Soundtrack for the game: humanists cry too

About myself

Briefly about yourself. My name is Dmitry. Since childhood I have been surrounded by friends - programmers, sysadmins and other IT specialists. He tried to connect life with this - at one time he was a web developer of shit sites, he taught html, php, but it did not go further. All the time in the creativity. But my main job work always revolves around IT. I am a tech support administrator in a small but proud provincial Internet provider, a copywriter, a freelance content manager.



What spoiled my life and did not give me time and assiduity to master any well-paid IT specialty is the love of writing all sorts of soundtracks and OSTs. From the perspective of experience, I can immodestly declare that I am a very good composer. I write from time to time. But I'm not interested in the arrangement of artists, I do not write music for songs and dances with cowards lowered. I like to combine classical, rock, ethnic and deep (intelligent) styles of electronic music without words. This results in excellent soundtracks for movies, games and other media projects. Which are written simply “in the table”.
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Because in the modern world it is not enough to make a good product when there is no window to show it. As long as you are unknown, nobody needs you and is not in demand. Write a voice acting for the film Bondarchuk will not call you, because they do not know about you. Large domestic game-devs of the company send you to the forest, simply because the staff already has a composer. Jobs on this position, if you google, dated the beginning of the two thousandth, new does not appear.

Therefore, music remains my hobby without a chance to turn it into a profession and the meaning of life. And the unrealized dream, as it does not drive into the depths of yourself, still gnaws at you. And sometimes it is so strong that in a fit of hysteria, you fit into the voice acting of the first indie game with a bunch of hemorrhoids and for a penny in the hope that this project will shoot, become famous, and someone big and important will pay attention to your soundtracks.

About the project “Star Federation | Star Federation”

Once again, I jumped in to write a musical accompaniment to the game. Long thought, is it worth it. But this project seemed to me quite serious, in order to spend time on it even for free. And then there was some suggestion. The game is “Star Federation”. A small team of enthusiasts made an online space strategy that seemed to me very interesting, intelligent and thoughtful.

The game has its own mp3 player, something remotely resembling radio stations in the games of the GTA series. Each player can choose his own musical accompaniment, switching tracks to his discretion right in the process of the game. The development team of “Star Federation” decided not to go the way of piracy or selection of music with a free license from audio stock. They wanted originality, but with stylistic support for a certain range of already existing musical compositions of other composers. Simply, I was given several references (samples that need to be followed). Very diverse in terms of musical style. From Dark Ambient, metal, eight-bit techno, to Jean Michel Jarre's classic works. In common, these melodies had one thing - they had a clear cosmic smell. But a completely different structure, melody, musical instruments and principles of writing. That is necessary not to die from the monotony in the work.

It took me 18 songs for 7 minutes each. This is about twice as much music as any standard music album of popular artists. Such albums they write for two or three years with a huge team of professionals. I had two months, I myself, several live musical instruments accumulated during the days of stormy rocker youth, and a half-dead computer with old music software (at that time I hadn’t been composing for about 4 years).

And I agreed to this delusional venture, promising to give 200 percent (I like fiction, space and rock musicians, who are the developers of this game). But one desire to start working was not enough.

Startup problems

Today, if you are poor, but you can write music, four options for the technical realization of creating your workplace and working tools open up before you:

1) You can record music on a computer through an inexpensive microphone, using inexpensive real musical instruments and an adequate inexpensive audio card and special software for multi-track audio recording (sequencer). The software, naturally, is pirated. But in general, all this requires certain costs for the purchase of a microphone and bad musical instruments (of which you need a lot to make the songs more diverse). All this junk needs somewhere to search, store, know how best to record. And on all this you need to be able to play a little (learn how to press the keys on the piano, play the trumpet, drums, learn to play the bagpipes and torture the violin is not exactly the same thing and this may not be enough life). The composer knows the principles of writing music (he knows by ear how to play), but he is not always a multi-instrumentalist (he doesn’t know how to play everything like he hears in his head). This is a bad way. It takes a lot of time, money, useful space, and at the output we get the quality of home recording from the apartment.



2) The last century throws up the idea of ​​buying a synthesizer that connects to a computer via a MIDI interface. Its memory bank contains about a hundred presets - a simulation of the sounds of various musical instruments. And if not, then the drivers from any of the cheapest audio cards already have a similar built-in synthesizer. These MIDI keys are not expensive. You only need to be able to play the piano. No extra costs. You can record directly to the sequencer without a microphone. Some positives. But the output is music from the Russian perestroika serials or most of the songs from Chanson radio. Why? Because the simulation of the sound of a violin by synthesizer sounds even less like a violin than a cheap similarity to a violin with aliexpress. The best that can be done with the help of such synthesizers is polyphonic melodies for the first colored push-button mobile phones.



3) You can get a job in a real recording studio. Where there is access to good microphones, real expensive musical instruments, where the room is created specifically for working with sound. But there is no free time to write what you want. You will write backing tracks and little bits to different gifted individuals who are good if they are at least like Buzov (in terms of fame, and not in terms of creativity), and not smoked rappers from the neighboring region.



4) You can use the virtualization of musical instruments and the technical equipment of the recording studio. These are the so-called VST (Virtual Studio Technology) musical instruments and plug-ins. This is a very expensive software, which, of course, is pirated in the Russian Federation. Each defined VST instrument is a virtual clone, as a rule, a very expensive real musical instrument.



For example - some Stradivarius violins. This is a library of recorded sounds from this violin. Recorded on a good microphone (or on several different good microphones separately), in a smaller room, larger, in the concert hall and in the stadium. In each room and for each type of microphone, each note is recorded on each string of a freaking violin many times. Because each note can be played with different strengths, because the violin can be played either with a bow or with a pinch method (with fingers), because there are a lot of techniques for playing the same bow and many more “because” like you can also play on the strings muffled by the palm of your hand. ” As a result, each such library of VST instruments includes many thousands of different sounds of the same violin. The more expensive the VST instrument, the more these sounds will be. Because there are sure to add a few Stradivari violins of different sizes, year of production and color to choose from and some kind of garbage like: “we have little room, studio, stage and stadium. And let's write down all these violins in the Cathedral of Notre Dame and add to the user one more preset (pre-tuning) of the sound of this violin in this cathedral, and then suddenly you want to play so that the sound is like in a cathedral. ”

Such a VST musical instrument is embedded directly into the program for recording music (sequencer) as a plug-in and is controlled by this instrument from a regular MIDI interface (MIDI keyboard, MIDI pad, old synthesizer with MIDI connectivity or even using a standard computer keyboard, connected to the sequencer through several special softin). That is, to play the virtual violin with an absolutely real expensive sound, you do not need to be able to play the violin, you need to be able to press the keys on the piano.



All this is cool from the point of view that any rogue like me would never dare to hope that he would be allowed to play the Freddie Mercury piano or lend Jimi Hendrix his favorite guitar to record his shit track. And here all this is realizable. Of course, if you engage in piracy. If you buy - no money ordinary Russian is not enough. The use of virtual instruments is the only possible option in order to create bearable, good and even sound work.

You can find and get at your disposal any VST-tool that you want. It would be desirable to add 40 orchestral cellos or the drums of Metallica to the composition - all this is possible.

But there is a serious “BUT”. Does virtualization require anything? Serious computing power.



You can’t normally use these VST tools if you have a dead processor, 4 gigabytes of RAM (three of them are downloaded by the tenth Windows) and a 100 GB hard drive. No sir. To quickly and well simulate the whole orchestra, you need just a little more. Otherwise, writing one song will take you two weeks, instead of one or two days.

Why? Because the composition in the head of the composer is usually already scribbled: you can imagine how a musical instrument should sound, what instrument and at what point in time. Melody is in my head. And it is ideal to have on hand all VST music instruments at once, open. To record separately the part of each of them, immediately listen to how different musical instruments sound together, and on the go correct flaws, inaccuracies, or change unsuitable musical instruments to others. (Yes, music in my head is always more ideal than it actually comes out, I don’t know how Mozart dealt with it). But all of them cannot be opened at the same time, because each of them wants to consume 1-3 GB of RAM. I try not to use more than 8 musical instruments in one melody. If this business is multiplied, there will be not weak requests for RAM. If you look at Rihanna's tracks, 45 musical instruments were recorded there in places. How many of their standard small orchestra - in general do not want to think. Darkness. In general, at the same time everything does not start.

I had to get out.

It was necessary to start the program for recording (sequencer), turn on one of these tools. And start recording the musical part on this instrument. Listen, export the resulting sound to the WAV audio format (equivalent to rendering in video processing, which is actually needed to export the received product and unload processing power — when writing music, until it is exported, to listen to it with the ability to change notes, all of it is calculated through RAM and processor. After exporting, it is almost unchanged). Exporting a single instrument usually takes about 10–20 minutes, depending on the computer’s workload, the length and complexity of the part of this musical instrument.

When one musical instrument is ready and exported to audio, you need to close all the musical software so that the RAM is unloaded and cleaned, open the software again, select another musical instrument, register its part, listen to it and also export the sound to WAV.

And so many times, as many times as you yourself invented musical instruments that should be involved in writing this composition.

It's a hell of a lot of fun when, in the final stage, you're trying to put together the lighter exported WAV audio tracks of each individual musical instrument in the same sequencer. You put them parallel to each other, like layers in any video editor, you press play and you hear horror. Somewhere you have not come together. It does not sound like it was, notes somewhere are not friendly with each other and sound lazy. And instead of the flute here it was better to use a trombone. At this point, the whole process begins almost anew. This is if you do not take into account the repeated hangs and crashes of software without autosaving projects.

Problem solving

Returning to the topic of the article. A good music album on 18 tracks, with a total length of two times more than that of ordinary artists for two months to write in such conditions - is unrealistic. They do it in expensive studios with a wagon of specialists for two years. I didn't want to write a bad album. Something had to be done. I took a timeout of five days. And in five days I had to make up for lost time in the past long years without music.



I borrowed RAM from friends. Found and mastered a bunch of music software with the ability to automate, optimize and release computational power. My salvation was the sequencer and audio editor SONAR Plantium 2018. (I hadn’t seen any Sonar before, but I’ve heard that many generations of sound producers broke their brains on this hell of a thing). I have always worked in another simpler software from the same manufacturer and was afraid to change something. And then I had to.



In general, in short, this miracle thing allows you to do the unthinkable. It allows you to freeze individual musical instruments when you do not need them. For example, while you are playing the notes of a bass guitar, you can freeze the drums, the piano and everything else. At this moment, lightning-fast pre-rendering or pre-export of these musical instruments is performed right in the program. You hear these musical instruments all together, and you can adjust the notes of one non-frozen instrument to them. Finished with him and wanted to correct something in another musical instrument? Freeze the bass guitar, defrost that instrument, edit and listen to everything, until your ears fall off or decide that that is all.

Exactly five days was enough for me to pick up all the tops of the grandiose music software industry that could be quickly put into action. And exactly five days was enough for me to realize that if I hadn’t been looking for simple ways in the past and was not too lazy (not afraid) I would have been able to study the most complex professional music software more tightly in my time, I could now be a completely different person. This is a banal, but important note about laziness and fear of changing the usual way, learning new things, suitable for any person in any field of activity. Kick yourself and more often. Otherwise, it will not work at all, and then you will always have to look for the guilty around you, just to not think that you yourself are a donkey.

In addition to this terrible SONAR'a, I plunged into the study of heaps of modern plug-in additions to it. And this is an extremely amazing world of robots, AI and neural networks and something self-learning and self-understanding, which I originally planned to write an article, but leave it for the future - this is really more interesting than this complaint article. I will only mention that there are cases when you are asked to make music similar to this one of Michael Jackson’s tracks. You pick up the same or a similar set of musical instruments, invent your own melody, but in the end this freaking orchestra does not sound at all like what was required. And then you have been working for weeks with equalizers, filters, saturators, in order to liken the overall sound to a sample. And still it does not work, because the composer and the sound producer are two big differences. I had to look for robots that have long been able to do all this and more.

Then I had to look for a way to combine a bunch of different musical directions in one concept album.

At the exit, I received a good product, which customers liked, and most importantly, it perfectly fitted into the game and received good feedback from the players of the “Star Federation”.


And it was absolutely impossible for everyone how it turned out. No one really understood that instead of drums, radio signals from real stars-pulsars were hidden in music, translated into an audible frequency spectrum. Everyone didn’t care that there were Gandhi’s speeches, first people’s talks on the Moon and other dubs like radio signals from different parts of the cosmos received by a radio telescope and the fifth track were written to the memory of Chester Benington (music echoes final masquerade of Linkin Park)

I did not become a famous composer, because this game and soundtracks were not noticed by someone big and important, because the “Star Federation” hadn’t yet fired, although I was hoping very much - the project is mega cool and intellectual. But the guys just like me, there is no fame and large resources to get this fame.

Therefore, I once again think to stop writing music forever and to do some normal business, although even after writing this soundtrack I studied everything that had been missed before. As deep as it ever will be useful to me.

Why did I push on Habr to pour out soul? Well ... how to promote yourself and the Star Federation space online strategy, keeping a little hope that the project will be noticed, and the developers who have become my good friends, and me as a music writer. Until new meetings on the air.