Gear good for tv/video games/incidental music and cues.

[gongchime]

I saw an article online that said people who apply for music composition jobs or composer's assitant jobs will more likely get it if they have the most gear among the other applicants. (They probably meant 20 year olds fresh out of college not 45 year olds just starting but oh well)

I'm interested in composing for TV or video games incidental music and cues. Not ready for film scores yet although I have the compositional chops just not the scoring for film techniques yet. What gear would be beneficial to add to what I have? I'm more of a do it all within the computer with samples and not record live players kind of person for now.

Anywho, I've got Cubase 5, Kontakt 4 (which sample libraries would I benefit from owning? I think it was Mazz who said that the samples I use for classical orchestra were not going to be competetive against people who have better samples), UX2 Pod Farm 2 software effects chains and a AT4050CM5 mic.

Is there anything else that would be good to have in order of importance and from low cost to high of course

Thanks

[kclements]

I would say the Spectrasonics stuff is a must have. I use Stylus, Trillian and Omnisphere on 99% of my tracks. Best purchase I have made in a long time.

My #2 choice is Kontakt - which you have. There are a ton of great libraries that use Kontakt as a base, (i.e. LASS, Tonehammer...) so you can look at individual libraries that fit your style.

cheers

kc

[mazz]

Greg,

I'm not sure how much video game music you've heard lately, but the big time games are scored by composers who write for orchestras and the big game companies will spend the money to record at Skywalker or Abbey Road. So if you want to enter the game business and compete with those guys like Inon Zur, Gary Schuyman, etc., you will need to invest in some fairly extensive libraries and the computers to run them.

My suggestion is to narrow down the styles you want to focus on for starters and gear up according to that. For instance, if you wanted to do electronic music mostly, then you could buy the Spectrasonics stuff, Alchemy by Camel Audio and possibly add Komplete from Native Instruments, which contains several great synths in addition to Battery which does drums of all kinds really well.

If you really want to go to the high end orchestra stuff, then you'll probably need to invest in a very beefy computer with tons of hard drive space and RAM, and, in fact, you may want to consider more than one so that you can have your orchestral template loaded with most of your sounds at all times. Prepare to invest at least $7,000 in computers and software, possibly more if you want to get most everything at once. Some of the big libraries run upwards of 1K.

Here's a short list of excellent libraries that many of the big guys use, at least for mockups:

LA Scoring Strings
EW Quantum Leap Platinum
VSL
Symphobia 1 and 2
CineBrass
SAM True Strike Percussion

The list goes on. But buying those libraries all at once will probably set you back over 5K or more, and that's just scratching the surface.

Doing orchestral stuff for real in order to get these gigs takes a lot of horsepower. Plus even with those fantastic libraries, the music won't sound great unless the performances, orchestration and production are of the utmost quality. Factor in good speakers, excellent reverbs (convolution or hardware or both), plug ins for mastering, etc. It starts to add up fast.

Plus to get into game music you need to do networking. Factor in a trip to SF for the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) early 2012 to hang and network with all the audio directors from the companies plus schmoozing with the small and up and coming game developers. An audio pass is about 500 bucks early bird plus plane ticket and lodging, etc. It's not just about the music, you have to meet the folks that are hiring composers and make friends with them. At least to get in the top end. It's no different from the TV or film business.

And scoring games has it's own set of challenges that are different but just as challenging as composing for film or TV. The non-linear aspect makes it particularly challenging, google "adaptive audio".

I make these observations from my own experience. Your mileage may vary.

Good luck,

Mazz

[gongchime]

Thanks for the reply Mazz and kc. I defeinitely do not want to do high end stuff yet. I just want my taxi submissions to make it over the bar without spending a lot of money. Not sure if that's even possible. Just scoping out the situation. If I was going to add just one more piece of software beyond Kotakt for the purpose of improving my Taxi submissions what might you recommend?

[mazz]

Omnisphere and if you can swing it, Stylus RMX. They are indispensable tools. I just am finishing up a track and I used 6 tracks of Omnisphere. It's so versatile and the editing is very straight forward and intuitive on the surface and yet it's incredibly deep as well. An investment that would really raise the level of your sounds. The caveat is all that power takes a pretty strong computer to run.

Good luck!

Mazz

[gongchime]

Omnisphere sounds like the one for me. Thanks

[LamarFranklin]

Mazz, Man what an eye opener for me too. Thanks much!

[mazz]

Also keep in mind that game music doesn't have to be orchestral music. The high end games certainly do use orchestral music, but that's the big time and breaking in is as tough as getting to the top of any business. But there's lots of smaller games (casual games like iphone games, Angry Birds, etc.) that use electronic music, or music with some acoustic instruments mixed with electronic, rock, and so on, it's all over the map.

With any endeavor in this business, the key, IMO, is to make the absolute best music you can with the gear you have in front of you. If all you can afford are cheesy sounds, then make the coolest music with cheesy sounds! Make the cheesy sounds work by how you use them. There's a resurgence of music called "Chip Tunes" that's being made by using sounds from video game and computer systems from the 70s and 80s. All of a sudden, cheap, 4 bit lo fi sounds are back in style! (Well, the music has to well written and performed, of course!)

I don't see the ukelele folks complaining that their instruments only have 4 strings and are small compared to a guitar! They're too busy making music!!

Start where you are.

I know you already know that, I just had to say it!

Cheers!

Mazz