The Game Composer’s Blog

Game music, a matter of life and death.

Thou Shalt Not waste your time. (#8)

thoushaltnot2

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.

November 24, 2008 Posted by | Thou Shalt Not | , , | 2 Comments

Thou Shalt Not rely on loops. (#6)

rely on loops when creating your music.

The translation from the Ludus Sonitus Decretum was difficult to pin down for this rule. It was tough to say whether the rule meant “Thou Shalt Not rely on loops” or “Thou Shalt Not use loops”. But, in thinking about it, the more sensible translation is “rely”. Loops have their uses. When used sparingly, they can save some time. They can add some color to percussion tracks or add some interest to background ambient sounds.

The problem arises when someone fires up their copy of Acid or GarageBand and spews out piece after piece of loop-created music. Sure, the music sounds pretty professional. Loops are often created with terrific production values. Anyone can make something that sounds practically radio-worthy. But they really didn’t create anything that a monkey with a good dart board couldn’t have created, did they? And then they call themselves a composer? Picking a key and a tempo and then fitting things together that don’t sound like fingernails on a chalkboard are not the only qualifications for a composer. Composition is about creating an original piece of music out of a limitless palette that enables you to express whatever you want.  Loops instantly lock you into an extremely limited toolset. Orchestration, melodic and harmonic progression, freedom of structure and expression… they all go out the window.

Not to mention, your music is going to sound an awful lot like someone else’s music at some point. And what are the chances you are going to have the loops that specifically fit the style and character of the game you are working on? You’re locked into expressing a very limited vocabulary if all you use is loops.

Your development as a musician can only progress as far as the loops will take you. You’ll have to wait until the next pack of loops come out before you get out of that inevitable creative rut. For your own good, and as decreed by the good book, keep your exposure to loops to a minimum! In an industry fueled by creativity and originality (or at least aspiring to that), loops have a very, very minor place.

September 25, 2008 Posted by | Thou Shalt Not | , , , | 2 Comments

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.

July 21, 2008 Posted by | Developer Music Tips, Music Nitty Gritty | , , | Leave a Comment

   

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