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Blog: Music in Beat Games

Tim_HarbourTim_Harbour
in Questions and Answers
Here is a short blog I did today discussing music in beat games. I hope this is interesting for composers of video game music. Any comments and input would be appreciated :D

http://www.jumpshipmusic.co.za/music-beat-games/
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Comments

  • MexicanopiumdogMexicanopiumdog
    Interesting project! Regarding the cutting up each beat for each bpm: Fruity Loops has this amazing plug-in called Edison which lets you record a snippet of music/sound and save it...that might be a bit faster than exporting every single time (or not)
    Im sure programs like Fmod have something that can tackle gradual speed increase?
  • Tim_HarbourTim_Harbour
    Yeah I'm sure Fmod can do it as well but I'm still a noob with it... so I was trying to find a more old school method of doing it...but I should really learn Fmod better.... Thing is some tempos can work nicely together as long as they are a certain increment apart...such as say 10 or so BPm but once it starts getting exponentially faster it becomes a problem. I know Edison and it's a great plugin but I dunno if recording a snippet at each beat will be any less time consuming than mixing them each down...but I'll have a look and give it a shot ! :D I am quite new to this so any input is really useful :D Thanks! Love to get some dialogue going over this!
  • MCAMCA
    It's an interesting exercise in composing music for games. The reverb/delay issues you mention can be overcome using the reverb/delay plugins in Wwise/FMOD, which would process the music in realtime and so then be adaptive to the changes in tempo - so export the music "dry" from your DAW.
    Otherwise you'd have to reduce the reverb/delay so that the tails of the effect are short enough such that there's no over lap between the audio clips.
    As for switching between music tempos, I think having separate audio clips for each tempo beat might be the best solution. You'd have to sync the separate audio loops having them maybe overlap on the particular beat so that Music80bpm stops just after the beat as Music100bpm comes in on the beat - doable in FMOD/Wwise.
    Wwise does have a time-stretch plugin, FMOD almost certainly does too, and that might work, but given the bpm range that you're wanting to cover there will likely be some distortion artefacts as you stretch the music more. You could maybe over come this by exporting at say 100 bpm and then "time-compressing" down to 80 and stretching up to 120.
  • Tim_HarbourTim_Harbour
    Yeah I figured Fmod could do the post processing, as I mentioned I suuuuck with FMOD :P but I'm trying to learn, so should get somewhere soon. I kinda liked the challange however of using cleaner/dryer/less evolved sounds for this project, because it gave it a bit of an oldschool 8 bit feel. When I check out FMOD I'll try of reverbs for sure!

    In terms of the tempo issue would you say time-compressing the files would be better than just mixing them down at separate tempos? I guess the compressing might make things quicker but will is sound as good. I do have a time stretch plugin so I would be interested to try your method. What vst do you use? Also MCA have you any experience with FMod? I'm looking for some tips in how to get started in that regards! :D
  • MCAMCA
    @Tim_Harbour I think for best quality you should ideally mix down at each tempo separately, but if you've a time-stretch plugin give it a go and see how far you can get - it might be alright if you're working at a high sample rate.

    I use Reaper, and so can adjust tempo of music just by, well, changing the tempo of the project, which works fine. It has a stretch function but for something like this I wouldn't use it. What DAW are you using? If you're working with MIDI just change the project tempo and all the notes ought to auto-adjust.

    I've not tried FMOD, simply because there aren't many online tuts, but I'm pretty familiar with Wwise since that has a lot of learning resources available, and as mentioned it has reverb and time-stretch plugins that work in real-time and could be linked to a Real-TIme-Parameter-Control (RTPC) like tempo (as does FMOD) - so if you exported a 100bpm piece from your DAW and put it in Wwise, you could set up an RTPC so that the time-stretch begins at 80bpm with reverb, and as the games' pace increases the degree of time-stretching is reduced along with the amount of reverb. That's all assuming that Wwise's time-stretching plugin sound good at 80bpm…
  • Tim_HarbourTim_Harbour
    Yeah I've already done the mixing down at seperate tempos. I use Ableton and I know exactly how to mix down at different tempos I was just wondering whether you thought time stretching might be more efficient :P. All fine with mixing down at diff tempos etc. It's just really time consuming hence I was wondering if people had any other methods :D

    I'll check out WWise, I'm pretty sure I have it installed here.... :D Will open it up
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