Composing For Games
David Konow: Does the music come into your mind when you're playing the game, or does it come later?
ALEX KATUNICH: It depends on the game. I mean some of these things are real no-brainers. If you're playing a racing game, to me the first thing that I was thinking about was a tempo and a feel. Racing is supposed to have you on the edge of your seat. I wouldn't want to put something really slow and down tempo in a game that's supposed to be fast. So that's a good starting point: what's the feel of this game? And hard-driving music isn't necessarily going to work in a game where you're creeping around trying to be as quiet as you possibly can and not get discovered by aliens.
There's also a third approach, which is once I've played this game a whole bunch of times, and I'm no longer relying on the audio component to really attribute a mood to anything. So I get to choose whatever I feel like listening to. If I'm in a mood to listen to outrageous electronica and dance tunes while I'm playing something that's really slow, that's my prerogative. But in general with scoring, I would say starting with a feel. What's the game about? Can I match whatever the feel and tone is of the game to the music? There are a lot of different genres, but tempo is a pretty important thing. That's usually a good place to start.
David Konow: How different is making soundtracks to making an album?
ALEX KATUNICH: Pretty different. The soundtrack stuff that I was doing for those games tended to be a little bit more song-oriented. One of the games was a racing game, so it lent itself to songs without lyrics, just up-tempo stuff. Red Faction had to have a little more ambiance to it, so it was a new experience. Typically, you write a song, write all the instrumentation, the singer writes the lyrics and you record it. This was, "What should the feel be if you're about to go into battle?" You want to suggest a certain amount of tension. "What should the feel be when you're actually in the midst of engaging in fighting?" It needed to be a little bit more emotive in writing for those kinds of scenarios. Playing bass and playing guitar is the same whatever you do, but the mentality behind why you're writing certain parts and chord changes is definitely different.
David Konow: How much music do you have to compose for a game?
ALEX KATUNICH: It depends on what kind of game it is, and how much music the producers want. As technology gets better, you get into what's known as adaptive soundtracks, whereby you're walking through one level and you can go three different ways. The music changes based on where you are at any point in time. And so yeah, in that respect you do have to write a lot more. It's not like Super Mario where you've got 10 minutes of music and it's just going to play over and over and over again.
Because games are three-dimensional now, and there are so many options, you have the ability to just go further and further with it. It's like choosing your own adventure story. But keep in mind that each adventure that you choose has a different cinematic component to it. So I could see why someone would say, "Yeah, I need to do three times as much music as I did before." Adaptive scoring is only now starting to become more and more prevalent, and only in certain games. It's an expensive process, and a very time-consuming process where you have to work with the actual programmers to make sure that the music synchs up to the options that are presented in the game. It's really only big budget titles that do that.
I find it to be a very exciting way of doing things, and I actually think it would be fantastic if there was a way to deliver radio that would somehow connect with a game so that you would truly have a ton of different options for every point that you were walking through. We're still a ways away from that.
David Konow: How good was the sound quality on the games as opposed to doing an album?
ALEX KATUNICH: When it was first described to me what I was doing, I thought I was going be getting a stereo soundtrack. So all the cool things that I did, all these effects that I recorded on my fancy recording setup probably got dumbed down to the point of it being unrecognizable. From a technology standpoint, they're pretty similar. If you're going go score a game, and you're going get an orchestra in there, obviously you're recording as if you would be recording for a film. So it's just as intensive. But since most people don't go that route, any orchestral stuff that's in a game is usually just synthesized on a keyboard. That would basically be the only tool you'd really need to write an entire game soundtrack if you wanted to. You don't need to go into an expensive recording studio and do it that way. As a matter of fact, most bands don't even record that way anymore. With the advent of digital recording technology, it's put a lot of studios out of business. No one really has a tape machine anymore; that used to be a $100,000 item, a two-inch reel-to-reel tape machine. Now everything's just run through ProTools or some version thereof.
David Konow: Did you record at home?
ALEX KATUNICH: Yeah, I had a studio at my house and it was just done in ProTools. A buddy of mine engineered and played on some of it. Actually the producer of the game was a drummer, so I had him come in and cut some speed metal drums to some tracks and got him involved. It was all done out of the house. It's literally the way a lot of records are done now.
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