Hello.
My name is Jam, and I’m responsible for all of the music production that is going into Border! This means that all the battle music, background music, the main theme music, all the town music, and anything else that needs composing – i’ll be making. I’ll probably be updating the blog every Wednesday or thereabouts, depending on work commitments. I do have a full time job (although sadly nothing as exciting as making music!) which I do 6 days a week, so time is restricted. Especially since Christmas is coming I am likely to be working every day. However, fear not, as I guess you could say I am addicted to making music, and work fast when I come up with something I like.
I am working alongside Ist, and he provides me with the inspiration I need to make the music you will hear in the game. The beauty of working so close alongside him is that I really get a sense of the atmosphere he has created, and therefore I am able to produce music accordingly. I believe not many other composers are lucky enough to be able to work as closely, which means for me that I can hopefully make music that really suits the specific themes or characters that are being portrayed by Ist.
So what is my background of music production? Well, actually, not much! I mean there is the fact that I have been playing piano since the end of primary school (So I guess when I was about 10 years old), and that was 10 years ago now. But I was always learning by rote – so playing classical tunes over and over and over again until I got it perfect. I’ve certainly never done much in the way of actually composing music itself. All I did was just read music (try to anyway!) and play it as it appeared on the page – hardly that creative. So I decided after 10 years of piano lessons that I would go my own path, and make my own music by ear. I actually began with Blues style music, which is certainly very different from the classical stuff I was used to playing. But maybe that’s why I enjoyed playing it so much! Anyway, fast forward to the current day, and I find myself creating music for Border – an RPG. Wait. An RPG? How on earth will I create music for this I wondered. I’m sure it can’t be that hard…. right?!
The Challenges:
Now I’m going to be upfront here – I’ve never played an RPG before, let alone heard any music that such games have in them. So therein lies issue number one. By this point, Ist has already completed a large section of one of the cities, however, writing a town theme is out of the question because I did not have enough knowledge of the backstory to appreciate what atmosphere the town would give off. Therefore I set my sights a little lower in terms of difficulty. In the city he had produced in the first weeks is the Angelus Church. All Ist needed was a background ambience to help set the somewhat eerie atmosphere. Now with eerie music I’m sure I can muster something up fairly quickly, after all, classical music can be a bit creepy!
My Creative Process:
So let’s take the eerie church music example, and I’ll try to put into words how I created the music for it. Every time a bit of music is needed, I will be given a sort of brief to work from. A few bullet points that describe the atmosphere, how slow or fast paced it should be and other general information to set the scene. For the church it was this:
“The Angelus music should represent a church of control that sounds angelic and strong, but deep down it has a hint of something wrong about it, very subtle, but it has an underlying bad feel about it.”
From there I put myself into the scene itself, so in this case I imagine walking into a huge cathedral, completely silent and still and then based on the atmosphere presented to me by Ist’s description, music starts reverberating around my head. I imagine what instruments would compliment such a scene and from there begin to play around on the keyboard. It’s hard to explain how this transforms into music, but as soon as I find a tune or instrument that I find sets the scene well I will just roll with it, adding more and more instruments as necessary. The tune is then sent to Ist and he will give feedback, and suggestions for improvement. And that is essentially how most of the songs are created. An important note though, most of the songs will need to be looped in game, and thus I have to take this into account when creating music. If the music needs to be looped, I have to avoid things such as crescendos at the end of the song so that it doesn’t sound jarring when the song repeats.
So like I said, the way I produce music would probably seem quite bizarre to most people. But I honestly feel that once you have a description of the surroundings/atmosphere and you know which instruments would work in the scenario, then it is possible to play random (ish) music sequences and you will in all likeliood find something that works. Whether it be in 10 mins, or a couple hours. Then with tweaking and a few more instruments to back it up, you have the basics of what could potentially be a good bit of music. Although, of course, you need a good understanding of what chords go well together, which contrast and which just don’t work at all!
The Software:
I am using Reason 5.0 – a music software developed in Sweden. The great thing about this program is that I can use my MIDI keyboard and plug it in to the computer. This software makes it easy to add additional keyboards and control surfaces, meaning you can use some nifty kit to make my compositions sound better. Anyway, it looks very complicated to begin with. Well, actually it IS complicated, but once you work your way around the program and fiddle with settings you can create some very decent music.
The instruments used in Reason are all recordings of genuine instruments – not electronically generated claptrap. This means you get pure tones and genuine sounds. Without getting into details, I will just say that Reason 5.0 has been ideal for the use in hand, and if any of you are budding music artists I would recommend trying it!
Summary:
So there ends a summary of who I am, and what I contribute to Border. Hopefully I can post some music samples as the project gathers momentum, and if people would like me to do a video on how I produce the music I will try my best to do so. Future blog posts will likely be much shorter, and I will keep to the point. I expect the next updates to include sample music and a description of what the music is supposed to portray.
Well, I think that about sums up my role in Border, so if anyone has any questions please feel free to comment and I will try and get back to you as soon as possible.
‘Till next time!
Jam
Fallen Valkyrie Studio 