Hello, most of you know im not just a beat maker who makes hip-hop beats and or only produces uplifting trance tracks and progressive house songs. There is more than meets the eye than just dance music with me. Video games along with dance music has always been my passion, growing up in the 80s, i have played many video games.
So with that said, a few friends asked me to share some tips about how i score video game music. Because i want to keep this post as short as possible to basically get right to the point as in not to bore you with useless information. So lets get at it.
Steps to follow
So, i decided to just comment about 4 factors that could be effecting your video game music career or side hustle. You are here because you want to learn how to compose or score video game music, for developers. If that sounds like you then you came to the right place as i will show you the four main factors you will need to focus on.
#1 Create a chord progression
#2 Create melodies on the fly from scratch from nothing
#3 create a ostinato
#4 Arrange everything based on each level, each scene etc.
More in depth
Chord progressions, are a great building block because it helps you and the rest of your band to always know what key you should be in. You also have a cohesiveness of your overall tune. For example, the listener will always expect the key to be cohesive and uniform and so forth. Your arrangements will sound top notch, because of the simple fact of using the necessary chord progressions.
Melodies- Complicated evolving atmospheric or epic chord progressions would sound great in a video game. For video games you want the user/player to be tuned in to the game and in a game like trance state. Yes. You want the user to be hearing the music in his or her head as they get to each level, as they are battling when they die or when they achieve victory. So you have to create a catchy, melody that keeps repeating to suck you in to the game and keep you coming back for more, putting more money into the machine or buying or renting more games. It all starts with the melody. A good rule of thumb is to write in minor or mix minor with a natural major.
Ostinato
Repetition , Believe it or not ,but many people do not know the capabilities the ostonato. Again video game music is all about repetition, you turn on the game its playing a song,you start fighting its playing another variation of the same loop you heard when you turned on the game. Basically each level you get to you will hear a new version of the same theme song. The more repetitious you make the song the better it will be. And that starts with a ostinato. What are they, you ask? They are short musical phrases repeated in a clever way.
Some composers will have a violin or cello playing the same riff then create the same ostinato but have other instruments play this osinato at different points in the track to give it more context and to make it sound more full.
Arrange
Once you have everything going right and everything sounding right, and all your instruments are programmed and ready to go. Then it is time for the arrangement.
The key to arranging really all boils down to space. Yes space is very important. What you want to do is only have instruments playing where they can be heard, and not have 9 instruments or 8 instruments or 7 instruments playing all at the same time. So make it a point to space out your instruments sound more and you will be thanking of me.
Of course id love to hear some of your creations, so feel free to message me your sample video game music. id love to hear it and you know we have to call.
If you are brave enough to make your own video game soundtrack and or background, id want you to have the best gear maybe in the near future when you can afford it. Actually Native Instruments is having a two hundred dollar sale on
Trilogy. They are also having a 200 hundred dollar sale on
Kontakt 6. Both of these are perfect for epic cinema type background music because they sound so real.
Do for you
If you would rather save your wll earned 200 dollars and you find yourself struggling with programming and sequencing and recording and layering and scoring and composing.(if you said hell no after reading that then hey i can do it for ya) For some things in life some things come easy and for some others things for these people they seem hard and out of reach if that is you i can do it for ya. Just visit my page at
fiverr.
If you find yourself stuck and have no clue about panning and creating space
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