Hello, I start to learn more and more about composing music for games 🙂

I have a question about dynamic & linear music.

So for example the music is composed dynamically for the video game so there would be for a basic example different sections / loops that work seamlessly together (Horizontal and Vertical).

There are Games that have this type of dynamic music in game but also a linear / static soundtrack release.

How does this get achieved? What would be a common way to do this? So that you got you're dynamic music in the game but also the “linear/static” soundtrack release?

I would be very glad if some one could give me some information on this topic.

Greetings

The lazy way is to just take the source tracks you have, throw them on a big pile, and release them as they are.

The better way is to take the source tracks and mix them together in a way that feels satisfying. This means making creative decisions and possibly even composing new material to give the loops a satisfying conclusion.

Thanks for the reply 🙂

So in this scenario it would be the “best” way to take the source tracks / loops and carefully choose and rearrange them for a “soundtrack version” mixdown yes? Makes seens to me 🙂

But if I like the “classic” way of composing (linear music) I could just compose it the other way around right?

This means:

First compose a “full” song with dynamic sections in mind because of the seamless looping for example ending on a dominant chord and then slice the song down into sections or just use specific sections and add variations to it. So you would have the “basic” song and then just “add” the loops & dynamic layers to it.

I think both would work and I then could just choose the method that works best for me right? 🙂

The OST version of a dynamic soundtrack is manually arranged by the composer(s) for the track release.

The dynamic, in-game version is controlled by a variety of parameters in the engine and reacts to gameplay.

As far as how to compose like this, it's fairly straight forward:

You write the piece in a linear fashion first then you break out various individual layers so the engine can have options of what to trigger when.