
Soundtrack for the game: humanities also cry
About myself
Shortly about myself. My name is Dmitry. Since childhood I have been surrounded by friends - programmers, system administrators and other IT specialists. I tried to connect life with this myself - at one time I was a web developer of shit sites, I taught html, php, but it didn’t go further. All the time drawn to creativity. But my main work work always revolves around IT. I am the technical support admin in a small but proud provincial Internet service provider, copywriter, freelance content manager.

What spoiled my life and did not give me the time and perseverance to learn any well-paid IT specialty is the love of writing all kinds of soundtracks and OSTs. From an experience perspective, I can immodestly claim to be a very good composer. I pee from case to case. But I’m not interested in arranging artists, I don’t write music for songs and dances with their underpants down. I like to combine classical, rock, ethnic and deep (intelligent) styles of electronic music without words. This makes excellent soundtracks for films, games and other media projects. Which are written simply "on the table."
Because in the modern world it’s not enough to make a good product when there is no shop window to display it. While you are unknown - nobody needs you and is not in demand. They will not call you to write the voice acting for the Bondarchuk film, because they do not know about you. Large domestic game-dev companies send you a forest, simply because the state already has its own composer. Jobs on this position, if google, are dated to the beginning of the two thousandth year, there are no new ones.
Therefore, music remains my hobby without a chance to turn it into a profession and the meaning of life. And the unfulfilled dream, how not to drive it deep into yourself, is gnawing you anyway. And sometimes so much that in a fit of tantrum you fit into the voice acting of the first indie game with a bunch of hemorrhoids and for a penny in the hope that this project will shoot, it will become famous and someone big and important will pay attention to your soundtracks.
About the project “Star Federation | Star Federation”

Once again, I jumped into the venture to write musical accompaniment for the game. I thought for a long time whether it was worth it. But this project seemed to me rather serious to spend time on it even for free. And then they offered to throw some money. The game is “Star Federation”. A small team of enthusiasts made an online space strategy, which seemed to me very interesting, intelligent and thought out.
The game has its own mp3 player, something remotely reminiscent of the radio stations in the games of the GTA series. Each player can choose their own musical accompaniment, switching tracks to their discretion right in the game. The Star Federation development team decided not to go the way of piracy or selecting music with a free license from audio stocks. They wanted originality, but with stylistic support on a certain circle of already existing musical compositions of other composers. Simply, they gave me several references (samples that need to be followed). Very diverse in terms of musical style. From Dark Ambient, metal, eight-bit techno, to the classic works of Jean Michel Jarre. These melodies had one thing in common - they had a clear cosmic soul. But absolutely different structure, melody, musical instruments and principles of writing.
It took me 18 songs of 7 minutes each. This is about twice as much music as on any standard music album by popular artists. They write such albums for two or three years with a huge team of professionals. I had two months, myself, several live musical instruments, accumulated during the days of turbulent rocker youth, and a half-dead computer with old music software (at that time I had not been composing for about 4 years).
And I agreed to this crazy idea, promising to give everything up to 200 percent (I like science fiction, space and rock musicians, which are the developers of this game in combination). But the desire to start working was not enough.
Problems at the start
Today, if you are poor, but you know how to write music, you are presented with four options for the technical implementation of creating your own workplace and work tools:
1) You can record music to a computer through an inexpensive microphone, using inexpensive real musical instruments and an adequate inexpensive audio card and special software for multi-track audio recording (sequencer). Software, of course, pirates. But in general, all this requires certain costs for the purchase of a microphone and bad musical instruments (of which you need a lot to make the compositions more diverse). All this junk needs to be looked for somewhere, stored, to know how to record better. And for all this you need to be able to play at least a little (learning to press the keys on the piano, play the trumpet, drums, learn to play the bagpipe and torture the violin is not exactly the same thing and life may not be enough for this). The composer knows the principles of writing music (knows by ear how to play), but he’s not always a multi-instrumentalist (he doesn’t know how to play everything in the way he hears it in his head). This is a bad way. It takes a lot of time, money, useful space, and at the output we get the quality of home recording from the apartment.

2) The past century throws up the idea of buying a synthesizer that connects to a computer via MIDI interface. His Memory Bank contains about a hundred presets - a simulation of the sounds of various musical instruments. And if not, then the drivers from any of the cheapest audio cards already have a similar built-in synthesizer. Such MIDI keys are not expensive. You only need to be able to play the piano. No extra cost. You can record directly to the sequencer without a microphone. Some positives. But the output is music from Russian perestroika series or most of the songs from Radio Chanson. Why? Because simulating the sound of a violin with synthesizer means sounds even less like a violin than a cheap similarity of a violin with aliexpress.

3) You can get a job in a real recording studio. Where there is access to good microphones, real expensive musical instruments, where the room is created specifically for working with sound. But there is no free time to write what you want. You will write backing tracks and beaters to various gifted personalities who are good if they are at least like Buzova (in terms of fame, and not in terms of creativity), and not stoned rappers from a neighboring region.

4) You can use the virtualization of musical instruments and technical equipment of a recording studio. These are the so-called VST (Virtual Studio Technology) musical instruments and plugins. This is a very expensive software, which, of course, is pirated in the Russian Federation. Each specific VST instrument is a virtual clone, usually a very expensive real musical instrument.

For example, some Stradivarius violin. This is a library of recorded sounds from this violin. Recorded on a good microphone (or on several different good microphones separately), in a smaller, larger room, in the concert hall and in the stadium. In each room and for each type of microphone, many notes are recorded many times on each string of a freaking violin. Because each note can be played with different strengths, because you can play the violin with a bow, as well as with a pinch method (with your fingers), because there are a lot of tricks of the game with the same bow and many more “because” of the type “but you can also play the strings muffled by the palm of your hand. ” As a result, each such library of VST instruments includes many thousands of different sounds of the same violin. The more expensive the VST instrument, the more these sounds will be. Because there are sure to be added a few Stradivarius violins of different sizes, year of manufacture and color to choose from and some kind of garbage like: “we don’t have enough room, studio, stage and stadium. And let's record all these violins in the Notre Dame Cathedral and add to the user another preset (preset) for the sound of this violin in this cathedral, otherwise we’ll want to play so that the sound is like in a cathedral. ”
Such a VST musical instrument is embedded directly into the music recording program (sequencer) in the form of a plug-in and this instrument is controlled from the usual MIDI interface (MIDI keyboard, MIDI pad, old synthesizer with the ability to connect via MIDI or even using a conventional computer keyboard, connected to the sequencer through several special software). That is, to play the virtual violin with an absolutely real expensive sound, you do not need to be able to play the violin, you need to be able to press the keys on the piano.

All this is cool from the point of view of the fact that any rogue like me never dared to hope that he would be allowed to play the piano of Freddie Mercury, or they would lend Jimi Hendrix's favorite guitar to record his shit track. And here all this is realizable. Of course, if you engage in piracy. If you buy, no ordinary Russian will have enough money for this. The use of virtual instruments is the only possible option in order to create tolerable, good and even excellent sounding works.
You can find and get at your disposal any VST-tool that you want. I would like to add 40 orchestral cellos or drums of the Metallica band to the composition - all this is possible.
But there is a serious “BUT”. Virtualization requires what? Serious computing power.

You won’t be able to use these VST tools normally if you have a dead processor, 4 gig of RAM (three of them are consumed by the tenth Windows) and a 100 GB hard drive. No sir. In order to quickly and well simulate an entire orchestra, you need just a little more. Otherwise, writing one song will take you two weeks, instead of one two days.
Why? Because the composition in the composer's head is usually already sketched: you imagine how a musical instrument should sound, what instrument and at what point in time. There is a melody in my head. And it’s ideal to have all VST musical instruments on hand at once, open. To record the part of each of them individually, immediately listen to how different musical instruments sound together, and correct flaws, inaccuracies on the go, or change unsuitable musical instruments to others. (Yes, the music in my head is always more ideal than it actually turns out, I don’t know how Mozart was doing with it). But all of them cannot be opened at the same time, because each of them wants to eat 1-3 GB of RAM. I try not to use more than 8 musical instruments in one melody. If you multiply this thing, non-weak requests for RAM will come out. If you look at the tracks of Rihanna, there were recorded in places 45 musical instruments. How many of their standard small orchestra - generally do not want to think. Darkness. In general, all does not start at the same time.
I had to get out.
It was necessary to run a program for recording (sequencer), enable one of these tools. And start recording the musical part on this instrument. Listen, export the resulting sound to the WAV audio format (equivalent to rendering during video processing, which is actually needed to export the resulting product and unload the computing power - when writing music until it is exported, to listen to it with the ability to change notes, the whole calculation is done through the RAM and the processor. After exporting it can hardly be changed). The export of one instrument usually lasts about 10-20 minutes, depending on the load on the computer, the length and complexity of the part of this musical instrument.
When one musical instrument is ready and exported to audio, you need to close all the musical software so that the RAM is unloaded and cleaned up, open the software again, select another musical instrument, register its part, listen to it and export the sound to WAV as well.
And so many times, so many times, how many times did you invent yourself musical instruments that should be involved in writing this composition.
It’s damn fun when in the final stage you are trying to compose the lighter exported WAV audio tracks of each individual musical instrument in the same sequencer. You expose them parallel to each other, like layers in any video editor, press play and hear horror. Somewhere, something didn’t fit together. It doesn’t sound the way it was wanted, the notes are not friends with each other somewhere and they sound foul. And instead of a flute, it was better to use trombone. At this point, the whole process begins almost anew. This is if you do not take into account repeated freezes and crashes of software without autosaving projects.
Solution of problems
Returning to the topic of the article. A good music album with 18 tracks, with a total length of two times more than ordinary artists can write in two months under such conditions, is unrealistic. They do this in expensive studios with a wagon of specialists for two years. I didn’t want to write a bad album. Something had to be done. I took a timeout of five days. And in five days I had to catch up over the past many years without music.

I borrowed RAM from friends. Found and mastered a bunch of music software with the ability to automate, optimize and release computing power. SONAR Plantium 2018 sequencer and audio editor was my salvation. (Before that I had not seen a single Sonar, but I heard that many generations of sound engineers had broken their brains on this hellish thing). I always worked in another simpler software from the same manufacturer and was afraid to change something. And then I had to.

In general, in short, this miracle thing allows you to do the unthinkable. It allows you to freeze individual musical instruments when you do not need them. For example, as long as you control the notes of a bass guitar, you can freeze the drums, the piano, and everything else. At this moment, lightning-fast pre-rendering or pre-export of these musical instruments is performed directly in the program. You hear these musical instruments all together, and you can tune the notes of one unfrozen instrument to them. Finished with it and wanted to fix something in another musical instrument? Freeze the bass, unfreeze that instrument, edit and listen to everything until your ears fall off or you decide that is all.
Exactly five days was enough for me to grab all the tops from the grandiose music software industry, which could be quickly put into action. And exactly five days was enough for me to realize that if I hadn’t been looking for simple ways in the past and not been too lazy (not scared) to study the most complex professional music software more closely, I could already be a completely different person. This is a banal, but important remark about laziness and fear of changing the usual way of life, learning new things, is suitable for any person in any industry. Kick yourself more often. Otherwise, nothing will work out at all, and then you will have to always look for the guilty around you, just to not think that you yourself are a donkey.
In addition to this terrible SONAR, I plunged into the study of a bunch of modern plug-ins for it. And this is an extremely amazing world of robots, AI and neural networks and something self-learning and self-understanding, which I originally planned to write an article about, but leave it for the future - this is really more interesting than this complaint article. I will only mention that there are times when you are asked to make music similar to this Michael Jackson track. You pick up the same or a similar set of musical instruments, come up with your own melody, and as a result, this fucking orchestra, does not sound at all like what was required. And then for weeks you get muddled with equalizers, filters, saturators in order to compare the overall sound to the sample. And still it doesn’t work, because the composer and the sound engineer are two big differences. I had to look for robots,
Then I had to look for a way to combine a bunch of different music styles into one concept album.
At the output, I received a good product that customers liked, and most importantly, it fit perfectly into the game and received good feedback from the players of the “Star Federation”.
And everyone did not care how he got it. No one really understood that instead of the drums in the music, radio signals from real pulsar stars, translated into an audible frequency spectrum, were hidden. Everyone didn’t care that there were Gandhi’s speeches, recordings of the conversations of the first people on the moon and other dregs like radio signals transformed into audible sound from different corners of space received using a radio telescope, and the fifth track was generally written in memory of Chester Benington (the music echoes Linkin Park band final masquerade)
I did not become a famous composer, because this game and soundtracks in it were not noticed by someone big and important, because the “Star Federation” has not yet been shot, although I really hoped that the mega project was cool and intelligent. But the guys, like me, do not have fame and great resources to get this fame.
Therefore, I once again think forever to stop writing music and do some normal business, although even after writing this soundtrack I studied very deeply everything that was missed earlier. As deep as it ever comes in handy.
Why did I float on Habr pour out my soul? Well ... PR for yourself and Star Federation's online space strategy, keeping a little hope that the project will be noticed, and the developers who have become my good friends, and me as a music writer. Until next time on the air.