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GAME MUSIC, MUSIC, PRODUCTION & TUTORIALS

Tutorial: The Sunsoft DPCM Bass Trick in Famitracker

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Dun Da Dunda Dun Da Da Da….
Dun Da Dunda Dun Da Da Da….

You probably heard me mention before how much I love the Sunsoft DPCM bass trick on the NES. Of all the chiptune composers, Sunfsoft’s people really set the bar high with this trick. Although it does muddy things up a little bit, the crunchy bass lines on a handful of these old NES games really stood out. Today we’ll take a look at how to build some slick DPCM bass lines in Famitracker with minimal fuss and hopefully minimal static in the final product.

Read on to find out how we get this sound out of 8-bit samples..

Continue reading Tutorial: The Sunsoft DPCM Bass Trick in Famitracker →

PRODUCTION & TUTORIALS

Life As A Freelance Musician Part 11: The Secret Art Of Composing Melodies

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Melodies are what drive a song, especially in the case of classic video game songs. When you only have 3-4 channels, each note has to count. However, coming up with melodies that are unique and interesting is probably one of the hardest parts of composing. This article talks about some tricks for finding melody that don’t involve classical training or worrying too much about scales and things like that. These methods work great (especially for orchestral music) but since not everyone has that training and we’re focusing on video game music here, these are a few methods I’ve found handy for squeezing the best melody out of an idea.

 

Repeating Theme With Changing Bass Line

This is pretty much what most pop songs are and it works great for getting started in a video game song too. Come up with a simple melody that’s only a measure or two long. Set your DAWs to just loop it over and over. Then with a keyboard, try different bass notes along with the sample. You’ll quickly notice how the combination of bass note and melody change the feeling of the same notes playing repeatedly. Once you settle on a pattern you like, record (or put down MIDI notes) the bass part and then start modifying your lead to highlight the differences in the bass.

 

The highlighted section just repeats over and over again while the changing bass line modifies the feeling.
The highlighted section just repeats over and over again while the changing bass line modifies the feeling.

Here’s an example that started with just 13 little notes played over the course of 2 bars. The last two bars feature changes to break up the repetition and highlight the difference in the bass but at the beginning the highlighted notes played over and over with the entire bass line.

 

 

 

What Comes Next In Your Brain?

 

This is probably my favorite little technique. We listen to so much music that sometimes we sort of subconsciously know what “should” come next. It’s not always the most original thing, but if you are stuck, this trick can help you get back on track. If you have a song done up to a point but can’t seem to decide what should come next, set your DAWs to play it and then go into some empty space. At that moment, think what you expect to hear next. Don’t try to play it on a keyboard or a guitar, just let your brain tell you what comes next.

 

Arpeggios Lead To Ideas

Remember those 80s keyboards Radio Shack always had(has?) on display that has all those cheesy bosa nova presets where you press one key and it starts making a whole song? Well, this isn’t a bad way to stumble onto interesting chord progressions. I like to use arpeggio setups for this technique. Set up a arpeggio with lots of notes and just move around your keyboard and see where it takes you. Here’s a scratch track from an upcoming game where I built an arpeggio and started moving around the keyboard before settling on this progression that had chord changes I’d never have come up with just playing my keyboard.

 

Instant Inspiration

 

The most elusive of them all; sometimes you just get hit with a whole song all at once. This happens to me only about once every 3 projects, but its usually the best song in the whole project. Be ready to record ideas at any time. Most modern smart phones have voice memos. My wife gets a kick out of going through mine and hearing me going ‘duh duh da –daaaaaah’ when you can hear cars or a restaurant in the background, but you have to record when inspiration strikes. Often times, its when you aren’t doing anything that ideas appear. I was going to post one of my ‘da da daa’ tracks and a final version of it to show the difference but its just too embarrassing. I have heard more than one professional, respected songwriter/musician say that they have lost great song ideas because they didn’t have a pen or thought they could remember it later.

 

Subconscious Composition

 

I am not one of these people, but I know at least three who say they’re subconscious writes better songs than they do. They literally DREAM songs or have ideas in the moments before they drift off to sleep. Again, being ready to record and forcing yourself awake in these moments is the key. I can’t say this has ever happened to me and it seems like it’d require the most self control not to just fall back to sleep, but whatever works!

 

Work With Others

 

Nothing helps you get inspired more than working with other musicians. Have a friend write the melody or a rhythm track. Know someone who plays a rare instrument? Have them record a part. When I used to play in a band when I was younger, a combination of my friend’s ideas plus the “What Comes Next In Your Brain?” method applied by someone else to the same song lead to our group’s most dynamic and interesting songs. Two heads are better than one.

 

Got any techniques of your own? Any questions? Please share them.

 

Screen Shot 2013-05-03 at 2.36.44 PMBeatscribe is a full time indie composer, musician and writer. By day he creates soundtracks and sfx for various mobile gaming companies, by night creates megaman-inspired chiptunes, in the afternoons he drinks tea. Check out his latest releases, tutorials and retro ruminations at www.beatscribe.com.
PRODUCTION & TUTORIALS

Life As A Freelance Musician Part 10: My Biggest Mistakes as a New Freelancer

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Like anything in life, when you look back, you wish you had your current level of knowledge back at the start of a new endeavor. Here’s a few common mistakes that either I’ve made or seen others make when starting a career as a feelancer musician.

Buying Too Much Gear

Sure, we'd all love to have this in our basement, but is it the best use of money when you're just starting out? Do you really need all this to make music?
Sure, we’d all love to have this in our basement, but is it the best use of money when you’re just starting out? Do you really need all this to make music?

Probably the biggest thing I see all over the net is people who become total gear nuts. I hate to write this because I LOVE analog gear, I love battling to get some old synth to work with my system and having wires and knobs all around, but the problem is for many, this becomes too important.

I see folks who have every piece of equipment you could ever imagine and are surrounded by wires and modules. However, you listen to their songs and what’s missing is dedication to their craft or songwriting skills. The things they’re creating with their massive amounts of hardware only sound marginally better than tunes that could be created with more modern software-based methods.

Sure, a hardware oscilloscope looks cool with its little waves appearing as you play your song, but is that really money better spent than good headphones, good monitors or software solutions that do the same thing and then some? If you are just starting out, you might not even have the expertise or knowledge to fully utilize a lot of pro gear. It’d be better to spend your money on lessons or some other appropriate means of learning.

The companies that make gear are always telling you you need more. Remember that you really don’t need a more than a few pieces of hardware and a few programs to make decent music. There’s a level where buying gear and fiddling with it becomes a distraction from actually completing songs and producing something. Here’s a great article to start with from earlier in this series if you’re not sure what the most important things to buy are.

Not Backing Up Data

Now, a lesson from my own bank of failures. This is the most catastrophic thing that has happened to me thus far in my career as a freelancer. I had four large projects going at once, I had been working on them in tandem for about three months, so many things were close to done but not quite there. One day after a very long session, I delivered final drafts and a few completed things to most of these clients. To this day, I don’t know what happened, but the next day, ALL my music was gone. All my project files. I only had a backup from about 5 months earlier on a USB hard drive.

If this had happened ONE DAY earlier, I would have been unable to recover from the loss. I had just completed about 18 hours of work finishing 3 of the 4 projects. I still had to pull an all-nighter and remake the final projects songs for mastering. It could have been so much worse so it made me realize I better backup every day.

I don’t recommend Carbonite, since they exclude WAV files and a lot of others with their free plan. Also, have fun completely removing it from your system. Idrive.com is a much better solution that is simple and automatic just in case catastrophe strikes. Your money is better spent on a backup system than most other things you could buy when starting out.

Taking Criticism Personally

Early on, I lost some jobs and contests I entered. I felt my entry to the contest was the strongest of the many that I heard. The one they picked as a winner confused and disappointed me. I spent a lot of time and I thought their song was boring. Now, almost a year and a half later, when I listen back to mine, I hear glaring mastering and mixing problems. Although I still don’t think the winner’s track was more interesting, it was definitely professionally mixed and mastered whereas mine was a bit more amateur.

You can’t win them all. I still lose jobs. As mentioned before, you can’t always beat someone else’s prices or turn around time. And there is always someone more talented out there. I would imagine that even big-name Hollywood score composers don’t get every job they’d want. Take it with a grain of salt and glean any positive constructive criticism you can.

Worrying Too Much

When I first started, I worried constantly while away from my computer. I thought I might miss an important email or someone else would quote back a client before I could and get the job. I obsessively checked after sending auditions in. You don’t want your emotional state to be all about work in any kind of job. I’ve learned not to sweat it so much. What happens happens.

My articles have been a little inconsistent lately since I’m in the middle of a huge project right now. I’m saving up that melody one for when I have time to make it really good. Stay tuned, I am not disappearing.

Next up:
-The Secret Arts of Coming Up With Melodies
-Beginner’s Guide to Compression

 

Screen Shot 2013-05-03 at 2.36.44 PMBeatscribe is a full time indie composer, musician and writer. By day he creates soundtracks and sfx for various mobile gaming companies, by night creates megaman-inspired chiptunes, in the afternoons he drinks tea. Check out his latest releases, tutorials and retro ruminations at www.beatscribe.com.
PRODUCTION & TUTORIALS

Life As A Freelance Musician Part 9: Making Music for Other People

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Making music that someone else has the final say on can be really frustrating. After all, this is basically art. It is a way to express yourself. When you start doing it for money, one of the hardest things to let go of is that full control.

I have made some original video game songs that I thought were amazing, only to have a client say, “that’s not what we’re looking for at all”. I literally had a client for a while who pretty much just wants one long droning bass note with little else for his game’s background.

So here’s a few tips on how to find a happy medium between what your client wants and making something you still actually care about at the end of the day.

What Not To Do

Early on, I’d get a contract signed, and spend a few days making an entire song and then sending it to the client, as a pretty much completed product. This didn’t always work out so well. Usually they had their own ideas of how it would sound, or would tear it to pieces with criticism. I found a much better approach was to make a small, looping sample just to give them an idea and they can tell me what they like/don’t like about it. This also gives them an actual loop they can try in their game to get a feel for it. This is also good to do because down the line, they can’t really tell you they decided it doesn’t fit in the game when they had a chance early on to try it.

Interpreting What a Client Wants

One of the hardest things about working on someone else’s vision is getting on the same page for a specific sound. Here are a few little examples from some games I worked on. The links after quotes show the finished product.

For act I, the player’s going to be presented with a straight-faced arcade shooter. “Are you a bad enough dude to save the president”, sort of plot. I’m going to try to subvert a lot of the normal tropes in the shoot-em-up genre; while they’re presented with clear-cut mission goals and instructions (“defend against the alien menace”), ingame they’ll be shown to be helping civilians and the like. So, as far as music, I want it to be upbeat & heroic, but not altogether honest. -Wick, Rubicon Mission 1

I love the way Wick writes, but sometimes I had no idea how to get what he was going for. How do you make ‘not altogether honest’ music? I’m still not sure. What I took from this was the parts that made sense to me and tried to use some classic melodies that give that heroric shooter type sound.

Wouldn’t want to go overboard with that–I don’t want it to sound like the player is on vacation in Jamaica or something. But maybe the western guitar with some bongo type drums or some light steel drums. Maybe just the guitar with more of a island–or maybe Mexican–kind of feel. –Andy, IQ Soup, TBA Game

This is for a post-apocalyptic western styled game coming up. When you’re asked to make post-apocalyptic cowboy Mexican party music, you have to ask yourself how to combine all those influences together in a way that sounds natural. I took a few little things from each genre – nylon stringed picked guitar for the ‘mexican influence’, a slide guitar for western, blade runnerish synths for post-apocalyptic – but put them with some orchestral elements that you’d find in all these styles to blend it together. You sometimes just can’t put in everything they want, so you have to try to strike a balance between the feeling they’re going for and what they think it’ll take to get there.

A great tip I have is to ask the client up front, send me your favorite track or a youtube video game songs that you imagine playing during your game. You of course aren’t going to directly copy it, but it should put you in the ball park of what they mean and want. If they just say “space music” that could mean anything from Star Trek theme song to an ambient song or a vgm remix type thing. Having some sort of base point to start from is a great idea.

When They Don’t Like What You’ve Made

I think I only have three clients who pretty much accept whatever I give them on the first run. And that’s because they have a lot in common with me as far as influences go and they also give super clear instructions like “the Narshe song from FF6 but with some bongos”. It’s not hard to quickly create an original video game song when you have directions like that.

But if they don’t like the work, don’t take it personally. Most clients and I have a lot of back and forth. You should build this into your pricing since it will happen more often than not. Just keep working their feedback into your song until you find a happy medium.

Some people will just never be satisfied. Strangely, it seems to be the ones with the tightest budget. You’d think it’d be the other way around. I have pretty much just said “we’re done” to a few clients who after a myriad of revisions still was not happy. Don’t drive yourself crazy over a client who wants to pay pennies and get 40 hour a week service. It’s simply not worth it.

When You Don’t Like What You’ve Made

Some clients’ vision of their songs may be so far off from your own, that you might not even like the end product. What do you do then? Well, you are not obligated to put every song you make on your soundcloud or share it with the world. One thing I do sometimes is do my own little “remix” of one of the songs to share on my soundcloud. It’s good practice and good for your video game composer portfolio. I will say this though: when you aren’t inspired about a game or a project, it’s really hard to stay happy and passionate about working on it. It feels more like work. Keep this in mind when looking for jobs.

-The Secret Arts of Coming Up With Melodies
-My Biggest Mistakes as a Freelancer
-Beginner’s Guide to Compression

 

Screen Shot 2013-05-03 at 2.36.44 PMBeatscribe is a full time indie composer, musician and writer. By day he creates soundtracks and sfx for various mobile gaming companies, by night creates megaman-inspired chiptunes, in the afternoons he drinks tea. Check out his latest releases, tutorials and retro ruminations at www.beatscribe.com.