Hi all,

I was just wondering what are the final checks you go through to check that your music is up to standard or "polished"?

Thanks,
Caleb Faith

The way I notice a tune is not up to standard is that I get tired/annoyed/dislike of it after I have put it in the game. Either it doesn't fit the mood of the game or it just sounds bad. I try to differentiate the song; either it being because I heard it a lot of times and I am tired of it that way (which is OK, that's a keeper) or because I think it genuinely doesn't sound good enough.

Its safe to say I'm not a very musical guy.. but I'm making my own music for the games I develop. It's hard to say what makes a good enough song, much depends on how high your goals are.

As far as composition goes, I'm never "done" with a piece. There's always going to be something I wish I could tweak, or improve, or change, or whatever. Same thing goes for any FX I design. But my rule of thumb is that once I'm content, and the client is happy with it, it's time to move on. If I have time later I can maybe go back and tweak something, but once those two criteria are satisfied it's usually time to leave it alone and shift my focus to something else. Throughout the process though, I always like to check my final mixes against tracks that myself and the client have set aside as references. I do some comparisons for volume between the reference tunes and the finished track just to see if they come in close volume-wise. That usually makes the client happy with the volume, and gives me a little leg to stand on if they do come back with the inevitable "can you make it louder?".

A/B comparisons tend to work the best, at least for me. But as Pete said, it can be an ongoing experience. What I do to make sure the game works is test it out on whatever device(s) it's going to be experienced on. If it's an iOS game then I play the audio on an iOS device. If it's for console, I play it on TV speakers - and so on.

Thanks guys I've been trying to keep my music up to standard and this helps

As far as composition goes, I'm never "done" with a piece. There's always going to be something I wish I could tweak, or improve, or change, or whatever. Same thing goes for any FX I design. But my rule of thumb is that once I'm content, and the client is happy with it, it's time to move on. If I have time later I can maybe go back and tweak something, but once those two criteria are satisfied it's usually time to leave it alone and shift my focus to something else. Throughout the process though, I always like to check my final mixes against tracks that myself and the client have set aside as references. I do some comparisons for volume between the reference tunes and the finished track just to see if they come in close volume-wise. That usually makes the client happy with the volume, and gives me a little leg to stand on if they do come back with the inevitable "can you make it louder?".

I have forever had this problem. I have music I composed 3 years ago that, if I still had the working file, I'd go back through and ravage, even though I know I'd find something else to fix in about a month or two.

I try and listen to other songs that happen to have the style or emotion that I want to mimic at a high level of satisfactory. My feelings are similar to that of O-san and Nsma, though having it playing in game is the most helpful for me. It allows me to see if my music meshes with the visual aspects it is portraying or accenting.