustements easily on the fly. - composing : often with MIDI and external VSTs. A feature I really enjoy is the possibility to have all your MIDI instruments on one piano roll page, and the ease Sonar gives to get from one to another. Seems quite standard but really useful. For some stuff like sound design or audio restoration I'll still use Adobe Audition 3 since it has really good plug-ins for that kind of stuff (still I'll use ReaFIR in Sonar for noise removal if I'm at mix prep stage and I come across a bad source). To be honest I first chose Sonar because it wasn't expensive at all, and also it reminded me a lot of Logic Pro which I used to work on with a bandmate (the "groove clip" system in Sonar for example is a lot like the "clip loop" system in Logic). Please ask if you have more specific questions ;)
Great video! Would love to see more of these, maybe hear your opinion on the Cuphead soundtrack, or more interviews with people working with music in the video game industry in general.
My guess is that video game music is more competitive and difficult to get into becoming a producer or engineer. That being said, there are a lot of indie games
Games are pretty competitive, yes. But there are a lot of games being made--not just by indies, but smaller, but professional companies as well. We sometimes call those games "mid-core" or "casual core" games. Indie games are also great to cut your teeth on, and learn some of the challenges of working on games. According to "pocketgamer.biz" around 1500-2500 new games are added to the app store every month, so there's a lot of them out there
Yakuza series has some world-class moments in their very guitar-laden soundtrack; try looking up Yakuza5 - Affected Fight, Yakuza 0 - oath of Enma or Yakuza LAD - Friendship. Astoundingly good stuff
Rick Beato I love it that you talk about video games too, I am a gamer myself. What do you think about the music in the game Cuphead? If you don't know the game, check it out by watching some gameplay on TH-cam, you won't regret it. It is one of the most popular games at the moment, it was developed by a small team as a work of passion, financed with extra mortgages. They handdrew all the animations in 30's style and the music is from a live orchestra, the gameplay also is good for those who like to game. The music is interesting and effective (anyone can tell that) but is it also good? I would like to hear your thoughts on it sometime. Games and music is an interesting combination, like movies and music (and TV shows and music, Alias nailed it for example, look at the first episode). The music gives clues to the viewer/gamer and it strengthens the atmosphere and emotion of whatever is going on. For example in Mass Effect (1-3) they had very effective music.
Try it! Whether or not it is difficult depends on the person, people who have played a lot of platform games since the days of the NES shouldn't have a problem with it. People who are not used to play this kind of games might have to get used to it but you will adapt. Not everybody will be able to finish all levels on the highest difficulty level with perfect scores but finishing all the levels with a passing score on the normal difficulty level shouldn't be a problem. Learn the patterns, experiment and have fun. For more experienced and talented gamers (fast reaction speed, good at seeing patterns, good coordination) it is a challenge to get perfect scores for all levels on the highest difficulty level but just passing the levels on the normal difficulty level is easy for them. If you want to get some experience with a more difficult game which is free then try the fanmade Megaman Unlimited. Good to get some experience, Once you finished that you won't find Cuphead that difficult. The game is not nearly as polished as Cuphead but the gameplay is good.
I hate advertising so much that I avoid all advertising and I avoid product which are advertised in an agressive way. Product which are good don't need advertising, wordt of mouth suffices.
Great interview and thanks as always, big thumbs up. It would have been nice to cover the financials of the industry as well. How much a game composer can expect to make. What it pays per project and if there are "points" or "royalties" involved in sales at all. Especially with small indie game companies where you might be working for cheap in hopes that you have a hit on your hands. Would the composer retain any rights to the music for later use in films or soundtracks related to the game and such. Just some thoughts.
Great question, Brian. We (at GameSoundCon) do a survey every year that covers a lot of those issues. www.gamesoundcon.com/game-audio-survey-2017 The short answer is that it depends on the game type. For the most part, games are done as "Work for Hire" which means that the composer signs over all rights. 95-98% of the big budget games get their music under "work for hire." For indie games, it's more likely that a composer will be able to keep their music rights; about half of freelance composers working on 'indies' said they kept rights to their music. "points" or "royalties" are almost unheard of in games (again, more common in indies than in professionally produced games). On the plus side, for professionally produced games, the up front fees are pretty decent. The survey has a bunch of charts and graphs that show what composers are charging for different sized projects (indie to "casual core" to "AAA").
Hi Rick, really enjoy your videos for the insight and interesting stories. I recall fondly many of the songs you look at but through my kids, I have also ventured into VGM so I was wondering if you might react to a VGM cover by The Consouls (my obsession). They cleverly turn VGM into jazz (I've been listening to jazz for decades). I think the VGM genre is still fairly niche but growing and there is some amazing VGM out there, particularly by the Japanese composers who were geniuses when you think about the limitations they faced. (eg 8-bit sound) and using VGM as jazz standards is something quite fascinating.
You got 128 kilobytes? The Atari 2600 had 128 BYTES of memory. And yet, people were still able to make impressive games on it. It lacked in the music and sound department, though... Really love how far music in video games has come.
Nice video very informative just, when you send the finished loop or full song to the game developer what file type do you send them? .wav , ogg, aiff, mp3?
Great question. Usually a game developer will want the original, uncompressed .wav file. Alternately, they may want you to incorporate into 'game audio middleware' (google "wwise" or "FMOD") yourself, and deliver the game audio middleware project files.
As a game producer that hires composers for game projects, I have to tell you there is no 49 minute video in the world that tells you all you need to know about composing for video games. Rick has some great videos and congrats to Brian for all he has done, but do not think watching this clip will get you the gig.
Thanks for this one! There's also a book written by Winifred Phillips called "A Composer's Guide To Game Music" that expands on a lot of things that Brian talked about here. Are there any DAW's you would recommend for specifically composing game music?
The best DAW is.... the one you know best. :).. I happen to use Sonar and DP, but a lot of people I know have been gravitating towards Reaper. If you're looking at higher end production, Nuendo has actively been adding game-specific features to their product. For example, you can export directly from Nuendo 8 to Wwise (a very common game audio system). Reaper also has some extensions that people have written to make it more game friendly for both music and sound design. And, Yes, Winifred's book is great. I had the pleasure of helping edit an early version of it. Chance Thomas also has a great book on composing game music as does Michael Sweet (teaches at Berklee) and Aaron Marks. Aaron's book is more on game audio in general, including both music and sound design.
Noted, thanks for the reply. I'm learning how to use Cubase at the moment. I actually have Michael Sweet and Chance Thomas' books as well; I started in on one of them but I haven't finished reading though them yet.
I'm afraid you're right.. I had the awesome pleasure of studying with Jacobs for a time, though when I turned from "tuba" to "theory/comp" I stopped having lessons with him.
I want to get into film scoring but don't know where to start. I am still in high school so I can't yet go to school to learn film scoring. What can I do right now to get my feet wet in film scoring?
It's all over the map of course. That said, Reaper is increasingly popular. Nuendo also has some built-in technical hooks that make it easier to interface with game audio software such as Wwise (a tool game composers and sound designers to put music and sfx into games). Personally, I'm a fairly long-time Sonar user, who is in the process of transitioning to Reaper, but I've also used DP for a long time (going back to when it was just "Performer"). And of course a lot of people are Logic + ProTools.
Hopefully I will become a fountain of knowledge 48 minutes from now
well, did you?
Are you a fountain of knowledge now?
yes
You probably are. If i have a conversation with you, you will have something to tell me. Everyone has.
@@ronzonirafael That's deep
Video game music is one of the main reasons why I make music today. My teenage brain was literally wired and shaped in the 90's by Nobuo Uematsu's music (Final Fantasy series). Even in the late 80's, on the 8-bit Nintendo, I already had a thing for video game music and it played a big part in my immersion in a game. Search for Final Fantasy soundtracks (FF7's Sephiroth's theme for example) and get blown away. Also, Castlevania Symphony Of The Night soundtrack. One of the best ever.
Uematsu's music has had a huge impact in my life. I'll never forget the emotions and memories I have associated with so many of those Final Fantasy songs. I aspire to reach that level of composing.
Uematsu's and the rest of Square's music in the 90's is absolutely fantastic. Before voice acting existed music was the only way to convey aural emotion in a game and thus, soundtracks were so important. Those OST's are all in my daily listening.
Check out the "Diggin In The Carts" documentary if You don't know it yet :)
I don't know how they did it but they made some good music for those NES games, both Nintendo and other developers. Some of them weren't even professional composers, like Miyamoto.
You and me both. I was born in the 90s but my musical heritage is your strongly to the games you mentioned, especially Uematsu's work. I don't make game music (although I would love the opportunity someday) but my playing and working has been heavily influenced by gaming.
One of the best implementations of music in a video game is Banjo Kazooie on N64 - in the overworld there's a main theme but as you go to each different area the instrumentation crossfades. You can sit halfway between areas and hear both versions and whatnot. Changes the feel of the game seamlessly.
This was a really fascinating approach I'm not sure I've seen in any other game since. I'm not sure why either, it's utterly brilliant.
They did the same thing in Conker's Bad Fur Day, amazing game too !
I believe it was in all RareWare games actually
Even Diddy Kong Racing did it, starting from the character select screen. Fading in different instruments and melodies on top of the same beat on the fly is such a cool touch.
True ! Yes, Diddy Kong was a great game !
The soundtrack of super Mario galaxy is what has turned me towards this stuff. Hope to one day write for film and or games
Same dude, so emotional and rich. I always find myself so inspired by the muisc, but I never know how to write stuff like that. I think its mostly that the songs dont really have a formulaic structure, any tips?
I still remember the exact moment when it occurred to me that the soundtrack
of a game had been steering my emotions through the experience. I was in nearing the end of Silent Hill 2 and it was a really jaw dropping moment, and also one of the primary reasons I enrolled in my local colleges music recording technology program. Akira Yamaoka is a genius.
Silent Hill 2s soundtrack is one of the best! There is a really interesting PDF you can find online regarding the musical sound design on a scientific level, it's called-
A spectral analysis of Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill 2 original soundtrack
What school are you at that has that program??
Glorious interview Rick! Thank you so much for doing it.
Brian Schmidt provided in depth and thoughtful answers to each question. There is so much to learn from him.
I became interested in video games after doing a few scores for some small games. It opened up a whole world of music for me that I'm still exploring.
I came into games from a film scoring point of view. It was an eye-opening challenge and extremely exciting. It's not my main job, but I'll always take on a game score if I have time. I'm jealous of those who do it full time!
This is absolutely fascinating! I first got into computer based music because when I was younger all I wanted to do was write music for computer games. I loved seeing those old arcade boards with the synthesiser chips - they evoke so much nostalgia from my youth. I'm still in awe of some of the music programming that was done back in the day, that had to be written to such precision in order to fit within tight memory restraints and take up minimal CPU cycles. It's great to hear from someone who's been there from the beginning and can share how each new technological advancement has shaped the approach over time.
These concepts just set my brain in a frenzy over the creative potential, imagining linear motives for different characters and villains and convertible counterpoint possibly combining them in permutation fugues during battles, with subsequent events in game leading to different episodes and so on. Ground bass forms such as passacaglia and chaconne are perfect for changing textures over time to increase or reduce tension also.
Composing music and making audio for games was my childhood dream and I am so happy to have a career doing it!
How’d you get started?
@@GabeWilliams I started at the Indie level and worked my way up and attended a lot of events until I became a speaker myself. I never did music for free, though! Not even once...
@@walzmusic how’s your job going? It’s also my dream job but I’m not sure how the whole business works exactly. Like where do you find games to compose for?
@@Pmf95k going great! I am in house these days at Riot Games. Attend conferences, meet people, be great and easy to work with, amass clients and relationships!
@@walzmusic awesome!
Two words, Akira Yamaoka. If you never played Silent Hill 2, do yourself a favor and play it immediately. Some of the most incredible use of sound design and composition in creating immersion and atmosphere.
I used to agree until I found lots of the sounds he used in Omnisphere. I thought he spent lots of time creating those amazing pads and modulating effects from scratch, but nope - they're premade patches. Now don't get me wrong, Yamaoka still did a lot of beautiful work in Silent Hill (especially in SH2) and I still love those long, repetitive (meditative) tracks like White Noiz - but holding down one key on your midi controller for 3 minutes isn't the hardest thing in the world to do ;)
Ah I had no idea you had videos for game music. Digging in.
This is actually extremely useful for my current research paper
Michael McCann is one of my absolute favorites. Just thinking about music in DX:HR gives me chills. It's so huge, and oh so beautiful.
I certainly noticed the smooth change of background music even back when I was a kid playing Monkey Island 2. But now knowing the effort that went into it, I am simply amazed.
Awesome interview. I never realized the complexity of how video game music interacts with the action.
Horizontal and Vertical re-sequencing were things that I knew the concept but didn't know the name... You made it so much easier to research now!
Thanks so much for this!
Thanks for getting a game composer on your show! Really nice!
Great video! Thank you so much
I recently saw the Legend of Zelda road tour with the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap. Amazing. If you haven't seen it, you should go if they're still touring. Video screen with gameplay and full live orchestra soundtrack. Gobsmacked.
Wow! You've been reading my mind! This is amazingly helpful, and exactly the reason I'm studying composition/orchestration so I can learn more about it and (attempt to) get into this field.
On the matter of active tempo sweeping, its possible to automate tempo in some daws, and programming hooks can take advantage of that in a program called modplugtracker which is like a sampler / sequencer program
The problem is that if you do the tempo sweep in your DAW, then it's 'baked into' the music. That is, you can't change the tempo at an arbitrary point in time by an arbitrary amount during the game. Ideally, you'd like to change the tempo as the user does various actions--but you don't know when (or if!) they player will do those actions.
You're correct in that if you use something like modplugtracker, you can change the tempo at arbitrary points in time. However, now you are back to 'synthesized' music, being generated on the fly, as opposed to pre-recorded orchestral (or other studio-produced) music, so generally your production values will be lower.
That's currently the tradeoff we have to make in games. We can have great production values (live orchestras, vocalists, etc) with a kind of coarse interactivity or we can have high-interactivity scores, but with lower production values.
That said, people have been experimenting for some time with mixing and matching-- for example, using a live orchestra as the music 'bed', but than having some melodic or rhythmic elements synthesized on the fly laid on top.
I'm still reminding developers that modplug /XM exists... So much potential with tracker music in game sound 🎧💙👍
Rick, you are a great person for making these incredible videos. Please never stop.
Video game music gets seriously underrated. The Phoenix Wright series has some awesome jazz tunes and obviously a lot of games have great orchestral scores with Journey's soundtrack almost winning a Grammy. Chrono Cross is my all time favorite though.
Great Rick... I'd put "Sounding Off" in the video title though... it would be easier to recognize it as an episode of... Soundig off.
Thank you for the video. I wish it could have been longer. Can you get Brian to give some hands-on advice and examples of actual game audio work using FMOD or a similar tool, and to elaborate on horizontal and vertical resequencing etc? Those of us who work on video game music, on indie video games etc, need every bit and snippet of advice we can get. Especially how we can get away with limited resources and manpower and do the best with what we have. Really good video! Huge respect and gratitude to you both! Awesome channel! Maybe Rick could analyze one of the popular video game scores and compare it to film music etc? It is such an interesting field.
I’ve already loved music and been playing for a long time and I thought I wanted to become a session or touring musician. Went to Musicians Institute and realized I don’t wanna do that. However, 28 Days Later soundtrack, Little Birds, and especially The Last Of Us soundtrack made me realize that I really want to write music for videos games or even film.
Thanks for that fascinating insight - could have listened all day.
I'm SO jealous! That's like all the stuff I really wanted to do and never could (I had to settle on being a sound programmer).
You should see if you can get Yasunori Mitsuda from Japan, composer of CHRONO TRIGGER, (widely regarded as the best VGsoundtrack Of All Time To The Best RPG of all time) He founded Procyon and he just finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Maybe you can get do something. It’d be major.
You should do a Sounding Off with Marty O'Donnell!
I had to sit through a tampax advert that you couldn't sit to see this. This better be good Rick!
Red dead redemption had a continuous theme and it was beautiful.
Thank you so much! I was wondering when middleware like FMOD studio was used in the process. Now I know!
Thanks rick and brian
Rick, your interviews are so good.
This was super interesting to me; thank you so much for another great interview, Rick! You rock
Lol i searched composing videogame music on youtube and rickbeato came up, what a coincidence :)
I love you
Great interview- fascinating subject matter
the comparison to the movie theatre organist / pianist is SPOT ON
That was one of the most informative and interesting video's I have ever watched on YT (and I've watched 1000's....possibly)
Thanks! Rick asks the perfect questions!
That was really awesome, Rick! Thanks for bringing Brian here for some enlightenment! Also, i would really like to meet Jessica, she seems to be incredible at what she does, hahaha
Jessica just does what she's told...
Thanks for this. Dont get to hear stories like Brian's as much as we should. Very informative.
Look into the music created by the Follin brothers. That is some of the craziest video game music I have ever heard.
What a great interview; thank you!
Hey Rick, awesome that your doing some videos on game composition. Have you ever checked out music from the Final Fantasy series?
Cool interview, I think the PS2 was the first to have surround sound via the optical connection
Thanks for the comment. It depends on what the meaning of 'surround sound' in games is :).
PS2 (which came out before Xbox) had optical out, so it supported Dolby Digital 5.1 on non-interactive content, typically non-interactive 'cut-scenes' in games (as well as normal DVD movie watching). A cut-scene is a term we use for little linear movies that generally provide some story elements, played between game levels. But they don't let the user interact with what's on the screen--it's just 'sit and watch.'
What Xbox had was interactive Dolby Digital (called "Dolby Digital Live")-- this allowed all the audio for a running game to be encoded into Dolby in real-time, letting it be fully interactive, and not limited to cut-scenes. Dolby Digital Live was invented during Xbox's development, in conjunction with the Xbox team.
woah!!! as a gamer, this is something I always liked a lot, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Castlevania! :D
CastleVania! Final Fantasy! 8-bit Music Theory
Metal Gear FTW! started my career :)
Hey Daniel, let's catch up soon!
Thanks for another great video! Learning so much!
Brian's shirt is like that Google Nexus live wallpaper
Incredible interview -- funny that I was able to follow conceptually what was going on but if you sit me down in front of a console I'm lost. Please do more vids on this topic.
Very interesting thank you! Yes!
Super cool interview! Exactly what I wanted.
Awww man. I only just marked my senior class’s game score comp assignment. If only this came out 2 months ago! Next time
That's a very informative video, it's worth the time. Thank you.
Here’s what you need to know about making a living composing music for anything. Buy a lottery ticket. Your chances of striking it rich that way are far far better.
This is one of my goals, but, I have also branched off into motion comics
Gotta love the "Jessica" explanation ! :D
Fun and nice guy, also really interesting !
I was just about to post some ads to local AV and game design schools !
Grant Kirkhope was the vg composer that inspired me to create music today tbh.
Really excellent interview! Fascinating to hear about the development of the VGM world :-)
Hey Rick, I know this video is like already 1 year old but there is music from a game called "Chrono Trigger" which has Ost's with Non functional harmony in it, would be amazing to see this being covered in a video by you. Thanks for all content!
Great video! I would love to see you get Martin O'Donnell on. My favourite game composer.
Apollo Project used that kind of 'core-memory' because NASA's people were afraid that outer-space radiation would wipe out the spaceship computer memory and 'kill' the mission...
It was knit by women, due to their attention to that kind of handcraft.
this some good stuff
maybe more on this, or also movie scores
Brian Schmidt is a lucky guy. How awesome is it that you make music for a pinball machine for one of your first jobs and you have been making music for games for such a long time? Indeed, anywhone who works on a game should be a gamers himself, it shows if these people aren't, then you get weird disconnects between the gameplay and whatever they do. Though he explains a lot of advanced concepts of music for games there also is a lot which should be improved, '3D'-sound might be on the top of that list. Learning how to make sound change due to collissions with materials inside the gaming word, much more advanced than just putting a reverb on the sound for a cave. AMD uses TrueAudio for this, Nvidia later created its own proprietary technique for it. Unfortunately it is not being utilized a lot yet, possibly because you would need to use two tools to make it work for all PC gamers.
Yes, a lot of the cutting edge in game audio has to do with 3D sound using "HRTF" technology, especially with Virtual Reality being so big. VR--even 'linear' VR (like a VR movie, as opposed to a VR game) uses a lot of the tools, technologies and techniques that games use, and 3D audio and "Object panning" is certainly one of them
And games have relatively recently started using DSP effects inside the games themselves to have the sounds change based on what materials they are made out of, or what they bump into, etc. Or in some cases, there is research in just doing away with recorded wave files altogether--and use physical modelling for sound effects, much in the same way that there are some great physical modelled instrument libraries.
It is a fascinating field. I have a bit of a background in engineering (academic, electromagnetics, fourier transformations, digital signal processing...) myself, I can imagine how complex it is and how much work still can be done for research and development in this field and how rewarding it can be to gradually approach better results by improving the models and implementing these in software and hardware. It must be exciting to these people that the increasing capability of hardware makes it possible to use better models. As a viewer I agree with Rick, the two of you should definitely talk more about this another time.
The first time that I played a 'modern' game on the PC and I heard how the sound changes based upon the material you walk upon (small stones, wood...) and how the sound changes from left to right and back to front depending on your position and how you turn the 'camera' (mouse) I was immediately impressed. It is a small detail but it makes a world of difference for the game, especially if you use high quality speakers. It amazes me that some people spend $100 each year on a graphics card on average but they never buy good heapphones and a decent DAC + amp while sound adds as much as graphics to a game. The added value is large but many people seem to not notice it, until it is not there or it is bad. However, because sound is so powerful you also notice screwups immediately and that can be annoying, the effect is the opposite of demersive. In some AAA games you hear that the direcdtion of the sound is wrong or the volume doesn't make any sense.
"Whatever you use, Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Sonar..."
Wow, as a Sonar user, I've got to say that it's not a DAW that we hear about that often. Mabe it's used a lot more in games than elsewhere ?
FSBass From what I've heard, Sonar has a pretty good reputation with MIDI, which can be very useful in video game work. I've been tempted to start using it myself! I assume you use it; do you use it for MIDI, and if so, what editing features do you enjoy?
Hi !
I've been using it for almost 3 years, currently with SonarX3. Just so you know I've previously worked on Cubase 7, Pro Tools HD 10, and I was using Adobe Audition 3. when I first started recording myself 6 years ago.
I literally do everything in Sonar :
- recording :the take lines and comping system is quite nice.
- mixing : quite usual features, but I really like the "send" system, also trim gain on each track.
- mastering
- editing : I don't do time editing a lot, and I admit Pro Tools' Beat Detective is really better for that, but you can get decent results with Audiosnap, it just takes more time. Still with the auto-crossfade and easy time stretching you can do some little adjustements easily on the fly.
- composing : often with MIDI and external VSTs. A feature I really enjoy is the possibility to have all your MIDI instruments on one piano roll page, and the ease Sonar gives to get from one to another. Seems quite standard but really useful.
For some stuff like sound design or audio restoration I'll still use Adobe Audition 3 since it has really good plug-ins for that kind of stuff (still I'll use ReaFIR in Sonar for noise removal if I'm at mix prep stage and I come across a bad source).
To be honest I first chose Sonar because it wasn't expensive at all, and also it reminded me a lot of Logic Pro which I used to work on with a bandmate (the "groove clip" system in Sonar for example is a lot like the "clip loop" system in Logic).
Please ask if you have more specific questions ;)
Have most of them but Sonar Platinum is the best option for my world
Well, you can say goodbye to Sonar. Cakewalk is closing its doors.
Just read that, that's sad for me. I guess I'm gonna switch to Cubase !
Great video! Would love to see more of these, maybe hear your opinion on the Cuphead soundtrack, or more interviews with people working with music in the video game industry in general.
Very cool video! I`ve get nice info! Thanks!
My guess is that video game music is more competitive and difficult to get into becoming a producer or engineer. That being said, there are a lot of indie games
Games are pretty competitive, yes. But there are a lot of games being made--not just by indies, but smaller, but professional companies as well. We sometimes call those games "mid-core" or "casual core" games.
Indie games are also great to cut your teeth on, and learn some of the challenges of working on games. According to "pocketgamer.biz" around 1500-2500 new games are added to the app store every month, so there's a lot of them out there
Yakuza series has some world-class moments in their very guitar-laden soundtrack; try looking up Yakuza5 - Affected Fight, Yakuza 0 - oath of Enma or Yakuza LAD - Friendship. Astoundingly good stuff
Pls do a series of review of great video game music
Awesome interview!
Love your Channel!
Thank You
very unexpected thing for you to discuss about video game thingy Rick!
So glad I became your subscriber! keep up the great things happen
Koji Kondo & C418 are my favourite game composers
awesome!
great interview!!
Rick Beato
I love it that you talk about video games too, I am a gamer myself. What do you think about the music in the game Cuphead? If you don't know the game, check it out by watching some gameplay on TH-cam, you won't regret it. It is one of the most popular games at the moment, it was developed by a small team as a work of passion, financed with extra mortgages. They handdrew all the animations in 30's style and the music is from a live orchestra, the gameplay also is good for those who like to game. The music is interesting and effective (anyone can tell that) but is it also good? I would like to hear your thoughts on it sometime. Games and music is an interesting combination, like movies and music (and TV shows and music, Alias nailed it for example, look at the first episode). The music gives clues to the viewer/gamer and it strengthens the atmosphere and emotion of whatever is going on. For example in Mass Effect (1-3) they had very effective music.
A few friends of mine have been telling me about Cuphead. It sounds intriguing! I heard it was very difficult, so I'm scared to try it!
Try it! Whether or not it is difficult depends on the person, people who have played a lot of platform games since the days of the NES shouldn't have a problem with it. People who are not used to play this kind of games might have to get used to it but you will adapt. Not everybody will be able to finish all levels on the highest difficulty level with perfect scores but finishing all the levels with a passing score on the normal difficulty level shouldn't be a problem. Learn the patterns, experiment and have fun.
For more experienced and talented gamers (fast reaction speed, good at seeing patterns, good coordination) it is a challenge to get perfect scores for all levels on the highest difficulty level but just passing the levels on the normal difficulty level is easy for them.
If you want to get some experience with a more difficult game which is free then try the fanmade Megaman Unlimited. Good to get some experience, Once you finished that you won't find Cuphead that difficult. The game is not nearly as polished as Cuphead but the gameplay is good.
If the music is interesting and effective, then it IS good. What more would you want?
Is that a question or an advert?
I hate advertising so much that I avoid all advertising and I avoid product which are advertised in an agressive way. Product which are good don't need advertising, wordt of mouth suffices.
Great interview and thanks as always, big thumbs up. It would have been nice to cover the financials of the industry as well. How much a game composer can expect to make. What it pays per project and if there are "points" or "royalties" involved in sales at all. Especially with small indie game companies where you might be working for cheap in hopes that you have a hit on your hands. Would the composer retain any rights to the music for later use in films or soundtracks related to the game and such. Just some thoughts.
Great question, Brian. We (at GameSoundCon) do a survey every year that covers a lot of those issues. www.gamesoundcon.com/game-audio-survey-2017
The short answer is that it depends on the game type. For the most part, games are done as "Work for Hire" which means that the composer signs over all rights. 95-98% of the big budget games get their music under "work for hire."
For indie games, it's more likely that a composer will be able to keep their music rights; about half of freelance composers working on 'indies' said they kept rights to their music.
"points" or "royalties" are almost unheard of in games (again, more common in indies than in professionally produced games).
On the plus side, for professionally produced games, the up front fees are pretty decent. The survey has a bunch of charts and graphs that show what composers are charging for different sized projects (indie to "casual core" to "AAA").
Listen to Argonia.
A hidden gem.
Hi Rick, really enjoy your videos for the insight and interesting stories. I recall fondly many of the songs you look at but through my kids, I have also ventured into VGM so I was wondering if you might react to a VGM cover by The Consouls (my obsession). They cleverly turn VGM into jazz (I've been listening to jazz for decades). I think the VGM genre is still fairly niche but growing and there is some amazing VGM out there, particularly by the Japanese composers who were geniuses when you think about the limitations they faced. (eg 8-bit sound) and using VGM as jazz standards is something quite fascinating.
Perhaps my two video game soundtracks are Super Mario Galaxy and Minecraft. It would be interesting if Rick Beato did videos on those.
video games are now the closest thing to gesamtkunstwerk since gotterdammerung
thanks fellas
Thank you for this video! Very interesting :)
Really obscure game but Atelier Totori has a really good soundtrack.
Like most of the games in the Atelier series.
You got 128 kilobytes? The Atari 2600 had 128 BYTES of memory. And yet, people were still able to make impressive games on it. It lacked in the music and sound department, though...
Really love how far music in video games has come.
Rick, you should make a video examining Akira Yamaokas style and techniques
Nice video very informative just, when you send the finished loop or full song to the game developer what file type do you send them? .wav , ogg, aiff, mp3?
Great question. Usually a game developer will want the original, uncompressed .wav file.
Alternately, they may want you to incorporate into 'game audio middleware' (google "wwise" or "FMOD") yourself, and deliver the game audio middleware project files.
As a game producer that hires composers for game projects, I have to tell you there is no 49 minute video in the world that tells you all you need to know about composing for video games. Rick has some great videos and congrats to Brian for all he has done, but do not think watching this clip will get you the gig.
Steve Albini interview would be cool.
Is this conference something that happens every year? I'd be interested in checking it out!
In my drunken stupor, misread title as “Composting Video Games” sounded like a good idea.
From now-on I shall call the responsible programmers Jessica
Watching in 2019! LOL.....
Thanks for this one! There's also a book written by Winifred Phillips called "A Composer's Guide To Game Music" that expands on a lot of things that Brian talked about here.
Are there any DAW's you would recommend for specifically composing game music?
The best DAW is.... the one you know best. :)..
I happen to use Sonar and DP, but a lot of people I know have been gravitating towards Reaper. If you're looking at higher end production, Nuendo has actively been adding game-specific features to their product. For example, you can export directly from Nuendo 8 to Wwise (a very common game audio system).
Reaper also has some extensions that people have written to make it more game friendly for both music and sound design.
And, Yes, Winifred's book is great. I had the pleasure of helping edit an early version of it. Chance Thomas also has a great book on composing game music as does Michael Sweet (teaches at Berklee) and Aaron Marks. Aaron's book is more on game audio in general, including both music and sound design.
Noted, thanks for the reply. I'm learning how to use Cubase at the moment. I actually have Michael Sweet and Chance Thomas' books as well; I started in on one of them but I haven't finished reading though them yet.
I bet Mr. Schmidt studied with Arnold Jacobs...I am superbly jealous.
I'm afraid you're right.. I had the awesome pleasure of studying with Jacobs for a time, though when I turned from "tuba" to "theory/comp" I stopped having lessons with him.
Anyone else just sit in the menu window in Civ 6 because the music is too good to stop? 😅
Nobuo Uematsu
I want to get into film scoring but don't know where to start. I am still in high school so I can't yet go to school to learn film scoring. What can I do right now to get my feet wet in film scoring?
What DAW do you and others here like for game audio? Digital Performer, Cubase, Logic etc? Thanks!
It's all over the map of course. That said, Reaper is increasingly popular. Nuendo also has some built-in technical hooks that make it easier to interface with game audio software such as Wwise (a tool game composers and sound designers to put music and sfx into games).
Personally, I'm a fairly long-time Sonar user, who is in the process of transitioning to Reaper, but I've also used DP for a long time (going back to when it was just "Performer").
And of course a lot of people are Logic + ProTools.