Game Music

Wow - nearly the end of January and I haven't posted here for a week!  Time flies when you're hacking.

This is a really quick post just to frame a quick recording I made of some basic video game music.

I didn't want to just post the music as a raw sound file so I dropped it into a quick video format so I could put it on YouTube, and that also gave me a bit of an opportunity to mention the technologies I used to make the music.

I have a Yamaha PSR-E413 Keyboard, which is a very basic guy - just fine for what I need.  I can play it stand alone as a keyboard but I mostly use it as a midi to drive Garageband.  Because I am very low on the skill level - I can do a few basic chords & scales, that is it - I love the GarageBand ability to do multiple takes until you get something you like.

For this I chose a basic scale and just fiddled about until I found some notes I liked, then worked out a rhythm to suit.  I used GarageBands metronome to get things in time, and then turned that off when I exported the recording.

As I mention in the video to get the atmospheric and futuristic feel I wanted, I used a synth pad.  GarageBand comes with a few but I wanted to be able to tweak it a bit so I picked up NLog Poly Synth from http://www.temporubato.com/

The result is pretty average but good enough to use as a place holder for the early stages of the game, and to give a pro musician an idea of the sort of thing I want if I get funds for a bit of polish on the game.