In my current project I've been experimenting with doubling up instruments (or otherwise blending their sounds). I'm curious about what opinions other people here have about which instruments blend well with each other.
Some blends seem fairly obvious: flute/clarinet, oboe/cor anglais/bassoon, horns/trumpets, trombones/tuba. These are just same-category instruments combined with each other: woodwind with woodwind, brass with brass. Strings obviously blend very well with each other, and also seem to easily blend with just about everything else.
I've also considered blending instruments that are adjacent in the traditional orchestra seating arrangement, for example doubling the flutes with the horns seated directly behind, scoring them an octave apart. I haven't actually tried this much, but I'm assuming that there's a good reason that certain sections tend to be seated next to each other.
What instruments have other people found that blend well together?
I realized I never posted this track here for some reason.
A few months ago I was asked by the Battle for Wesnoth developers to compose a new main menu track for the game. As I was still working on the FFL soundtrack at the time I wasn't able to get very far, but I've returned to it over the last week and now it's largely finished except for polish and tweaks.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, Wesnoth is an open source turn-based strategy game that has been around for ages. It was Wesnoth that got me started doing game music in earnest back in 2006, and this new tune is an overture based on various tracks I did for the game, plus a couple of themes (or, well, interpretations of themes) by Aleksi Aubry-Carlson and Doug Kaufman.
Again I used my old orchestral template for this one, as the rest of the Wesnoth music is getting kind of long in the tooth by now and I felt that the sound of the old template would blend in better.
I'm curious to hear what you think, especially if you've played the game in the past and have some familiarity with the music.
Lately i've been considering the pros and cons of college, specifically taking some combination of computer science and music. I'm currently 29, living with my girlfriend (and dog) and working as a lab technician for a tech company doing research and development. My job is okay but it isn't my passion and it doesn't pay a whole lot. My girlfriend is currently working on finishing up her PHD, after which we will probably be moving out of the small college town that we currently live in.
My real passion is writing music, and I specifically love writing the kind of psuedo orchestral music that goes great in video games. I have a 4 year degree from a state university in digital communications, but its basically useless without more schooling.
So, I am considering going back to school to work on computer science, which I see as potentially interesting and a great career in terms of job prospects, and music, which I see as a horrible chance to make any money but I love it.
I was curious to get some other opinions on this and share experiences.
Version 2.3 of Virtual Playing Orchestra is now available. It's mostly about adding dynamic cross faded patches for trumpet, french horn, trombone with a few other small improvements such as some of the tremolo section patches.
I've been looking around the interweb and found some free samplers/sample that I was wanting some feedback/opinions.
SampleTank Free - come with some free instruments
UVI Workstation Free - come with some free instruments
Independence Free - come with some free instruments
Kontakt Player 5 - come with Factory Free Selection - 50 free instruments
I downloaded the Kontakt player and free instruments. All the free instruments play in demo mode (15 minutes then shut off?) which is unfortunate. Quality seems very good. But to upgrade to full version of Kontakt is $400. Too pricey for me...maybe later
Any opinions on the Kontakt free stuff or additional "Powered by Kontackt" libraries? that will not be in Demo mode?
How about SampleTank, Independence or UVI? Good quality?
Others? (Aria engine?)
In USA Ohio country area, internet is pretty slow, so don't want to spend half a day downloading something that's not so good.
Any advice and opinions are much appreciated!!
Jon
OK, so it seems I have entered a period of being completely sick of music. At least with listening to it, in any form. I get these bouts from time to time and they usually last only a few days, a couple of weeks at the most. I guess it comes from saturating your brain and ears with the stuff to the point where it makes you want to puke.
Thus I'm going to stick to the off topic section, because it feels like I have nothing meaningful to say about anything VO-related right now, so I'm not even going to try.
Anyway, here's something that occurred to me a little while ago: what non-orchestral stuff are you guys into? If anything?
I was curious in Alpha Centauri after reading so many good reviews and enjoying Civ III immensely all my childhood and even today.
I took a cursory glance around the game files and was shocked to find there were zero actual audio tracks, aside from a short main menu piece, nor were there any midi files!
Instead, the game has a set of ~350 .wav samples, they appear to all be 22.05 kHz Mono @ 16 bits and take up (for the time, 1999) an astounding 78 MB of space (keep in mind at that time, the max amount of RAM you could put in the ESI-4000 sampler was 128 MB and the default was only 4-8 MB). Files with the '.amb' extension seem to reference these samples (almost like tracker files?), although it seems the actual music is done dynamically. Very cool! This is honestly the only time I have seen {almost} the entire soundtrack of a PC game being comprised of bundled samples.
Too bad it'll be another what, 80 years before anyone can legally work with or redistribute these samples. :/
The composer's (or at least, implementer's) name is listed in the files- David Evans. Maybe someone else has heard of him? I haven't had a chance to do any more research yet.
EDIT: On a second listen through, it sounds like a lot of these sounds are commercial libraries from the time. One of them sounds like a bowed glass patch I think was on the Mirage, and the timpani sounds reeeaally familiar but I can't put my finger on it... maybe a Roland thing. That might mean at least some of these samples are of questionably more legal standing?
I'm starting a little review of Swing More! to kind of learn about the instrument pack, learn about swing, big band, swing and all that jazz, get lots of sponsors and get people to give me free stuff to review... But mostly to be helpful. .
Anyway since it is a blog I'm writing backwards so percussion with help need I.... Err I need help with percussion, which I'm writing first / last, which I understand less than most things. Any clue about how this kind of percussion works? It seems quite different than the roll and roll beat the drumkit to death and make lots of booms style. Or for that matter my attempts at mixing a rockin dance band where they told me crank the bass drum and the lead singer as she's a diva and will kill you if she can't hear herself LOUD and if we hear anything else that's a bonus and better than our last sound guy. So how does big band, swing drumming work?
I've been meaning to do this for a long time now, as my games collection has grown to a point where I can't remember each and every title I own anymore. It's happened on several occasions over the last year that I've come home from thrifting or whatnot with games that I already have. Not a big deal I guess as I rarely pay more than $2 for used games, but still.
So, as this has been a kind of rainy and boring weekend I decided to sit down and make a list of all my games on all platforms, both physical copies and Steam/GoG (though the former far outnumber the latter). I've put it up on my site so I can easily have a peek at it wherever I may be; maybe I'll put it on Google Docs so I can edit it online if necessary but this'll do for now.
Odd thing is, once I started going through them all I realized there's stuff missing. There's like a half a dozen games or more that I'm 100% sure I have bought over the years that are nowhere to be found. StarCraft, Age of Wonders II, Icewind Dale 2, Diablo, Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna, Doom 3 and maybe a couple more [Edit: Half-Life 2, and Deus Ex for PC]. Have I lent these to people and not gotten them back? If so I have no memory of it, and I normally don't lend out games anyway.
At any rate, finally getting this done feels good. Anyone else here keep a catalogue of their games?
I had a little extra time, so I finally started on a project I've been wanting to get going on for years, writing open documentation for the sfz format that is up to date and actually helpful. I got started earlier this week by setting up a wiki and writing the first dozen or so articles. I'm probably going to write 5-6 articles a week, and perhaps with the help of contributors, it should be fairly up to date in about half a year or so.
You're all welcome to check it out, tell me if I messed anything up, or if you have time and are willing to do so, contribute a few lines or even a page. Let me know what you think!
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