Inside a Game Soundtrack

Oct 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

HOW THE MUSIC FOR 'DEMIGOD' WAS COMPOSED, ARRANGED AND RECORDED

There are many similarities between composing music for films and for videogames, but there are also significant differences. Because game composers generally don't get the notoriety that their film-scoring peers do, the procedures involved in writing game music are less well-known.

To help shed some light on the process, I spoke with Howard Mostrom, staff composer at Gas Powered Games, a developer in Redmond, Wash. Mostrom has scored a number of games for Gas Powered, including the recently released Demigod, which will be the focus of this story.

Getting In the Game

Mostrom is a sax player who cut his teeth in the commercial music field working as a staff engineer at Triad Studios in Redmond. “We'd have a wide variety of clients,” he says. “One day we'd do a TV spot, the next day recording orchestra for a WB [network] trailer, a rock band or whatever; it was all over the place. I would write, produce and perform music whenever there was a need. We also did some game stuff. And that was kind of my introduction into games.”

One of the Triad clients was Frank Bry (pronounced “Bree”), the audio director at Gas Powered Games. Bry, says Mostrom, “kind of coaxed me into game audio. When we worked together at the studio, he was always trying to get me into games because we worked really well together. I made the switch, and I've been loving it ever since.”

Early Stages

Because Mostrom is on staff at Gas Powered Games, he's involved in projects at an earlier stage than a freelance composer might be. In the case of Demigod, a game in which the player (or players, as it's often a multiplayer online game) chooses to be one of the eight “Demigods” and fight it out for who will “join the Pantheon of true gods,” Mostrom familiarized himself with the game — which was still a work in progress — by playing it.

“I started playing the game as much as I could so I could get the pacing and the overall feel of where things should go,” he says. When I ask him if it is typical for a composer to play the game before writing the music, he replies, “I know it should be. I'm not sure how typical it is. I know some people do and some people don't. But for anyone who was integrated as I was into the project, it's a necessity.”

After getting a sense for how the game worked, Mostrom began working on some of the sound-design elements. (Throughout the project, Mostrom, along with Bry, developed the numerous sound effects for the game.) “I would put sound effects in place, even if they were just temp,” Mostrom recalls, “so that they could give me feedback for the game's soundscape and pacing. I like to do that before I write so I know what frequencies to work off of, and I'm not fighting with the sound effects as much.”

At that juncture, the working version of Demigod not only had temp sound effects, but also a lot of temp graphics. At the point at which composers do much of their work on a game, the art elements are frequently still being hashed out. “You're working off of concepts, so it can be vague,” he says. “Sometimes there will be different phases of the art in place. Usually, it's just like a block, or a very vague form of what the creature is. And it will be working in the game, but it doesn't have all of its art facets in place.”

Getting Musical

The first decision for Mostrom was the score's musical direction. “Choosing an instrument palette was probably the toughest thing to do in the process,” he explains. “If you listen to the music, there's not much brass at all, and there's no choir either.”

Instead, Mostrom combined elements of orchestral and ethnic instrumentation (see Web Clip 1). “I didn't want it to sound like I was featuring any ethnicity,” he says. “I wanted it to sound like it was another world. Instruments included Duduk and Tambura [wind instruments]. “A lot of the stringed instruments are ethnic, as well,” he says. “It's kind of all blended together.”

At first, Mostrom had to submit ideas to higher-ups at the company for approval. “Once they knew my general direction, they were very happy with where I was going with it.” At that point, he was able to continue without needing constant sign-offs.

Although he eventually mixed the game music in Digidesign Pro Tools, much of the composing and arranging work was done in MOTU Digital Performer, and was often in the MIDI realm. His instruments included those in the Native Instruments Komplete bundle, as well as Submersible Music's DrumCore, among others. He used orchestral sounds from a range of collections, including those from EastWest and the Vienna Symphonic Library.

Mostrom, who was a music major in college, deftly handled the classical orchestration. Although there were some live recorded wind and percussion parts on the soundtrack, the strings were all programmed, yet sound very realistic (see Web Clip 2).

He played many of the MIDI wind instrument tracks using an Akai EWI. “It was really fun using it,” he says, “because you can be so much more expressive than with a regular controller.”

Mostrom also created custom instrument sounds to help create the feeling of otherworldliness that the game required. “I did a lot of custom sound design work for the drums,” he says. “I actually went out and recorded a bunch of crazy things: Axes hitting a huge garage door and stuff like that.”

Many of the percussion sounds ended up being heavily layered (see Web Clip 3). “I wanted those big hits to be their own and not sound like anybody else's,” he says. He would often pitch the samples down to make them sound even bigger. “I would treat the drum hits more like a sound effect. Some of the drum hits would have 30 different elements for the hits themselves.”