Music and Audio Gamejamming!

Though I was up and ready at 7am, as there was no game concept until late afternoon, I had effectively nothing to work on for about half the working day. This was predictable in hindsight and I'll definitely consider it next time. So, I ate my morning porridge and hung around. When we had eventually spoken, I began straight away putting some sounds together. I built a sample library of placing/clicking sounds, which came from clicking, switching, pushing and pulling everything on my guitars. Each sounds different. I recorded the clicks from pickup switches, turning the whammy bar screw, jacks going in and out... anything I could get.

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These sounds were actually perfect, and formed the entire basis for the interaction. This was combined with my trusty free synth which I have had for years, and know back to front, which means that though it's a bit limited compared to some of the more exciting stuff out there I can pull all kinds of sounds out of it, and in combination with amplitube it makes a cool little sound-design synth, as well as a musical one. And talk about value for money- this little thing has been in an amazing amount of my music so far, in many different disguises.

The computer speaking voice was actually my girlfriend's idea, which I liked so I recorded her, and multitracked and processed the voice to make it sound computer generated. I thought it came out very well, and gave the interface some definite extra jazz. She's all over the soundtrack in one way or another! And yes, I think it does come out sounding a bit like the command center woman from BroodWar. I just like it, okay...

At the end of the first day I had samples to send over and which were well-received, so I was happy with my direction for the next day, and that my samples and approach to the sound design would be good enough.

Second day, I had to get the music direction sorted since everyone else would be at work on the final day, and I would need that time to make the polished final ambient tracks. This meant less time for my morning porridge, but I prefer having more to do rather than less. Got scribbling music and came up with as much as I thought I needed, and put together a small sample. I had instinctively wanted the guitars in there since I first heard the concept, so I didn't bother fighting it, figuring that it would work nicely and give a nice human side to the music which many games possibly wouldn't have. I knew this meant I would have to be writing, learning and performing in a very limited space of time, and though this felt a little edgy it wasn't nearly enough to put me off. They liked the sound of the demo, having issues only with the structure, which was all good. At around this time they also got a full list of required sounds over to me, so I was happy to go back then and spend the afternoon finishing off all the sounds.

What's great is using a whiteboard at this point. Just organising what needs doing and what's done in my head never goes very well. Spreadsheets are not something I enjoy using. Text documents are messy. So, whiteboard is perfect. Actually, pretty much everything in my life goes on my whiteboard these days, but that's another story entirely.



Simple, but really helpful, and kept me on purpose. So, I hit the sounds and got them to a good place. This left me with hundreds of individual tracks, mostly stock sounds which I'd made, so the next day I saved everything I would need need for the ambient music and sound as presets which could be dropped into a new project, and booted up a clean new Cubase project.

The final day was about my writing discipline- write it all, then record. No jumping backwards and forwards or getting bogged down in half baked ideas, as there simply was no time for that. My daily practice in composing over the last couple of months certainly played a big part in helping this go along super smoothly, and by the time the rest of the team were back from work I was well along the way, and had them a cleanly produced track before the evening wore on too long. The time-pressure definitely had an impact on those breakfast sounds sneaking in at the beginning. A good take is a good take!

I was really happy here to be working with good monitors, I must say. Teamliquidans (or whatever we're called) who advocated me getting some new speakers and heard some of my productions beforehand, I hope you can hear the difference in the end result. I really thank you for your input on that.

All that was left was to make sure all the sounds were standardised to avoid any weird volume issues, and to get it over to the team when they were ready. Since they had been at work all day, things got really late for them. I was actually very glad to be three hours behind them since I really don't function well at 3am. At about midnight my time, we were all happy with where the sound and integration was, and I could head to bed, anticipating waking up to the results of the weekend's work the next day. It's always cool to hear how things come together when you've worked relatively isolated from the rest of the project, whether that's in a game or a film. There is something particularly awesome though about interacting with the sounds in the format of the game, and a satisfaction to experiencing the sounds as cohesive elements of the whole.