Star Citizen: April Subscriber's Town Hall feat. Audio Team
The audio team discusses recording the orchestrated Arena Commander theme in Bratislava and mixing it at Real World Studios, plus the dynamic music system in CryEngine and Wwise. Also covered: sub bass, sound occlusion, radio, the soundtrack release and the My Planet preview.
TL;DRThe first Arena Commander track was done in MIDI as a draft for Chris, always intended for a real orchestra, which later recorded it and moved the team.
Initially everything starts with MIDI orchestration. When I did the MIDI for that one, I already knew it would be played, of course, with a real orchestra for sure. So I didn't place too much detail into it. Some backers heard it. I think it was one of the very few, probably the only track where I heard some kind of not so positive comments back then. But no one does perfect. Everyone doesn't do good all the time, actually. It needs some luck and hard work. Most of it hard work. But anyway, that track was in MIDI just to get an idea for Chris. Chris loved it back then and we always thought we would have an orchestra. It took a little bit longer but it's done now and I love it personally. I personally really enjoy it and it was really a touching moment for me when it finally came true. We had one of our very own friends and colleagues, Bob Rissolo from our team, there in the session, and he heard it live. I still hope that we can actually play it live to people, to our people, or more people than just our backers, because it's because of them that we can do all of this. Of course, I never forget that. That's why we put so much passion into it. And I remember Bob was listening to it in the hall, and his eyes got a bit wet. I never thought that it would touch him like that. It was pretty cool. That was a really cool moment for me.
That hall is just amazing. The hall in Bratislava, it's absolutely phenomenal. It's just such a beautiful building. If anybody wants to check it out, just Google the Slovak radio building. It's an upside down pyramid in a brutalist style. And the whole back of the hall, it's the biggest musical organ in all of Europe. It's like a 40 foot musical instrument. It's amazing. It's breathtaking.
TL;DRMusic is split into small blocks that shift dynamically based on a game-fed intensity value, such as arriving enemies or kills, so it follows the player's adventure.
Well, the complication is because you have this beautiful music, but obviously in this kind of sandbox gameplay, you can never guarantee what people do. You can take a beautiful song and you can just slap it into a game and it'll sound beautiful, but there's no dynamism. There's no interaction. There's no feedback with it. So what we have to do is take these tiny sections and then just move dynamically from one to another based on feedback we're getting from the game. We have a running number of intensity that's fed into from all kinds of elements. Are more bad guys arriving? Did you just kill someone, or is your friend dying? And that number rises and rises and rises. And as it does, Pedro's music, broken into these little blocks, will slowly rise with your story and your adventure, which is so much more interesting and so much more engaging for the player.
Of course. We want the music to work with the game. It's good when it also sounds nice outside the game, but the most important is, of course, the game. We want players to fully merge with the game. I feel we have a ton of material and we're doing a ton more material now. I think we just did the most difficult part. In my opinion, now comes the easier part, because we nailed the action part and the stuff that really requires a bit more work. Now it will be easier and we'll assemble it all together and we'll just adjust it as needed to make sure it fits with the game. That's it. Hope it sounds great.
TL;DRRecording the full orchestra was moving, especially the Arena Commander theme, and the musicians played with passion and skill, even sight-reading complex music.
Well, yeah, we did, and Ross can speak about it. He was there on all the sessions. He was really helpful, so maybe he can describe it better than me. Oh, well, yeah, it's really great. It's not my first time. It's really not my second time, but I try to remember when I did it for the first time a long time ago, and it was more overwhelming because it's a novelty, you're not used to that. But there was one of the tracks in the first session that we did, also in the second, but the first one really touched me. It was the Arena Commander theme, actually, because I did it so long ago and I kind of wished that moment would come true. And I had a small idea in one of the tracks, and in the initial part, I changed a bit of the melody. And that melody for some reason really touched me, because I was glad that I had that time so I could review the score. The orchestra played beautifully as well. They were feeling it, with passion, I could feel that. That's also important. Those guys are used to playing a lot of music. If they get touched by the music they have in front of them, that's probably a good sign. And I felt that.
Yeah, completely. Of course I love them all, but some of the tracks really came out much better in the performance. It's like the first time they probably played, I don't know, Beethoven's Fifth or something, it probably was not the best performance. But even though they played it just a few times before recording a final take, there were some really nice takes there. It really moved me.
Even the first performance though, these people are so outrageously talented that you can put this sheet music in front of them for Pedro's beautiful, complex music, and they can crash through it and do a pretty amazing take, just sight reading as a first performance. It's absolutely astonishing to witness it.
It's not one single orchestra. It's actually a combined orchestra with some of the best players in Slovakia. Most of them, I believe, are from the Slovak Radio Symphony, if I'm not mistaken about the name. I didn't memorize it completely. Anyway, the players are great, like Ross said. The players are really great and they just did a great job.
Well, besides Bob crying. I think anybody that was there and witnessed that music had a tear in their eye. Like I say, there was this outrageously giant church-style organ that took up the back wall. We really did try all the time to have a go on that. I never got to have a go. Did you get to have a go on it, Pedro?
Yeah, I did get to play it, and I actually recorded a little bit of it. The sound was just awesome. It made me want to use it at some point. I don't know if that will happen, but it really was an awesome organ.
That's right. That's probably more for Geoff Zanelli, the other composer that's working with us, and he will do an amazing job. Maybe we can drop the tip for him for Squadron. It probably can be a very nice addition.
TL;DRRoss mainly attended and helped with mixing at Real World studio, while Pedro credits Lee Banyard for approving live percussion, so the final recording is fully live.
Not a lot on that song. I was with him in Bratislava, but really, I'm just there to be there and if he wants to discuss anything, I can give an opinion. But this stuff is Pedro all the way. I'm just helping out where I can. After the initial recording, we took it down to Peter Gabriel's Real World studio just outside of Bath in the south of the country, which was a great decision. It was a phenomenal place to mix it. We had a world-class orchestral mixer called Peter Fuchs with us who took the helm there and he did a fantastic job. And that whole place was just an amazing thing to visit. It's just out of this world, what Peter Gabriel's done with it.
I just want to say that it's actually not true. Not only Ross, but actually another person who is not here, which is Lee Banyard, who was also decisive for this one to sound good, and I will explain why. We did an initial recording, which is what you heard, with the full orchestra except the percussion, because that's what all composers do: they place the percussion in MIDI. It's fine, everyone does that. Zimmer, anyone, except probably John Williams. And I really felt that even though the performance is great, if we had the percussion in the hall, the performance would be better, because the musicians will feel the percussion in their bodies and that will influence the way they play their own instruments. I asked Lee if I could make a new orchestration with the full percussion, which was cymbals, timpani and snare, which you heard, and then suspended cymbals as well. So all those four symphonic percussion. And I said, well, if we have some final minutes in the session, maybe in the second session, maybe we can try it. And he said yes. And he also allowed the percussion to be hired for the actual performance. And I really think it was his decision, and it was a very good decision. It really made a difference in the music. And the one you're hearing is all played live. No shortcuts. That's just like we're in a concert. There are no gimmicks, no overdubs, nothing. Just what you would hear in a concert hall. So I was happy.
TL;DRLive orchestral recordings don't suit the modular block system, so they'll be saved as whole pieces and triggered rarely for special moments, such as a first visit to a planet.
It's difficult because there are certain restrictions, obviously, with recordings of a real orchestra versus MIDI. There's the human element, which is what you want from a real orchestra, all that detail and human input. If you want to break things into blocks for that music logic system we were talking about earlier, sometimes that doesn't really work, because it needs to be so regimented and so machine-like for those blocks. So really what you want to do with these kinds of beautiful tracks, like Pedro's been writing, is save them to be enjoyed as one long piece. So these will be used in those sort of breathtaking, show-stopping moments in the game, where we'll make sure that they're triggered very, very rarely, when the right conditions happen. Say maybe it's your first visit to a planet and one of his beautiful, heart-wrenching melodies will come in, and where it has been a bit more modular and machine-like before, suddenly it becomes super emotive and human. So it's about making sure the conditions are right to go bam and drop one of these Pedro bombs on people.
TL;DRNo track count given: in-game music will be large, dynamic and grow with the universe, while the first soundtrack is a curated selection of unheard in-game pieces.
Yeah. But for the soundtrack, this is me personally, and I felt everyone felt a bit the same: I prefer to have a well-selected amount of music that works together on a CD, so I can enjoy it while driving a car or just listening at home or on the PC, rather than having a whole bunch of music, like a storage of music. So for this soundtrack, which is the first volume, we are not placing all the music that has been heard. We're placing music that has never been heard, but that actually fits better in the context of the game, because it's music that is heard while you're playing the game. That was the main goal. There's a lot of music I did that was more for trailers, but that was really for a trailer. It's like when you have music for a trailer and music from the score of a film. When you get the soundtrack, you get the music that was actually used in the film, not the music that was used in the trailers of that film. I think it's much more than we have right now, but for Squadron 42, as you know, we have a wonderful composer, which is Geoff Zanelli. He's a fantastic composer, an award-winning guy, already a really famous guy, so he will do a fantastic job. I don't know how many tracks he will do, but probably a lot as well, so it will be great. Above all, it will be great. We are all passionate about this. We really want this to work well.
Yes. Well, that's the plan. We really want to make sure that as you move around the universe... The systems that will be in place will be kind of a universal rule for how music works in space flight, etc. We'd really like the whole palette of the music to shift as you move between different parts of the universe. Take games like Red Dead Redemption, which was a great example for its dynamic music. You could move into different areas of that map, and although the flow of music was comparable no matter where you were, you really knew where you were just by the instrumentation and the tone of it. So the plan is to do that on an intergalactic scale.
It's really all about picking the good spots for everything now. Obviously everything's expanding out at a good pace, but we need to pick our moments very carefully for these pieces. There's stuff arriving sooner rather than later, but I can't give you anything very specific yet.
We are working very hard. Me and Ross are working really hard to make it, as soon as it's polished. We just don't want to show something that's not good. But I think you may hear something new in this show eventually. So you will hear some of the new stuff. So I hope that keeps the faith about everything.
I hope so. The important thing for me, I want to add this: I really like to be in my own corner doing my stuff. And I'm really thankful that people appreciate what I do. But it's not my style to be a rock star. That's for Jared, Chris, Ben, Sandi; they are the rock stars. I'm just helping them.
Well, the other guys in the sound team, particularly two of our guys, Darren and Luke, are working pretty hard on that at the moment, actually. For us, sub bass is a tricky one, because everybody loves huge boomy explosions and stuff, but it needs to be used very carefully and very considerately. Whenever somebody starts sound designing, in your first week in the job you're like, dude, I'm going to make the biggest explosion in the world. And then you realize you can't have that, because it all adds up. So they're working on systems that will manage, in an intelligent, self-sustaining way, how much of this awesome bass is getting used. So short answer, yes. It'll sound badass, but there's some special tech coming in the future for that.
We're in a transitory state with a new mega system of music logic. And it was an innocent bystander that was stripped for a little while. So we'll get that back in.
TL;DRIt's the first crowdfunded project for both; Pedro says the open process showed listeners care about audio quality, citing the criticism of his deliberately rough MIDI mock-up.
Certainly my first one. I've always been in traditional game company models where you spend many, many years secretly making a game and then you release it, and it does very well, or no one buys it and the company dies. But this is wonderful. I love the fact we can talk openly about what we're doing and have this support. It's completely new to me. I guess the same for you, Pedro.
Yes, it's the same thing for me. It's the first time with crowdfunding. It's actually been harder for me, because I was always trying to be very fair, not just with the clients, but with who was going to play the games I was scoring. I always had the idea that players are actually good listeners. There could be some discussion about whether they were or not, and I thought they were. So I was always very perfectionist about every single little detail. For me, it's important. And being in the crowdfunding game kind of proved that, because the only time I did a sloppy MIDI mock-up, which was for Arena Commander before we had the actual live recording, and which was done on purpose, that was the time I got slapped in the forum, with people saying, oh my god, this sounds rubbish or something like that. And it really shows how people are listening, and they are very good listeners. And we have several great musicians and actual composers that crowdfund us, that really help us with funding. Everyone wants to do a good job; I want to do a good job and Ross wants to do a good job. But we should never underestimate that. It is not the case with Chris Roberts, but there are other projects where the music is sometimes not regarded as something essential, like, I'll just do something because people don't care. I think by being open and crowdfunded, with people hearing it step by step, we can see how much good audio and good music matter in everything that you do. It makes stuff look better, I think. It's not all about graphics and 3D cards.
Sound occlusion is a tricky one. It's something that bothers us. We want to get it working. It makes such a big difference. The native occlusion of CryEngine isn't particularly powerful, so it's something we hope to address. It's a system that really makes or breaks certain aspects of games. And in a game like ours, obviously, we've got these confined spaceships and stuff like that. You don't want to hear sounds bleeding through, so we're working on it. We're aware of it.
It's not something that we haven't considered. That's a lot of negatives. It's something we have considered. That's easier. It feels like there's room for it. At the moment, what's important to us is just starting to learn how people play the game. Quite often, whenever you get some kind of open game, people start thinking about radio stations and stuff like that. They're thinking of GTA and stuff. But you need the space for people to enjoy it. GTA has those great big long car journeys. It seems like we have the kind of game where it'd be quite nice to be cruising along in your space cruiser and chuck a few tracks on for your friends during the journey. So yeah, we're looking into stuff and we're thinking about it. I don't think I can really say a lot more than that at the moment.
I think this could be a good moment, but maybe we'll save it for the end of the show. In the small sneak peek we have, the music has a lot of dynamic range. So I really think the dynamic range is there. We didn't lose it. It's already done. It's already mastered. So we can say that, right?
Actually, to that end, just because I'm scared I'm going to forget, I wanted to mention Darren Lambourne here from the UK audio team. He's been over to Munich to work with Christoph Stickel, and they've been mastering Pedro's music. And that mastering process is what really pulls the last extra juice out of that dynamic range. And they did an amazing job over there, which I'm sure Pedro will agree with.
Yeah, it's great. I just heard it all. It sounds really great. And as he was saying very well, it didn't lose the dynamic range. Some of the tracks are more hybrid, so they're a little bit more into the max. Of course, that's normal. But most of them have a lot of dynamic range. I'm really happy about it. Seriously, really happy about it.
TL;DRPedro uses the Kontakt sampler with several libraries and his own sampled orchestra, advises writing only what a library can do, and prefers libraries recorded in one hall.
The VST is Kontakt, the Kontakt sampler. But he was mentioning the libraries that I use inside Kontakt. EastWest has Play, which is another VST. They are all great developers. The thing about samples, and the more you work with samples you'll get to that conclusion, especially orchestral samples, is that there are no best choices. When you work with a real orchestra, you can actually write for what a human can do, which is for me the best thing you can do. When you have a sample orchestra, you have to write for what the library can do. You should never try to make a MIDI mock-up that pushes the library into an area it was never designed or recorded for. It doesn't sound good when you do it. That has happened to me sometimes, also in some of the music that we use in Star Citizen. That's why in the meantime I sampled my own orchestra. I do have all the libraries he mentioned, 8Dio, VSL, Spitfire, EastWest as well. They're all great, but they all have limitations. That's why I sampled my own orchestra about two years ago, to have a bit more freedom. Still, it's not perfect. It's just not like the real orchestra. You really need that to get the full expression, in my opinion. What I want to tell him, because I can tell he probably is a composer, or wants to be a composer, or just enjoys making music with that: just write what is comfortable for the library. Imagine the library is someone that is a little bit handicapped. You should never make handicapped people run a thousand miles. It'll never work. So just limit your composition to what the library can do, which can be a bit frustrating sometimes, but it's better to do that than make a mock-up that sounds really weird and strange with something the library can't do. I do have to say that he should also add Orchestral Tools to that list, which has been doing a great job as well. What I would say is that it's always good to focus on a library that has a complete orchestra recorded in the same hall. That's what I like: orchestras recorded in a certain hall, so you get not only the orchestra but the whole sound. VSL, in that aspect, is all recorded really dry and up close, and you have to use a lot of reverb. It kind of works, but it's never the same thing. At least for me; there are some people that use it and love it. So whatever works better for him. That's what matters.
TL;DRBoth use AKG headphones out of long habit; Pedro stresses a familiar neutral reference and a decent audio card rather than integrated motherboard audio.
I'm kind of like Ross. I also always use AKG. I don't know why, I just like the brand, but it has nothing to do with the brand. The thing is, you should have reference equipment that you like to use, that is minimally good, minimally neutral, and on which you hear all the soundtracks you really enjoy, all the great soundtracks. Memorize the sound you get from those headphones and then try to get to that sound with the reference. It's all like the principle of relativity. Of course, it should be able to reproduce the bass. There's something he shouldn't forget: it's not all about the headphones. A lot of it is about the preamps that feed the audio into the headphones. At least for me, that always made a big difference. Nowadays not so much, but you should have a professional-level audio card. Otherwise the converters will just send crap to the headphones, no matter what headphones you have. You don't need the most expensive stuff, but minimally good stuff.
Well, nowadays everything has been improving so much. I could be speaking like an ignorant, but I do have something outside the motherboard, of course, really large, over there. So it's really different and it sounds really great. I actually did a big comparison and it sounds really different. The same headphones sound completely different.
Yeah, Big Benny's, people love it so much. It does inspire me. We want to do more. And that ridiculous little song came from something so small. I just went home one evening and for about 15 minutes I wrote the melody. And then I got my wife to come in. My wife, Julia, hello. I got her to come in and she wrote some lyrics for it and sang them. And then I took it to work. So there we go, I made a little song. And then people loved it, so I expanded it out to this full-length version. That must have taken me about 60 hours. Once I knew I wanted to make it perfect, it went from no time at all to every evening thinking, what am I doing with my life? It's 1 a.m. and I'm listening to Big Benny's again to make sure the claps sound right.
TL;DRPedro Macedo Camacho names living composers who influence him, including Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, his teacher, John Williams and especially Zimmer, whom he credits with a new repetitive, rock-band-like orchestral style.
Living composers. Well, there are actually a couple of classical composers who inspired me a lot, like Steve Reich, I love that. Arvo Pärt, love that one. It's really, really great music. My own composition teacher, Eurico Carrapatoso. He's an absolutely fantastic composer. I'm always speechless about his music. I've cried a lot of times listening to his work. He's such a phenomenal composer, really. Also, of course, John Williams is always that really big rock. John Williams is great. Zimmer, I just love Zimmer. Zimmer is just great. He has something that almost no other composer has, I think. He created a new style for the orchestra to play. I think many composers wanted to do what Zimmer did but never had the guts to do it, which is to make the orchestra repeat a lot of patterns, which is what made his music popular. And he did it in such a cool way that makes the orchestra sound like a rock band, and that's awesome. I even believe that he changed the way future concert composers work because of that. That's phenomenal. So those are probably the composers that really influenced me the most, the ones who are living. So not too many.
It's actually a theme that we worked on, because we all work as a team. Lee Banyard, who is our director, was actually the one who said I should finish the track. I started that track when I saw the procedural planet [video], and we ended up not using it there. And Lee said, oh no, this is good stuff, we should use it when approaching or visiting a special planet for the first time. And so I finished the track and I actually love it. So I called it My Planet.
TL;DRThe snippet is from the middle of a track that Camacho hopes will fade in as players approach a special serene planet; procedural planets are not finished, and he is only going by the shown videos.
Yeah, I want the music to kind of fade in. That's at least what I have in mind. We're still working on it. Once we have the system to actually enter a planet with the full procedural tech, which is already done, but we need to polish it to make it playable. I can't wait to have that. I really want to play that.
Sorry, the only thing I have access to is the videos that everyone saw. I haven't seen anything else finished. But I was so excited about it, like everyone was. I loved it. I really can't wait to try it. But one of the things I have in mind is that it would be really cool if there was a special serene planet that we're going to land on, and the music kind of fades in and we hear it as we approach it. Quite a nice moment, I think, I hope.