Hey team, so my very first blog was about my very first project as a part of my studio 1 module, project Wild Machine. Since then the project started nearly 8 weeks ago I have learned so much regarding writing music, mixing music, working in a group, managing a project and also refreshing some analog studio knowledge as well. To start this blog off I'm going to summarise what the project was and how it evolved over the month or two we worked on it.
Project Wild Machine is a combat sound track inspired by the world of Horizon: Zero Dawn, a video game based in a post apocalyptic setting where humans have reverted to tribes and the world is inhabited by robotic animals. The music and sound design within this game is very unique and meant a lot to me and Tom the other person I worked on this project with. It involves synthetic music as well as tribal human elements which blend together perfectly to create this world of sound unlike any other game at the time. So we set about making a track that would fit inside this world. Originally we planned on making a single track that behaved much like a normal song with an intro, verses' chorus', etc. However as we learned later in the trimester in our extra curricular class Game Audio Club (GAC) video game music is not that simple. To explain it simply Game music is used very differently, as apposed to normal songs or even film scores everything is very easy to plan as there are no variables from the audience. When people play video games however everyone plays it differently, someone may spend more time in an area or in a combat or even exploring the environments so you need music to adapt to what that player is actually doing. As I mentioned in my track teardown for our reference track Colossal (a song on the HZD soundtrack) video game music is made in loops. So generally video games will loop music to fit what’s happening in the game. Obviously there is a lot more to it which I won’t get too bogged down in but an article on The Music Maze written by Isaac Shepard goes explains it really well,
“When creating loops, you need to remember that the song arrangement needs to match the game play. Therefore, it usually makes most sense to split up the parts of the song into their own loops and then let the audio programmer mix and match them as appropriate. For example, you might have a verse loop, a pre-chorus loop, a chorus loop, and a bridge loop, and then let the game decide when to move on and play each type of loop.” (Shepard.I, 2017)
Once we learned this we decided to split our track into 4 main loopable sections, a chilled out exploration vibe, our general combat theme, our synthetic tension theme and our epic boss battle theme. We basically ended up making our project 4x as hard but we were super proud of it in the end. If you're now super curious and can't wait to hear it here's a link.
So that was basically how the project evolved as we learned more about the genre but I'd like to focus now on how the project went from a team point of view and the lessons I learned from what went right and what went wrong.
What went wrong:
Throughout the project a few things went wrong which contributed to the overall delay of the project. We were well on track in the earlier sessions recording our samples early and working on the song at an appropriate speed. What went wrong however was the sharing or the track in progress. As I didn't have much song writing experience I let Tom lead and I tried to learn as much as I could about MIDI and song writing. This lead to the main issue of our project, I didn't have access to the session due to the unique plugins Tom was using. The session was started and edited on Tom's personal laptop which had a lot of his personal plugins which meant I could just download the session and work on it myself. Later on we were told a few workarounds for this in the future like bounced the MIDI data into a waveform and working with that instead of just the data but by the time we worked it out the project was delayed due to a pile up of work on Tom's half. In no way am I blaming anyone as this was a team project and from the start we didn't consider this a problem but we've learned a lot from that error. In the future have the session in a format that everyone can pitch in as I spent a lot of my time sit and watching rather than being hands on.
The only other problem I can think of was our analog sampling session. Early on we booked the Audient B to record some flute samples as we believed it would fit very well into the overall feel of the track. When we got into the studio we were both pretty rusty forgetting some very basic signal flow. Once we got it all sorted out and finally remember to turn on the Headphone preamps we started recording our samples. At this stage of the mix though we didn't really have any of the song worked out yet. We didn't have a key or tempo or even really work out any of the structure we needed to know before recording these samples. It was a rookie error and most of our samples were basically useless without some form of editing. We did use a few samples in our final product but I feel that session could've been more useful if we recorded those samples later into the project.
Things that went well:
Even though we were a little mixed up and behind schedule I am very happy with how the final product turned out. Tom and I worked pretty well as a team. However there are plenty of aspects of our group dynamic that could've been improved like our work ethic and punctuality. In the end decisions between us regarding the project were always democratic and we're both happy with how the project evolved. I was also happy working with Tom as I learned a lot about how music is put together and the do's and dont's of songwriting. For example I started the third section of the song picking out synths that blended together and sounded ominous to feel the theme. When I was finished Tom showed me some of the mistakes I had made but never treated me like an idiot. I learned a lot by watching him work I just wish I was a bit more hands on with this project. Song writing, synth building and music theory are just some of the things I learned during this project and are still aspects of sound design that I need to improve on. I think I need to make another track like this in the future but I need to make it either by myself or working with someone who lets me take the reigns more.
In conclusion Project Wild Machine while being a bit of a mess was a blast to work on. Our team dynamic made the project exciting however we needed to push ourselves harder to make the deadline. The next time I work on a project similar to this I will be more hands on and try and use my newly found knowledge of synth building and songwriting to make a track even better than Wild Machine. Thanks for your time!
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