Staying creative.
When working day after day on a contract, or multiple contracts, eventually the time will come when you just feel tapped out. It seems all the musical ideas that ever were in your head have finally been used up. You’re empty.
But you said the music would be done in three days. (Cue Keanu) What do you do?
When that happens to me, I don’t force it. I take a break. Nothing recharges the creativity bank like a little time off. Go walk the dog. Clip your toenails. Read a book, play a video game. Do anything that doesn’t require you pulling magical melodies and heart-wrenching harmonies out of thin air. Music is the most abstract of the arts. To create something good requires constant concentration and an eternal ear for details. It is extremely draining.
So, knowing this, plan ahead. To be creative all day long just isn’t realistic. Break your work day into 2-4 hour-long bits with plenty of rest time in between. Picture yourself with a little Sims-like bar above your head which measures creativity. That bar’s going to drain so get ready to fill it back up with those breaks. You’ll end up saving time in the long run because you won’t have to deal with writer’s block and an increasingly tense, stressed-out mindset. You’ll have a better attitude overall as you don’t get down on yourself for (seemingly) failing at your job. You’ll find new approaches to creating music as you avoid getting into a production rut.
Take those breaks!
Also, find some time at least a few days a week to get some exercise. Nothing clears the mind like a good run around the neighborhood or a friendly tennis game. Endorphins are real. Use them to keep a good attitude and to find a new kind of creative spark.
One final tip, as composers you probably already listen to a lot of other people’s music. Well, keep doing that. But listen to it more critically. Listen to how other people orchestrate, how they structure their pieces, how they construct their melodies. Nothing wrong with recharging your batteries with other people’s creativity. That’s not to say go steal other people’s music… just listen to their music with an ear on how you can apply their processes to your own.
All that being said, sometimes you just have to battle through those inspiration-less periods. You said you’d get that insane amount of music done in an insanely short amount of time. When you have no time to rest, you’ll just have to dig into your bag of tricks. You have one, right? The distillation of your creative method into easy-to-follow steps? Well, if you don’t have one… get one straightaway! Every composer should analyze their creative process and be able to whip something up whenever they’re needed to. That’s why we’re professionals.
But of course, this shouldn’t be standard operating procedure. To always work this way will result in formulaic music, ultimately uninspired. I think that’s a common problem in movies and games of today. Composers aren’t stretching themselves, but rather relying on the currently fashionable orchestrations or rhythms. Yawn.
All of these tips also apply to graphic artists, and even programmers and designers. Most of this is common sense, but it’s easy to get bogged down and ignore that common sense when deadlines and producers are breathing down your neck. Just take a step back every once in awhile. Everyone will benefit from it.
Silence.
No, this isn’t about the book by John Cage (and if you get that reference, nice job!). It’s about the importance of silence in your game. When people think about game music, they usually think back to something along the lines of the Super Mario Bros loop. It’s a great tune, instantly recognizable, and almost never gets old thanks to enough variation.
Music implementation, especially in boxed games, has gotten a lot more sophisticated since then. With CD-ROM and DVD games, you can have a lot more music in your game. So music gets stale at a much slower pace. However, the colossal casual games market is plagued by generally less sophisticated music implementation. It hasn’t really progressed much past the old Super Mario Bros style of loop, loop, loop, win music.
Of course download size is the limiting factor here. As broadband internet spreads and gets faster, this will be less of a hindrance to providing good music in your game, but what to do until then? Well, beef up your music system! Don’t just do loops. With the limited megabytes you have to play with, loops will still be integral. But consider going a little further and adding things like layers and starts/endings.
For an example, here is something we did in Solitaire Pop. Have a basic loop consisting of just drums and harmony. Then have a layer that can fit right on top of that that spices things up. It could add a melody or extra rhythms to make things more interesting. Also, have a short piece ready that can plug right into the end of the loop that can end the music. Then have a similar short piece that can start the loop up again. Then you have many more sonic possibilities without that much more compositional work, though it does create a little more work for the programmers in order to implement such a system. Make the layers and starts and stops all happen randomly. For a casual game, that’s usually good enough. But you can go deeper and incorporate another idea from Solitaire Pop. We also had a “danger” layer that could play over the loop when things started looking bad for the player. The possibilities are endless! You just have to make them happen.
But back to the topic of silence, it’s amazing what a little silence will do for a game. Suddenly you can hear things you may not have noticed before. Maybe you’ll notice your heartbeat. Whenever there is a change, sonically or visually, it’s human nature to take notice. And there’s no bigger change than music becoming silence. The player will take notice. And that’s what we want, the player to be sucked into your game even more.
No matter how brilliant a one or two minute loop is, it will eventually get old. We need to keep things as fresh as possible for as long as possible. Consider different ways to build a music system for your game. It really does bring some more life to the experience. And sometimes the best addition is done by subtraction.
Tributes… yeah, they’re tributes!
In our profession, it’s inevitable that sometimes we’ll write something that sounds just like something else. Sometimes we haven’t heard the other piece and when someone points it out to us, we’re kind of peeved that someone else had the audacity to write that piece of brilliance first. How dare they! Other times, however, we know that what we’ve written sounds like something else but it’s just inevitable in our music that it has to sound that way. The flow of the piece just brought us to the point where we have to borrow a bit of someone else’s work. To do otherwise just may not make sense musically.
Well, playing Morrowind years ago I was always struck by one particular snippet of music that sounded just like a part in Jupiter from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. I finally sat down today and listened to both works side by side and they’re not only incredibly similar, but the snippets are in the same key and both come at very important points in the music, the ends of phrases. I think that’s pretty funny. Jeremy Soule is a terrific composer and I don’t want this to be a knock on him at all. We’ve all been there. But he has to know that he lifted this particular phrase from Jupiter. Have a listen:
Holsts’s Jupiter:
Morrowind Snippet (Call of Magic):
Again, not a knock on Jeremy Soule. This is just one of the more obvious examples of music… tributing… I’ve found in games. It goes on in music all the time. The Planets was generously… tributed… in Gladiator. John Williams has … tributed… many many composers in his work (check out Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella for a motherload of material Williams… gives tributes to).
Anyway, this topic came to mind yesterday as I was writing a piece of “Hollywood Egyptian” music. Something was sounding an awful lot like Philip Glass. So I changed it. A bit. It still kind of sounds like him. But not exactly. I hope.
If it does, well then… it’s a tribute.
Blast from the past… coherence.
To kick things off I thought I’d steal a post from 2004 that I posted on GarageGames. It deals with musical coherence in a game and gets into some nitty gritty details of the now-defunct game GravRally. Too bad that game never came out. It was FUN. Anyway, step into my time machine and enjoy…
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(Oct 20, 2004)First off… IGC was great! Next year, gotta get down there earlier. Seeing the 21-6 guys once a year is definitely not enough, though. Some excellent games are coming. What a great time for indies. Now the meat of the post…
I thought it might be interesting to sit down and look at the music I produced over the past 16 months for GravRally, the futuristic racer being made by 21-6 Productions. Specifically, I wanted to analyze my music and see how I attempted to create a coherent whole out of the seven pieces I made for the game. That may sound weird coming from the composer but, while I created the music, a lot of the connections were made intuitively- by “feel”. Analysis certainly goes on while I compose, but it’s really just a part of the compositional process, and I forget a lot of what I was thinking about while I composed the piece. So part of the reason for this analysis is simply to remind myself what the heck I was thinking about at the time, consciously or unconsciously. Structure within pieces and among the pieces is very important to me so it was mostly done consciously, but I thought it would be useful for me (and I hope other composers and game developers) to dig a little into the pieces and see where the connections are.
There are seven pieces that will go into the game if the download size allows it: one menu piece and a piece for each of the 6 racing locations. I will go through the pieces chronologically (earliest to newest produced). Here’s a chart of the connections (download the pieces here):
Fig. 1:
You’ll notice everything springs from Metro and Menu so I won’t go into those too much. The main link from Metro to the rest of the pieces is its main melody (played on guitar in Metro by 21-6′s own Justin Mette, who I hope you all got to see play live at the last two IGC’s!). It is as follows (starting in Metro at 0:17):
Fig. 2:
The main link from Menu to the rest of the pieces is its opening motive, played originally in Menu by the guitar. The M3 and m7 intervals are the most recognizable bits of this motive, especially the m7 :
Fig. 3:
One link between Menu and Metro is Metro’s bass line, which is played by the basses at 0:41 in Menu and then again later at 1:14. I thought it was important to have a link between the two “parent” pieces, if even only a small one. Though that might not have been necessary, it’s probably better that there is one. Now, let’s see how the two seeds from Menu and Metro plant themselves in the other five pieces.
OCEANSIDE:
Fig. 4:
The link to Metro is very subtle, relying almost completely on the +4 note and two notes surrounding it (P4 and P5) at the A melody. Those notes are hammered away by the melody, never explicity playing Metro’s melody, but instead referencing it by using those same scale notes, with +4 being the most noticeable.
The connection to Menu is almost equally as subtle, with the m7 interval being played at the Intro and then being alternated with the P4 interval in the A sections. The fact that the m7 interval is right at the beginning of the piece makes the connection to Menu even stronger, since it opens with the same interval (interrupted by the m3).
REFINERY:
Fig. 5:
The transitions have a very obvious Metro melody. The link is strong there, though the rhythm has been changed a little bit and a few repeated notes added.
The Menu connection is a bit of a stretch. The chords being played in the A section follow the contour of the Menu motive. Going up, instead of M3 and m7 intervals, they are m3 and m6 intervals. Then it follows the contour back down instead of going back to the m3. To make it even more of a stretch, the m6 is displaced downward an octave. Hey, I said it was a stretch! But that’s ok, because the connection to Metro is so strong.
ARDUUS:
Fig. 6:
The Metro melody is fairly recognizable in section A, though it’s obscured a little bit by the different harmonic stuff happening underneath it. So it’s definitely there, but you have to listen a little closely. The “feel” of the melody I think is obvious.
The Menu motive is also there, though again obscured a little bit. The melody at section B brings back the characteristic m7, actually in both the melody and harmony. That M3 is also there, but only in the harmony. From the sketch:
Fig. 7:
The m6 in the melody is also a little link back (really little, but real nonetheless… you don’t always have to be hit over the head for there to be a connection) to the Refinery piece, adding a little more coherence to the entire collection.
FOREST:
Fig. 8:
Forest is the least connected of the bunch. Mostly because there is no Metro link. But the Menu link is definitely there. The melody at section B hits the m7 interval hard, while also passing through the M3 interval as illustrated:
Fig. 9:
So it’s hidden a bit with that A between the D and F#. But this is one of the reasons I love linking pieces together. It’s the same motivic material, but it achieves a completely different effect when played by an orchestra than when played by a guitar. It’s gone from a quiet (expectant?) Menu opening to a brave brass fanfare. Hmm, the D section sure sounds familiar…
POWER PLANT:
Fig. 10:
Because the Forest piece had the least linkage back to the parent pieces, I really wanted to make some more explicit connections in the Power Plant piece. So you really can’t miss them here. The Metro melody can be heard very easily at section A” (with the great robo-monk backup singing). It can also be heard in section B and B’, though altered rhythmically.
The Menu motive is right out in the open, once again opening a piece and heard throughout (like in the transition to A”). The Power Plant music basically functions as glue for the entire group of pieces, helping bond the various pieces together. When you hear connections between pieces as explicitily as you do here, I think you naturally tend to listen for connections in other pieces.
CONCLUSION:
I’d been wanting to go through these pieces for some time now. I was pretty sure I had tied the pieces together but I wanted to go through and see exactly how I had done it. This wasn’t an incredibly in-depth analysis, but it sufficed in showing how you can make pieces coherent in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways. There are tons of tricks composers use to do this. I used some of the more obvious methods, mostly sticking with rhythmic variations of the same melody. But some other fun ways include inversion, where you flip a melody’s notes upside-down (instead of going up a m7, you go down a m7) and retrograde motion (playing a melody backwards). I didn’t go into orchestration here, either, which is a very effective way to tie pieces together. The orchestral sections of Menu and Forest, for instance, are bonded by their orchestrations.
In closing, let me say I hope this will also dissuade some of you game developers from using music libraries. If you’re creating a unique game, why not create a unique soundtrack for it? For another, you will probably end up with an incoherent mishmash of music. While the music itself may be good, the incoherence between the tunes in the collection can’t help but create a disconnect between the game and the player. It would be like every level of a platformer being made by different art studios, with a different hero in each level. First, you’re Scooby Doo fighting in an anime world… next level, you’re Jackie Chan in an old black and white Mickey Mouse world. It’s much more fun to be consistent and watch how your character, or how your music, develops from level to level. A simple trick done all the time in movies is taking a character’s heroic melody and transforming it into a sad melody. Old trick, but effective. Anyway, that’s the perspective of this game composer. Until next time…
About This Blog
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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