Star Citizen Live: Make Mine Music

So, as I was saying, I was a huge Wing Commander fan. How did I get started in Star Citizen? I was a huge Wing Commander fan, and I used to play with my father, actually, before my father passed away. It was a long time ago. And he also loved the project. So when I saw this project being announced, I immediately knew I had to find a way to contact Chris Roberts. I literally showed him some of my work. And I did a demo and it started from there. And I got a nice proposal to make, as if it was a second stage demo, where I had to compose a bunch of stuff and also use a live orchestra at the time. Then we used it a couple of times later as well. But at the time I had to use a live orchestra to see how it would sound with the real thing. And I think it went well. Probably, otherwise I wouldn't be here.

And it's curious, but before that test, as I was talking about some minutes ago with Jared, my son is turning seven in June. And I was composing the first commercial we did on Star Citizen, which was the 300i. The commercial came out days later or something. I mean, it was basically the same time as the 300i came out. Literally, I was composing it while my wife was almost about to go to hospital. So I finished it before that, thankfully. And it was a special commercial. I still love it. Some people sometimes ask me which ship I love the most. And I have to say it's the 300i. Because of that, it reminds me of my son, which is like a treasure for me.

Well, ArcCorp for me was like... Taking the question two steps: two things before going through ArcCorp. Each planet is so much work from the team. It's so much dedication that everyone pours into it that I feel that it requires a completely new set of music. I try to be as original as possible, without being so original that no one even relates to it, but trying to be as original as possible.

And ArcCorp in particular, I loved doing it. It took me a while to do it. That was not a fast piece. New Babbage was done at a much faster pace. But I tried to merge all the cultures. Everyone looked at ArcCorp, and everyone's immediate response would be, oh, this looks like something futuristic, punkish, whatever stuff. And I looked at it and said, no, no. When I looked at this planet, I saw a merge of cultures all working together as one. And I wanted the music to feel futuristic, but with roots in each kind of style of culture that we could think about. So to me it was not an easy process. How could I do this without sounding ethnic, without sounding African, without sounding Japanese, without sounding anything in particular, but sounding like everything at the same time? So I think it was a lot of work. I was getting a bit nervous at times, because when you go into unknown territory, you feel unsafe in what you're doing. But I think in the end it really worked well. I love the piece till now. I still love it. And I know what others feel about it, but it's very touching to me.

Also, when I make music for a certain planet, I try to make the music not only describe the planet, but also describe some message, what I feel when I look at the planet. And since ArcCorp is that monstrous, global constructed city, I thought, oh man, this is traffic everywhere. Everyone crazy going from one side to another. And it's probably so populated, but a bit like in the real world, maybe people just go on their routine: work, home, work, home, stuff like that. So I tried to put that in the music a little bit, the frenziness of the world, and everyone on their own. That's what I thought.

Hurston was a completely different approach. One of the things my father loved a lot, and one of the things he did when I was a kid, was to listen to a lot of music with me. And he had a broad taste. Actually, recently, like last week, that happened for the first time in my life: I went through his old LP collection. I couldn't believe it. I'm 40 now, and I've seen that collection since I was born, a huge collection. He was very organized. And I went through all the LPs to see what he had, what he heard. And that's exactly the image I had from when he was still with us. And he loved Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream. So Hurston is like a hymn to those origins. To me, they're some of the main pillars of electronic music, at least of electronica.

And on Hurston, I tried to give it a little different taste. I tried to make the synths sound like an orchestra, which was what Vangelis did a lot, and tried to make the orchestra, which is there, sound like synths. So it was the reversal of what we usually do, which is something I never tried before. And I believe it worked quite well. I liked it. It was also hard to approach at first, but I think it worked out, at least for me, quite nicely. As I was saying in our pre-chat, it gives enough space in the music that we could create a whole feature film on that planet just using the musicscape from those few pieces I did. I think it's enough because there are enough different instruments, enough different thematic content there. So that's how I did it.

Okay, so this particular track, which I will show you, was composed a bit before, not too much before, CitizenCon last year. And it was basically the first time I tried to feel New Babbage, because the composer receives everything very late in the process, of course, because things have to be done for me to see stuff, in this case at least. And even though we had concepts, one thing is that and another thing is to have the actual footage inside the planet and to feel it.

When I saw New Babbage, I saw it first from afar, because the demo started from afar. We saw microTech from afar. And then we were coming to New Babbage and I saw all that snow and that horrible environment. And then when you get to New Babbage, it's like being in a safe place, like being in a beautiful safe place. And it reminded me, I'm sorry, it's true, I really thought about my daughter. I thought a lot about my son when I did the 300i. And I thought a lot about my daughter with microTech, but mainly New Babbage. It's like when you're a father in the world, and the world is all hazard, you can see it even more now, and you try to make the world a safe place for your little baby. So that's how I thought. I want music that feels like, okay, everything else is gone. Now you are safe again. You feel the joy of living without any worries.

So when I did this track, I immediately thought I had to do something very different. And I picked instruments. I wanted an organ. If I'm getting too technical, Jared, please let me know.

I don't think you can get too technical with a Star Citizen crowd.

So this is the actual initial organ I used, which is a custom patch that was built just for microTech, for Star Citizen. I try never to use a library patch that we can buy. I try to also create the instrument. I like to do that. That was also merged with another layer over here, and it created this. Because it reminded me of my daughter, like a sacred safe place.

Then I thought, well, this needs a bit more meat, because I wanted to have the weight of the city. It's not like a small daughter, it's like a really big daughter. So there was the bass, so you can hear it with more weight. Then I thought, okay, so this is what I hear when I'm approaching New Babbage. But I wanted to have an element that felt like being in New Babbage as well in this crescendo, because this is music for you reaching New Babbage. And I thought, okay, I need to make something that makes me feel happy. And this was it. Which is actually very odd. It doesn't sound like anything. And it's always in the same chord, while the organ is always changing chord, and then the strings and all the arrangement. And at first I thought, well, I'm doing just one chord for one part and the other part is always moving. This can sound a bit strange. Well, the reason I did that and kept it that way: I wanted the music to have the sounds from inside New Babbage within the sound that you're hearing when you're reaching New Babbage. So that was the philosophy I had.

Then after that, there's the melody theme from New Babbage, which is this. It repeats throughout the whole thing. It goes up and then dances a bit graciously, like a ballet dancer when he's bowing at the end, something like that. That's the image I had in mind. The sound of the violins is different from what I usually use: it's played near the bridge, which is sul ponticello. I wanted this sound because it's more frozen. It reminds me of something frozen, and the planet is frozen. So it's not the usual articulation that you would get from the violin. I'm doing something I was not supposed to do, because I can screw this up completely, and this is live. So this would be the normal bow position for the string section of an orchestra. I wanted these strings to feel the ice cold of New Babbage. So I used a patch where the strings are played legato in a more frozen way. But the result initially was a bit too harsh, so I mixed it with a bit of sul tasto, which is played a bit more up the strings, not so far down near the bridge. Sorry, in Portuguese I have the name, but in English I forgot it now on the livestream. Anyway, it's something like this. Then it repeats again, doubled in octaves.

So as you're hearing, the strings are playing the melody, and that odd stuff is just playing a single chord, because it's like the joy of a kid inside when you reach New Babbage. I felt like a kid when I saw New Babbage inside. It was like, wow, this is awesome. I personally loved it. So it had to have the joy inside. And then there's the organ, which gives the sacred side, like the sanctum where you're safe from all that hazard stuff.

And then after that buildup, and this was a hard part for me, not easy at all to achieve, but after a lot of experiments, I felt, well, when I reach there, I want to feel like, oh, I'm here. So I hope you feel that musically. I'll play this a little bit here. And you will hear a soprano, because the soprano was singing in the microTech theme before we reach the New Babbage landing zone. No one told me to consider microTech as having any gender. That's just my image. And that was basically, in a very simplified way, how I did the first part of the theme. Then there's the second part, like a repeat, but with more emphasis on the epicness of the site, not so much the emotional part, which I love.

So there's a lot of technical stuff; this music was a bit technical. In this track, I didn't go too much back to my influences. I went more for modern influences of electronic music that I really love. I love symphonic parts, I love orchestra, I also love electronica. So it was a bit more modern. It was more about patch building, creating the sounds that each instrument had. So this is one of the sounds, this is another. I created like 20, then I narrowed it down to these ones. So you're just getting the final result. We've seen so little, but it took so much. It was difficult to explore and to get into this. I was nervous when I created it, because it's so different: organ, strings, synths and soprano, it's not too common. But I hope you guys enjoy it. I'm proud of it, but I hope you enjoyed it.

No, I come in a bit later in the process. When it has to be, it comes, basically.

I suppose it's better for you to have something real to see before you start your work anyway. It's just like a movie composer has a rough cut of the movie ready before they begin composing.

When I did ArcCorp, I started way before, and on New Babbage I came in very late. And there are pros and cons in each process. I think when it comes very early, you can experiment a lot. Sometimes you just deviate a lot, because you have the luxury of time. When you don't have time, sometimes you just have a day or a few hours, you just have to do it. Sometimes it comes out even better, because you did it with your first reaction to what you saw. So it's not bad. It's always good. So I'm not worried about having more or less time to work, or about already working on it. It's not always a benefit.

It's always easier to love music when it's coupled with an amazing project and with amazing visuals, and with the amazing sound team, and everything looks awesome. So it's a bit unfair. There are a lot of talented folks around the world that didn't have the luxury I had of working on such an amazing project. But it gives us responsibility, which I actually love. I love pressure. I work much better under pressure than with any other method.

But one thing is for sure, and I should have mentioned it before, but I'll take this chance to mention it, which is very important: throughout the process of making the music of Star Citizen, I've never been alone, ever. There have been a lot of talented people that have worked with me and helped me a lot to get through, and to give me ideas and insight. Not only, obviously, Chris Roberts, because in a way this project is his child, so he knows what he wants, and he always has a word to say, and I love his insights. He's like a living encyclopedia of movie soundtracks and classical music. He knows a lot, so he's someone whose feedback you care about. So that's a very good thing. And that benefited Star Citizen a lot, because he knew what he wanted and he knew how to articulate what he wanted with me. And that helped.

Other people I have to mention, and I'll go in backwards order from the most recent: there's the audio director, which is Darren Lambourne. He's a super talented composer as well, and also a talented musician. And he helped me a lot through this process, New Babbage in particular. I'll specifically mention this track that I showed you. I didn't have the orchestral percussion initially, which was actually his idea. My music was a bit more electronica. And he said, Pedro, you're forgetting the orchestral percussion side. You have to try to give it a bit more. And I was so under pressure at that time. I said, oh my goodness, I have to revise this track. But I made the revision. And actually, he was right. After some months, he heard the version I did and the version after his comment, and it was definitely better as he commented. So if I didn't have that extra pair of ears, that would have been absolutely impossible.

Another person I have to mention, who is still working with us, thankfully, is Phil Peers-Smallwood. Hi, Phil. He was absolutely great during the whole process. Not only New Babbage; in all the CitizenCons, which is always a time where I've happened to compose a lot of music, he is my side man. I don't like considering myself a Maverick, but if I was going to be Maverick, I would be nothing without Goose beside me. You need a co-pilot to be with you sometimes, just saying, don't worry, we've got your back. Even if this music comes a bit later, we will find a way to place it to make you sound good. It makes you feel more relaxed. It gives you insight, gives you ideas. Just like in a movie, and I've worked on a lot of commercials with a lot of directors, and a game in particular is even more so, I think: there's a lot of teamwork. Also, the implementation is great. I'm grateful that the music was very well implemented in the game. Otherwise, if it was placed at a wrong moment in the game, it wouldn't sound any good.

And there are many other people that came before them, like Ross Tregenza, who was also a great guy, Lee Banyard. He was like the person that had the role of Phil now. It was great to work with him as well. Also, there's Luke, who at some point played guitar for me. He was great. The whole team is important for you to make any great music. So if I was alone, you would not love me. Only with this team is it possible. That's how I feel. I'm not saying this just because it looks good or feels good, or because it's the usual thing people say. This is actually real stuff that's happening in the project. So thankful for the team. Thank you.

No, no. It's always in sequence. There's no exploring. You have to do that, and you just do that, and that's it. It has to be done until you get to the next one. Don't jam. It's not good, because you have to focus on one thing and just get it done and go to the next, which is great because you go into very ultra-fine detail. For example, there's one of the interior tracks that I did for New Babbage that we didn't hear here. I did the track. I liked it. I thought the mix was nice. But then later on, Darren came in and he also mixed the track, and what you hear in the game is Darren's mix, and the track gained with his mix. It's basically the same thing, but it feels different because of the mix. The mix is also important. So you have to focus on one thing to get to the fine details of that. So it's not only the notes, it's also the patches, the way you perform it on MIDI or record it live, and also the way you mix. So I think jamming will never get you there. At least for me it doesn't work. Maybe it can work for other people, but not for me.

I think it's more the voice. That's how I think. I don't actually have to sing it. I can hear it in my head, but it's always with a voice, with a vocal. It can be a guttural voice, some groove, something like that, and you can feel the rhythm. You're looking at the screen, at the image or the movie, and I feel it with my voice. And then the melodies also, I try to sing them while I write them. If you can sing a melody, it's usually a good sign. Attention, you don't have to be able to sing it for it to be a good melody. There are melodies that go into extreme ranges. I could hardly sing this melody here. But in my head, I can sing in any range, because I can have a soprano voice inside my head. But it's always with a vocal tone in it. So maybe it's the voice, even though I'm a pianist myself. So after doing that part, I go to the piano to make the harmonies and to find the colors. I think this was a good example in the track that we heard, where a very simple instrument that was just doing a simple triad gained so many colors along the track because it had different harmonies next to it.

There are different problems. Usually, when you write for a movie, the deadlines are much shorter. You have to write it much faster. And you can actually make the music work with the mix that you have. For example, if you already have the sound effects and the dialogue, you can make music in a way that will work with that. Sometimes it can be simpler, sometimes it can be more complex. You always have to judge everything. When you're doing music for a game, you don't know what's happening in the game. Well, sometimes you do, but for ambient music, you don't know exactly what's happening in the game. So in both worlds there are many different situations and specific problems that occur.

On Star Citizen, I do tend to work a lot on both sides of it. When I do music for marketing, I'm doing music as if it was for a movie, with a bit of a longer deadline than usual, because when I'm writing for a commercial or for movies, there are days of deadline. You have one day to make a cue, one day or less than a day. It has to come out, and it has to come out good. And for a game, you usually tend to have a bit more time. Not always in Star Citizen. In Star Citizen, sometimes you also have a short deadline, plus all the aspects that come with the fact that the game is never linear. You don't know what's happening, what the sound effects are going to be. So when you compose for a game, if you know there can be an explosion, maybe you can't make any percussion that sounds too low anywhere during the whole two or three minutes of the song, because it can happen at the start or at the end. If you're scoring a movie and you know the explosion is going to occur at that moment, you can beef up the percussion before that and then calm down on the explosion, or the mixer will just mix it, because it's actually a mixer that will mix the movie. So I think both have a lot of challenges. One thing you have to do is try to make good music. There are two styles of music, good and bad; try to make the good one.

The music that really stuck with me the most: there was a track, and I actually made a homage in Star Citizen because of it. It's a track from The Chaos Engine, which was made by the same company that made Speedball 2 on Amiga. It's a long time ago, early 90s. And I used to play it a lot, again, with my father. I used to play Chaos Engine with him. And I just loved the vibe of it. It was electronica, and it really worked very well for the tech at the time. Of course, we have to take that into account.

I also loved the music for Amiga in general. Amiga was very important to me because Amiga was the computer where I started composing, when I was 12 years old. Sorry to keep mentioning this, but it's important because it was part of my composition history: the first piece of music that I did was the last piece of music that my father heard. And he enjoyed it. After that, he had cancer and he stopped being able to hear. And eventually he passed away. So the Amiga was very important to me. I used to play a lot of computer games with my dad, and computer games in general were very important to me also because of that. We also enjoyed movies together a lot. But those games were games I had a lot of fun with, and I enjoyed the music.

Another game was Flashback. I really enjoyed the music in Flashback on Amiga. It was really awesome. Shadow of the Beast, another incredible one. The first time I heard the music from Shadow of the Beast, I was like, whoa, with that pan flute. It was curious: when I was working on Star Citizen and making the music for the racing track, the music which I called Speed Activated, which was the only other music I had my voice in, there's a part where I say 'Speed Activated'. That was a homage to The Chaos Engine. If you play Chaos Engine and you activate a node, the voiceover always says 'node activated' with the same kind of groove. I tried to contact the person who did the music for Chaos Engine, because I thought maybe it would be cool to actually use the bassline from the game, and get an authorization, but unfortunately the composer is already dead. So sorry for the long response, but there's a lot of awesome music that has been done recently, but that's the music that really stuck with me, at a particularly young age.

I kind of prefer outside, because it's always challenging. One thing I've noticed in my life is that people usually judge other styles as easier than the style they're used to, until they actually have to do it. And when they have to do it themselves, they actually come to the conclusion, oh my goodness, this stuff was not as easy as I thought. That usually happens. For example, I'm a jazz musician. This is just an example. Jazz usually has a very complex harmonic structure. It's kind of deep stuff. You have to learn it and play it correctly. And then you say, oh, pop is so easy. Just two or three chords. Anyone can do it. Then when you try to do it, you come up against the challenges. And when you finish, you compare it with an actual good pop song and say, oh my goodness, my track doesn't sound any good. It's not as easy as I thought. So it's always great to be humble and respect others' work. So always try to do something you're not used to.

No, not mine. Something I should have mentioned here: as far as I know, the music in New Babbage's bar was done by Darren Lambourne. He composed all that. He did an awesome job on that. I wish I could have done one, but I was busy doing the non-diegetic tracks, which require a lot of another style of work. That's how it ended up. Maybe someday I'll try to do one. But I did the music with vocals for the 300i commercial, the second one, which had the singer. So there were vocals, a bit jazzy, but there were vocals. It was cool.

I have to give minor credit to Mike Kinsella, who wrote the lyrics.

No, he was great. He was great doing the lyrics. It was hard to match the music to the picture that was already locked and make it seem like the music was composed before the picture was done. Very tricky. At least for me, it was very tricky.