Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The Last Pieces of Music

Week 5: 6/4/2012

This week of work that I accomplished was the last pieces of music that was needed for the Captain Heart Game. I recorded, edit, and mixed the songs for games: Arteries Maze, Pipe Dream, Storyline, Title Page, and Ending of Game. This was not as easy as last time in the studio, where the writing juices flowed.

First off one of my musicians that was suppose to be at the recording session was not able to attend, due to a car accident. So, it was just myself, Chris, Mike the studio owner, and Kevin one of the engineers at VNote Studio.

I felt that working on this session we where running out of ideas for writing music for this project, since there was so many songs to do for this project. The creative forces we not with us this time.

For the Ending Music, we just redid the Menu Music and changed it pattern of notes and only did three tracks, the first time we did about seven tracks. We also changed the tempo on the Ending piece to change it it up some. I did most of this piece in Pro Tools and Chris just played a track of guitar. I just patch his guitar right into the console, directly into Pro Tools. No mics this session. I then just place some plug ins from Pro Tools on his guitar track and that was it. It was finish pretty fast.


Chris playing guitar on ending song for the Captain Heart game.

For the Pipe Dream game, it to was kept simple. I played one track on the MIDI keyboard using one of the Reason sound effects and place into Pro Tools. I created a dream like sound to give to this game, since the game is called Pipe Dream. Kevin and myself had to go through a bunch of sounds on the Reason program until I found a sound that I was happy with to use for this song.


Kevin and I going through the Reason program for that right sound.


The Title page or intro of the game, was keep simple, but had a little flavor to it. It was myself on the keyboard using a Reason sound effect and using on of the drums track that we used before in on of the songs we did earlier to get the realism of drums. Using program sounds can only go so far. This once again only had three tracks in this song to keep it simple (plus we where running out of ideas).

The Storyline song of this game had to stay simple no matter what since there would be voice overs playing at the same time and did want to over power the over overs or make it to complex where the player would tune out the voice over and be listening to the music more. Once again this was done through Reason and choose a chime sound from the program list. Mostly just broken chords where used to create this sound. It was an upbeat sound in order to capture the player.

The last song that was the most complex and most creative piece we did that day, it was for the Arteries maze game. This had several layers of sound to this piece. The sounds we used was from the MIDI keyboard, through the Reason program and recorded in Pro Tools. We used a grand piano sound, bass guitar sound (which sounded like a program sound not the real thing unfortunately), and multiple drum sounds (snare, cymbals, bass drum). These where placed one instrument at at a time into Pro Tools. The piano when first since the other instruments worked around the piano part. Chris played this part along with the bass on the MIDI keyboard. The drums parts had to go in the tracks individually and had to be edited and space in correctly inside Pro Tools to line up with the other instruments, in other words I had to do this by hand otherwise it doesn't sound or work right in the piece.  This was my favorite song of the day.


Myself behind the console


Working in Pro Tools to place all the drum part correctly in the Arteries Maze game song.


We finished all the music by eight that night. I also had to finish the reminder of the voice over sounds too that night. I just finished all the pitch shifting the Captain Heart and the boy character of the story that my team wanted. Captain Heart need to have a deeper voice shifted to, while I thought just my voice that I did for Billy wasn't quite enough, so I pitch up the voice just a little. I took all the breath sounds in the records and deep check all the voice overs parts to make sure they where perfect.


Screen Shot of the Pro Tools session recording of the Arteries Maze music.


Everything was done by 11:30 that night and I was glad. I'm going to work on one more song for the Rhythm game to give another level of music. My part of the project will officially be over now, unless my team needs something from me. I'm glad to have this over.

Until next week......



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