What software/program do YOU use to create your own music for adventure games?Ã, It seems that many people have talent when it comes to music-making, but we never get to know what's the tool behind it.
As for me, I suck at creating that kind of stuff, but I'm currently trying to get along with FL Studio.
I only have two experiences but, for my first game, I used Anvil to create MIDI music. I'm currently using Sound Club for my current game.
Anvil Studio. It's the best freeware midi-making tool available.
http://www.anvilstudio.com/
Hmm... That Anvil Studio looks very interesting. Gonna have to check it out later today. I've been using Guitar Pro for sometime now. I haven't made any music for any games yet though...
I have an old copy of Sonic Foundry Vegas and Sound Forge. It works like a charm.
Been thinking of getting a YPT200 and for $89.99 what a deal.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1334522&CatId=0
Features
61 full-size touch sensitve keys for expressive playing
Yamaha Education Suite 5 (Y.E.S.5) teaches timing, note reading, chords in 7 steps and grades your performance
102 Songs built-in to learn using Y.E.S.5
Reverb and sustain effects to enhance any sound
Portable Grand for the realism of a stereo grand piano
134 instrument voices and 100 accompaniment styles play any type of music
Large backlit LCD display shows musical staff and chords
Stereo speakers, bass ports and Bass Boost System provide great sound quality
General MIDI, MIDI IN and OUT for computer connectivity
Sound effects turn the entire keyboard into a sound factory
(http://images.tigerdirect.com/itemDetails/Y23-2124/Y23-2124-callout.jpg)
I'm kinda cheating because I've just modified music from my own albums that I've wrote. I do intend to make some ambient music for certain scenes though.
The program used is Music 3000. (and a couple of tracks used with the basic ejay clubworld)
I use Cakewalk Music Creator and a little Roland keyboard I've had for years. (and have had to buy a USB connector for...)
Cakewalk Sonar 4 (though sometime I want to get Sonar 5...)
Here's a little sample of a song I cooked up yesterday:
http://herculeaneffort.adventuredevelopers.com/doldrums.mp3
No loops or anything silly like that, just 5 instances of RM4, 2 instances of Superwave P8, Manyguitar, and two SoundCell soundfonts loaded up.
Gear-wise, this is a list of stuff I use in making music:
Hardware:
Soundblaster Audigy
M-Audio Ozone (as a secondary soundcard for processing 24 bit, and for the 2-octave keyboard, knobs and wheels)
Shure SM57 (for basic mic recording)
Blue Audio Mic Cables
California Audio 1/4" Cables (I don't use Monster Cable because of their unethical business practices)
Fender P-Bass
Fender Stratocaster
Chinese Erhu (made by Dun Huang company in Shanghai)
Software
Cakewalk Sonar 4
Soundforge (an old version)
Audacity
VST(i) Plugins
ChineeErHu
ChineeKongV2
ChineeWinds
Jamstix (with all the addon drumpaks)
ManyGuitar
ManyStation
Miroslav Philharmonik (7 GB of orchestral samples, whoo!)
discoDSP Phantom
RM IV
...and a bunch of free VST(i)s and Soundfonts.
Audacity! I use that for recording my speech! :)
I use:
For recording and mixing purposes and effects: Cool Edit Pro
For programming instruments and drums and effects: Fruity Loops Studio 5
My songs usually have a guitar in them, which I record with either my Ibanez electric, another cheaper electric or my Fender acoustic one. I then use a Behringer V-Amp 2 for great guitar effects as well. My drums are usually programmed like all other instruments (piano, synth etc.) with Fruity Loops, then imported into Cool Edit Pro, where I do the final mix.
Works really great if you put a little time into your work!
Hardware:
Nothing!
No keyboards!
No mics!
An awfull sound card (but I will buy one for Christmas)
But very good headphones (the best, almost)
Sennheiser HD 600
Software:
Cubase SX
Eastwest sound library Gold (I will upgrade that too...)
Waves Gold bundle
Reason
Absynth
FINALE 2000
Greg: I hope that you will finish that song... Lovely, indeed...
About what programm to use:
I would propose Cubase SE3, which comes at around 150 euros/$ or 99 GBP. It has anything you will ever need. It's own instruments, it can handle midi and audio. It has plug-ins on its own and plus you can get lots and lots of free synths/instruments from the net.
Quote from: Nikolas on Wed 14/12/2005 20:20:44
Software:
Cubase SX
Eastwest sound library Gold (I will upgrade that too...)
Waves Gold bundle
Reason
Absynth
FINALE 2000
The East West Symphonic Orchestra Gold library sounds really good. It has a really explosive, dramatic, clear sound to it. Miroslav Philharmonik (what I use for orchestral stuff) is good too, but it's more suited for slower more "emotional" songs.
Quote from: Nikolas on Wed 14/12/2005 20:20:44
Greg: I hope that you will finish that song... Lovely, indeed...
Thanks! That guitar solo is played with the Manyguitar VSTi (http://www.manytone.com/mgdescription.html) (which I helped do sampling for) using my 2 octave M-Audio Ozone keyboard. :)
Hardware:
GC-2 mic
My beloved Les Paul
Behringer ultragain linemixer
Steinberg VSL2020 sound card
Software:
Cubase SX
Reason 3.0
ReCycle
Adobe Audition for mastering
But I must admit for the game music I do I mostly just use Reason. But that'll change in my next game.
Actually I'm not particuarly happy with East West (the gold Edition). It lacks some obvious stuff, which you are obviously supposed to compliment with other. Explain: It has pizz only to the violins, violoncellis and Contrabass. No violas, for some reason. The same goes for tremollo and other stuff.
I saw in their site that with an extre 695$ you can get the rest of the missing techniques, but then it is like having paid for the platinum edition (995$), and not getting the 24 bit samples!
Bastards!
But yes, this library is mainlyfor BIG bababoom stuff.
I do have other stuff, but don't use them outside my university.
I have the Garritan strings, all the Vienna Cube, Dan Dean woodwinds and Brass.
I don't use them though. I now only use what I have royalties for... No risk...
But the Garritan strings sound marvelous, where the personal orchestra sucks...
erm... :-[ i scower the internet for midi tunes that FEEl right for the rooms Im working on. then i um... USE them.
I use mods, also known as Mark Lovegrove.
Quote from: dkh on Wed 14/12/2005 19:22:33
I use:
For recording and mixing purposes and effects: Cool Edit Pro
For programming instruments and drums and effects: Fruity Loops Studio 5
Me aswell. Cool Edit Pro 2 that is
For me it's the contrairy, I use Fruity Loops Studio (as you might have seen aboveÃ, :P ), but I'm still trying to get the feel of the software.Ã, I like it because it has a wide selection of sounds, instruments, etc.Ã, I'm having trouble with the creating part, it's not my ability in art, it's just the way the software works.Ã, I think I might try a few other things after reading the other posts, alot of them seem interesting...Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã,Â
SKALE Tracker. I used Fast Tracker II before that and before that I used Octamed.
Instruments are samples of whatever I can get, though I would like that East West VST and a few others.
Quote from: ProgZmax on Thu 15/12/2005 03:06:58
I used Fast Tracker II before that
Hey me too!! That was one cool program. :D
Me three! Fast Tracker II was great. Well, it would have been much better if I had had any sense at all about finding decent samples. I still had fun though. :P
Nowadays I just use Sibelius 3, Audacity, and sometimes FamiTracker. That's mostly because I have no money, and I'm extremely stubborn when it comes to learning how to use things I've never used before, such as free soundfonts and getting a job and etc.
You know, Anvil looks like it actually has the kind of interface I've been looking for for a long while. The only difference is that I've been looking for that style of interface for a MOD/S3M tracker.
I'm probably putting a date on my age here, but back in the DOS days I used to play around with MODEdit 3.0. It was the only tracker that had an interface that graphically displayed the notes on a scale rather than displaying the notes in a text representation (note+octave, like "C#3"). Most trackers consider it more important to display time and all the various channels at once rather than display the notes in scale and time with the inactive (in the editor) channels greyed out behind the active channel.
I always found that deeply counter-intuitive. Knowing what note you're playing and when always seemed much more important to me than knowing which channels were playing what when; timing always seemed to tend to itself.
I'm gonna DL Anvil because I miss playing with music and I might just find it useful when I start making my game. But if anyone knows of a digital sampler/tracker that has a similar interface and can tell me how to get a copy, well, you can have my first born male child.
I use FL studio too! It rules! It's the best thing I know for creating music (since electric guitar)! (That's the only one that I can use)
I wanted to try Anvil to see if it's any different than "music maker" that came with Adventure Maker.Ã, Too bad, I keep getting this "blue screen of death" when I try to install itÃ, :( .Ã, Oh well, back to the good old MIDI "Music Maker"Ã, ::)
not to get too offtopic here, but i just got anvil, working alright, but after i save as Song, it doesn't play in WMP. Well, it plays, but no music is heard.
Same goes for if i try to save it as a MIDI.
HELP!!
I'm not familliar with Anvil at all, but I don't think that WMP can play songs. I mean the projects you save in Anvil, or any other software doesn't mean that they can be played anywhere. You would have to export them (or save them) as MIDI.
Now the fact that it doesn't play even if you save them as MID, is kinda bizarre, but tell you what. Try this small trick. After you have saved your song into a midi file, quit the project you work and start a new one. And in there import (or open), the midi file you jyust saved. This way you'll get to see what's inside the midi file you just saved. If there is nothing in it means that you're doing something wrong while saving (or Anvil is bad), if there is something inside, that means that the configuration (have no idea again), of the WMP is clashing with MIDI files.
Quote from: Nikolas on Wed 14/12/2005 22:14:27I have the Garritan strings, all the Vienna Cube, Dan Dean woodwinds and Brass. All illegally.
Possibly not a good idea to admit you pirated these libraries, especially when someone posting in this thread does work for one of the companies you mention there :P
I know, but actually I have never used them outside my university where they have some kind of license. And of couse none of my tracks have illegal stuff.
No worries. Not that I have any intention to go on a big tirade against the evils of piracy you understand, but I'm of the opinion that if you have to steal software then don't go publically blabbing about it even if you use it or not :)
(Incidently, I find your opinion that 'Personal Orchestra sucks' to be quite misguided. It's not all about gigabytes kiddo ;) )
I'm not into Mb, or big big stuff either.
But every sample (mp3s), I've heard from the personal orchestra, it's just not up to standard. And since for some reason EastWest decided (were forced to?), to have 50% off I got at almost the same price the Gold Edition.
Of course sucks is a big word, I can understand that!
But I personally think that the comparing products would be the Silver edition with the Personal Orchestra. That I could argue about, but not with bigger libraries.
And I did think about it when I was bying the library I wanted. And for the money I spent the Gold Edition was perfect! As I said in my first (2nd maybe) post in this thread I'm not crazy aobut EastWest for a lot of reasons, but still for now I'm fine.
My dream actually would be Vienna Library (PRO), but this is 5000$, which I won't ever have. But the Garritan strings are my second dream, and I have worked with these in my university, and I really think that they're great,
It all comes down to what you want, how much you want to spend and what music you're writting.
EastWest did a very good deal on Gold for sure, however I don't use any of their products as I'm not keen on having the 'bigboomy' sound (and static hall reverb) imprinted on my Orchestral renditions, not to mention that their buisness practises are quite unscrupulous - the guys in charge take great delight in making rediculous claims against competing products (take for example the nonsense spurted out on their fourms after the recent Vienna announcements).
The reason why I have a lot of love for GPO is that it's small and extremely playable, making it wonderfully easy to just write music. With anything else you have to carefully plan out what articulations you need to use and quite often end up restricted by the number of instruments you have going due to RAM and processor limitations, unless you have a number of dedicated sampling workstations. I've tried writing things from scratch using VSL and it's just extremely tiresome - you spend more time arsing around locating the right patches and loading them up from an endless list than actually composing! With GPO I can just bam up the patches and get on with making music with no hassle, and when you end up working under strict deadlines this becomes very important.
Of course when it comes to rendering a final piece it's a much different story - big gigabyte libraries becomes much more desirable at this point! (At least for the time being anyway, monolithic sample archives are going to become extinct soon as sampling/physical modelling hybrid technology begins to mature, which means less hard drive space and RAM will be needed but more processor power will).
But yeah, it depends on what you want and how much resources you have to throw at it. EastWest is Hollywood-in-a-box if you're into that sort of thing, Vienna is the CS-80 of the Orchestra sampling world and everything else in between gives you many different colours in a wide palette of sound.
Actually up to the point that I hadn't heard EastWest I was against the BIG Hollywood sound also. But now I'm a slave of the royalties... :(
I am classically trained composer and I would love to be able to use various techniques and articulations but I haven't found them on any library. And I'm not talking about very weird stuff. Some fluttertongue, some glissanti, a little sul pont here and there.
It's been a couple of weeks that I added 1 Gb RAM in my computer (where I had 512 Mb, and was barely enough for Kontakt + a couple of samples) and now I can open even 2 Kontakts and actually do whatever I want, regarding memory.
Of course my old habbit (due to low memory, poor computer) was to export everything into audio and mess with the automation after that... No use of RAM anymore...
But you are right about GPO. It is very convinient, and I can understand how it feels to search endlessly for the sound you want through 240 (!!!!!) Gb of samples!
And again you're right about being the end of the samples... I have tried the demo for the synful orchestra (which unfortunately is only for solo instruments for the time being, I think), and it is superb actually! I could never imagine that a program of 64 Mb could do such a good work playing Stravinsky (a demo in their site). It is simply amazing! And while I'm talking about it, in www.synful.com you can get a demo of the orchestra. It is for 10-15 days only, but it's worth it...
At least, I'm not in the hunt for new stuff every now and then or tracking down every plug-in that's out there.
What is always important is that you are familiar with what you work with. Even with MIDI you can do a very decent work, if you're clever enough.
Synful is the future, looking forward to the updates that are supposed to be happening soon. I think the quick demo I did with the trial when it first came out is still somewhere on the website. It has some timbral issues at the moment, but as the technology is refined these will start to disappear.
In regards to articulation, this is unfortunatly a luxuray you only get with the upper tier libraries. Garritan Orchestral Strings has pretty much every articulation you can imagine, but GPO doesn't, heh (apart from fluttertongue for the woodwinds). EastWest does also stiff you on various articulations as well, although there's the XP versions that have just come out which apparently plug those holes up along with some unremarkable psudo-legato feature.
I start out with Finale, beacuse I find it easier to work with a notation program, but then I use ModPlug Tracker and Mo3 Encoder to get the file size down. Even though I find trackers unwieldly to work with, I am happy with my music-making process. My game currently features half an hour of music in less than 1.5 MB! That's good beacuse the total size is over 33MB anyway.
I'm impressed with Synful, though.
Quote from: Nikolas on Fri 16/12/2005 02:53:29Even with MIDI you can do a very decent work, if you're clever enough.
Though you might find it sounding completely awful on someone else's computer, since there are no guarantees on how it'll sound.
Back when commercial games used MIDI, the composers often created several renditions, for different sound cards. And now there's much more variation on the hardware! After hearing how an old version of my action game sounded on my brother's computer, I'll never use MIDI directly in a game again. (On the other hand, MIDI with DLS, something like Interactive XMF (http://www.iasig.org/wg/ixwg/) would be interesting. As long as it sounds more or less the same everywhere.)
Quote from: Trumgottist on Fri 16/12/2005 18:00:23
I start out with Finale, beacuse I find it easier to work with a notation program...
I also use FINALE.
But before that I make my composing in manuscript. It does mean double work, but I can't work straight on a computer. Not to mention the pages of notes and drafts I use...
About MIDI of course you're right, but then again if you are to write a full score 5 minute work with 10 Kbs, it is worth it. And I sometimes do feel bad about the music I write for games, cause the games end up being 50-70 Mb bigger cause of the sound...
But anyway it is a little off-topic now...
Quote from: Adamski on Fri 16/12/2005 01:43:19
(Incidently, I find your opinion that 'Personal Orchestra sucks' to be quite misguided. It's not all about gigabytes kiddo ;) )
I had a choice between GPO and Miroslav Philharmonik. I chose Miro because it covered a greater range of orchestral instruments (it has choirs!). I also chose it because I like the tonal quality better--just a personal opinion thing. Really I don't mind how realistic the samples as much because you can make up for that with good sequencing. To me, realism comes from good sequencing--you can't always expect the samples to make themselves sound real (though Miro does a good job of that :))
I will say that the new Garritan Stradivari Solo Violin sounds gorgeous!