NYC Conference Provides Two-Day Game Sound Crash Course For Composers and Sound Designers

For all of you composers, sound designers and recording engineers/mixers out there who’ve pondered getting into the music-for-games game, a crash-course conference coming up in NYC could be that extra push you need to go for it.

...Coming to NYC October 2-3, 2010.

GameSoundCon is a two-day symposium for composers, sound designers and recording professionals (and others) who want to learn what it takes to be successful in the video game industry.

The NYC conference will be held October 2-3, 2010 at the Faculty House at Columbia University. (Register at special rate til 9/3 HERE!)

Additionally SonicScoop readers can use the promotion code “SCOOP” and get 10% off!

Hosted by 24-year game sound veteran, G.A.N.G. Lifetime Achievement Award recipient and game audio technology developer Brian Schmidt, GameSoundCon 2010 features two packed days of seminars and master classes on video game music composition and video game sound design, focusing on the unique technical, creative and business challenges of working in the video game industry.

Check out the tentative schedule for the two-day conference HERE.

Norwalk, CT-based composer Tom Salta

The program includes master classes and roundtables on introductory and intermediate topics including: How Games are Different from Anything You’ve Worked on Before, Essential Game Audio Tech, An Interactive Underscore, Interactive Sound Design, Game Audio Tools, The Business of Game Audio and Going From Film to Games.

The keynote address at the conference will be presented by Tom Salta, composer for such games as Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Red Steel 1 & 2, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 & 2, and electronic artist/producer recording under the name “Atlas Plug.”

Before you sign up though, you might be wondering…how active is the game sound game really? And how applicable are your composition and sound design, recording, mixing and production skills — i.e. is this a viable transition for a TV composer? We went ahead and asked Schmidt for some thoughts…

What say you to composer/sound designers who would like to get involved in game sound/music, but feel it’s out of their reach, either for geographic reasons (feeling very little game development is happening in/around the NYC area) or it’s too far a leap for them to make from TV, commercials, etc.?

Actually, quite a lot of game development occurs on the East Coast; NY is in fact the fourth largest employer by state for game software publishing and development.

The top 3 are California, Texas, Washington State. California is, well, California, and Washington State is home of the Xbox creator, Microsoft, as well as having a significant Nintendo presence. Massachusetts is #5, primarily the Boston Area, and is home to companies such as Harmonix — inventor of Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games. Check out the Video Games in the 21st Century 2010 Report – see table on page 13 and note that these figures count only direct employees and not independent contractors. [Our favorite game developer, Bethesda Softworks, makers of the awesome Fallout franchise, is based in Rockville, MD.]

Brian Schmidt is a veteran game composer and technology developer, responsible for the overall audio system of the Xbox 360 game system among other major projects.

That said, a large amount of video game music & sound design is done remotely.  When I was living in Chicago, my largest client was Electronic Arts (in California and Florida). I also had steady clients in Canada and Japan.  In these days of ubiquitous broadband, location isn’t all that big a concern. People routinely ship their scores via FTP or email so distance tends not to be much of a problem. Game developers have become accustomed to working with remotely-located, independent composers and sound designers.

As far as a leap from TV/Commercials — at the end of the day, game developers want high quality, creative sound and music delivered on time and on budget.  While there are certainly technical issues important for composers and sound designers to learn which are specific to developing for games, at the end of the day it’s about great quality and professional attitude and delivery.

It’s been my experience that experienced film/TV/Commercial composers are nothing if not professional in attitude and delivery.

Games also are a good fit for the TV/Film composer in that often you’re asked to be fluent in multiple styles.  The last three small-scale games I did for one client recently were 1) surf guitar music, 2) Orchestral Viking strings/horns and 3) big band Jazz.

What would you say are the emerging opportunities out there for composers and sound designers in gaming? Are there any trends or new developments enriching this field in some way — creating new or expanded opportunities for music and sound professionals?

One change in the industry over the last couple of years… there has been a giant increase in the number of so-called “casual games” (and casual game developers).  Casual games are relatively simple, easy to play games, which are designed to be played a few minutes at a time and maybe are delivered on your iphone, in your web browser, etc.  This is a very big opportunity, particularly for those who like to do both composition and sound design — because they’re relatively small (a few minutes of music, a couple hundred sound effects), the audio is often done by a single individual.  So that is definitely a growing area.

Ubisoft's "Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands"

On the other end are the very high end games.  These are the games with the $50 million development budgets, which require hundreds of minutes of music, recorded by live orchestras, thousands of sound effects and even tens of thousands of lines of dialog recorded by SAG ‘big name’ voice talent.

These games tend to really push the envelope creatively and technically.  As a result, the audio for these games is done by larger teams of up to a dozen people.

For those games, the industry has been moving towards specialization.  For example a composer may team up with an “interactive arranger” who knows how to work with the composer to take linear music ideas and sketches and put into formats that  can be manipulated by the video game.

So there is growth at both ends of the spectrum.

At GameSoundCon NYC, you’ll be covering the tools/tech and business of game audio … on the former, would you say that composers for TV and film are largely setup for game work?

From a tools/tech perspective, the game industry does have its own specialized tools specifically for game sound and music development which wouldn’t typically be found in a TV or film composer’s or sound designer’s studio. Creating sounds or music for games isn’t as simple as just creating a .wav file in Pro Tools (or Logic, Cubase, Sonar, etc.).

These game audio tools allow the sound designer or composer to take work they’ve done in their workstation and mold them into interactive formats required by the video games. Although a great DAW/studio is certainly a necessity, a traditional setup alone generally won’t cut it. The good news is that game audio tools are generally free for use by the composer/sound designer.

Specific tech issues aside, TV and film composers and sound designers are well-set to do games, but are missing some of the know-how (above and beyond creating creative, compelling music and sound).

There was a trend starting a few years back where game developers wanted film/TV composers to start scoring their games. As they were brought in, we noticed that they’d almost always stumble when faced with some of the real-world differences between games and film — yes their music was great, but it was hard (and time-consuming) for the game developer to have to hand-hold the composer through some of the issues that would come up.

I saw it happen over and over again with different game developers and traditional composers. It’s overcoming that bottleneck which gave me the idea to create GameSoundCon in the first place.

So yes, GameSoundCon is a 2-day crash course, cram course, boot camp, etc. for people who know how to create linear audio (film, TV, music) and have that pretty well covered, but don’t know the additional technical and creative problems they are asked to solve by game developers when writing music or creating sound effects for games.. We also include some of the business aspects, as well, since that’s often a foreign world to the film composer/sound designer.

To register for GameSoundCon, go to: http://www.gamesoundcon.com/process.asp. Rates increase from $495 after September 3, so register now! Also, remember to use the promotion code “SCOOP” to get 10% off.

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