GameSoundCon

GameSoundCon this year was great! I was working the event as part of Pyramind's floor team and got to sit in on many of the presentations. While they were all useful in terms of information, they strove towards the loftier goal of predicting a fundamental shift in the direction of the industry. Brian Schmidt set the pace in his early talks on game audio technology by suggesting that the terminology of "gamer" and the "gaming" industry is already antiquated in a day where games are ubiquitous.

Everyone, not just some niche teen male market, is playing games. Everyone has games and even a gaming platform with them at all times in their smartphone, ipad, Kindle, or other mobile device. Essentially, culture is absorbing games into the more broadly defined "entertainment" industry. Children grow up with games and even use them as learning tools in school. The "Digital Natives" can be frighteningly adept with technology.

Other talks I was able to hear included Paul Lipson's talks on interactive game scoring and several hours of FMOD tutorials by Stephan Shutze, who also pointed the way to the future of the industry with examples of "generative" game music that will be designed so that it is never heard the same way twice.

The functionality of FMOD has a ways to go yet, but the future of game music is not a static block of sound that triggers or loops, but a tapestry of interwoven musical fragments designed to play nicely together and compose themselves on the spot to match player interaction. We can already see elements of this style of implementation today in many releases, but the ideal has not yet been reached and the tools get better every year.

In short, I was very excited to attend and I'm fired up to get out there and implement many of the techniques and strategies that were discussed.

Pro Tools 10

So... Pro Tools 10 is out and Avid has laid off many of the people who helped make it and version 11 possible. It certainly sounds terrible, but I'll reserve judgement as I don't have all the facts yet. Considering how their stock price has fallen over the last year, perhaps their options were limited, although the timing of it certainly seems rather cold and calculated.

As for Pro Tools 10 itself... it isn't 64 bit, which is what I was really hoping for. It does have some nice features which I could get excited about, such as clip gain and new Audiosuite functions, but I'll probably skip this version and wait for 11.

Clip Gain is great, adding a new level of gain adjustment without having to draw in automation or process Audiosuite gain. Clip gain can even have envelopes - creating a new layer of automation, which enables you to leave the primary automation lane intact without resorting to trim automation. This is fantastic especially for post work and for sound design, where the levels of individual assets would previously need to be modified with AudioSuite GAIN processing or with automation.

What would have been nice to see was for them to take Clip Gain one or two steps further and implement beyond the features that Ableton Live offers in that area. In Ableton, individual clips on the fly can be pitch shifted, time stretched, reversed, gated, and contain individual envelopes that modulate more than just gain. Pro Tools can do the stretching and pitch-shifting when Elastic Audio is enabled on a particular track, but it still isn't quite as elegant as Ableton's design.

More to come on Pro Tools 10 later, I am still learning my way through the new features manual, even though I probably won't be picking this version up.

Best Wedding Ever

So I just got back in San Francisco from my sister's wedding, and I have to say, it was the most beautiful thing I've ever been to. (I guess it should have been, as they spent two years planning it.) But still, I am really happy for her and my new bro, Kris.

The wedding took place at the Red Corral Ranch in Wimberley, TX, and was an incredibly serene and ethereal place, which defied my expectation of "Ranch" and was more like a shady romantic oasis. I'll be sure to link to pictures whenever they come back from the photographer.


Congratulations, Kris and Jen Harrup!

Frustration in the wake of Testpress

Well, from my post last week I clearly knew what the issue was with the track "Faraway" before going into Testpress, but I didn't have the time to correct it. The judges didn't particularly care for it for that very reason: it lost its groove.

The track hits the best part and then loses energy and never recovers before the short ending at 3:30. I should go back in and make a longer edit of the track with an extended dance section. Sonically, it also felt a tad too strident in the mids and lower mids. Either my ears were fatigued when I worked on it last or there's an issue with the HD room at Pyramind. They HAVE been planning to reshoot that room for awhile now.

At any rate, I am happy for Jay, Nick, and Alex. They did a great job and deserved to win.

TestPress 2011 Tomorrow

The Testpress event takes place tomorrow and I have a track named "Faraway" in it.

I sometimes tend to feel like I'm on shaky ground with electronic music, particularly with club and dance. Since my current workflow tends toward linear composition, I have trouble finding a good groove and just sticking with it. Linear composition is fine for orchestral music and scoring to picture, but it has a tendency to drive me towards constant change, which can negatively impact groove. The Testpress event also has a track time limit of 3:30, which probably also contributes to a rushed pace. Either way, I've lost perspective.

I'll be assisting with operation of the event and will have better feedback after the review tomorrow.

Integration Issues

So... integrating my own page code with Bloggers is turning out to be more trouble than I expected. Even if I get my own page to host the thread, every single link is going to want to leave my own page and go over to Blogger. A nuisance indeed, but I may have to just go with it and accept the problems for now. Unless I want to redesign my own page from the ground up, (and I don't at the moment), I think I'm going to have to accept the flaws as they are and press on.

Website Quirks

Getting around to finishing my site has been slow, and I'm sure it is probably backwards that the Audio page is the last to get up and running, but since I already have a number of tracks available on the Soundcloud player, it naturally follows that material on the Audio page needs to be different and special.

I want to put only concrete, work-related examples on the Audio page, particularly samples of sound design and music that has been used in various projects, as opposed to just tracks that I've made. Once a certain game is released in a few months, I'll probably be able to post examples of my work from that.