DOOM: Behind the Music

[Music] he cannot be allowed I'm willing to take full responsibility for the harmful effects of the last 24 hours but you must understand our interest in there was purely for the fandom and aligned everything has clearly gotten out of hand but it was ported the risk [Music] good evening everybody I tell you I'm so happy to be seeking you all this evening this is absolutely brilliant I'm really really happy to be speaking to your one because I know it's five o'clock on Wednesday afternoon so I can guarantee that at least 30% of you are sober the second thing is that I really have not had a chance to geek out on those wonderful details that went into the good tune sound track like a will tonight so if you hear for those sort of geeky details that's really what we're going to get into let's get started have you ever received a brief that went something like this we want you to make music that no one has ever heard before it needs to fit the game perfectly and be instantly loved by millions of fans now if you're anything like me when you get a brief like that your initial reaction is to run into the bathroom pour the cold tap on crawl up into a little ball and have a little cry but what I'm going to talk to you about tonight is how you can execute a brief like this and I'm going to discuss with you the lessons that I learned to enable you to do so I first met the hood software team back in about mid 2014 they sent me a music design document that started like this doom is about demons on Mars you have a shotgun sender back to hell cool the second part of a brief went like this no guitars we hate guitars we do not want guitars in our game do not put guitars in underneath that big section with a little line that said I love since cool I can't wait for that the third part of this brief went like this we want you to create music that nobody has ever heard before it needs to fit the game perfectly and instantly loved by millions of fans now doom fans they're not like Disney fans if doom fans don't like what you've done they'll burn your house down so let's say we take a brief like this right and we hand it to a piano player now this piano player is going to channel in the demons and they're going to channel in the hell and they're going to channel in the Mars but what you're going to end up with is a solo piano piece it's inspired by the brief sure but it's not an A and the execution of the brief now say you gave this same brief to a dubstep producer this dubstep producer is going to take all those awesome demon growling basses they're going to take some awesome bell samples to get the hell thing in there and they're going to get mixed in some brass samples to get in the Mars thing right but what you're going to end up with is a dubstep track it's inspired by the brief sure it's got cents in there but it's not an execution of the brief now same again if you handed that exact same brief to a composer and that composes instant reaction is to open up their Cubase templates that they've worked with for the last 10 projects and they're going to use all their demon's contact patches and they're going to use all their hell contact patches and they're going to use all of their Mars contact patches you're going to get up with it you're going to end up with the same piece of music that that person is written to last 10 projects it's inspired by the brief sure but it's not an execution of the brief now why are these three fails the reason that they're failing in this example is that they're going through the exact same process that they've always done every single time and you cannot expect to end up with a different a different outcome without changing the process change the process change the outcome now this is obviously a lot easier said than done we're very fearful of changing the process if you're anything like me you suffer terribly from the fear of rejection it's that fear of rejection disables us from changing our process why because that's asking you to take everything you know and put it aside come up with a new process in the hopes that you're going to reach something better now as humans we don't want to do that if something has worked a certain way before we want to repeat that process to end up with what we perceive is going to be the same result if it's gotten us a success in the put in the past we expect it's going to get us the success in the future but in the ever-changing perpetual world that we live in that's simply not the case change the process change the outcome but the key to this is working with a team that shares this exactly in philosophy I was very excited to meet the doom team then picked me up from the hotel in Dallas and drove me all the way down the lead offices the whole way he played this most incredible electronic music it was great it was all this weird sort of crazy like experimental stuff there's no beat there's no time signature there's no nothing it's just random sort of weirdness but he listens to the stuff every morning to inspire him when I entered the office I met Chad Moss older Chad was just finishing up the Masters on his latest experimental electronic music album this one here which is divine did a remix on it it's really really fantastic stuff I was then introduced to Chris Hite the audio director now Chris's room I couldn't even get into because it was full of synthesizers that was since everywhere there was boxes of sounds everywhere I couldn't move straightaway after meeting Chris I was told that there was a very very very very important audio centric meeting so we all rushed into a room you see effects twin had just dropped a couple of new tracks and we all had to have a listen it was clear that these guys lived creativity and they breathed creativity in fact every Wednesday evening after work they had this fantastic concept called weird Wednesday where they'll all get into a studio together and just deep out for a while on any new plugins or any new pieces of equipment that they got and they just jam now they're not jamming the conventional sense there's not a tempo there's not a key signature that they're setting - they're not playing licks or anything Chad over there on the far right is running his guitar to his laptop and he's playing with all sorts of vigil modules making all sorts of cool sounds bend in the middle there at the background he had a Euro rack system and he was making all sorts of Awesome incredible sounds with his maintenance modules that he just picked up that's Chris there on the left and he had his able to live set up and he was making all sorts of you know processing and sound as I'm based on what the other two guys are doing I had my little life 2 laptops set down and up at the frontier and the guidance would record this and they'd just jam we're making all sorts of weird random sounds for 2 hours and they'd record it for archival reasons but that wasn't really the purpose the purpose here was to break away from any creative inhibitions it was to break away from anything that was stopping them from getting to their creativity what they were doing was creating an environment where each of them felt comfortable in failure so I was sewing inspired after you know hanging out with these guys for a couple of days and I couldn't wait to get back to my studio right and I was like okay cool I'm going to come up with some like really really incredible you know creative do music great form sense and stuff right so you know since right dude so we got sense and this hell right and hell is down below so you know since we can put them down below like a salty air so let's start with like a sub pot right oh man GDC speakers you kidding me hahahaha that's what that sounds like okay it's really low subpar right but this is actually going to go to see the trouble with some notes is when you're running them solo as we demonstrated just then you can't hear them so instead we want to take some high-frequency content we want to add some high-frequency content to those sub parts in order to the for the player to be able to hear them on their TV systems now one of the ways that I like to do this is to take white noise and I take this white noise and I turn the white noise on and I turn the white noise off at a rate that mirrors the frequency of the sub underneath so what I'm essentially doing here is ring modulation right but it's ring modulation at the audio frequency now the sub there that you couldn't even really hear was ringing at about thirty six point seven Hertz so thirty six point seven times per second that that that's bouncing we're trying to bounce it wasn't really bouncing and so when you take a like a white noise and you do that with the same sort of thing you went out with this sound alright so when you combine those two together and you get the sub and the white noise you can hear them together you're probably not going to hear the full result on these speakers though there's the self right I feel really testing the DDC speakers here now if you take this combination you feed it through a distortion process you get all sorts of really interesting harmonics in the next video here I'll run these two together through some distortion you'll hear all sorts of interesting stuff start to happen now I'll turn the white noise off halfway through and you can hear what the de sources do the doing to the sub alone and you'll notice that the white noise is actually doing quite a lot [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so there we go so I was like oh man this is brilliant right here we go this is going to be the doom sound we're going to taste sine waves I'm going to take noise I'm going to run them through some distortion I'm going out for lewd genius this is brilliant so I send this off to Chris right and I tapped out a really big email justifying the whole thing in the sentence is going to be awesome let this thing blow your mind and then I send it off I sent hit Send on the email and I way to Chris's reply he replied with this now you're only laughing there because you're suffering the same fear of rejection that I am right and then I am I read that my screen and I'm like I know I failed again right time to go turn on the cold water in the shower and have a bit of a cry but then underneath that he had these lines I feel you've taken the first step on a journey toward the perfect destination keep going you're almost there now instantly I felt comfortable with failure I wasn't worried about failing with this team I was encouraged to be able to keep going Chris understood what I was trying to do here but rather than rejecting it out right and therefore rejecting me and my abilities he was saying keep going you're on the right path he was an encouraging he was encouraging an environment where I felt comfortable in failure now it was clear after this that I really wasn't doing the right thing right I knew and myself it wasn't correct all I've done is taken some sounds and ran them through Distortion I mean that's not really amazing I'm a guitar player and they're living out of doing that exact thing for about ten years but what I needed to do was change the process right change the process change the outcome I'm a big fan of Doom three I really really quite enjoyed doing Doom 3 I really loved the darkness that they were able to get into it I relive the storytelling I thought it was such an amazing technical achievement that they were able to pull off back in 2004 I found it really really quite inspiring as an interesting project now of course the music that you're hearing there and Chris Brenner had produced this track for Doom three now Chris is an incredible person I've only spoken to Chris a couple of times but his high level of music ability is only matched by his personality he's a really really wonderful person and Chris of course played drums of mine nine-inch now so many years and went on to play with Marilyn Manson and all that sort of stuff really really great guy but it was his experience with Nine Inch Nails that remembered something I remembered that 1.90 snails toured with David Bowie now David Bowie and self is obviously a really incredible musician and this reminded me of an interesting story back in 1977 when Bowie was in Berlin recording heroes he was working with a fascinating engineer an engineer named Tony Visconti now due to the technical limitations that these guys were working with they had only run out they'd pretty much run out with tracks on this tape machine that they were using they had one track left for vocals but to get the full emotional impact of this song across they needed to have reverb that was scaleable so tiny the engineer came up with this really incredible technique he set up David Bowie in the middle of the studio here right on the frontier so David would be singing into that microphone about 20 feet away from that would be a second microphone then at the end of the hall was a third microphone now microphones two and three in the back there were behind a gate alright everybody understands what a gate is right open closed gate audio gate right now when David was singing at the start of the song and it was kind of low tones there wasn't much volume to his voice so this first microphone was all that was picking up then when he'd open up a little bit the second microphone the gate would open and allow some of his voice through that would create a bit of a natural ambience then when Bowie would really rip into it the gate on the third microphone at the back would open up and what I thought was really fascinating about this is that they designed a system that dynamically added reverb based on the input so I thought what if I designed a system that dynamically produced interesting and appropriate musical bits based on the input to be inspired by this I started getting this awesome concept art through for the project now if you're really fascinated by these concepts of where they had these giant rock structures that were being held together with this evil force of energy this hell energy and the story in the game is that this evil corporation has found a way to mine this energy as a source of renewable energy right sustainable energy source I kind of love this idea that everything from your mobile phone to the TV you watch to the pacemaker that's keeping you alive to the plane that you're flying is all being powered by energy mind from hell it's kind of evil energy right I had this idea about this this sort of force that was traveling through things and getting corrupted this evil energy so with that in mind I start out to design the following system now for the sake of this next bit I want you to think of audio like water it flows downhill we start with a computer at the top the computer is what generates the sound in this case it was a simple sine wave we'll go into more of that in a little bit that computer split that signal out into four different paths these paths went into a chain the first chain consisted of a whole bunch of petals four petals a result now for this first test actually wrote these down for the real geeks in the audience if you're curious so the first petal there with a retro mechanical labs 4 3 2 K distortion box really really great distortion box the second pedal was a meta Sonic's kV 100 really interesting tube distortion the third pedal was a Geiger counter it's like a bit crusher that you can kind of do some cool stuff with the fourth pedal was add Warcraft funds from the dwarf craft the devices guides oh really cool as well that was the first chain at the bottom of that was a splitter we'll get back to that one in a second the second chain went through a very similar setup we had another four pedals the first one was another Geiger counter just our awesomeness the second one was a meta Sonics TX 3 Google it or don't the third was a mutant bi-phase an old phase it from like delayed 60s early 70s really really old phaser pedal because I really liked old phaser pedals they were the second one of those it was a Dodd 70s phaser as well it's a really really cool stuff at the end of that was a compressor we'll come back to that one in a second the third chain consisted of a tape echo I had this Watkins copycat old tape echo they would actually record to a tape and then the record head is back with the playhead so whatever you record plays up behind and it says it's like proper echo excellent natural echo when I on a tape machine write real stuff the second distortion box that was under that the pedal one you see listed there in the third chain that was just another distortion boxes at robotronic valve distortion thing it wasn't really there for the distortion aspect it was there more for the compression aspect after that I had this old Akai reel-to-reel machine machine from the 70s it's like a tiny little quarter interesting great sound really really grimy what I was doing here was feeding it with about 40 decibels more than it could handle which is really really cool and then recording back off it at the same time following on to that that went into a spring reverb tank with a wet and dry control so I could kind of play around with that that went into a compressor which I'll talk about in a second the final one we did a couple of different interesting things with the signal was sent out to a little mini amp you know those little crappy like Fender mini and things that got like a tiny little speaker in them again it was being said with about 40 decibels too much of what it can handle this that was being mics with a little like like a microphone with so the speaker had a microphone in front of it and a little bit of that signal was being sent through a splitter back into the amp itself so we're creating a feedback loop there but the feedback loop was only very very small it was so small that if a sound was actually coming through the amp it would choke out the feedback and when that sound started to disappear the feedback would come back up in the mix I have a little example of that run so we knew whenever that distortion sort of stuff starts to die out the feedback comes in right so the next thing is that every single one of those ran into a mixer so I could start summing things back down that ran into an EQ and a compressor the YouTube wasn't really doing much of as adding about four or five decibels down really lower about thirty to sixty Hertz and then we're adding about the same up about sort of eight to ten basically creating a nice sort of smiley face II - nothing really amazing there that was running into a compressor this compress was absolutely friggin pinned I'm kidding it was knocking off about 20 decibels right the reason I was hitting it that hard was so when the loud noises would start to go away the compressor would begin to open up and bring up all the interesting noise that every single one of these pedals and bits of equipment was creating I'll show you more of that in a second that's very important the compressor itself was set at about a 30 millisecond attack so we've got some really cool punchy stuff and then I'd adjust the release based on the tempo of whatever I was sending through it again I'll show you that a more in a second the ratio was about twelve or twenty to one pretty pretty pretty drastic pretty crazy and that was running straight into the to the digital audio workstation than recording stuff so what I'm going to do next is attempt to if we can get some volume on the the computer here I'm going to show you my first experiment running through this array I'm going to show you a series of sub sine wave tones therefore f notes followed by a little bit of a gap it's not meant to be bother knocking you the gap okay so that's it now I know what you're thinking is really not amazing right I know the music of the year right here whoo but when you run that through this array all sorts of interesting stuff starts to happen what I want you to listen out for is a couple of things at the end of those 4f notes you'll hear another note creeping underneath it's like an e it's like just below the F that's not being generated from me that's not being generated from the computer that's coming from some ground hum within the array additional to that there's all sorts of interesting distortion layers that are coming in and out based on that splitter on the left-hand side there that was sending a signal to those compressors along the bottom sometimes if I wanted to that was essentially side-chaining the signal from those other chains so based on whatever the input what it was doing was sorry based on whatever the input was doing it could dynamically change the mix of which it whatever you each chain I had and the last thing I want you to hear out for is all sorts of interesting stuff that's going on with the Sonics and things you will hear all sorts of harmonics anyway here again is that same subwoofer tone run through this array several times you Oh [Music] ah now we're getting somewhere interesting the way I started thinking about this was that this was my instrument I'm feeding it a very basic input and all I'm changing from that input is amplitude and pitch of what I'm sending through everything I was sending through it was a sine wave that's it the reason I chose a sine wave is because the sine wave is a most pure representation of what sound can be it's simply a wave that goes up in a wave that comes back down therefore any interesting thing that was happening within this array was being imparted onto that sine wave in the purest form possible I started to think about this as my doom instrument now don't care too much about this sort of thing these pedals would change I'd swap stuff out and all that sort of thing but the concept remained the same I'm going to show you a couple more examples of what I ran through it next here's another little sub pot I ran through I hope you guys can hear it that's it very very interesting not really kind of sucks here it is run through that array all I'm doing is changing need the amplitude and then tweaking some of the knobs as I go [Music] [Music] here's another example this is the same sort of thing so I'll just play that one again that did it and did it and did it and did it and pretty basic right now I'm going to play that one through this array again you'll hear the rhythm change halfway through just because I was getting bored with the same did it and did it in tune and over and over again [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] again everything there is being generated based on those sine waves alone so here's finally with finding something that's interesting this is some interesting music that is appropriate to doom it starts feeling good when we started putting into the game it started working really really quite well but we only reach this thing because I changed the process change the process we changed the outcome [Music] [Music] so here we are filing we had something interesting right some really thought that was kind of unique it was kind of special to doom it started feeling really really good throwing into the game everybody was responding it to really well we're really quite happy with it the thing was though it was missing something so in the modern zoom is nothing but a tribute to Niners game design 90s game designs really quite fascinating you walk into a room and you're instantly presented with a series of very distinguishable enemies it's your job then to figure out what weapon you want to pick to be able to kind of get rid of those enemies now it's for that reason that you're allowed to carry as many weapons as you like you don't need to aim down the sights you're not hiding behind cover none of this sort of stuff the idea is that you're being constantly encouraged to move it's very quick it's very fast in fact even when you start to take health you've got to go look for a health pack you can't just hide somewhere and have it generated it's all about kind of keeping that moving right now I feel that what was really interesting about the doomed team under on the new doom was that we're really able to capture that nineties feeling even with a modern first-person shooter when I visited the it Studios in Dallas I was really blown away with how well the new doom game actually felt it was making me give these sort of weird nostalgic feelings of playing doom back in the day it was feeling very very similar to the same thing so the game itself there felt like doom but it wasn't sounding like doom and I knew exactly why we had no guitars now both there's a really good reason behind that right I mean I know this said no guitars we had guitars don't put guitars into a game but I totally understood why why it's because the sound of an electric guitar somehow instantly summarizes a genre that has become a bit of a joke sure we'll pick one up when I go out today balloons and then I'm in good shape story or of I mean you can instantly see why no developer wants to be associated with such a joke right I mean it totally makes sense the thing is though that harsh aggressive upfront sounds that you get from a guitar is exactly appropriate and it was the thing that was missing from the soundtrack now it took some convincing but after a while we started looking at hey what happens if we add a little bit of guitar like 5% here and there maybe 10% here right a little bit by a little bit now slowly slowly slowly what we wanted to do though with kind of experiment with different guitar tones we didn't just want to take sort of general metal sounds and put those into the game because it didn't feel appropriate it kind of felt like that so we started experimenting with different ways to get guitar tones I was again inspired by the work with the Chris Brenner and things have done of the 90s and stuff like that and and and specifically Marilyn Manson and an engineer that Marilyn Manson worked with name's Sean Bevin and he had this brilliant technique back in the day of getting this really chunky guitar tone it was a guitar tone that they used for like beautiful people and stuff like that and one of the methods they used to get that guitar tuned was to take the guitar part as it normally was play it up an octave and then twice as fast and you record that to tape at 30 inches per stick per second right then you take that tape and slow it down to 15 inches per second and get some really interesting results now I had a tape machine and I wanted to give this a try so this is the guitar part played up an octave twice as fast now I know it's talking about Bill and Ted at the moment don't worry we record that to tape at 30 inches per second play it back at 15 inches per second run it through a preamp which is kind of jacked pretty hard you get this pretty cool stuff super super gnarly right another thing I did was started extending the range of the guitar down a lot now that a lot of people have made jokes about this sort of thing and fair enough to I got a hold of a nine string right when the line strings are really freaking crazy you don't need a nine string it's like excessiveness a nine string is so low it is literally like having a five string bass on the bottom of your regular guitar it's kind of stupid I had this nine string riff for the main menu theme [Music] the trouble was that it was sounding too much like a guitar is standing again too much like a sort of metal thing and as I said the whole nine string thing yeah really really really stupid I actually got rid of the nine string after finishing up the doom project I gave it to a buddy of mine he plays in like the biggest most aggressive metal band in the world and even he can't find a use for it around the time I was experimenting with this the synaptic plugin people re-released a plug-in called morph and it's a really cool plug-in to recommend anybody check it out basically what you can do is take two sounds and interpolate some characteristics of one sound into another I don't know exactly how it works but basically you can take one sound to kind of start to morph it into the other sound I took a sample of the chainsaw from the original doom game and started to interpolate that guitar tune with that chainsaw sound and this is what we ended up with didn't kind of violent if I didn't make that point sorry I should have pointed that out at beginning haha anyway so this is a really interesting way to kind of start getting some unique guitar tones into the game now once I got this I felt this was like the little Trojan horse that I was able to sneak into the id's software bases right and once I was in there I was able to put as much guitar in as I wanted interestingly what that allowed us to do was do something that I really loved doing on every single project and that is to create a couple of souls that belong in the game that kind of become easily identifiable to that game it's a process I really enjoy doing it's not just like the score stuff that sits in the background but it's these songs that fans seem to really enjoy so ones that they point out with it's the songs that become associated with the game in the end so once we started doing this guitar thing it allowed us to do this it allowed us to get these songs in there it was finally starting to feel like a doom game and not so much just like some nerdy geeky since best [Music] so all of a sudden just like cutting that stuff in there it started to feel like a dune game it started to make the player run around the arena a little bit more and feel comfortable doing that also what was really funny about that is that once the game came out fans of the game started to make jokes about the song [Music] so there we go by changing our process we change the outcome we were able to come up with some sounds that fit the game I would argue that it's not stuff that nobody has ever heard before but it was something that started to become quite unique for Doom it fits a project by adding a bit of guitar and stuff in there it started to fit the project even further even that was in the brief as a no-no we decided to go back and change that brief in order to better kind of access that other point that was in the brief which is that it needs to be instable love instantly loved by all the yards doom fans out in the world right so here's where we are this is how we started interpreting that brief now on doom it's impossible to ignore the controversy that the original doom caused when it first came out back in the 90s but music has had its fair share of controversy as well in May of 1982 teenagers of a congregation in Topeka Kansas destroyed thousands of dollars worth of records and tapes which they felt contained the message of Satan I think that within the rock music field you've got people who really are into the occult and into Satan they're propagating safety they're propagating the demonic line the are cultic world and I think it's a devastating thing on our culture the only thing that's a devastating thing on our culture is that guy's pants so cool right no worries whatever whatever one day I was working on this bass part three notes repeat pretty basic stuff kind of bored with it I was looking for something that needed to make this thing interesting is safety revered in rock to some the answer is obvious y'all headed monsters and demon like figures are probably the most lately and there is the number 666 also known as the mark of the beast the symbol belonging to the Antichrist who the Bible tells us is safe I'm a moth and that's a really big [ __ ] flame I was playing around with one of my favorite scents called hammer made by image line and one of my favorite little little things were harm is that you can take an image any image loaded into the synthesizer and it starts to generate characteristics of that image across the frequency spectrum so essentially what you're able to do is insert an image into a wave file but you need a spectrograph to be able to see it right so I found this picture of the number six and I pulled it over the base part [Applause] now don't know if you've noticed but there's a big problem with that there is that we've got this big giant gap in the middle so I grabbed hammer again and I made another interesting face using this really interesting image I found on the internet of a star it's kind of upside down now this point I'm gleaning like a child so much so that just my wife recently heard the giggling she came in she said what on earth are you doing and she snapped me at this moment where I had this really child just kind of look at my face now of course there's bit of fun right you gotta have fun in this project but don't worry I did the thing that any responsible composer would do I saved it I put it into wise I put it into the game and I send it off and I didn't tell anybody about it what's the worst that can happen right I mean for anybody to see that they'd have to crack open the game pull out the wise files and run every single file through a spectrograph and find that single bass pie it's never going to happen right [Music] so it doesn't get any clearer than that with all the pentagrams in the six six six right there they let me know here's our leases to Satan and your children are listening to this good wait there's more I was working on this drone sounds [Applause] pretty pretty hard pretty nasty drones now if anybody is curious the way I made this rune sound was by Bogota everything you're hearing there is Bogota I'm boning this guitar between C and sorry C sharp and D and I've spread that out across four octaves and all I'm doing is just slowly bowing between those two notes and I recorded that a whole bunch of different frames and laid it on top of each other when you do that that's kind of fun to get it's really really quite cool thing again it's kind of using guitars in an interesting way to get that horror thing across now have this idea one day that I wonder if I can hide a message in there somehow what happens if I put something in the center and then took a little bit of information from one side of the channel and put that into the other side of the channel and then flip the phase then what happens is if somebody listens back to that in mono they get this literally there that's exactly the same sound I just played before but played back in mono and what's that all about government investigation has found subliminal messages on certain albums when played in Reverse so what happens if we play that in Reverse now do you know how many news websites wrote about that one friggin none so what do we line onto well if you want to get a different outcome you must change the process change the process change the outcome if you're struggling to come up with something new if you find yourself stuck in a rut if you're suffering from creative blocks change the process change the way you're doing things and you'll end up with a different result not only that that has the courage to do so I say courage not confidence confidence comes from doing the same thing over and over and over and over again it takes courage to change that the second thing we learned change the brief if it makes the project better even though the brief said no guitars and we went down that route to begin with we felt comfortable changing that later on to satisfy a more important element of that brief sometimes you cannot do everything that being said though I feel we reached a more interesting place by ignoring the guitar element that was so synonymous with the Doudna mood the doom universe to begin with I feel if we started with guitars in mind we would have ended up with something that sounded like those memes I was playing before finally and the most important a team that encourages an environment where you feel comfortable in failure will enable you to thrive as a composer on the project your fear of rejection will often get in the way of you experimenting and pushing the boundaries a little bit more and that's understandable sometimes you're working with somebody who is not encouraging that and we say whenever you're on a project you're playing one part of the provider of the music and one part is the educator of music try and educate your other team members above below and on the same level that an environment in which you're encouraged to fail and feel fine failing is something that will allow you to thrive [Music] thank you everybody [Applause] the ladies and gentlemen we've got about 10 to 15 minutes for a bunch of questions I really encourage anybody who wants to ask a question just don't straight up to that microphone there and let's get into it yo hello hey man this is brilliant by the way thank you one of my favorite things about your music both in doom and in killer instinct is how its integrated to kind of respond to player actions and player input like in doom the glory kills cause some of your music to muffle and distort and then in killer instincts you've got those ultra combos that completely changes the music in real-time and I'm curious do you have a hand in some of that integration and can you talk a little bit about the differences between this project and killer instict yeah sure absolutely a really really good question the reason I chose not to kind of go too much into the implementation side of things on doom is that there's a lot of questions and things here that it usually happens at GDC about this which allows me to answer those sort of things in only that there's a lot of talks that kind of go into the implementation side of it as well and I found that there were some really important lessons that I learned on the Doom score such as the team that really encourages an environment where you feel comfortable in failing that we're kind of really important that you don't really see discussed it in a GDC so thanks very much for answering this question essentially the biggest difference between killer instinct and doom was obviously the style of the game killer instinct has a very predictable structure where you're going to have the first round the second round you know this it kills at the end this combos that can happen there's this kind of framework that you're working with in Doom essentially pretty much every battle in Doom is a linear path right you enter the arena the demons come out your role is to kill all the demons and then you kind of move forward it's as very kind of linear progression now we chose not to do too much crazy dynamic music stuff within that structure because it just seemed to get into the way of the groove basically when that player started and their demons came in and we just wanted it to be on just on just going just bang bang bang bang bang just like you jumped in the car and if hit play on that bad album right you're just going you're off off so that was the biggest thing there was a couple of little things that we did obviously when you did the glory kills the music drops out and there's a little white riser that happens we didn't really know how long each glory kill was going to take so I made a series of what I call endless rises these are essentially looping risers now I know that's a break in terminology but let me explain it basically we're taking the Shepherd's tone you ever know what a Shepard tone is yeah okay basically it's just taking a series of notes that go from low to high right when those notes are coming in high you're kind of fading in the lower notes again it's a little bit more complicated that I really encourage you to jump on Google and check it out it's a really interesting thing but if you use this philosophy you can create these looping Rises it just feels constantly like there's this tension rising it's really really handy in game environment when you're stuck in a situation when you don't know how long something is going to go for so we did that and then other times we started to experiment with this idea of like the music had started and like there with the hi-hat and the basic wrist kicking along and then BAM when everything kicked in that's when the music would start and that's when it really kick in honestly that's as complicated as the dynamic music system in Doom was how I delivered that stuff to the team I would always break my songs out and put that stuff into wise and then I'd send the wide smiles off to the team the stuff I'd break out was mainly just just the variation so we didn't have like a single 30-minute loop I would break that down into a series of different bars so it would be constantly rearranging but it's not rearranging on any data or anything like that it's just going from there that's very different to another project that I'm on at the moment where we're exploring all sorts of really interesting stuff that you can do with dynamic music so yeah there's all sorts of different ways you can take it thanks for the question that's really exciting thank you oh thank you hi and thank you for a super energy doc actually I have three very quick yeah Shane I know our energy questions so first of all I set up but you made yeah you use sine waves right yes didn't you did you experience with Solway square waves just to how to get more harmonic yeah interesting so the first thing that basically everything started is a sine wave what I wanted to do as I said as I said before is to kind capture whatever the pedal was going to add to it now if one of those petals has a preamp stage that's ramping that sine wave up into clipping range and then it runs through quicker that's clipping off that sine wave you're instantly creating a square wave there so some of those things would happen naturally and organically within that system I didn't experiment with any other waves being sent through it everything sine waves what I did do a couple of times though was send two sine waves through the system that were slightly pitched differently so to create this phase and balance and that would do all sorts of crazy stuff to the paddles okay second question um that setup created actually we really punchy high attack sounds right did you put an envelope on it or just was it just the compressor working so a lot of the time is a combination of things one with the splitter sending to the sidechain compressors I would send the signal out and I'd set the attack so it would be safe you know 0.3 or 30 whatever it is 30 so yes 30 milliseconds and that usually creates a really really nice and sharp attack and then everything was running through a slow compressor at the end it was really pinning things back right that once that came into the computer I might do some more processing within the computer itself such as transient processing and things like that just to kind of get those transients really to punch through transients I believe are really the key to getting a really punchy sounding game mix when you've got all these sound effects and screams and gunshots and all the sort of stuff going through if you've got just a solidly limited thing sitting in the background it doesn't come through what you want is those dynamics going hey on a punch then I'm gone and a punch then I'm gone and that tricks the players ear into believing that there's more solid music happening in the background okay final simple question did you only use a date they W or actually maybe use some hardware sequencers or RPG Arizona these kind of no I didn't I had a gear a rack system that I used to generate a whole bunch of different stuff that I use I didn't really talk about in that this in this talk because that's kind of you know general sort of stuff set up a since setup a sequence of place and stuff I mean people have kind of done that stuff a lot so I did use a little bit of that but once we created that sort of array that zoom array system I found that was enough to get really interesting fewer textures that were coming out that really suited the game itself okay thank you so much for the talk alright I hope you don't mind if I rip off an experiment with yourself no no please that's the idea of sharing it right that's the whole idea at GDC please awesome thank you very great talk I'm glad we didn't all kill each other when the music went on first so I mean I'd love to hear your take on yeah your take on sequencing when you release the songs just to be two on your stereo the santur came out I play it a lot I almost kill people listening to it and just what recommendation you have based on your experience with this soundtrack along with others about sequencing you know lots of different content from your rides full-on songs to your sort of dip stuff yeah I'm glad you raised that question as well thank you so much so I believe that a soundtrack is usually a wasted opportunity with a video game I really get so disappointed when I'm the big fan of the game and then the soundtrack itself comes out and the soundtrack is just like a whole bunch of loops that they pull data wise and then thrown on an iTunes playlist or whatever for me the soundtrack is the absolute best opportunity to put forth the best representation of that music so it's something that needs to be treated almost like a separate project we had a lot of fun on the soundtrack we had these monologues that I sold from the game basically voiceover files that were pull it pulled from the game and I used those to separate these different segments of the soundtrack which was basically inspired by sort of 70's and 80's concept albums like sort of metal albums I was hugely inspired by the War of the Worlds concept album and then yeah it just made sure I made some pretty cool arrangements and stuff like that that people would enjoy it too it's important to understand the context a soundtrack needs to be enjoyed on its own on its own you need to be able to put that soundtrack in the car and use it as a memento from your time playing with the game it's a lot more than just a collection of loops that you pull down the game just to make some sort of marketing opportunity cool and a quick follow-up how men give hints about the remaining Easter eggs I think you said they're fine yeah so this five Easter eggs I think for been found um there's one that hasn't been found yet um yeah I don't know keep moving Thanks yummy Arnie hey honey I wanted to know since you finished this project if you've had to spend some time like in the church to purify on look I mean I didn't put that stuff in there to offend anybody I mean I probably did right I mean course that anybody's going to do it obviously people got pretty upset about that sort of stuff um it's silly for me to say that's not the intention I mean I can say it's not the intention but once it leaves me and my own mind I have no control over it it's out there okay now I understood that when we were playing in that realm it's going to happen I felt it was we were able to do it in doom because doom itself is full of demons full of pentagrams for the religious stuff the story behind doom is that this evil corporation has the people that work for the corporation under such a tight roll with a thumb that they're able to get away with all sorts of things the corporation itself once you get higher up in the corporation levels you can opt-in to become a human sacrifice and things like this so I mean there's all sorts of that that stuff that's in the game already thanks man maybe yeah good question hahaha No hi there so I'm a graphics programmer so please correct me if I'm full of [ __ ] but I noticed a bunch of doom themes coming out in the music and I was kind of surprised you didn't mention that and you talked yeah grossest there any like integrating those themes and choosing what seems to put in yeah how do you put them in yeah no good question um again I always feel it's a wasted opportunity when you're working on a pre-existing franchise that you don't pay some tribute to what's happened in the past I feel that's really really super important I didn't talk about it so much in this talk I've talked about that in a couple of other talks and I wanted to focus more on those sort of geeky details that I can't talk about it say some other other conference right um but yeah it suits me it's really super important to do that those things whether we like it or not work their way into the the consciousness of the fan base the fans are expecting to hear that it to them is as as much of an icon within that game universe as the name doom itself that's very very important how I chose which ones to use um basically I'd just been working on a track and see whichever sort of thing I could fit in there sometimes I work them in a really obvious way the theme for the for the baddie in the game house is based on one of the the Bobbie Prince's original themes very very clearly but some other times they'd just be like a riff that would come in for two or three seconds and then it would go back out and it's just so the player playing oh yeah cool it's a doom game and then they go back into killing demons and stuff like that so yes that's a good question that is thanks for the talk yeah no worries I probably got for one more so this is really cool yeah there's only one more yeah no way could you briefly touch on how the music works with the sound design in general because I feel like sanitizer is a major like storytelling tool one yeah cool no of course so I don't feel a hundred percent confident talking about this because I wasn't in control in charge of this sort of thing that responsibility obviously falls onto the sound team in the audio director but I can talk about kind of stuff that we made sure that we did together for a tight mix for me one of the most important things is tonal elements right so if there's a tonal element that's happening in the game it's very important that that is in a similar key or same key or same root node or whatever it might be of the music that's playing so you'll notice in a couple levels there you pick up a chain gun right this chain gun is able to be split out into three chain guns so you've got like this ultimate killer chain gun thing going on right the current and the the sound of this chain gun the the bullets firing out of it happening so quickly that it produces a tone that was the philosophy behind that now we made sure that the tone of that was a denote it was a load d note and that Dino was sitting with the same music that was sitting in the background which is also sitting on a D so when you do that you get this really solid mix that's happening you don't have frequencies of the clashing my best thing that I can say about that really is that it's something that really needs to be considered on every project it's not an afterthought and it's not something that you can fix in wise or whatever you're using later on if you're ducking stuff when something else happens or if you're trying to compress this when this is happening you're fixing a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place now those tools exist to allow us to fix that but ultimately if you can carve your sounds and your music with that stuff in mind to begin with you're going to end up with a much tighter mix in the begin there in the end thank you very much cool thank you so much everybody have a really good GDC

Channel: GDC

Views: 1,512,888

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, doom, bethesda, id

Id: U4FNBMZsqrY

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/diablo75]

I'd love to see a blog post about all the Easter eggs he hid in the music; he mentioned at the end that at that time one hadn't been found yet but 4 others had (e.g., "Jesus loves you" when a drone sound is played in mono in reverse, or the 666 only visible in a spectrograph). I wonder what the others found are and if the one he said hadn't been found yet had since been found.

[u/Future_Shocked]

while using traditional DAW's is the interesting part. Like a really dope noise band.

DOOM(2016, PC Game) Soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm932Sqwf5E

[u/MF_Kitten]

The mic in front of the guitar amp providing feedback is a huge part of the sound. The actual feedback itself is one of the things I was wondering how he did, because it SOUNDS like guitar amp feedback. And it fucking is exactly that!

[u/haptomancer]

the earlier part of the talk is worth watching too, as it describes how he came up with that processing chain. fundamentally it's a talk about creative process design and how he built a whole unique process out of a design brief.

plus, mick gordon is a great speaker so it's very watchable.

[u/cultculturee]

Anyone know what he's talking about when he mentions "wise" files? E.g. "I would send the development team the 'wise' files so they could adapt them into dynamic play". Sounds like stem files--is it a mastering program or something?

He talks about it at 51:03

[u/MallyMcCoy]

Very helpful

[u/Immaterious]

Glad to see how much attention Doom's music and Mick's work is getting. He's tremendously talented and such a cool guy.

[u/eltrotter]

Absolutely fascinating, thank you for sharing.

I love the idea of taking something as basic and 'pure' as a sine wave and turning it into a gnarly, angry, aggressive ostinato. Fits the vibe of the game so well, and sounds really rich and organic.

[u/VinceOnAPlane]

I remember watching this earlier this year and greatly enjoyed it. "Change the process, change the outcome" really resonated with me. It inspired me to try a lot of different stuff out.

On a related note, I fuckin' love this track that he did for Killer Instinct.