I've been designing theatre shows for the past five years and would love to break into the video-game world after doing some extensive QA work on a handful of 360 titles this past year.
Most of my work involves creating ques, or selecting music that already exists to fit the mood for a particular moment. However, I have started using Acid to create my own work.
An Angel's Approach Destroy's the World (MP3, 0.853MB)
- An Angel appears, causing the world to rip apart. In the space, this
was 6 different tracks playing on a 6-point surround system.
Great job on the sound engineering! I don't want to get you too down or anything, but as a musician and sound artist myself, I think I should tell you that most companies and studios that need sound effects or sound support for their games either hire a group of sound technicians with expensive equipment to go record their needed sounds (which are sometimes edited by the sound technicians or by the studio themselves), or buy precompiled CD's full of sound effects (which cost quite a bundle). There is also a plethora of free sound effects online (which of course are awful) that lots of indie game developers use, but I find them really cliche-ish (sound effect wise).
Music, on the other hand, is generally composed and "rendered", if you will, by someone who uses pre-recorded sound samples of various instruments as a layover for their composition. For example, in games like 0 A.D., a music artist composes a piece of music in Finale or something similar (or maybe just tracks the whole piece in something like ModPlug or Renoise), and then would either export the song as a midi with tracks for each instrument, or replay the song into the sampling software with a midi keyboard. Once the notes are inside the sampling software (one of the biggest is Reason, by Propellerhead Software), instruments and soft-synths are used as "instruments" for the notes that were imported from the midi (or hand-played in with the keyboard).
Another aproach is for a real orchestra to play the piece, such as with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
And still another aproach is to use pre-recorded loops and fills and put them together into a song, but this method is almost never used in comercial games (except for quick songs) because it doesn't allow for originality to be put into the song.
Here's a list of software that a lot of Musicians use (some are expensive): Reason (sampler and soft-synth) Cubase (very expensive, a vst/midi tracker and sampler) Renoise (not too expensive, full featured tracker) Acid (what you use, often used in soft-synth and loop-fill composition)
A lot of professional composers for games use Logic Pro 7.1, Digital Performer 4.6-5, Cubase SX 3, Sonar 5, Nuendo, Live, ect. The list goes on and on. As for samples if you are doing orchestral music, the are some nice orchestral sample packages out there such as the East West Orchestras, Vienna Orchestra, KH, GPO, Sonic Implants, Miroslav, AO, synful once again the list goes on and on.
That being said, having the skill of being able to score for live musicians is a almost a necessary skill. It might not be one that you ever use, but having it makes you an even more valuable asset. (Or if you can't do it, know how to get it done) A lot of the bigger titles are using live scores and a combination of samples as well.
Sean Beeson
Sean Beeson | Composer for Media
www.seanbeeson.com
I love musicians who are also sound designers. They really get the whole picture usually. Toss in dialog production and you become a triple threat. Most of the work I do? Dialog.
Composers are a dime a dozen and devs can go to canned SFX and get decent results. But dialog has to be planned, scheduled, engineered, edited, mixed and delivered with specifity. (is that a word?)
Being able to do all three snagged me a good job doing it full time so I can't encourage all you audio cats out there enough to branch out and try everything.
Back to the point at hand, BlackGaff, you're stuff sounds interesting enough. I'm unclear if all these clips are yours or just picked out by you.
Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster The music in this game uses Garritan Orchestral Strings, afaik.
Ah. I could be wrong. I could of sworn I read in PC Gamer that it was played by an orchestra and composed by Jeremy Soule. Its possible my memories are mixed up though.
Either way, it uses sounds from a real orchestra =P
