Musician overload

[Applewood]

Wow, five new musicians added their details to the help forum today.

I think there's about 9 trillion of them now. I never knew there were so many about tbh. I'm amazed there's more sound/music support available than there is art.

I wonder how pissed the first guy on the list is :)

[TeeGee]

True. But there are hundreds of games appearing everyday as well, but that doesn't mean they are all great.

A good composer will always defend himself/herself, even if composers would start growing on trees ;).

[sound app]

A good composer will always defend himself/herself, even if composers would start growing on trees ;).


Let's be honest: it does affect how music is perceived, and how much a developer is willing to give.

It has a "Myspace band" type on effect: when you have zillions of them, why caring ? And as we are in a global market where every step of the way has to be taken care of and monitored so budgets stay afloat, composers do have to be careful.

At the same time, it's true that the developers who really want to make a difference with the music and sfx they'll use will always listen closely to the style and touch composers can give to their game. It DOES make a difference when the music /sound effects and game match well and add that precious emotional factor you can create with a good soundtrack.

[princec]

I wish there were more talented artists about :/

Cas :)

[AnthemAudio]

Yeah, I caught the barrage of musician posts this morning and for some reason felt miffed by it. Like there was some list of forums to post on released over at GANG. :D (http://www.audiogang.org).

Then I thought...good for them, at least they are getting their stuff out there. I remember my first-ish post. A little cocky, a little salesman, a whole lot of "if you want memorable music blah blah blah then come to me!" kind of stuff. (And I got called on things!)

I would say the best thing any of the musicians/sound designers out there could do is just try and become part of the community. Learn as much about game development as possible without trying to find a way of inserting a sales line. Contribute to forums as a true member, giving feedback on games, relating stories and truly bring something to the table.

We stopped listing musician posts at music4games.net (http://www.music4games.net)a few months ago because they were way too numerous from people not really wanting to contribute to the community, just to (hopefully) grab a quick buck.

Audio cats out there, sell yourself first, then your music. Be sincere about your commitment to game dev and realize that audio will never be the biggest of priorities regardless of it's impact on the final product. A good demo reel may get you a job or two, but a good personality, a varied skill set, and good communication skills built upon lasting relationships will ensure your career.

(Hey all those musician posts scooched my post down the page!!!:mad: )

;)

[TeeGee]

Let's be honest: it does affect how music is perceived, and how much a developer is willing to give.

It has a "Myspace band" type on effect: when you have zillions of them, why caring ? And as we are in a global market where every step of the way has to be taken care of and monitored so budgets stay afloat, composers do have to be careful.


Sadly, there's some truth in what you say. However, in a big part it's because devs/programmers don't put enough value in the music. Most consider it as something that has to be in a game, but that's it. Good? Bad? It's just a music, the game has to have one, right?

Fortunately, as you said - there's always a bunch of indies that were lucky enough to not have their ears amputated at birth and they won't hire a random musician. They listen to loads of tracks, look for a professional looking website, good portfolio and a friendly personality. Or they'll work only with someone that was recommended to them. I'm one of these guys and I don't give a crap about the outbreak of musicians showing on forums ;). I don't think that they lower a value of a good composer, just like I don't think that tons of crappy games lower a value of a good one. I was lucky to find a wonderful musician (http://www.robwestwoodmusic.com) - I'm gonna stick with him and recommend him to fellow indies. Good music is priceless. Almost everytime I hear from someone about my game, that person mentions that music is wonderful (even if they dislike the rest). That's something, considering that I'm a small, niche indie and people remember music from my game, while I couldn't remember a tune from the last big casual hit I've played (with some exceptions of course). Even if my life would depend on that ;).

In any form of art or business, there are always crowds of averages and few talented people, who will always be better. No matter how many folks will try themsleves at that particluar business/art. Well... maybe in *almost* any business. I agree we could use more artists here on indiegamer ;).

[princec]

The last awesomely good music I heard in a game was Quake. I still listen to it while I'm coding.

<edit> OOoh just you wait and see what we've got coming up for Treasure Tomb!

Cas :)

[cliffski]

It's worth noting that hardly any musicians are good at everything. You wouldn't hire me to program an FPS, it's not my main skill, and its important to pick the right person for each game.

Good, purpose-designed music is something that you only really appreciate after you have paid for it, and listened to it while playing your game. Nobody ever says they bought your game because of the music, but it contributes big time to the general subconscious ambient sense of quality that helps prise open peoples wallets.

I can't even conceive doing another game with stock music now. I guess it's easy to say that once you have the budget for good stuff though.

[radishan]

The last music I remember really enjoying from a game was Flatspace (great job, Mark). The intro was awesome and I couldn't stop listening to the music. It really does add so much to a game.

[Jesse Hopkins]

I think there's about 9 trillion of them now. I never knew there were so many about tbh. I'm amazed there's more sound/music support available than there is art

Here are the factors:
1) Clients find it harder to assess quality in music than in art.

2) Many of the tools for making music are free, and almost anyone can make something at least passable.

3) Musical tastes are so broad these days that nearly anything is acceptable. Some of the most popular music is technically the equivalent of a crayon drawing by a serious musician's standards.

4) Many musicians think games are a place to make a quick buck and have nothing invested.

5) Many musicians are willing to work for free, even across multiple projects, just to get some attention. The sad part is nobody notices anyway, so usually it is not worth it for the musician and the game suffers from it as well.

6) Developers many times undervalue the music - this in turn allows for a plethora of low class music to be heard in successful projects (even AAA titles). This attracts more and more people who say "hey, I could do that!" And 9 times out of 10 the bar is set so low that they can.

7) We all grew up playing NES, Genesis and N64 - this sets our expectations lower at a time when music technology has blossomed greatly in the past few years.

8) Many people don't know that great music is very hard work and takes as much time to create as beautiful backgrounds and sprites. 1 minute of finely crafted music can take between 4 to 20 hours of work, depending on tempo and style.

[Nikster]

7) We all grew up playing NES, Genesis and N64 - this sets our expectations lower at a time when music technology has blossomed greatly in the past few years.


I don't want to piss on anyones fire, and I'm probably in the minority of one, but, I think the opposite is true here, while I agree that orchestral compositions have come on leaps and bounds what with newer technology and less memory limitation compared to your old school systems, this is the only area IMO that music has currently excelled.

I guess this is because you can create more emotion than using some really crappy parp sound that is supposed to resemble a trombone etc. ;)

However, I've yet to hear a track within the last few years that can capture the mood in certain genres, music in games like Tetris, Streetfighter and Mario would all surpass anything I've heard in their equivalent genres todate.

This maybe because musicians today tend to bend toward "realistic" sounding music, if that makes any sense, as if a real band or such were performing it, unfortuantly this leads to it sounding just more or less like a generic track that really has no connection between the game and the user.

A sample, some platformers that have plinkety plonk style music, while fine, are let down by overuse of reverb, in my eyes musicians use reverb like decorators use MDF.

This may be my opinion because I gamed through the 80's and 90's, tbh, if you want to prove to me you can technically do any genre, why don't I hear any hardcore shootemup style music ? you know, the ones that have leads and background sounds from the old yamaha YM chips and are still used in really great hardcore shooters today ;)

From my point of view, when I start something that needs an orchestral track, the job I'd find difficult would be picking one of the four people from these forums I think can do a good job at that kind of music, but for everything else, I don't know.

one thing is for certain, you're not going to be overlooked by the freebie masters and the 'Reason' one click monsters, or as I see it, the recent influx of new musicians who's web pages don't work or have dead links to mp3's which is more like scam spam tbh.


Sorry for the rant, it's friday, I'm lonely and don't even have any beer :)

[Diragor]

2) Many of the tools for making music are free, and almost anyone can make something at least passable.

I think that's the big one right there. The barriers to entry for music production have come crashing down the past few years and anybody with a computer can give you something passable. On the other hand, game art still requires skill and talent (unless you're intentionally going for a primitive look or something).

There are a couple areas where game visuals have suffered from the same entry-barrier-reductions as music: Poser models and texture generation tools. But even in those cases the points above about problems with quality assessment and standards apply more to music than art, I think. That is, even gamers who aren't programmers or artists may learn to recognize the look of Poser models and associate them with low production values in a cheap game, but extremely few people will ever recognize loops or instrument sounds that come from GarageBand. Anybody can create a decent game soundtrack with a few clicks and almost nobody will ever know the difference. The end product will suffer because the music isn't specifically written for the game by somebody who actually knows what he/she is doing, but maybe that's hard to recognize without having some good, custom soundtrack material to compare.

[Jesse Hopkins]

Great post, Diragor,
Re: garage band and the like - I've invested in a 10,000 dollar music studio, give or take, and have never used a loop or pre performed bar of music to help me out. The samples I use are cutting-edge individual chromatic samples of each note of each instrument. Many of them are used by film composers like Thomas Newman, Hans Zimmer or Danny Elfman. I've even gone further to reprogram my samples in Kontakt 2 so I can achieve as natural 'performances' as possible from my digital musicians. As a composer of the old school who believes composing is actually choosing which notes and beats play, and the expression with which they're played, I do find it sad that there are those who would rather paste together premade riffs and rhythms and call it an original composition.

For many PC download games out there, it's probably no big deal for somebody to use loops or garage band. But I do find it frustrating when I find beautiful visuals and animations matched with music that could have been written by the designer's little brother. I may offend someone by saying this, but just because many players turn off the music in a game and play something by "Creed" doesn't mean you shouldn't at least try to draw the player into your game through the use of appropriate and evocative music. I played the most games in a time when you had to live with the music in a game if you wanted to hear the sound effects, and composers were under pressure to write something that perfectly complimented the action. Some of those game soundtracks were unforgettable, but we need to strive to an even higher standard now that it is available.

It is possible now for Indie developers to afford music that (even in technical and artistic terms) rivals the best music from the highest-budgeted console games. Catching a rising composer by the tail from these forums is a great way to raise the quality and experience of your game. Some of them will go on to AAA titles and by then they'll be making 700 to 1500 USD per minute of music.

I'll get off my soap box now.:) I did notice though there are only about 200 composers searching for projects and many more projects going on... so I am not even sure there's an overload now that I think of all the projects in development. It seems to me each of these composers could be appropriately matched to a project if they're any good.

-Jesse

[Jesse Hopkins]

This may be my opinion because I gamed through the 80's and 90's, tbh, if you want to prove to me you can technically do any genre, why don't I hear any hardcore shootemup style music ?

Maybe because I gamed throughout the 80's and 90's and was a little more impressed with this kind of stuff - hence the reason I created these compositions for retro style games.
http://www.composerarts.com/OdetoNES.mp3
http://www.composerarts.com/Skyship.mp3
http://www.composerarts.com/LegendaryBoss.mp3

Re: anything hardcore, I never would want to be one of those composers who will handle any style. Providing music is both a service and an art - it's bad business to write anything that isn't close to your heart. You can only get so far trying to cover all styles. Maybe I'll post something for a shooter I've written for my own amusement, as I loved Thunderforce 2 and the Capcom/Psikyo shooters - not hardcore sounding music but still shootery. Not all shooter music has to sound one way.

[Nikster]

Not all shooter music has to sound one way.

That's true, but as you point out in point 2 "2) ...., and almost anyone can make something at least passable."

But if you can't adapt to any genre because you feel your heart needs to be in it rather than have a techical ability to beable to cover many genres, how does a customer of a musician know if he will be getting the musicians way or the right way ? :)

The way I see it, is you can take 5 random shareware titles, you could swap the music between them and no-one would be any wiser, because it all sounds generic.

I agree in that musicians are like graphics artists, they specialize in a certain style, however, I think musicians try to cover more styles because it would be bad business not too.

[mot]

The last awesomely good music I heard in a game was Quake. I still listen to it while I'm coding

That, and Amon Tobin's soundtrack to Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. That's brilliance. The rest is forgettable. Provided, of course, we don't count the GTA soundtracks as game music.

No matter how much a 'game musician' knows about games, he/she has to be a good musician in the first place.

And I'd bet that Amon Tobin actually spent some time playing the game or one of the previous installments before making the music. Can't imagine him getting a laundry list like, say,

Victory
Suspense
Suspense 2
Briefing
Drama

and making anything good.

[princec]

Aha, another Amon Tobin fan :) I've been trying to figure out a way of getting him to do some music for one of my games, without, er, having to pay him large amounts of money ;)

Cas :)

[Dan MacDonald]

Honestly that musicians forum is one of the most useful resources on the site. Sure there's a wide range of quality, but there's a lot of good stuff out there. I know when I was looking for music for SSH I relied heavily on it, going through page after page until I found a company capable of achieving the sound I wanted for the game.

Like some of the posts have said, not everything is going to be good at everything. If you want to make an RPG with some classical scores go look for a portfolio with a lot of that. For me, I wanted a more metalized rocking score and after a lot of digging was able to find some guys capable of that style. Depending on the type of game you'll probably want a different sound / music team. Still that's what makes that forum so useful as there's a nearly endless selection of styles and abilities listed there.

[papillon]

most memorable game music...

The title theme to Space Quest IV (PC). I think chibi-me actually called friends to listen to it over the phone, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. (Lingering fondness for a lot of Sierra stuff, but that's the one that I made a particularly huge deal over. Fifteen years later, you may not be able to tell why it was so impressive.)

Journey to Silius (NES). I didn't actually like the GAME that much, but I thought it had a pretty cool soundtrack.

The soundtrack to Planescape: Torment, which we still listen to as mood music.


("A Kiss to Build A Dream On" doesn't quite count as a game song.)


... Of course, I think Fatal Hearts has some pretty cool music in it. But I could be biased. :)

[elias4444]

I always enjoyed the music from Richard Garriott's Ultima games. It continued to evolve with the games themselves, and never lost it's original feel.

[Jesse Hopkins]

That's true, but as you point out in point 2 "2) ...., and almost anyone can make something at least passable."

But if you can't adapt to any genre because you feel your heart needs to be in it rather than have a techical ability to beable to cover many genres, how does a customer of a musician know if he will be getting the musicians way or the right way ? :)


There is no right way. There are norms, but they're not derived from necessity. The most important thing is tempo, mood and energy. If the game has a story, it is about finding the right emotion as well. Style and instrumentation are a matter of preference. If you prefer a hardcore shmup style composer whose sound resembles your favorite shmup tracks, you could easily find one. A shmup with an orchestral score would actually work wonderfully believe it or not, given that the tempo, mood and energy were complimentary.

I'm pretty sick of the idea that only fantasy or war games can 'work' with orchestral music. It's nonsense. Just like everyone clones ideas and graphic styles in games, so do they with their musical direction. A lot of games are more full of 'dance music' than anything effective. 90 percent of game scores, even in AAA titles are crap because of the result of too many chefs having input on the final product. The composer has to please more people than when working on a film - the artists, the production manager, the game tester... everyone. And it usually comes out worse because people who give direction want to hear the composer incorporate styles they listen to at home - dance music rhythms, pop grooves, rock riffs (it was cute in 8 and 16 bit but crappy now that it's 'real') etc... and they have no idea what the experience for the player will be like if they ask for these styles in their game scores.

The way I see it, is you can take 5 random shareware titles, you could swap the music between them and no-one would be any wiser, because it all sounds generic.

You could do that with 5 bad shareware soundtracks. But take one of those and switch it with LOLO, a game that could have been a shareware game. No way. That music is too good to switch with generic music.

I agree in that musicians are like graphics artists, they specialize in a certain style, however, I think musicians try to cover more styles because it would be bad business not too.

Covering every genre is only bad business at a certain level, and then it becomes bad business not to have your own sound. If you want to be "Music 'R' Us" you won't make a name in this business that leads to becoming sought after. Studios like Somatone are good for that because they have a number of composers working for them. There's a thread running through my music that, if you got to hear it all, you'd recognize my voice as a composer. Yes, I have some of the same influences as film composers, but I'm not a copy of a copy. I actually listened to and studied Honegger, Korngold, Mahler, Resphigi, Britten, Walton throughout my youth... And also the aliased Japanese game composers of Capcom(Yuukichan's Papa, Gondamin), Sega(Yuzo Koshiro), Nintendo(Koji Kondo)... the golden oldies that form the basis of game music. Once my voice is matched with the right games, I have no doubt it will lead to other clients that seek that "Hopkins sound" :) At least that's what I'm in this for.

Journey to Silius (NES). I didn't actually like the GAME that much, but I thought it had a pretty cool soundtrack.
I'll check that one out, paps. If you weren't biased by the game it must have something special going for it :)