RAW – Game Audio Tutorial If This Gets Funded!

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted, but I’ve been very busy with some new projects, one of which was the audio post-production on a state wide TV broadcast production that aired on christmas day.

The other however, was this:

http://www.justinkownacki.com/2010/09/27/10-tips-for-funding-a-successful-kickstarter-project/

I worked on many of the sound effects and much of the music for this game, and would very much like to see it come alive! And if it does, I will do a massive write up a lot of the stuff I did for anyone interested in some amateur game audio. So please back this!

The game has a really great story, a rough draft of which can be read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10sCTgO3bw99erYG3oBvSoEBmKed4cCxIqvsmgeM8Sx0/edit

And all my submissions for the game can be heard here:

http://www.detour-games.com/RAWdio/RAWdioSubmissions.html

(I’m Alec Shea)

It would mean a lot to me and the awesome dudes from Detour Games if we could get this funded, please help!

And I promise I will do an awesome tutorial if it does!

Eleanor Rigby Dubstep

For my first assignment for digital audio programming at uni we have to do some sort of electronic version of Eleanor Rigby, so as to be expected I decided to go dubstep. The project  is still in the works but it will be up on sound cloud soon enough, however I’d like to mention as a logic user how effect it was using a sampled kit and mixing/adding effects rather than using ultrabeat, don’t get me wrong, ultrabeat has some great kit sounds, but a recorded kit is just so much fatter. If you want a big sound, you need big samples. I’d like to personally recommend http://changostudios.com/samples.html this kit sounds absolutely awesome. Changestudios is responsible for the production of my favourite band, Sleeping with Sirens http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poZLiypLJzQ but these samples when edited right will create just bout any huge sounding drum kit you like.

I’d also like to share this tutorial video, and this guys channel in general, I’ve spent a lot of time searching for good dubstep tutorials, and this guy is one of the best I’ve found.

For All The Pianists Out There, and… Film Composers

Tonight I went to go see a Russian pianist performing a complete recital of Chopin. It was absolutely brilliant, his technique was incredible and all the pieces were extraordinary. As much as I would love to discuss piano technique and performance characteristics of tonight, instead I’m going to talk about my thoughts on it in relation to composing, particularly for film. It’s often common practice to just use a high quality MIDI plugin to emulate the strings, and provided you write good enough music, this will do divinely. But whilst listening to this performer I thought about how no matter what you do with a machine, it’s doubted the result will be as moving as a real performance, obviously recordings generally still aren’t as powerful as a live performance, but still more powerful than MIDI. However, recording an entire orchestra for a film score is a very long, difficult and stressful process, as I know from talking to a friend of mine who worked on the recording and composed some of the music for a new Hollywood zombie movie called ‘Christmas With The Dead.’ And still wasn’t overly happy with the result. But then you have the great film scores of Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Jaws, ET, Jurassic Park, and many more written by John Williams and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, these are easily some of the most notable film sound tracks and the reason for this is both the score and the incredible sound of the recording/talent of the orchestra. This is the most extreme of the best, however, the music for Pirates of the Caribbean, another epic film score that is very notable and gripping, was recorded with a group of musicians later given the name The Hollywood Studio Symphony, over the course of 4 days.

All the orchestral music I compose, I compose with MIDI, but the one piece I have had performed was only performed by the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra, and even with my best synthestrated scored, that performance will always be more memorable. Which means if a youth orchestra can capture the emotion of a piece well enough to surpass a MIDI recording, that means the main struggle lies in the recording, which is no big surprise. People generally don’t get much experience recording orchestras, its so complicated and time consuming you’d have to be crazy to want to, but as John Williams has showed us, with the right stuff, the hard way is definitely worth it.

Composition Tip: 1

Try listening to a style of music that is COMPLETELY different to the music you’re writing during the time you’re writing it, because if you listen to the same style you will hear things and go ‘maybe I should do something like that’ then BAM you’re like crap now it just sounds like that other thing but not as good cause its still slightly different, where as if you listen to a different style, you will probably still get urges to use ideas from it, but… you can! and more often than not doing that will give it a nice original flavour cause its taking ideas from different styles that sound nothing like it.