Thou Shalt Not waste your time. (#8)
waste your time.
Time is a precious commodity when it comes to the music you create for your game, especially your downloadable games. It’s not uncommon for your title track to be one minute long and the in-game tracks could be even shorter. So it baffles my mind when I hear a composer waste what little time he or she has.
What does it mean to waste time? Basically, repeating things. Unfortunately, many composers still think dance music is appropriate for game music. Dance music repeats. A lot. They can spend 8 bars right at the beginning of a piece just doing the one-measure drum rhythm over and over. Then the next 8 bars adds the one-measure bass line. Then the next 8, keyboards, then voice…
Well, we don’t have time like that to waste in games. Repetition is inevitable. Every minute, your entire piece will repeat so don’t make the mistake of repeating music within your piece. We need a quick intro that leads right into the meat of your piece: the memorable and catchy theme. Then, maybe a B section that leads into a key change or another new idea.
Let’s look at it structurally. The most common musical structures can be boiled down to ABA and AB. Both of these work for your musical loops, but with ABA make sure the second A section is short or in a different key or has some other discerning feature and then has a transition back to the beginning. When you guide your piece to new territory through the entire piece, you create the illusion of a longer piece. Going the dance music route, the player will get tired of your piece much earlier because your piece actually seems shorter than one minute.
As the bad guy in Star Trek: Generations said, “Time is the fire in which we burn.” Make your fire a little more bearable by keeping things moving along in your piece.
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This blog is dedicated to topics concerning the creation of music and sound for games. It will deal with issues that come up in the day to day work of The Game Composer as well as thoughts on the industry as a whole. I hope it will be useful for developers and other game audio professionals. Feel free to contact me: thegamecomposer@gmail.com
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Welcome back! I was surprised there was such a length of time between postings, so I can imagine your exceptionally busy. This is a good “Thou Shalt Not…”. I find that I either don’t have enough structure, or I have too much structure when I write, and I either end up with something that has 4-8 bar sections that resolves too rigidly in that sequence without much variation, or the melody is constantly changing, but the song doesn’t flow near as well as I wish.
Reading your entry, made me think back to the Solstice game intro for the NES. Most old school style games had a few short repeating tracks that covered the breadth of the game with variation, but the Solstice intro is some 4 minutes long, but the entirety of the game play has the same small short track repeating over and over. Back then it was acceptable, and the intro piece was nothing short of amazing, nowadays it’s getting more difficult to write a piece that doesn’t slowly give the player a headache with it’s repetive qualities. You give alot of good advice, and just like to let you know I appreciate the time you spend writing this blog.
Comment by Matt | November 25, 2008 |
Thanks for the welcome back and I’m glad you’re getting something out of the blog! The time off was a result of business, but also a health issue came up with my cat that made it difficult to get quality free time in order to update the blog. He’s doing better, so I hope to get back into regular blogging.
Good observation about the old NES game. Playing that video game music quiz that I posted awhile back, I was stunned by the amount of repetition in so many of those old games. Some of the music seemed to come straight from dance forms, which is horrible for game music. That’s even more surprising with the MIDI-like music they had back then, which didn’t necessarily mean you had to have short pieces. That was one of the few bright spots of MIDI or tracker music: the files were small so you could have longer pieces.
Comment by thegamecomposer | November 25, 2008 |