Check it out our new course right here - here: thinkspace.ac.uk/courses/how-to-write-video-game-music/ How To Write Video Game Music is our brand new course and we are super excited about it! If you ever wanted to get started in video game music or you are looking for a new musical challenge this course will give you the essential skills every video games composer needs. The course includes our new interactive video technology, MinusONE scoring projects and a vibrant and supportive Discord Community where you can share your work and get feedback from your peers.
I appreciate Guy Michelmore and what he does for the music community so much, and intros like this remind me of why I originally subscribed all those years ago. ❤️
The amount of work this man puts into describing specific musical concepts for free is mind boggling! Thank you so much for making these amazing videos!
Funny story 😂: I looked for some tips on composing a videogame for a client. This video was the one which seemed to be great to watch. And then, I saw your face and I was like: "hmmm, this person is very familiar to me but I don't remember who exactly". And when I finally reached the end of video, I was like :" wow, great explainer, he is very familiar to me. There was this great and aged-person I considered as Gandalf for music composer and his name was Guy Michelmore. However, this one have a beard. Guy didn't had a beard at that time" When I was going to look for another video, I just looked at the OP name and it ta-da it is Guy Michelmore 😂 I missed your Easy-Go-Ness, I feel I belong with you humably speaking. Thank you for the video Guy! Great work
This is absolutely amazing! Very very creative and informative! But I think one of the challenges is to put down a great pieces which doesn't suck or get very boring on lots of repetitions!!
Wonderful! So glad to hear you mention Jason Graves! I went to high school with him and had the pleasure to play music with him! He's really done well for himself and we're all so proud to know him!
@@ThinkSpaceEducation A secondary side note... it was fun to find out that years after we both graduated, that we met again professionally before socially. Not long after graduating from university, I started working as an artist for a games company and as I was tasked with making cinematics and needing time on an editing deck locally, imagine my surprise to meet Jason out of the blue. Before games, he was in video production - at least that's my memory from 25 years ago! Since that time, I guess we've both kept with it... the odd fact about this that I want to share is that Jason is a drummer... that was his musical start, and almost everyone else that I've met in game sound and music are also Drummers! Out of 5 people in the audio department, 4 were drummers. Maybe its because there's something about drummers on the east coast... maybe its industry-wide... I think it would be fun to poll anyone that you meet that also has made a career of video game composition and sound design if they were Drummers first. Thanks for all the inspiration and for using Cubase! Cheers!
7:46 A great example is the music in Mirrors Edge. In that game the composer named Solar Fields really added lots of horizon movement so that the soundtrack feels alive. Which makes one song easily around 10 minutes long. How? Well Solar Fields divided the pieces in certain blocks like Guy talks about in this video: The first one is just an ambiance, the root of the song like Guy made at 2:45. From there he starts adding and subtracting things so that the song gets lets static. The second part is the more "alert" style of the music. In Mirrors Edge this can me you get chased by people or something happens in the narrative that shifts the music. The third part can go two different ways, so for the music creation there is an branching path: You managed to escape but are now in a building where you have to solve a puzzle by doing parkour or, the chase intensifies to an another level and the music gets more aggressive and got that "hurry up" feeling. From there things gets interesting, because again an level can be branched in more different ways. Note that the alternate music always got the same roots as the ambiance, for the track still ahs to feel familiar. But now so familiar that i gets boring. So Solar Fields added lots of modular synthesis to solve that problem(also something you hear in the Doom 2016 OST by Mick Gordon)...!!! If you want to hear an example to follow along of what i am talking about, here is a link to one of my most favorite pieces of Solar Fields~ Hopefully it can you help all out if you want to create your own video game music...!!! Keep on creating D Mirrors Edge - Flytrap OST: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Kn_fOSl0MGU.html
This feels like it should be paid content, you wouldn't get quality like this from any college lecturer. I feel inspired to try and compose myself now. Absolutely phenomenal demonstration with a great balance of interactivity as well as tons of useful information. Love it!
Really had no idea that video game music did some of this. I pick out cross fades and loops when I play one but the vertical layering is really something else entirely that I didn’t even realize. Very neat content this week.
This is great ! Though being a game composer specifically often also requires a bit of knowledge of the tools used to implement the music into the game - usually FMOD or Wwise - and actually playing the game to understand it and the kinds of interactions one may have in it is also beneficial.
Absolutely - as i say at the end its like learning of the rules of chess not becoming a grand master. This is the grammer and synbtax - now go write a novel
I am loving your content Guy!! I just found your channel yesterday, and I’ve must have watched like 10-15 of your vids! They’re both educational, inspiring, and just fun, I love your energy and personality
You are one of my absolute favorite music educators on RU-vid. You are so knowledgeable and have such a great way of conveying the matter. Absolutely love your videos!
This video is the most informative, succinct, revealing and practical introduction to game music composition the world has ever seen! A master communicator, thanks👍.
Great explanation, Guy. Shows some insight how video game composers have to think - scoring a game you probably not even know too much about, yet the composer knows the players will probably listen to this music a lot (so it has to be neither too boring nor too much in the foreground, being too annoying - which is a nother hurdle to take care of), And even thinking back to the very old days makes me kinda shiver even more, where all you got was a couple of oscillators with basic wave forms, and perhaps a noise channel (plus limited space), where bleeps and bloops had to make the same hoops (verticality could probably only done if you kinda juggle the instruments using those few channels. I like to think about those fast-paced arpeggios back on the C64 and 8-bit console days; like the Mega Man soundtracks on the NES), because you had limited resources. Which required the composer to be really creative then, also with the horizontal thing of making loops connecting to itself or other loops nicely.
Rah this video editing is SERIOUS. 10/10!! Great explanation of gaming topic. I like how you was inside the 🎮 . I could visualise what you was speaking about
Maaaan, I've gone 28 years of my life not understanding how exactly they transition music like this in games, and this finally explained it so very well 👏😁 absolutely fantastic job explaning it and showing it all off! Also incredible intro section haha
Amazing video. Quality was very high as well as informative and entertaining all in one! The beginning intro was top notch though and very creative. Saving your video and channel for when I start composing.
As always: a great video, Guy! I'd like to add: you don't necessarily have to compose to a scene that hasn't been directed. I like to ask for the installer file, or gameplay footage, and score to that because I think finding the "pace" in those scenes is important. If they don't/can't provide the installer, and I'm having trouble coming up with something, then I'll grab a snippet of a scene from another game that I think captures what I want to write, and then compose to that scene. For anyone interested in composition for video games Winifred Phillip's "A Composer's Guide to Game Music" is a solid learning tool!
Hi Guy hope you're well. Great video to introduce people into video game composition! Just a thought from my side, I've been using these type of techniques for over 20 yrs now, and although they are useful for some type of games they can also get very musically boring for the player. This depends hugely on the type of game and the way the player may or not play through said game. Your zombie game example is a great example of scoring interactively, i.e. what we can do with interactive music and middleware, but just to put a counter point of view out there: what if the player is going from stealth, to action, to stingers in a short space of time ? (ie 20 or 30s)? This sounds like a musical mess! What if the player plays more stealth but another player plays more action / combat driven? Therefore the music can sound too "AI driven" if we're not careful, and it's like there is a virtual mix person in the box frantically switching musical states. My point is: just because we can, does that mean we should? There are definitely places for these techniques but I also advise composers to look at a particular scene / segment of gameplay / mission from a high level point of view as to what the composer is trying to achieve from a creative and aesthetic point of view, and then work out how to create this in an interactive environment. It's always a fine balance between having the technical tools at our disposal versus the creative and musical tools about how we approach a game. And of course every game is different! :) RJ
Richard how nice to hear from you! ( Hey everyone - when at the end I say I'm just explaining the rules of chess but I'm no grand master - Richard is a Grand MASTER) You are 100% right and I have recently heard almost the same thing when speaking to Jason Graves and Will Roget. Ill email you and we should arrange a chat about this for our MA students.
I wasn’t expecting to run into your comment here, just wanted to say your presentation this month was really helpful, got the game for my birthday. Also, these are all really great advices, will keep in mind for future projects. By the way, do you have any tips for composing cello and double bass parts?
I'd preemptively donned my sunglasses of doubt having, as a gamer, seen years of marketing bonanzas wherein composers are given about 8 seconds to spill the beans that their game has a custom Dynamic Music System™ (like many others), or simply has music which (gasp!) makes you feel stuff and things. I should have expected better from you, but here I was with the glasses. This was great! Sincerely entertaining _and_ educational as usual. I figured it must be more complicated than I realized, and having this concrete peek at the process gives me even more appreciation for this version of the art. And of course your intro was great fun, even for me with my acute zombie game allergy. :)
So blessed to have found this video. Yes, this video is very useful. I will be starting a music for video game course soon and your video has certainly given me many pointers as a head start. Thank you.
Always inspiring. Your creativity in music is matched only by your child-like imagination, the one you use every time you have to come up with an idea for a video. 👌🏼
I love your channel. Most of the content isn't necessarily new to me, but you're one of the few who've captured my attention, and I'll watch to support you! Thank you for everything you do for the community! -Cheers
This was extremely helpful! I'm a senior in game design (art side), working on my thesis. Have a big background in music, but I never really knew how games went about music comp. This is really gonna save my butt, because music from our previous years theses have been so abhorrently uncared about!
Guy, really appreciate your time and effort w/this vid! On LinkedIn, video games companys are looking for audio engineers at large numbers. It's mindblowing to me, bc I grew up using razor blade editing, & now computers are so ubiquitous that we have a multitude of areas in audio engineering to investigate for employment. Your vid helped me to see how it is done. Thank you.
So for this upcoming year I’m gonna be doing game dev and I got offered to try to get music for this lil game this definitely helped a lot to understand and I’m glad you mentioned Jason graves I went to go search him and found he composed music for one of my favorite games untill dawn I can’t wait to get started with composing ❤
I’ve been playing The Last Of Us 2 recently - and was tuning into just this kind of thing, the way the music is cued at certain points, the way it fades, changes, is used to foreshadow - and have been intrigued by how well the score responds and interacts with my choices. So interesting!
wow. Love the energy. such a great explanation as always. I didn't think I was interested in game music, but this is very useful and interesting. and I remember when you split the tea, when reading the news.
In the new unreal engine 5, there's a thing called metasounds, they make it easy to only play certain music tracks for different gameplay scenarios, like battle and low health.
The first 5 minutes of this was really useful, in games where each scene has one track of music and it's not changing depending on what's happening. You just got to cut off the intro and then loop the rest of the song indefinitely. So render the music to audio. Cut off the intro, then make sure a few extra bars are rendered at the end so it can loop into the cut seamlessly. Bookmarking this video for future reference!
Thanks a lot for the lightning tour, Sir. That will help me a lot when doing music for my games. I will use it to illustrate the danger in a realm were you need to whisper and to be quiet. Keep up the good work :D
great video, i was recently approached with some work for an indie game and this has been invaluable in trying to figure out the structure of everything
Oh, wow, I wonder why RU-vid shared this with me. Its tooootally not like I have been enlisted by my partner to write the music for their video game or anything /s. Thanks for tue useful resource, this will certainly assist me in my production!
Guy, I am completely astonished at how familiar you are with the gaming world, especially when you mentioned Unity and Unreal Engine. The techniques you showed us are very much how it is actually done. Thank you for talking the time to make this, it was VERY helpful!
Good morning. First time commenting your channel, even if I watched quite a lot of your videos ! Love the positive energy in them ! Thank you. I have started to write some tracks for a game as well. And I love it ! Even if it takes a lot of time 😉 for me.
Great video! The part about using loops and handling transitions was incredibly useful. 🎵 I've been wondering, where's the best place to submit or advertise your music if you want game developers to use it? 🤔 I'm posting my tunes royalty-free on my website, but it's not the way, is it...
Guy, I'm learning C# and Unity, I'm already a musician with a degree in Music, I'd love to take the making music for video games course cos it includes F Mod, which is something I can incorporate within Unity.
I am working on music, sound design and integration of the sound in games for more than 20 years. Whings changed somewhat, but pretty much everything you say is true. First, composer must understand itnteractive element of the game. Second, people have to understand and grasp non linearity as well as generative audio - and I am not talking about droning ambience, but re-using existing file for multiple different purposes. Third, people should ge middleware out there for free and try to create music and sfx and them program it (there are bunch of free projects, you can find Fmod and Unity projects). Practice a lot. Layer a lot. Have fun.
