neobustatunez

Eden vs. Kaos -

2008-06-08T22:21:57Z

So as I'd mentioned in the last post, around the turn of the year I'd worked on two very very different projects back-to-back. Kaos War was a big epic MMORPG that demanded the kind of ginormous fantasy orchestra music that I'd been typecast for ever since I started writing for games. Eden: The Zhang Chronicles however was a machinima short that almost never takes itself too seriously, despite having insanely realistic visuals due to use of Cryengine 2. For this one, I used a very Hans Zimmer-ish blend of orchestra, ethnic instruments, and electronics.

Kaos War intro
Eden intro

As you can see, they're pretty different. Kaos is one of those games that really tries to be "THE BIGGEST GAME EVER", just super ambitious across the board. So writing the main theme for something like that was a pretty epic challenge; I needed to do something huge, but unique in a way that no one's really heard before, and at the same time memorable. The game's director was a big fan of the Ghost in the Shell movies (scored by Kenji Kawai, not the TV series by Yoko Kanno), so that was a good starting point; I dug up an old MIDI sketch that used that kind of a powerful, reedy choral sound.

After polishing it a tiny bit and getting approval, I had a somewhat luxurious deadline to get the thing done. My whole thing is, whenever I have a good amount of time to do something, it lets me bring new concepts in that I wouldn't've had time to work out otherwise. In this case it had to do with harmony and rhythm - harmonically, you never hear any "real" chords in the piece, only constructions based off of 5ths ("quartal" harmony) and Slavic-influenced voice leading on the choir. And with rhythm, I kinda have this intentionally-disorienting interplay between duple and triple meter, as well as a melodic theme that starts on an unusual beat and has unusual accents. The point of all this was to make it sound like it makes sense within the piece itself, but still be very different from what a listener would expect; hopefully, that'll make the Kaos setting seem coherent yet unique and otherworldly.

And finally, in addition to being an absolute MIDI monster with all the bizarre orchestration and percussion mixing (and EWQL choirs are always a nightmare to work with), I decided to record the non-classical Slavic choir live. Which was a blast, of course, but still a huge added difficulty to get it all scheduled, financed, and produced. We went up to Yale University to record with the Yale Slavic Chorus, which was a dream come true really - I'm a HUGE fan of the Bulgarian choral sound, and hearing the YSC during a visit to Yale greatly influenced my decision to go there. The session went great and we even had time to do some sampling recordings, which were useful for getting the same choral sound in other tracks in the Kaos score.

So long story short, this single 3minute 33second piece took about a whole month worth of composition, planning, recording, etc.

Now enter Eden.

I have to say that Eden is pretty much the easiest score I've ever done, which isn't saying much since I tend to make things a lot harder than they probably needed to be (see above). That said, for Eden I did end up doing two new things - to capture the feel of the show's island setting and its beautiful vistas, I came up with this sparkly plucking sound that blended well with these warbly orchestrations I had around it. And then I also taught myself to play the classical flute in a more "ethnic" (I love how generic that word is) way, using different playing techniques as well as electronic effects to get a more ancient tone. That and recording myself playing all the drum solos live.

Now by the time Eden came around, I'd already tweaked my MIDI orchestra to the point where it's actually (gasp!) easy to use, and in fact I even went so far as to just save an "Eden" template so that I can start a song in the Eden style right away without having to worry about loading instruments at all. That and it's so much fun to record yourself playing for your own music, plus Eden's a very melodic score and those are always nifty. Oh, and I got to write this song for the end credits.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while Kaos was by far the greater learning experience and something to be much more proud of, Eden is easily just a lot more fun to work on. Whole lot less pressure, less of a hassle to just get started with the music, and certainly less of a pain to make things unique...since I really don't have to. It'll probably be in the short term more memorable of a score too, since it's easier to remember a melody than an overall 'feel'. So maybe the lesson learned is that you really need a balance between both kinds of scores, the easy fun ones and the gigantic overly-ambitious challenges.

Year in review?

2008-06-08T20:55:51Z

So I've basically done exactly what I promised not to do, and that is go obnoxiously long periods with no updates whatsoever. Hope you had fun! :D

Anyways as far as the past year or so, things have been pretty friggen epic. That little "metal instruments sample library experiment" thing turned into a really successful commercial library, and by now I've started a sample development LLC over at www.impactsoundworks.com with Andrew Aversa, we're working on a few others already and it continues to shock me how well it's doing.

I've also finally updated my website, www.rogetmusic.com, with a new design courtesy of Adjust Reality Studio. It looks rather Gucci. ;)

Oh, and uh, in January I moved to San Francisco to work fulltime at LucasArts. Which is, uh, pretty friggen amazing. I'm in the audio department working on music editing and implementation, and have had a chance to work on like 5 or 6 titles so far (Lego Indy, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed [which by the way is one of the most awesome games I've ever played], Fracture, the new Indy game, and a couple others that aren't announced it).

Other than that, I'm basically just having a great time overall. I'm in the Presidio, just a few hundred feet from the friggen Pacific Ocean; I took up guitar, weightlifting, and beard-growing; and I now own every single Playstation console. So there's rarely a dull moment these days, unless I guess an obnoxious cohort of bad guys keeps killing me over and over. That tends to suck.

I also have been writing music for an episodic machinima series called "Eden: The Zhang Chronicles". They finished the first ep in January, and I'll probably start working on the second sometime later this month. Writing music for it is actually a blast! Since it's not really a professional gig, I get to do all the things I promised myself I wouldn't do: write super-unoriginal and absolutely just-for-fun music that I probably would've rolled my eyes at if I hadn't written it myself. Maybe I'll do a separate post comparing the experience of writing music for this to writing music for Kaos War.

What I really wanted to show off though is my new myspace site - The VSTease. It's basically a super-diverse fake "band" I have, comprised of friends of mine online who've collaborated in some way on each song. It's kind of like my response to The Seatbelts, for those of you familiar with Yoko Kanno's slightly-more-corporeal-yet-still-diverse band of origin. Now that I'm doing the whole orchestral thing on a daily basis at work, I'll probably be focusing more on this kind of thing in my downtime.

(Except of course when Eden episodes roll around)

First game gig, first feature film -

2007-08-09T20:08:23Z

(HONOES TWO POSTS IN ONE DAY??!??)

So you may be wondering why the heck I've been invisible from April to August. Well besides all the work for Impact: Steel, almost immediately once I finished that and got the business side of it up and running, I got my first gig working on a major game title, Hellgate: London. They contacted me to do music for their E3 cinematic trailer - http://www.gametrailers.com/player/22749.html

Needless to say, that was a fun experience. These guys definitely know drama, and plus they were extremely easygoing and nice to work with... which is weird, weren't game professionals supposed to be agitated insomniac weirdos? :P

Little bit after that, I started on my first feature film, "Teen Idol Tom". It's unannounced on IMDB so don't bother looking, but basically it's a suspense drama set in the near future where all creative fields (art, drama, music) have merged into a single evil-conglomerate company that basically raises, develops, and sells artists like livestock. I won't go into more detail than that b/c I suck at synopses.

Writing for a feature is very, very different from shorts. First of all, the director himself has a wildly different style from all the other directors I've worked with, and is much more reliant on music to tell the story. There's several lengthy set pieces with no dialogue at all where the music has to take the lead in explaining what's going on. In my short films, it's more like I'm trying to squeeze the music in there, with almost no breathing room; the emotional "vocabulary" isn't quite as eloquent, and the music itself usually can't be as diverse. In short films, music is more about branding the film as a whole and leading the audience in a general direction, whereas in features you have a lot of time to show progression and diversity. In my opinion, the music for a short film has a bit more room to be independent and extroverted; in a way it's kind of like one big single piece of music. But then in features you can have those lengthy montages and setpieces, which also lend themselves to autonomous composition. So it's really a tough call, and is completely up to the composers themselves.

I basically had a month to score the feature, which would've been okay if that was my only work; generally Hollywood film composers get more like 3-4 weeks, but they have orchestrators / assistants / live players / recording engineers, whereas I'm kinda doing it all on my own. So it kinda balances out. But unfortunately, an AFI film project that'd been looming over my head for several months finally got its act together, and I had to score both the short and the feature at the same time... curiously with the same deadline. The short film is called Dead Man's Hour, and is basically a revenge story about a guy (Billy) who's simultaneously betrayed by his girlfriend (Sarah) and murdered by his best friend (Austin), then revives himself in a morgue and has only a few hours left to live. I actually had an incredibly wonderful time scoring this... in fact, I'm periodically alt+tabbing over to Sonar to put the finishing touches on the final cue.

DMH is arguably my most "original" score yet, I think. The story/acting/cinematography of the film holds up great on its own, which was a perfect inspiration for the music to kinda do its own thing and make bold, unique statements (which the director thankfully encouraged as well). Basically the score is kind of like a cross between a narrator and a reflection of the main character, who has this sort of dual-citizenship in the land of the living and the dead. So the music itself has two textures as well, juxtaposing acoustic instruments with heavily electronically-manipulated counterparts. Most of the score uses manipulated instruments that I myself "invented", a string section consisting only of cellos and basses (to get a rich dark tone), mellow acoustic and electric guitars, and some piano/dulcimer as well. Though each character has a theme of sorts, the music is told from the Billy's perspective, and so his theme bookends the story. An acoustic guitar/cello duet loosely based on his theme plays over the ending and credits, right as he dies a second time; this kind of symbolizes his change, and his decision to choose life instead of continuing the cycle murder. You never really hear that kind of a purely acoustic sound before in the score, so it ends up being a bit of a surprise (which I of course just ruined for you by typing that, nyah-nyah).

While I'm ruining otherwise-predictable-surprises, I think I'll mention that my favorite scenes are with Austin, the antagonist. Austin was a great character to write music for b/c he just has such a distinctive personality - he's "basically an Iago" (the director's description), pretending to be Billy's friend but really just preparing to stab him in the back the whole time. He also has this quirk of always carrying around a cigarette, which I kind of "translated" into music by constructing a sort of whistling sound (electronically manipulating a flute technique) and using it as his calling card. You don't really know who shot Billy (and in fact, neither does he) until a flashback halfway through the movie, where after he goes down a shadowy figure approaches. I put the electro-whistle in there as a fun kind of foreshadowing, sort of a musical "I TOLD YOU SO!". Back in the theme-sketching phase (ie. before I even started scoring), I planned out how to score Billy's revenge on him. Normally Austin's musical theme consists of these weasely, chromatically-descending low slightly-arpeggiated string chords (kind of a passacaglia technique I picked up from Penderecki). I figured it just sorta painted him as this subtle, dishonest villain; technically the passage actually starts and ends in major chords...but it just "feels" minor the whole way through, like you just can't trust the guy. Well once Billy gets his revenge and shoots him dead, those low string chords turn into blasty swelling horn s, now much more clearly minor. What's cool about it is that there's cellos and basses behind it, playing this huge chord that stretches all the way from F1 up to C6 and with tremolos and trills instead of individual notes, bending and sliding down with the horns. It almost sounds like he's getting pulled down into the underworld, hopelessly clawing the walls along the way.

Well whatev, there's other cool stuff (in my opinion) about it but we're starting to get into egocentric territory, so I'll leave the rest for the music theorists to figure out. Heh, right... the day music theorists start studying film scores (let alone short films) is the day I replace Danny Elfman.

(in bed)

Anyways, that explains my absence from like, life. I have a buncha other gigs lined up, but most aren't as "big" in scope, so I hopefully won't have to divorce myself from the rest of the world as much... plus I'd be better prepared. Two things I'm most proud of though - for starters, scoring the feature forced me to develop a much better-organized (and way better sounding) orchestral template. Now I don't have to go fishing through a million NKI files just to find the most recent violins patch I made. The other cool thing was that scoring the short film helped me to get a unique sound that I personally haven't heard anywhere else, and some new scoring ideas too. That's been kinda my goal this year, to build up unique musical branding that people would (hopefully!) hire me specifically for. The fun thing about it is that it actually makes music so much easier to write, you don't really have to try as hard or put in as much extraneous obligatory orchestration detail; you just say what you mean, and no one can judge you b/c there isn't anything to compare to.

It's kinda funny, I feel like being a score composer might've delayed my getting to this point of self-realization... a quick search for music "artists" over on myspace will award you with some pretty awesome unique acts out there. "Composers"? Maybe not quite so much! Probably this has something to do with the fact that we're always writing for something else, and don't often get to do music that's just completely personal. In fact most of the DMH sound is based off a random song I wrote at 4am one night, one of my sparse improvisation-based pieces. I don't have a point to make about this really, everyone's gonna do their own thing and originality is ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. But it's still just something I always find myself thinking about... fun times.

Maybe I'll post some clips from the two scores online once the films are released. I'm gonna try to release the feature's score on CD, if the executive producers let me.

Delayed Reaction

2007-08-09T18:19:02Z

So, as previously mentioned, I made a sample library. What I haven't mentioned yet was that, eventually it grew and grew. And grew.

And now it's been commercially released - www.impactsteelsounds.com

This is especially exciting for me b/c commercial release = $$$$, and while I won't divulge any figures I will say that it's been very much worth the while. So far it's been getting some very positive reviews, and some pretty big heavy hitters in the game and television music industries have been purchasing it lately.

Course being that this is now a commercial release, I can't go into detail about how I did it. Which I guess is a bit of a shame, but for those somewhat interested in building your own Kontakt libraries, I'll outline the steps. It's actually way easier than you think it is:

1) Identify and secure your sound source. What is your library for? If you're literally recording something, you'll need mics, a room, and perhaps a mixer. If you're doing something abstract with computer-generated sounds (like synth pads, textures, etc.), skip to step 3 and just make sure that, if selling commercially, you're legally permitted to use the source material this way. It's a good idea, if performing an instrument of some kind, to spend a lot of time getting to know the ins and outs of it, and figuring out exactly the types of things that'll be actually useful for you to record (step 3). And obviously if you're recording other people, you'll need to schedule them; recording an orchestral session is possible but you'll need to find a contractor who's willing to subject his musicians to that kind of torture.

2) Equipment and performance space. You'll need to either have some kind of a recording space (walk-in closets can work well if there's space for some kind of padding, like clothes or even bookshelves) or rent out a studio. Renting is obviously the more professional approach, but you'd better do some prototype recording beforehand and have a very good idea of what you want, how many takes, and how long it's gonna take. For reference, my ~350 recorded samples from Impact: Steel took about 3 days to record, and I didn't dawdle.

As for mic choice, that's a can of worms I'd rather not open. But you can find some great deals on zZounds.com - for low cost, near-professional quality gear, some names to look out for are MXL and Behringer. MXL makes a great condenser mic pair (990+991) for only $100, and Behringer has a nice mixer for about $60 last I checked. You'll need stands and cables - there's a cheap $19 package that includes a stand, an XLR (microphone) cable, and a crappy dynamic mic. And finally, you'll probably need a mess of cables and adapters to connect the mixer to your computer. If you're getting a higher end mixer, it'll probably connect via firewire or USB; the $60 Behringer model will need a Y cable (dual mono to stereo), a stereo 1/4" cable, and a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter to connect to most sound cards' line-in ports. Even if you're gonna be using a studio for the final recording, I'd recommend having some kind of semi-professional stereo home recording setup to make prototype samples, see what works and what doesn't, and iron out kinks in your workflow.

3) Cue sheet. Invaluable! Even for small projects! Make one! My sheet for Impact: Steel was in simple outline format, listing the instrument, the articulation (and a brief description of the best way to play it), the number of velocity levels (ie. loudness levels) and the number of variations / alternate takes. Lots of velocity levels will give you a very natural response to dynamics, and alternate "round robin" variations will give a natural and "organic" feel, without the repetitive sound you'd normally associate with MIDI. Make sure to print out the cue sheet and take it with you to the recording booth/studio.

4) Recording. You're on your own here, there's too much to talk about and the bottom line is to test and test and test again until you get a mic position, recording levels, and distance that you think is right. All I'll say is that with instruments with large dynamic range, you'll probably need to adjust gain levels to avoid clipping. Remember to record a noise print (~10 seconds of "silence") so that you can do a noise reduction in the editing phase.

Try to record as much as you can (within reason) in one shot so that you have a consistent sound throughout. If at all possible, get an assistant to help monitor your levels and prevent clipping. I recommend starting quiet and getting louder, and doing all the variations at that particular velocity at once (in other words, 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 etc.)

5) Editing. Fun fun fun. Oh sorry, I meant "misery". But you have to do it, so, whatev. Here's my suggestion - Start off with the noise reduction tool of your choice - Goldwave (Free-ish!) has a good noise reduction algorithm that works with noise prints. After that, you'll be cutting the files out into separate articulations (assuming you recorded a lot in one shot). Then separate out the round robin variations, deleting unwanted takes. The result would be a file with 7-9 (or however many velocity layers you planned for) hits in increasing loudness. Run this through an audio splitter like WaveKnife, trim and normalize the resulting files, and you'll have something you're ready to throw into Kontakt for prototyping (the fun part!) ((Seriously this time!!)).

6) Kontakt, part 1. Throw your samples into a new instrument by finding them on the left browser window and dragging them all into a new instrument's mapping editor. You can right click the editor first and play around with some of the mapping features (like snapping to white keys only). For unpitched percussion banks, you might wanna consider going to the group options and unchecking pitch-"Tracking".

In my experience, this was actually the most important step - finally getting a chance to test out the patch just as the end user would. The flaws and shortcomings you might not have noticed are now painfully obvious, whereas some of the problems you might've been worried about may turn out not to be an issue at all. Play around with ADHSR envelopes, EQ / filtering, different reverb settings (within and outside of kontakt), even dynamic filtering. When you come up with a tone and ergonomic organization that you like, you basically have two options: Either call it a day and save it as is, or do some offline postprocessing.

7) Postprocessing. Some may call it cheating, but personally I find it to be the smartest step I took when developing IS. Basically offline post just means looking at those edits (EQ, filter, reverb, etc.) you made in Kontakt and applying them directly to the samples themselves offline. You can do this with programs like Goldwave or Wavelab that allow you to batch process .wav samples using VST's. The process itself is very easy, you just go to the program's batch processor, drag in all the samples, and set up your processing chain - just remember to turn down the volume a couple dB as the *first* step in the chain in order to prevent clipping later on (you can normalize it again later).

There's both advantages and disadvantages to processing the .wav samples themselves, though. Lots of people will complain that this can result in an unnatural and unrealistically "hyped" sound, and that it prevents the end user from making their own edits in realtime. For example, if you put a reverb right on the samples, there's no way to take it off; whereas if you did it in realtime in Kontakt, a user can just bypass it. In my case though, I wasn't recording pristine orchestral samples and so the surgically-precise "natural" sound wasn't really sought after anyways. The advantages include not only conserved CPU, but also it allows users to drag the .wav samples right into their sequencers by themselves and do whatever they want to them (believe it or not, some people still work that way).

8) Kontakt, part 2. This is just the final step really, where you're renaming things, playing with the now-postprocessed samples, making final tweaks and saving final versions. If you're doing stuff you'd like to send to other people, it's a good idea to figure out a logical place to store the samples here, and save the NKI's to reflect that. For commercial work, you'll wanna send it around and get lots of feedback from other users; one of my best experiences was literally watching a friend of mine use IS for the first time, and observing his tendencies and expectations. That helped me to adjust the way the instruments were mapped, so that I could have the most ergonomic possible experience for keyboard users... which perhaps is a concept that hasn't really been explored very much, yet.

9) Conversions. If releasing commercially, it's not a bad idea to try and convert to several other formats, such as Giga, EXS, Halion, etc. Programs like Chicken Translator and Extreme Sample Converter can do the trick, but you may need to convert down to Kontakt 1 for those to work - I ended up having to build the library in KT1 simultaneously while working on the KT2 versions since none of those programs do very well with K2 patches.

Well there you have it. Developing IS was a great experience for me (lucrative too!), and it didn't really require very much in the way of equipment. All you need is a microphone, an idea, and a heck of a lotta spare time. And the payoff is that you now have an original sound that you can absolutely abuse, and get away with it because it's your own.

Coming soon!

2007-04-16T19:06:36Z

Right now I'm working on an extensive and completely independent sampling project for metal percussion. I'll give a postmortem and post some demos later, but just to summarize, this project will contain around 300 samples, with up to 9 velocity layers, 3 variations, and 14 articulations/playing methods per "instrument". I'm keeping a diary of my daily progress, and will post a detailed (yet, hopefully, interesting!) postmortem that'll give some insight on how sample libraries are built from square one.

For nerds only - "Expression Control"

2007-04-11T03:40:28Z

My first technical post; bear with me, and sorry to folks who don't know/care about this stuff. But maybe it'll offer some insight into all the crap I have to go through whenever I wanna make something sound realistic with computer instruments. ;-)

The most difficult thing to do in MIDI is realistic phrasing. Instruments have to flow and breathe, and the sense of a continuous melodic line must somehow be emulated via separate samples of individual notes. We now have legato scripting in Kontakt 2, as well as sampled legato patches in libraries like VSL and Westgate. But those techniques will only "connect" the notes - I'll explain how to edit Kontakt 2 patches so that you can get realistic phrasing and expression via automated timbral editing.

Open up your favorite patch (for this preliminary example, let's try a solo horn from EWQL Silver), and first take a look at the Group and Mapping editor:

Looks good, right? Not at all. When someone plays a note, they don't decide "Okay this note will be exactly mf, then the next note will all of a sudden be f, and then the next will be p, etc". There's a constant flow between volume levels, and so controlling the intensity and loudness of notes via velocity doesn't make much sense for sustained instruments. Just as an example, let's take a listen at the difference in volume between the three velocity layers: Horn Example 1. Not exactly the most realistic (or pleasant) sound.

So instead, we're gonna control volume more continuously via the modwheel. Sounds simple, but I'll detail some advanced techniques for an even more realistic phrasing method. First off, we need to decide how many sample layers we'll keep. Many older samples have only one velocity layer, which actually is perfectly fine because we'll be using automated equalization/filtering to compensate. Modwheel crossfading sometimes sounds nasty and causes phasing issues with certain solo instruments (high strings and high solo winds in particular), so sometimes you'll wanna keep the velocity layers as is... but in this case, it'll sound fine. This particular patch has three layers; the top one is a bit unruly, so let's stick with the bottom two and delete the top one.

Converting the layers from velocity to modwheel xfade is pretty easy here - they're already separated into velocity groups, so you can just rename them to "p" and "f" to make things easier. Then highlight all the samples throughout the whole range, and drag the velocity tab above so that it becomes 1 - 127 (when you select them all, it should read ??? - ??? at first). It should now look more like this:

Now we just have to get those individual groups to crossfade appropriately. Go back to the Group Editor make sure "Edit All Groups" is ON, choose the "p" group, go down to the Amplifier and click to open the Modulation. Add a MIDI CC modulator, it'll default to CC1 (modwheel). Then add another one. Don't touch any sliders or knobs yet, because with "Edit All Groups" on, that has a good chance of screwing up the order if you have multiple controllers. So go and turn "Edit All Groups" back OFF, come back to the Amp mod, and move one of the CC1 sliders down to about 50%. Do the same for the "f" group, so that they both have one CC1 at 100% and another at 50%. It should now look something like this:

Now to get the xfade to behave properly, choose the "p" group and slide its second CC1 from 100% to -100%. And finally, turn the velocity slider down to around 30% for both groups. Now when you play a note with the modwheel low, it plays sound from the quiet layer; higher modwheel gives more sound from the loud layer. You also will hear some additional volume attenuation thanks to the 50% CC1 - set that even higher for more dramatic volume change. Here's an example of the same passage played with velocity layers and then with modwheel crossfades.

This is old news to a lot of you though; modwheel xfades are standard issue in many sample libraries. The interesting part is dynamic filtering. Turn "Edit All Groups" back ON, and go to the "Group Insert FX" panel. Add an LP1 with a cutoff around 200, then add CC1 modulation at 75%. This results in an even smoother connection between the volume groups because it now has a continuous filter being applied - higher modwheel values give a higher lowpass frequency, allowing more highend to get through. Here's what the Group Insert FX panel will look like now:

Now as a final step, we can add some legato scripting, courtesy of Big Bob's Solo Instrument Performance Script. Download it and copy the .nkp file into your Kontakt 2 script presets folder (usually c:\Native Instruments\Kontakt 2\presets\scripts). To load a script, go to the Script Editor and just choose it from the Script pulldown menu; You'll probably need to restart Kontakt 2 for it to show up (sorry!!). Once you've loaded SIPS-Legato, choose "French Horn 1" from the Presets menu and give it a whirl. You don't need to worry about all those scary knobs and sliders, really; the presets are pretty good and cover several different instruments and ensembles. Here's what our final version can sound like: Horn Example 2. (I cheated a bit and used all 3 volume layers; it was a bit more complicated to set up)

Now again, many libraries have modwheel filter patches by default. Which is great! But the beauty of our patch is that it's set up to respond to modwheel and crossfade, as well as adding some volume attenuation. This lets you give an even more natural and continuous feel to the phrasing. But there's no reason to stop there - the horn example was simple because it responds well to a simple LP1 filter. But what about strings, winds, trumpets, full horn sections, voice? They have more complicated frequency behavior when going from quiet to loud playing. Because Kontakt 2 is so modular, you can physically model that behavior with as much detail as you want. For strings, try an automated EQ1 to control the brightness - Freq 7k, Bandw 2, Gain -4. Then set a CC1 modulation at around 40%, and choose "gain" from the pulldown:

Now the modwheel will control the amount of rosin and "air" in the samples, allowing for some very convincing phrasing and smooth volume shifts: Muted Strings Example 1.

Legato phrasing is just as important for strings as it was for the horn, but slapping a legato script onto a string section can give a very bizarre sound. This is because in reality, each player is doing things slightly differently from the others; a legato script will cause everyone to slide and transition at exactly the same time: Muted Strings Example 2. My solution for this is to load one or two solo strings over the main patch (on the same MIDI channel), give them the same automated filtering/expression via modwheel, and put separate legato scripts on those. Set each of the scripts' parameters to have sloppier tuning/timing than you'd usually want, but different from each other; then mix the two solo patches in at very low volumes. The result will have connected legato notes as well as a sense of independent phrasing: Muted Strings Example 3.

And lastly, I'll point out that you can have any number of effects in the Group Inserts chain, and they can all respond to modwheel; positively or negatively! For example, sometimes horn and trumpet sections can benefit from cutting the mids and lowmids when their volume gets to the fff range. This is because when blasting that loudly, the players not only won't be physically able to maintain a warm tone, but also the only frequencies that'd carry through the large orchestral bombast are the higher ones. So simply boosting the volume across all frequencies would result in an unrealistic mix. To remedy this, I apply a second EQ-1 at 85Hz, bandwidth 2.5, and gain 0; CC1 is set to gain at -50%.

Well that's it for now! Sorry for all the technobabble, but I hope this was useful for at least some folks. Until next time!

GDC Wrapup -

2007-03-17T06:02:56Z

So I just got back from the Game Developers Conference (www.gdconf.com). I spent about 10 days over in San Francisco, staying a few extra days to take in the sights and just hang out with folks in a less hyperactive setting, meet up with SF-based friends / fellow game developers, and just generally take in the sights.

Some preliminary responses to questions I know you're about to ask:

- Yes, I met up with tons and tons of people. Hopefully some projects in the future. Found out two or three new ways to get money from making music that I hadn't thought of before.

- No, I didn't get an award this year. I wasn't eligible for the AudioGANG student/apprentice contest anymore since I'd done a professional project shortly after the GDC last year. However, I participated in a much more useful event:

- The "Demo Derby", where dozens of composers play their 1-minute-long demos for a panel of experts: Bob Rice (THE videogame music agent), Alexander Brandon (game audio guru, literally wrote the book on it), Chance Thomas (extremely prominent veteran game composer; he scores tons of movie games, like King Kong, X-Men, etc.), Paul Lipson (president of AudioGANG, THE guild for game composers), Chuck Doud (president of SCEA's music department, THE guy to impress). This year was my first time participating, and it was a lot more intimidating than before since 1) much bigger room w/ large audience, 2) they made you walk up to a mic in the center of the room while they played your piece and then grilled you on it, and 3) did I mention the panel??

The first ~10 demos or so were pretty much amazing, it was this random cohort of experienced LA-based composers who all got their scores performed live by Prague orchestras. Most likely they were film music refugees, I'm pretty sure they were all over 30 and quite experienced already (no idea where they came from though, I'd never heard of any of them from AudioGANG). The judges were brutally honest and very insightful, and surprisingly specific in their comments.

Well eventually it got to mine, I chuckled a bit at how I compressed a 3-minute montage into a 1-minute shambles, but the judges actually seemed surprised and impressed by it. Actually I was practically blushing at some of the positive comments they made (apparently Paul had been "a fan of my music" since before we'd even met!), and I was of course quite excited when Alex and Chuck said they "wanted to hear more"... since, well, pretty much that's what I came to the GDC for - getting my music heard by the people who really matter. From what I've seen, composing for SCEA is pretty much the best job anyone could ever hope for, it's like a dream team of composers and implementation schemes. So, hopefully something good will come of it after I start following up in a few days.

- Of course the coolest thing was hanging out with Damian, Carsten, Anton, and Jeff. I roomed with C&D, and they had tons of experience in the whole networking/relationship-building thing so they really kept me on my toes. That and we pretty much came up with a whole lexicon of GDC-related terminology, which was fun in an elitist sorta way. The best part about our room though was that none of us were really in competition with each other; the "ditch rule" was still in effect, but since one of us was a composer, another was a sound designer, and the third was an implementor, we never really stepped on each others' toes. That and we all have tons of respect for each other; some extremely preliminary thoughts about starting up our own full-service audio outsourcing company in 5-10 years came about. So, we'll see what happens. ;-)

- I also got to do a lot of cool stuff outside of the conference itself, like visiting Industrial Light & Magic and LucasArts, meeting up with some gamedevvers I'd been working with, watching 300, and intentionally humiliating myself at a dance club just to get a free cab ride (word to the wise: self-inflicted humiliation is some of the most fun there is in life!). That and revisiting old friends (and composer-celebrities!) from last year's GDC was pretty epic too. Although I have to say I was most impressed by DJ Drunken Master telling me that I had an unusually good knack for writing melodies, then proceeding to sing back to me the theme from a totally obscure song I barely even remember putting up on my site! (weirdly, Chris Tin did the same thing with one of the songs from my demo montage... strange how only two years ago I was getting lambasted for being UNmelodic)

Aaaanyways, this turned out a lot longer than I thought it would, but hopefully it'll answer a lot of the questions I keep getting from people over and over and over. Interestingly enough, I kind of am starting to learn a lot more about what it's like being an audio lead for a game company, having to put up with hordes of composers, scads of demos, and endless emails. A good sign of maturity in any industry is learning how to respect someone else's time with succinctness and directness, knowing how to present your material in as easily digestible a format as possible while representing yourself as best you can.

Note: that rule does not apply to blog entries. ;-)

K. K. OK, already.

2007-02-23T22:16:23Z

(A bit of a rant here)

Note to music software/sampling companies:

CHANGING THE LETTER "C" TO A "K" DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MAKE SOMETHING COOL. IT'S ACTUALLY QUITE RETARDED.

Things have gotten way out of hand. First there was Native Instruments Kontakt, which was somewhat excusable because they're a German company and that's an actual word there. Then they gave us Kompakt, kiiinda pushing it but still technically a real word.

Then all of a sudden they pull "Akoustik Piano" on us. Now I know for a fact that that is NOT a word in any language. But it doesn't stop there - not to be outdone, IK Multimedia comes out with "Miroslav Philharmonik". Which, again, isn't even real.

And then of course in an unsurprising bout of "Me Too!!"-ism, Bela D comes out with BELA D GOTHIK MUSIK BOX. The best part about that one is how Bela D is run by an Italian guy somewhere in Delaware.

Now these all happen to be great products, so I don't mean to blast anyone. But my advice is that unless your product involves bicycle kicks, fireballs and de-spine-ing of enemies, C--->K isn't gonna give you any cool points.

Ahh, memories...

2007-02-19T08:12:25Z

Today I remembered two interesting firsts - my first video game experience, and my first video game music experience.

Game - Way back when I used to live in West Philly (please don't sing the song, I'm running out of places to hide the bodies) we lived next to a big shopping center across the street. One of the stores there was some kind of an ice cream shop, I think it was named Hillary's. Well the interesting thing about this place was that the tables themselves were Pac Man arcades! How they managed to keep these coin-ops working underneath inevitably dripping ice cream, I'll never know. And in fact, they stopped working after a while anyways. But it was a sweet idea, pun intended. And for reference, this was all before the Simpsons showed up on network TV, so we're talking late 80s. I had no game systems of my own until Gameboy when I was in 7th grade, and PSX when I was in 9th.

Game Music - This one's a bit surprising. Truth is, I had never heard or even would've recognized the ubiquitous Mario theme until very late in high school, after I'd already started writing my own stuff. Final Fantasy 7 was my first RPG, and the first soundtrack that inspired me to write my own game music. Tons of people have that same story, I'm sure. My first memorable experience with game music, however, goes back a few years before that, to....

....WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CARMEN SANDIEGO.

Ironically, my first game music experience was with a soundtrack that wasn't game music at all. In a somewhat anachronistic feat of game audio, this 1995 title had an entirely licensed soundtrack - instead of the MIDI-based tracks that everyone else was doing at the time, the CD-ROM version of this game used Smithsonian recordings of world music from each of the respective countries that the player would visit. Surprisingly catchy little 30sec clips that'd play on loop while you were searching for clues or planning your next trip.

Well fast-forward a decade or so, and now I'm writing my own stuff. But I really think I owe a lot to that soundtrack for broadening my mind to world music influences; I don't do it so much now, but back in the day I wrote a few RPG tunes that were directly influenced by some of the clips I'd heard. Maybe there's a world music influence in the stuff I write today, too! Or, maybe not. Either way, it's cool to find out that my most influential game soundtrack wasn't a Final Fantasy like everyone else.</b>

The Music Of: Yoko Kanno

2007-02-06T17:20:31Z

I promised a few people that I'd make an entry that attempts to give insights on this composer's shockingly diverse, often genre-bending music. I also promised that I'd try my best to avoid music theory jargon; this won't be completely avoidable, but I'll at least try to define my terms as I go along.

For those not familiar with her work, Yoko Kanno writes music primarily for Japanese anime, some live-action films, and a few video games. Along with Jo Hisaishi and Kenji Kawai, she's perhaps the most widely known and successful media composer in Japan. In general her music is known for its originality and diversity, as well as frequent use of solo singers. No two of her soundtracks sound the same, and there's often a great deal of genre variety within the same score. So it's perhaps unsurprising that some people would mistake her scores for compilation soundtracks (ie. scores derived from individual songs submitted by several artists).

But there is of course some overlap in how she writes, and her outlook towards anime scoring in general. I'll focus on a few musical components, using these scores as examples: Escaflowne (movie), Earth Girl Arjuna, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex (series), Wolf's Rain, Macross Plus, and Cowboy Bebop (movie and series).

Vocal Songs. Listening to a Kanno soundtrack, the first thing you'll notice is a number of vocal songs. In a typical Hollywood score, a vocal track in a film score might either mean a submission from a different artist than the composer, or perhaps an orchestral piece without lyrics (or in Latin) that doesn't follow a verse/chorus form but rather is used as underscore. Kanno's most noticeable innovation is her use of vocal tracks, written in song form, as dramatic underscore for a scene. For example, many songs from Cowboy Bebop are played behind fight scenes, emotional and dialogue scenes, and of course montages. The music takes an unusually foregrounded role because vocal music naturally draws more attention than, for example, symphonic orchestral music. And while several films use vocal tracks in montages and such, Kanno's are written by the composer herself, and are stylistically related to the rest of the score.

Lyrics. The lyrics themselves are worth noting as well. For her earlier scores, most of the songs would be sung in Japanese; Cowboy Bebop featured a number of English songs due to the show's heavy inspiration from American film and music genres. Starting with Macross Plus, a series whose main character was an AI-controlled superstar pop singer, Kanno began writing tracks in a gibberish language she invented herself. Escaflowne, Earth Girl Arjuna, and Ghost in the Shell also feature several songs performed in this nonexistent language (Example: "Sora" from Escaflowne). Mysteriously, she credits songstress Gabriela Robin for writing and/or performing these gibberish songs. Most people believe that it's a pseudonym for Kanno herself, despite the composer's repeated insistence that it's in fact a different person. Appropriately, Robin's first appearance was in the Macross Plus score, perhaps paying homage to the pop idol from the series itself.

More recently, Kanno has been writing polyglot scores with tracks in several different languages. Wolf's Rain tends toward a very warm acoustic sound, with tracks in Italian, French, and Portuguese as well as English. Ghost in the Shell takes this polyglotism up a notch with tracks that switch languages within the same song, for dramatic effect. The opening themes for the two seasons ("Inner Universe" and "Rise") begin with lyrics in Russian for the opening verse, then switching to English for the chorus; "Rise" reverses the pattern for the second verse, and "Inner Universe" also includes Latinate lyrics for a brief hook. Other songs in this soundtrack might have a single repeated line in an alternate language, or even a multilingual play-on-words in the case of the song "I Do" (in both Italian and English). It's possible that she experiments in polyglotism as a response to apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic themes in an anime series, as a way of portraying the entire world being affected by whatever disaster the series brings.

Genre. Kanno is perhaps the most diverse composer I've ever encountered, in terms of instrumentation and genre. It's always difficult for me to introduce her music to other people because in one score she might have classical orchestra/choir music, in another she'd focus on jazz and rock combos, another would be electronica and metal, world music from India and South America, the list goes on. Not to mention her frequent blending of various styles, and other genre-bending practices (you can probably combine any two of the previously mentioned genres, and she's written something that represents that). I'll even go so far as to say she's invented her own genre - whispery female vocalists with thick evocative instrumentation, electronic and/or acoustic ("Where Does This Ocean Go?", "Monochrome," "I Do," and "Dew" from Ghost in the Shell, several others from Earth Girl Arjuna).

While she usually uses several musical genres in each of her soundtracks, there's always a single overall "feel" that represents the series itself. In Wolf's Rain for example, the music gives a very warm acoustic feeling, often with Latin and Native American ensembles, jazz influences, small string sections, and very few cases of electronic instruments or manipulation (Example: "Silver River", "Pilgrim Snow", "Friends"). The series itself has an environmental subtext, mostly centers around nature scenes (and their contrast with urban environments), the artwork employs very warm saturated colors, and the protagonists themselves are youthful wolves. In contrast, Ghost in the Shell is futuristic, has a cold blue tint to many of the scenes, the protagonists are competent adults, and the story is focused around the social, political, and philosophical implications of a world infused with new technology. The music therefore is infused with electronic elements and manipulation, often in conjunction with strings (Example: "Spotter").

This stylistic variety is only possible with her successful collaboration with soloists worldwide. Stylistic legitimacy is a problem that composers face all the time, especially when working with MIDI approximations of real instruments. By working with extremely talented performers/lyricists in various fields (Maaya Sakimoto, Steve Conte, Tim Jensen, Joyce, The Seatbelts, several others), she avoids having to worry about just sounding legitimate, and instead can focus on doing new and different things with a genre. Cowboy Bebop is notable for having music in several popular genres from around the world, but particularly rock and jazz-related styles. This extremely commercially successful score was produced in collaboration with The Seatbelts, a band Kanno used to play keyboards for and subsequently reunited with to score this series. (Example: "Tank!")

Harmony, Instrumentation, Production. There are precious few common traits among Yoko Kanno's various scores, but you can find some recurring characteristics in harmony, instrumentation, and production. She cites Maurice Ravel as her favorite composer, an influence which can be seen in how she deals with harmony. She often uses jazz-influenced chord progressions and modal harmonies*, within the context of various other genres. One of the most noticeable cases is in the Escaflowne soundtrack, during one of the main action sequences, an orchestral/choral cue uses a Gershwin-esque jazz progression during a particularly dramatic moment ("Dance of Curse").

Modal Harmony basically means that instead of writing harmonies with chords (like major, minor, etc.), you simply combine notes from the scale in any way you want. Effectively, the difference between chordal and modal harmony is that chords are expected to lead to other chords, whereas modal harmonies don't necessarily have that kind of "gravity".

As far as instrumentation and production, there are some definite patterns you can hear throughout many of her scores. Her vocal tracks give unusual weight to the instrumentation, putting it on an equal plane with the voice. Often very complex orchestrations and/or synthestrations are used as backing, in a manner somewhat reminiscent to Trevor Horn's work, and Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" technique. You get the sense that her songs aren't about glorifying the solo singer, as is the case with most pop music, but rather are acting as a collaborative effort; the singer is a part of the ensemble. As far as production goes, these songs typically have the voice mixed unusually far back in the mix, sometimes with nearly unintelligible results (Example: "Dear John" from Ghost in the Shell). De-emphasizing the vocalists in this way has a practical application as well - it makes the music less competitive with dialogue in the same scene, which is vital considering how frequently she uses vocal tracks.

The production itself often plays an integral role in the composition of the song, to the point of which a piece is radically altered by filtering, reverb, or echo effects. For example, Earth Girl Arjuna's soundtrack often uses reverb, pan, and echo settings on the voice as a way of embellishing the part, or for dramatic effect (Example: "Early Bird", "Gentle Time"). The Arjuna soundtrack is also notable for subtly infusing electronic elements into an otherwise acoustic piece of music, and for its heavy world music influences (Example: "Earth Resonance").

Kanno's music often has deceptively complicated instrumentation as well. Often she'll introduce unexpected electronic or even vocal elements into an otherwise ostensibly simplistic song. For example, in "Monochrome" from Ghost in the Shell, a soft peaceful vocalist sings amidst a rhythmically chaotic background that uses several bizarre disjointed sounds (such as various clicks, misplaced kick drums, and even the AOL door slam sound). This song also illustrates her tendency towards modal harmonies, as you can hear in the chordal pad that sweeps around in an indistinct blend of notes.

Kanno also seems to pay particular attention to string arrangements, using both small and large string sections in many of her pieces, regardless of genre. In Wolf's Rain for example, she uses both solo and sectional strings in conjunction with woodwinds for an ornate agrarian warmth ("Float"), whereas in Ghost in the Shell she uses them both as an energetic element (the filtered strings from "Stay Home") and as an acoustic foil to other electronic elements ("Spotter"). She also seems to use polyrhythms* and irrational rhythms* frequently as an ornament to her background string parts - for example, this passage from "Valse de la Lune" (Wolf's Rain) uses irrational rhythms to give the impression of an acceleration (2, 3, 4, and 5 notes per beat). "What's It For" from Ghost in the Shell is notable for switching the entire song to a different time signature for the chorus.

Irrational Rhythm simply means dividing a single beat into an uneven number of notes. So for example, a quintuplet has five notes in one beat, making it slightly faster than a group of 16th notes (four to a beat).
Polyrhythm is where two or more instruments play in different rhythmic divisions of a beat or a measure. For example, one instrument can count two notes per beat (8th notes), but the other counts three (triplets); they'd "meet" at the beginning of each beat. This is different from irrational rhythm in that it requires two simultaneously-playing instruments/voices, whereas you can play an irrational rhythm within one line.

Melody. This is the last element I'll talk about, since it's not so much a binding principle as it is a casual observation I've made. One surprisingly frequent feature of Kanno's melodies, especially in her vocal songs, is what I call the "climactic staccato." Often in the chorus of a song, a vocalist will hit a high accented staccato note at the beginning of a phrase, followed by a brief pause. After that, notes will either descend from it ("Tell Me What the Rain Knows" from Wolf's Rain, "What's It For" from Ghost in the Shell) or start again at a lower pitch ("Lithium Flower" from Ghost in the Shell). Surprisingly many of her songs use this same pattern, or at least a general tendency of taking an unexpected pause after a high note. Frequently she'll apply a noticeable echo effect to this high note as well, such as in the first two examples.

Well that's just about all I can do as far as demystifying Kanno's music. One of the reasons she has such wildly disproportionate playtime on the soundtrack of my life is that every time I hear a song of hers, I hear some new element I never even noticed before (and I have pretty good ears, too). So what makes her music attractive to me is that it succeeds on several levels - the pieces are often extremely memorable, they have a powerful and surprisingly eloquent emotional contour (especially when heard in context), and the attention to detail keeps me coming back time and time again.

But I think her most important musical accomplishment is that despite all of the variety, detail, depth and originality, the music always seems to come together perfectly naturally. That synth that came in during the orchestral piece works subtly well, that Middle Eastern vocal chant somehow managed to fit with that mellow jazz ballad, and somehow it made perfect sense for that Indian piece to feature a sax solo. I think that's what it means to have a "musical aesthetic" - when what you're doing might be unusual to the point of not even really making sense, but the music follows its own logic.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully this wasn't too lengthy or undirected, and definitely feel free to ask me if I need to clear up some of the terms; it's tough analyzing a composer without using at least a few music theory terms.

Feel free to share this post with other Yoko Kanno fans!

The Stick

2007-02-02T16:22:17Z

So, today I encountered a new instrument - The Stick

Basically it looks like a board-less guitar with up to 12 strings, but because of the unusually sensitive action on the strings, you actually end up playing it more like a piano. Of course, it's far more expressive than a piano and allows for bends and slides like a regular guitar. Supposedly it's deceptively easy to play, too, and because of the large number of strings, it has a range that encompasses standard and bass guitar. The coolest part about it though is that each of the strings has an independent pickup, so you can actually send different strings to different amp timbres; give basses a clear powerful cut, give leads some distortion and chorus, it's up to you.

For some reason this instrument reminded me of the Zendrum, which is basically a very sensitive and expertly crafted drum controller. You wear it like a guitar and play with your fingers, and the pads trigger sounds on any external interface via MIDI.

So, how awesome would it be to have a three-man band, with Zendrum, Stick, and maybe some vibes thrown in. Just cuz they're cool. Maybe throw in a viola da gamba to be trendy.

Add that to my to-do list from the last post. ;-)

"Concrete Amelioration", or "Less Philosophy More Microscopy"

2007-02-01T10:50:22Z

So I've decided that there's a few specific things I need to do at some point, to help me write music better:

1) Take acting classes. There's really not much difference between acting and music making, if you think about it. When you're a performer, you're basically acting out the various emotions in the piece. Ever notice how many people have gone from music to acting, and done surprisingly well? Jamie Foxx, Eminem, even Justin Timberlake; it's the same skill set, just with different moves. Writing music for films means you really have to be in touch with emotional contour, more so than any other kind of composition. So I figure the best way to get better at it would be to approach film from a different perspective.

2) Study a non-piano instrument more thoroughly. This one's more utilitarian. Around the end of high school, I started teaching myself every instrument I could get my hands on - flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, french horn, violin, even percussion. Mostly I was just studying to get to a point where I could at least tell what would be difficult for people to play, what would be easy, learn various special effects; it was more an exercise in orchestration than performance. Well nowadays I have some good microphones and a makeshift recording booth, so I should really look into stuff like jazz trumpet and electric/acoustic guitar, maybe a few ethnic winds, more bizarre percussion instruments, that kinda thing. Live-recorded solo instrumentals add a ton of personality to a soundtrack, and when you yourself are playing it makes things so much more personal. Even things as simple as recording my own hand drums and hand claps made all the difference in some pieces.

3) Work with vocalists and lyricists. I definitely wanna try my hand at this, from producing other peoples' songs to writing my own, or even writing vocal music within a soundtrack. Some of my favorite composers owe much of their success to effective collaborations with soloists (vocal and instrumental), and so I figure that's an invaluable skill. Plus it'd help tremendously with lyrical and melodic writing in general. I just wish I myself had that kind of a vocal talent, but to those of you who've heard the horrors of my singing voice, I'm sure you'll agree that no amount of practice could save that train wreck.

4) Buy more computers and build a render farm. This one's extremely boring and obvious, but eventually will become vital when I'm on tougher deadlines. For those who don't know what I mean by "render farm", basically doing music on a computer requires a ton of CPU power and RAM. A large orchestra passage might require several gigabytes of sound data to be processed and played back in realtime, with hundreds of simultaneous sounds. Pretty much every Serious Professional ™ uses at least two linked computers to divide the workload, I know some who have 9 or 10 of them. Right now a ton of my time is spent in optimizing my instruments so that they'd fit on only one system, which is kind of a waste and very uninspiring. Of course, I'm mostly looking forward to the day when I won't need to use computers at all, and can afford all live players for everything. But until then, gotta keep up with the Jones's.

Well, unfortunately almost all of these involve some monetary cost, so I'm not gonna be rushing to the actors studio or Best Buy* anytime soon. But hopefully once I get the ball rolling in a few months/years, I'll have some time between gigs to try some new stuff out.

* No, of course I don't buy computer parts at Best Buy. www.scitscat.com and www.newegg.com for the win.

"Target Audience"

2007-01-31T18:19:36Z

By the way, I notice myself saying "you" a lot in these posts, as if I'm lecturing to other composers. I'm really just using it in the indefinite/general sense, I understand not everyone reading this is a composer. In fact, I really hope I get more non-composers/non-musicians (heretofore "civilians" ;-)) reading it, since it might be interesting to see how someone like me would think. Moreso, it'd be interesting to see what other people think, and how that might be similar/different.

I for one know that I'm blessed to have already known for years what I want to do with my life. So many of my friends are stuck in jobs they don't like, or wandering aimlessly without having any idea what to do with themselves. To wake up every night and go to bed every morning (that sadly wasn't a typo) with one thing in mind the whole time is such an amazing gift.

Anyway, these posts are too long. And too preachy. And not personal enough. I'll get better, I promise.

Feel free to IM or email or PM or whatever me if you have any suggestions. I want this to be interesting and not just narcissistic. ;-)

A different angle on the same subject -

2007-01-31T17:34:11Z

I think I neglected to mention one very fundamental idea from my last post. In fact, it's the one that matters the most. Here goes:

If your music isn't unique to you, it'll always be second rate.

That's the part that's been empowering/bothering/confusing me lately. The fact of the matter is, if you follow in someone else's path or define yourself on someone else's terms, you can never eclipse them. You can't out-Williams John, you can't out-Hermann Bernard, you (definitely!) can't out-Kanno Yoko. They didn't get to where they were by following someone else "to perfection" because if they did, there'd be an endpoint. Or maybe an asymptote. Or whatever.

Sometime last year I got to know John Powell's music more closely. He's the guy who did the Bourne Identity/Supremacy, Xmen 3, United 93, Happy Feet, etc. I only heard Bourne and X3, and was immediately struck with a dilemma: his music sounded too much like mine! Of course his is better since 1) he's the king, and 2) he's got live players instead of synths (not to mention a mountain of experience and various other qualities that point to #1). But the problem was that if I were to continue in the same direction I was going in, I'd constantly be compared to him. I'd hit an asymptote.

The solution was simple but still very difficult: do something else. You can't beat 'em at their own game, they wrote the rulebook and conveniently double as the ref. Originality is in the eye of the beholder, but if you yourself see that you're too close to someone, you owe it to yourself to look deeper and do something different. Of course this presents a number of problems since, as I mentioned before, marketability is vitally important at this stage in my career. The Powell sound is extremely marketable (roughly 100% of the action films I've scored used Powell tracks as temps), and the darker/ambient direction I'm trying out is pretty subtle. Not the kinda stuff you'd put on a demo. Maybe not even the stuff you'd write home about while playing the game / watching the film. But it's very personal, no one else sounds like that (I'd upload an example but I don't have clearance from the game directors), and it's just... what I'm gonna try.

At some point I just have to be brave about this kinda thing, I guess. And if it fails or just isn't versatile enough to develop a trademark, I guess I'll just try something else.

"Compositional Philosophy", or "Taking a Step Back"

2007-01-30T16:33:07Z

{Before I start writing this post, I just wanted to make the disclaimer that I want it to be readable by anyone, regardless of if you're a fellow musician or not. So I'll try not to get too technical. Try and fail. But, still read it. Please. I probably like you a lot.}

{...probably.}

Other composers often come to me for advice on any number of technical issues they run into. Usually it's sample/MIDI related stuff (boring), but I of course get the archetypical "I'm stuck on this piece and don't know where to go from here!!!" freakouts a lot, too. Well, my advice is pretty much always the same - stop thinking about where to go from there, look back at what you've already written, and come up with something based on previous material. This results in a more coherent, logical composition with a good sense of forward motion. Pretty textbook stuff, every composition teacher gives that kinda advice.

Well the last few months I've been kinda thinking about my own musical future. Like, what is Will Roget gonna sound like in 3 years, 30 years, that kinda thing. I noticed two things, one good and one perhaps very dangerous.

The good news? I'm on the right track for developing my own kinda sound. It's subtle, and I'm a notorious musical chameleon, but there's certain components you can hear in my work time and time again: saturation, timbral imitation among instruments, an obsession with natural flow and perhaps an immature fear of complete silence. I'm even compiling a private library of various textures, drones, drum patterns and musical effects/excerpts that I can rework and reuse for various ends, which helps in giving a kind of signature sound. My most recent soundtrack, Kaos War, has a few brief ambient tracks that I thought were particularly "personal" in the sense that it sounds like something only I would do, and feels extremely natural and heavily finessed. I sometimes make the allusion that composing gives me the same feeling that martial arts did; these tracks feel closest to that kind of gestural colossality. (surprisingly, that's actually a word!)

But here's the problem. First off, every composer started writing because he heard some other music, liked it, and wanted to join in the fun. But at some point you have to just do your own thing, develop your own musical outlook. That takes more courage than you might think. Nowadays music is a commodity, something that's bought and sold like it's a meat market. And, well, the truth is that some musical styles are just more marketable than others. For example, look at most television dramas and action films coming out now - everyone uses some kind of Media Ventures-inspired electro-orchestral hybrid, complete with the pads and drones and phat beetz. Music from amateur films almost always sounds like a watered-down version of this.

And yet, that's the kinda stuff that sells, puts you on the market and makes people say "Hey, this guy's awesome!" But they're really thinking more like "Hey, this guy sounds like ______ _________, but he's only 23 so we can pay him 1/100th of what ______ _________ would charge!"

Now I've always been a bit irreverent as a composer, with an attitude of "here's what I have to do, but how can I do it in a less obvious way?". But lately I've been looking at a few "successful" composers in particular and asking myself, what are they doing that I'm not? This isn't necessarily an unhealthy mindset in itself, but it's kind of like admitting that my own music is somehow defective, and I need to pretend to be someone else in order to be successful. This is really dangerous on so many levels. Obviously, they didn't get there by saying "okay who's hot right now and how can I imitate him." Instead they had an idea and went with it, it took courage and was a huge gamble but in the end it worked out. This is even the case with people who ostensibly seem like soundalikes - Giacchino writes a lot of stuff that sounds like John Williams, but he always brings that "psychotic gorillas" sound to it, which is a pretty unique perspective. And Yoko Kanno, while she may write in any number of genres within the same score, she always has her unique approach to lyricism, her heavy saturation and pandiatonicism {I know, I promised not to dork off with music terms, I suck}, her production techniques, stylistic blending, and constant allusions to jazz music.

So while I am trying to grow and expand my compositional mind and all that, I think I should probably start following my own advice - don't obsess over "where do I go from here?", but instead look at what I've already done, and use that to find out who I am. I can sit and pretend to be someone else, still writing music that I enjoy while succumbing to what I think other people would like to hear and hoping for the best. It'd probably be easier to write, too; the various technical problems have already been solved, you just have to apply their answers to your own work. But if you really wanna create something bigger than yourself, that lives on and doesn't sound dated, and maybe even influences other composers, you just have to be brave about it.

It's just funny how the scariest road is the one that leads to yourself.

A different kind of ranting -

2007-01-30T14:59:40Z

As some of you might know, I used to maintain an LJ several years ago. I'd post about whatever ridiculosities I'd encountered during the day, and maybe offer a little moral introspective on it. Apparently some people found it surprisingly interesting, but eventually I realized two things:

1) the people who were really bothering me would've known about the LJ, so I obviously couldn't write anything about them

and 2) complaining about random things isn't necessarily the most enlightening use of space on the interweb tubes.

So I laid low for a while, until I could think of something actually interesting to talk about. That is, an actual subject. I figure music is the central component of my life, so I might as well share thoughts on it from a composer/producer's point of view.

Some possible topics - opinions on film/game/anime soundtracks I've heard, sample libraries and sequencing/mixing/midi orchestrating techniques, composition tribulations, business-related issues and perspectives, updates on my own progress, and whatever else I can think of. That list sounds a lot drier and more boring than what you'll actually see, I promise. The goal is to give an insight into how my mind works, not so much to be in any way professional or even to spark interest. I might rant from time to time, I might tell a joke or two. I might even write a whole entry in lower case. Or Klingon.

Maybe.

(probably not)

So just as a heads up, this'll probably follow a bit of a predictable pattern: first I'll probably make several entries today, everyone has that initial bloggorhea. Then things'll eventually cool down while I decide where to advertise it; probably not on my website, maybe my AIM profile, and perhaps facebook or even myspace. If I deem it "successful" (is that really possible?) then I might make some effort to move it to a more accessible location, or even as an adjunct to my site. But who knows.

Wish me well.

I'm gonna stop typing all blandly like this soon, I'm sure. You know how colorful I can be.