My process for composing music

So, how does someone with a very small background in music theory and someone who played clarinet in middle school end up being able to compose competent sounding music for his games? Is that a question you've asked yourself before? Did you even know that I've composed the music for my own games? Well, you do now! Hee-hee.

The process takes longer for me than it does for someone more well versed in music composition and theory, but it allows me to add another personal touch to my games. I like my influence to be known in the games I create, and if I can somehow show a side of myself that the world doesn't often get to see, that's even better.

To start things off, I bought this digital voice recorder, the not the DVR you're probably used to seeing. Anyway, it's a device used by journalists to record interviews with subjects and folks giving press conferences. I originally used mine to record a monologue that I needed to remember for an acting class in my early college career. I would replay the monologue over and over again before sleeping in order to attempt to memorize the entire passage.

What I do with it now is when I get a good melody in my head that works for the type of setting I'm thinking of, I hum it into the device and it records my voice. I then replay it to get a general idea on how I want to build it in my music composition software. I use Cakewalk Music Creator 2, a program that is a bit long in the tooth, but it does its job well for me.

Hovering a note over the staff plays the note so I
can hear the pitch, and placing it then confirms the pick.

This is what the interface looks like. I add MIDI tracks and assign instruments to each track. The staff roll is where the action takes place. By selecting note lengths and placing them on the staff, I rebuild the melodies that I hummed into the digital voice recording device, creating accompaniment to go along with the melodies.

The menu where MIDI and audio tracks are added and removed.
This is also where choosing the type of MIDI instrument, channel,
and much more are located.

After the melody and accompaniment have been created and the entire song is finalized, I give it the twice over, listening for an irregularities in rhythm, pitch, chords, or whatever else, and if it all sounds good, I do a final save of all of the MIDI tracks together. For preparation for the next program I use, one that does more realistic VST sounds as opposed to the tinny MIDI, I save each MIDI track as a separate file. The hard part (composing and correctly doing notation) is pretty much over now.

This allows me to use REAPER, the next program in question, to put each MIDI track into a separate track, assigning a VST instrument to them. My friend from Fat Bard, a local music studio, Patrick Crecelius nicely gave me a whole slew of instruments to utilize, so many so that it'd likely be impossible to find a use for all of them in my lifetime.

A look at the REAPER interface

Selecting what instruments sound right, not just the instrument but the instrument type (for example, not just a violin but maybe a legato violin from the vast number of violin types available to me), is quite important to make the finished product sound somewhat professional. The end result is what you hear here:



That's the theme that was notated in the Cakewalk Music Creator screenshot. It's "The Countryside Village of Mabel", played during the opening town of Legends of Adrigal.

I hope you enjoyed the little look at the process of a neophyte video game music composer with this blog post!