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Inside a Game Soundtrack

Nov 16, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

How the music for Demigod was composed, arranged, and recorded.

Getting musical

The first decision for Mostrom was the score's musical direction. "Choosing an instrument palette was probably the toughest thing to do in the process," he explains. "If you listen to the music, there's not much brass at all, and there's no choir either."

Instead, Mostrom combined elements of orchestral and ethnic instrumentation (see Web Clip 1). "I didn't want it to sound like I was featuring any ethnicity," he says. "I wanted it to sound like it was another world." Instruments included duduk and tambura wind instruments. "A lot of the stringed instruments are ethnic, as well," he says. "It's kind of all blended together."

At first, Mostrom had to submit ideas to higher-ups at the company for approval. "Once they knew my general direction, they were very happy with where I was going with it," he says. At that point, he was able to continue without needing constant sign-offs.

Although he eventually mixed the game music in Digidesign Pro Tools, much of the composing and arranging work was done in MOTU Digital Performer, and was often in the MIDI realm. His instruments included those in the Native Instruments Komplete bundle, as well as Sonoma Wire Works(formerly Submersible Music's) DrumCore, among others. He used orchestral sounds from a range of collections, including those from EastWest and the Vienna Symphonic Library.

Mostrom, who was a music major in college, deftly handled the classical orchestration. Although there were some live recorded wind and percussion parts on the soundtrack, the strings were all programmed, yet sound very realistic (see Web Clip 2).

He played many of the MIDI wind instrument tracks using an Akai EWI. "It was really fun using it," he says, "because you can be so much more expressive than with a regular controller."

Mostrom also created custom instrument sounds to help create the feeling of otherworldliness that the game required. "I did a lot of custom sound design work for the drums," he says. "I actually went out and recorded a bunch of crazy things: axes hitting a huge garage door and stuff like that."

Many of the percussion sounds ended up being heavily layered (see Web Clip 3). "I wanted those big hits to be their own and not sound like anybody else's," he says. He would often pitch the samples down to make them sound even bigger. "I would treat the drum hits more like a sound effect. Some of the drum hits would have 30 different elements for the hits themselves."

Don't annoy me

One of the differences between game and film/TV composing is that in a game, a piece of music often repeats numerous times. Therefore, composing themes that won't become tiresome when heard over and over is an important consideration. "If the themes are too dumbed down and you can't get them out of your head," Mostrom says, "it gets kind of annoying."

So does that mean he is trying not to write memorable themes? Well, not quite. "For me, it's all about choosing your moments for where you want your themes to stick out," Mostrom says. "And then trying to make it so those themes aren't repeating so much that they get annoying. It's a very competitive game, and some players play it so much that if they're hearing the same theme over and over, they'll just turn it off."

In a videogame, different music gets triggered depending on what's happening in game play. "I wanted the overall match [the fight between demigods] to have different intensity levels," Mostrom says. "I wanted it to have a climax at the end so it really fluctuates depending on what's going on.

"Because I didn't want there to be a lot of repetition, I have alternate mixes that I'm triggering, as well as different themes that I would use throughout. But the overall pacing and shape to the match was important to me because it's not a game that really has a lot of downtime, you could say. It's pretty much nonstop action (see Web Clip 4)."

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