Battletech urban warfare music full#

When I went back to school for some training I had a real musical awakening and realized that my ear and writing voice had been pretty well trained all along, kind of like I was learning to write a language I had grown up speaking for most of my life. I think I believed it was just too far out of reach for me, since I didn’t have classical training at the time. For some weird reason, I just never connected the two worlds of my love for games and my love for music. Amon Tobin’s score for SPLINTER CELL: CHAOS THEORY was the first game I played where I realized that it might be something I could try. I never realized that I could make a career out of scoring games, so I didn’t really pursue that until much later in life. I ate up all the Squaresoft stuff (I loved the cinematic cut scenes with orchestral music) and also games like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout 1 and 2. I think the genre that spoke to me the most were role playing games. I was pretty obsessed with producing music since elementary school, whether it be recording myself with a tape recorder, sampling orchestral music with my turntable, or making electronic music with my old ASR 10 sampler. I think video games combined tech and music together in a way that just clicked with me. As a kid when I played games like Final Fantasy III or Chrono Trigger on SNES, I was completely blown away by the scores. JE: Video games got me into music in general, and I do continue to play them. GT: What got you into composing work for videogames? Are you a gamer yourself? If so, what’s your favorite genre? I’ll then take all those recordings, mix them into a final edit through a combination of plugins and outboard gear and then prep the piece for implementation. Getting a piece recorded live involves a lot of steps and sometimes hundreds of folks including the musicians to help bring it to life. Recording anything with a live human tends to up the realism and emotional depth of a piece of music.

Battletech urban warfare music full#

After I’ve created a fully realized mockup of the piece of music I’ll then decide which parts of it I’d like to record with live players, which could be anywhere from me playing a part myself with some instruments I have lying around, or hiring a full orchestra to cover all of those elements. I have a eurorack system I like to use for a lot of the music I write, I think it has a physicality that blends well with orchestral film-style music. After that I move to the computer and start to orchestrate the piece to get the timbre I’m looking for, choosing orchestral or digital instruments. I typically start writing a piece by messing around on my piano, or if an idea comes to me when I’m away from the studio I’ll write it down or record myself mimicking the idea with my voice. I use a program called Cubase to record and produce the music cues. JE: Thank you! It tends to vary from project to project, but for scores like BATTLETECH and DISINTEGRATION, I rely on a mixture of live orchestral recording, digital samples, and analogue synthesis. Let’s start with the basics - what gear are you using to create your soundtracks? I’m a huge fan of your work, so thanks for taking the time.

I wanted to hear about his creative fuel and how he builds such amazing and compelling musical scores to bring these games to life. I recently sat down with Jon Everist, the composer behind several soundtracks from Harebrained Schemes, and at the start of a fresh new project for Disintegration.