Hello everyone, I have a question concerning the creation of music for video games. How do they do it? Do you have to like have a bunch of instruments? Or can you get like Music Creator 3 and do it with that? If anyone could shed any light on this process for me I would be very grateful, also if you could maybe go over my different music creation options. I already have Music Creator 3. Thank you very much for your time.

There are three options. Each one gives better sound than the previous ones, but costs more.

1) Use a freeware MIDI program to create something on your computer, and synthesize sound at runtime. The cost of this can be as low as zero, but the sound is absolutely terrible.

2) Use a "digital orchestra" like the Garritan Personal Orchestra. Again, you feed it a digital form of your music (probably in a MIDI file) and it pieces together recordings of actual instruments to play your piece. The sound is very close to that produced by a full orchestra, but the cost is only a few hundred dollars.

3) Hire a full orchestra to perform your piece. The cost of this is huge, but worth it for studios with multi-million-dollar budgets.

I'm going to move you to the Music & Sound forum, I think you'll get better responses there.

I currently use the Garritan Personal Orchestra. It's not as powerful as the East West Symphonic libraries, but I think at $200 it's a steal. It's hard to get a decent electric guitar for that price, much less a full orchestra that never needs a break or complains about musician's union regulations.

You can hear examples of my compositions utilizing GPO in the link below.

Brian Timmons

The world of virtual instruments can seriously give you endless possibilities. I would wager to say a large percentage of music for electronic media is probably made using some sequencer (e.g., Cubase, Logic, ProTools, Sonar, etc.) and some assortment of VSTs. There are a number of VSTs out there that do a pretty good job of taking the role of a real, physical instrument, and with a bit of practice, you can make pieces that sound realistic (to the point where it'd be very hard to distinguish whether the sound came from a musician playing the actual instrument or playing virtual instrument). Of course, the higher quality sounds you want the more money you have to put out.

As someone said, GPO offers a nice orchestral package for a relatively cheap price. Native Instruments also makes a number of top notch virtual instruments, but most will cost you at least $200, with the average price falling around $350-400. I very much like their new FM8 instrument for more atmospheric or ambient type music, and I'm just starting to scratch the surface of their Guitar Rig 2 kit for guitar amp modeling and simulation. You can also go to KVR and search for a plethora of VSTs there. You can usually find free alternatives to NI's instruments there for when you're just starting out: sfz + naturalstudio drumkit in place of Battery, Crystal in place of Absynth, Free Amp 2 in place of Guitar Rig, etc. Just run some searches through their database or ask around on the forums, and I'm sure you'll find more things than you can shake a stick at.

For getting started, it is really neat to have a Mac... Garage comes pre-installed, and while not the most full featured program on its own, it takes standard VSTs as plugins, as well as most Logic plugins (and there are many free VSTs around).

While you probably will want to move to something more complex (such as logic) later, it provides a very good and cheap (read free) basis for learning and experimentation.

In addition to the posts above me i would say,

Get fruityloops it works very good with VST's and has a very user friendly interface, and was easy to learn for me. I hope it'll be easy for you to, if not send me a pm and ill be glad to help you.