Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

Last week the Berklee Learning Center hosted it’s annual networking event for the Boston/New England film community. This is an evening session that is held to bring together filmmakers and those people that do audio and music for film. It continues to grow each year! (and I see a few friends in the crowd here!)

Built as both a networking event and an expo, the participants meet each other and also learn what they each do. Filmmakers speak about making films and composers and engineers discuss creating sound for those films.

If you’d like to find out more and see additional pictures go to the official website!

We’re very fortunate at Berklee to have many successful industry professionals visit the campus. Today was one of those days when I was able to attend a wonderful presentation, this time by Grammy award winning producer Michael Powell and his current engineer Quentin Dennard.

Mr. Powell has had an incredibly diverse career, he started producing music in 1979, he has worked with (and continues to work with) great artists such as Aretha Franklin, Anita Baker, R. Kelly and more. The thing that was amazing about today’s presentation was that the conversation kept coming back to the music. Sitting in the studio, with a gaggle of music technology students asking questions, it could have very easily turned into a Pro Tools master class, but that didn’t happen! The conversation began and ended with the music. There was a lot of talk about production techniques, musical structure, and working with performers in the studio. These concepts haven’t changed that much from the days of analog consoles and today.

There are times that we get caught up in the next best piece of gear, or an anticipated upgrade to our favorite application, but in the end, none of it matters but the music. Something Mr. Powell said, early on, set up the rest of the conversation this morning. He talked about the fact that the music we are all creating today, if it is good, will still be listened to in 100 years. In 100 years our toolsets will be very different but the goal will still be the same, to create, capture and distribute great music!

As someone who teaches music technology and audio engineering I was heartened by Mr. Powell’s frankness and experience and also by Mr. Dennard’s many statements about using the tools you have to make a great record. When asked about a favorite mic for vocals he said he would use the best mic available and that it is his job to make it sound great. Now, that isn’t to say either of them were technophobes, quite contrary! Rather, they use the tools they have to fulfill their unique musical vision.

That is exactly what I try to convey to my students both on campus and online. Your goal should be to train yourself, be the best musician you can be, start listening, really listening, and learn your tools so well that they fall away. You don’t want to struggle inserting plugins and routing to busses, you want to intelligently and musically assess what your music needs and know how to get the sound you are looking for. You’ll be amazed what a freeing experience it is to be in a studio and just know how to accomplish a creative vision. It’s kind of like the first time you realize you actually can play that scale or sight-read a chart, because afterall, it IS all about the music!

In Lesson 3 of the Pro Tools 101 course, the students step through an exercise where they investigate how files are stored when recording into a session. It is always a good idea to know where your files are and Pro Tools makes it easy to keep everything organized. One of the tasks in the lesson though, demonstrates what happens when you’ve recorded audio and then neglected to save! The good news is, as long as you didn’t UNDO the recording it will still create and store the new audio files for you. That’s great news for someone to hear! Especially if they’ve just recorded an incredible, once in a lifetime take!

After the initial “Oh thank goodness that audio file exists somewhere” sigh of relief, the next question is always, “Well, how do I get that back into my session?” There are two basic ways, the labor intensive manual way and the sleek and smooth automatic way. The labor intensive way requires that you manually add the audio back to the session and then play around in slip mode and/or with nudge as you try to make the audio play in sync with the initial recording. This can be very easy to do if you started the recording at the beginning of the session or on some known bar line or timing reference. Just drop the sound file back on Bar 2 beat 3, or at 1:00 into the song and everything is ready to go!

But what if you just punched into record when you felt the time was right and you don’t know where your recording should sit in the timeline? That is where Pro Tools’ timestamping function comes in handy. Pro Tools is watching your back, without you perhaps knowing, the application actually kept a record of where you recorded that audio! Using the SPOT mode available within Pro Tools you can simply import the audio into a session and place it back in a track at the same point that it was recorded at. Take a look at the dialogue box that appears when you drop a file on the edit window while in Spot mode:

Notice how the program knows where the file was originally recorded. By pressing the triangle button to the right of the original time stamp Pro Tools will set the start point of the spot mode to match the original time (in this case Bar 5 Beat 4 Tick 955 will replace Bar 9 Beat 2 Tick 444). Also notice that you can, during the course of editing a project, create a user time stamp, and then use that user time stamp as the reference for Spot mode. The timestamp function is found in the Region bin menu inside Pro Tools.

So this all sounds perfect, right? Well, as in all things that have to do with computers saving you time, there are some catches. The timestamp does not always travel between different DAWs and sometimes not even between audio files created with the same program.

The timestamp function is one that is implemented in a few different ways. Some audio files themselves can carry their timestamp with them via an area known as MetaData, but not all. There are times when you will import a sound file that does not have timestamp information. In those cases you will need to revert to your ears and your own musicality to place your audio in the right position, but it is always worth the effort to see if the file can tell you where it was recorded, this trick alone has saved me from hours of manual placing and nudging on many occasions!

I ran across a couple of great articles earlier in the month, related to working in the video game industry. You know, things have changed drastically in the last few years. In case you haven’t been keeping track, the video game industry now far outpaces the film industry when looking at profits. We all know that usually equates to more work! According to the most recent Mix Magazine Game Audio edition where they quote a study from the Entertainment Software Association, more than 80,000 people were employed by the US entertainment software industry in 2006. Now, that isn’t just music and audio, it also includes legal staff, marketing and all of the other positions needed in a software development company, but oh my goodness, that seems like a lot of jobs!

All of this is to say, if you’ve ever wanted to work in games, this is the perfect time! Ok, ok, calm down… it is not as if game developers are hanging out on street corners begging people to come work for them. Now, more than ever, they are looking for qualified people that are also very creative. They are also really only interested in people that really want to work in the games industry. Being genuinely interested in the industry shows and they can tell if you love games or not. So, perhaps I should change that sentence above slightly…. how about this….

All of this is to say, if you’ve ever wanted to work in games, this is the perfect time to work your darndest to make it happen! I wish I could say I have the ultimate list of ways to prepare for work in the industry, but honestly, there is no one way to get your start. Just like the music or film industry, everyone takes their own path, it can’t be scripted. There is no Harvard Business School education that gets you into the equivalent of the Fortune 500 in the video game industry.

Over the holiday break, a couple of stalwart staples of reporting and discussion on the videogame industry came up with some resolutions for getting a job. Take a look at the CMP article on Game Career Guide and the rebuttal on Gamasutra for an interesting look at what you should do if you want to work on games.

I’ve decided, after reading the two articles, basically the same thing I decide every few months… really, I need to buy “a couple” of new games so that I can research them and really listen and assess how I think the music and sound work in them. It’s all about the research…