MediEvil

Nightmare with no Xmas! How to write for a synthesised orchestra with precious few sounds and even less experience!

It’s 1997, I’d been writing scores for games for seven years at this point but the first five were writing ‘chip music’, that is music programmed and generated by the sound chip of the games machine itself, I’d only moved into writing ‘real’ music with synths and samplers in a recording studio for the past two. Recent scores for Silverload and Defcon 5 were moving into a melodic film score style of writing but it was all still very new to me. And my writing style was based around riffs. I’d come up with a short idea, 4 or 8 bars of music, loop it and build on top of it. Effectively a bottom-up approach. 

Since gaming began, games music had two stigmas, both of them due to technical limitations. The music sounded like bleeps and bloops and was repetitive - irrespective of how long the task took the music didn’t change. Once technology evolved to the point where ‘chip music’ wasn’t a prerequisite it meant the music sounded better but it still didn’t change irrespective of how long it took to complete the task so it remained repetitive, normally cheerful and upbeat too - it still sounded like games music. For certain genres this still worked well – the Frogger remake I worked on in ’97 was cheerful upbeat and repetitive with a dollop of funk. The references Chris gave me sounded nothing like that, instead they were beautifully written melodies, performed by some of the best orchestras in the world. 

I found myself justifying why games scores I wrote back then didn’t sound anywhere near as good as film scores simply because I was writing with samples rather than the real thing. Turned out whilst convenient it wasn’t entirely accurate. Orchestral film scores I discovered are melody driven. Compose the tune first and the backing after; a top-down approach and precisely the opposite of how I’d been writing. Alas I didn’t have this lightbulb moment until a few years later.

So not only did I not know the difference between melody vs riff-based composition, I also had very few orchestral sounds. I had a synth module (a Roland JV1080) which had strings / woodwinds / percussion. Brass was very hard to synthesise well so avoided those as they sounded poor. I had a sampler, an Akai S3200 but no orchestral sounds. My first idea to remedy this was to buy orchestral sample CDs, the Peter Siedlaczek Advanced Orchestra CD-ROMS were great, other sample CDs came as orchestral riffs on audio CD which had to be sampled in manually. 

Buying the latter was a big help as I could start an idea using a ‘real’ orchestral riff and layer material on top. I bought sampled choirs, strings, anything I could sample to bolster the limited sounds I had access to. 

Another layer of complexity came about when analysing what makes the film scores we were given as reference - especially those by Danny Elfman - work so well. Whilst I couldn’t buy scores on paper, I had enough musical training to analyse how he wrote and learned that so much of the humour comes from writing melodies that weave between intricately orchestrated sections which change every few bars. (Orchestration is the art of arranging a piece of music for the orchestra, who plays what, how are the chords and melodies split up etc.) :- strings and brass -> woodwind and percussion -> choir and strings -> percussion and brass etc. It keeps the music sounding alive and vibrant with an energy that’s perfect here. 

So…. into the melting pot went orchestral sample libraries, riffs, choirs, percussion and sounds from the JV synth into what we called an Autoload, a template that we would use as a basis to write each track with. Our analysis concluded a mixture of comedy writing with slapstick semitonal movement and pizzicato strings, chord writing using a lot of minor thirds and diminished chords, madcap orchestration which constantly changes and write melodies that you hope folks will remember. No pressure. 

From all of that anguish I discovered it was a style of music I loved writing. The blend of fantasy, magic, horror and humour intertwined with learning to write for a sampled orchestra within the technological limitations of the time was frustrating but also immensely gratifying. 

To cap it off, the game wasn’t ready! 

Game dev is a complex beast, so much of the technology needed to drive the game and develop for it was being written as we were working on it, this was Millennium’s first fully fledged game in 3D, tech to learn, design challenges to overcome. All of this meant writing music in the proverbial dark, we couldn’t Dan running around fighting monsters on any of the levels apart, just concept adorning the walls. So that’s why these tracks were called MIG, it stood for MediEvil In Game, as we had no idea what level they would end up on! One technical restriction we discovered that in order to make the music fit on the CD whenever the track looped there’d be a noticeable gap as the CD laser seeks to the beginning of the track, to overcome this we wrote two-minute tunes which peak in the middle of the track so the start and end are quiet you wouldn’t notice.