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What’s new in the life of me? Well, mainly this:

Birthday - is something I celebrated on January 17th, my 21st actually. Sadly there was not much celebrating but rather 9 hours of work, leftover chinese food and online shopping. Luckily the mighty webs of inter knew I was getting one year closer to death and I got quite a few birthday wishes. Thank you for that you lovely people you!

Zeuhl – might be the best genre of music since the catch-all ‘Electronica’. Zeuhl is the brain child of French drummer Christian Vander and his band Magma and means ‘Celestial Music’ in his constructed language Kobaïan. It’s basically progressive rock/jazz fusion infused with utter madness and space opera. One of the gifts I got for myself this year was the 12-disc Magma box set ‘Studio Zünd‘ and I can already tell it’s one of the best things I’ve ever bought.

Work – is also something I still do. I’m currently working on multiple projects including ‘Rodent & Plank’ by ShadowMake, ‘Zlythy‘ by Ghostwheel and the upcoming projects by our studio Morsel. They’re all looking mighty tasty and all games offer some new styles for me to try. My work with Morsel will be especially interesting since I’m going to design my first game! The concept is looking rather solid right now and I’m currently trying to balance the gameplay as good as possible. Stay tuned for more info on all these projects including teasers and such.

IGF was just done and an early build of Kaleidoscope was entered. The judges all left feedback that we then got e-mailed to us. I was sad to see that the audio was mostly overlooked but pretty much all criticism was spot-on and has since been remedied. Here’s what the judges had to say:

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2d platformer Kaleidoscope is getting closer and closer to completion. I’ve finished yet another track, this one for the second world in the game. This world is autumn and wind-flavored with some interesting mechanics built on the latter so I tried to capture the airy feel in the music. For me this mainly meant going with some light drums (Roland CR-78), twinkly sounds and a really nice, smooth analogue pad. With the help of my trusty stereo imager and some reverb I really got the pad floating around the arrangement making it sound a bit eerie and very pleasing to the ear. I must also admit I’m pretty satisfied withe the melodic hook but I won’t go into detail on that.

The artwork for the game is looking fantastic all because of Sang Han, artist, general good guy and proud son of a mother who doesn’t speak a word of english. He’s been doing some fantastic job with the environments, especially when it comes to color schemes and interesting shapes. The characters and enemies are also a handsome bunch and very unique. To make it all come together Matt Stenback, developer and programmer extraordinaire, has really done some amazing job creating a first party level editor. We’re basically working hard on building the levels at the moment. Mainly Matt but both me and Sang has contributed some concepts and help refined the gameplay.

Overall this game is looking very tight and I can’t wait until it’s done so we can submit it to Dream. Build. Play. I’ve only got one track left to deliver, the map theme. I was thinking of ripping off Yoshi’s Island and make it evolve musically as you progress through the worldmap.. That oughta be good fun!

Nitro Game Injection, probably the best VGM podcast in the world, featured a “hot seat” edition with yours truly. I go in depth on my soundtracks and other video game music related subjects with terrific hosts Kyle ‘KyleJCrb’ Crouse and Larry ‘Liontamer’ Oji and there are exclusive tracks from the upcoming Kaleidoscope to be heard!

So, do go ahead and download the episode here and comment if you liked it, hated it or if you’re just bored!

I’m currently composing music for a project created by Ted Hung at Moment Games. The game, which I can’t tell you that much about, is set in an office environment so I’m currently trying my best to capture the spirit of an office in music. This is harder than it might sound because an office isn’t at all times dull, nor is it at all times fun. There’s a certain ambiguity surronding the office as a game environment and the game’s story doesn’t clearly present it in just one way.

With this in mind I decided to base the main gameplay track around a chord sequence that offers the same sort of ambiguity, in this case between minor and major. The “verse” section is a simple four chord sequence:

A – G – F#m7 – Fmaj7

The funny thing here is that I’m using chords found in A-major or A-minor (A and F#m7 from A-Major, G and Fmaj7 from A-minor). This makes establishing a key a bit harder, even though it starts with an A-major chord. The last chord is emphasized to further increase the confusion.

The “chorus” section offers yet another quite confusing chord sequence:

E7 – G – C – Bb – F – Dm7 – E7

Here I’m using some unconventional “leaps” between chords that makes it sound less rooted in a major or minor key. For example going from C to Bb or from E7 to G. While none of these are really daring, at all, they make for an interesting effect and helps add to the peculiar mood that’s in an office.

I’ve been keeping busy lately. Between finishing up my first academic paper in musicology (!!!) and working on two soundtracks there’s little time over for anything else. Luckily both of these are progressing quite nicely. The paper is on the soundtrack to the PlayStation-game Jade Cocoon, a game I adore for many reasons including the terrific music. I’m currently in the middle of analyzing some of the tracks I think represent the soundtrack and composer Kimitaka Matsumae’s unique style.

For the music part of things Kaleidoscope is really shaping up to be my best work yet! That might not be saying much looking at my pretty small body of work but I have a really good feeling about this. I’m very inspired by the game and concept too so the music is pretty much composing itself.

We (and by that I mean the developer Matt Stenback) will soon go public with some more detailed information on the game so you can expect some more posts about it in the near future.

As you may or may not know (probably the latter) I’m currently part of the developement team for Morsel’s upcoming game Kaleidoscope. I’m composing and producing the soundtrack. Beyond that I’m also helping out with some additional game design, mainly giving feedback and being the guy Matt bounces ideas off from time to time.

With Kaleidoscope we’re setting out to do an interactive soundtrack, something that’s not very unique but a first for me. The main concept being that when you “advance” gameplay-wise (can’t say more at the moment, sorry) the music advances too. For this to work we decided to go with a layer-approach. When I wrote music I did as I usually did but tried to also think about which instruments could be isolated and combined to work as a single track and later exported just a few channels of the track at a time so Matt could fade these in and out during gameplay.

The main work here was making the first of the 5 layers work on it’s own. To do this I tried to establish the main “hook” in this stage and use both something melodic and some kind of percussion. When I had the main layer down it was just a question of balancing the rest of the song so that the ammount of new content introduced in each layer seemed significant and, above all, was audible to the player. The issues I faced here were mainly how to make the track varied when I’m just putting layer on top of layer. My first layers were often feeling a bit too complete which made it hard to make the rest of the layers add something. I experimented with playing the same parts but with another instrument, in one case one covering more frequencies compared to the original which was heavily filtered and almost a bit thin. This worked surprisingly well and gave me a layer where I didn’t need to compose any additional music but still get the feeling of the track progressing.

Another issue was in what order the layers would come. Would I introduced the bass heavy sounds early or would I focus on getting the drums down first? What layer made the track feel most “complete”? To really get a feel for this I had turn to Matt and get some more info about the different levels and how they would look. While the layer order still isn’t set in stone I got some good idea based on the mood of the track what would be the most important elements and what would be the “sprinkle” that enters at the, gameplay-wise, less important stages.

Well, that’s all for now but I’m pretty sure I will post some more info about working on this soundtrack later on since it’s been a great experience.