Music Stage - "Broken Egg"

Last week I was skiing in Italy so I wasn't able to do any work on "Broken Egg". It was a really nice break for me to get out of the office and recharge - then again, so is the Music stage.What I love about the Music stage isn't just that I love to write music, it's that I'm able to work it strategically into my workflow so that I can break up the art basically into pre-production and production phases. The other thing is that since there is so much artwork that goes into something like this, having a week or two to just break away from that side of things, after all the concept art and storyboarding, and flex a different part of my brain for a bit is a welcome change. I think it really keeps me fresh for when I start the actual production and go back to doing art.You’ll have to bear with me on this post because I think it’s going to be a long one. There are a lot of things that happen in this phase and they usually happen pretty fast... in other words: this week. If you want to listen to the music while you read just look for the play buttons below.Like I posted in the first Storyboard post back in February 18th, I usually start orchestrating in a simple program called JazzWare. This program allows me to very simply put down the tone and melody of the song without luring me to get caught up in the packaging of the piece. There is a screengrab back in the Storyboard post I mentioned above.When it comes time to start rendering the track, I use a more powerful sequencer: Cakewalk Sonar (I’m using version 6 at the moment). There are a couple ways I go about this; I can manually mark the MIDI notes with my mouse in the piano roll view of the sequencer, or I can record in real time and play the notes on my MIDI keyboard. The keyboard I use now is the M-Audio Keystation 88es. It’s relatively cheap, full 88 keys, and plug-and-play with Windows. Like I’ve said many times before, I like my products to be simple and straight to the point. A note to anyone looking to purchase this keyboard... if you play piano you’ll notice that the key rebound is fairly considerable which makes playing delicate pieces a chore – but that’s what the sequencer is for: adjustment. Here is a screengrab of what the Broken Egg score looks like in Sonar 6.

This is the second pass of the song in general but the first in Sonar. For the virtual instruments I use East-West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Gold Edition (EWQLSOGold for “short”) for the orchestra, obviously, and Steinberg’s The Grand for the piano. If you have a keen eye you’ll notice that back in JazzWare I was using a Rhodes Piano for the driving undertone but when it came time to pull up instruments in Sonar I went with a Concert Grand. Both EWQLSOGold and The Grand are VSTi packs. I load the soft synths into Sonar and queue up the instruments in their respective panels for what I need and just assign them to the track they apply to. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s ok. As much as I love writing music, the process by which I have to go about doing it digitally is pretty much a jumble of nonsensical words anyway.I should write a word or two about the VSTi’s though. The Gold Edition of the EWQLSO is really just that middle ground between Silver and Platinum. I’ve heard good things about Platinum, but for double the price of Gold I just don’t think the articulation will be THAT noticeable. I think the Silver is going for around $200 now which is half the price of Gold, but as I had tried Silver before I can tell you that there are more instruments and better articulations by a fairly wide margin in the Gold pack.As far as The Grand is concerned, I have to say it’s not really the greatest virtual piano out there. Though, again by power of halves, it’s half the price of the East-West Piano’s pack and most people honestly can’t tell much of a difference between pianos unless they’re compared side by side so there’s really no reason to go more expensive in my opinion.So after I’ve made another crack at the piece, this time with soft synths, I make any adjustments that have been bouncing around in my head since then.

If you’ll notice bars 21-28 from the topmost screengrab has now been doubled to bar 36 (as shown in the screengrab immediately above). This was a timing issue that came up when I was storyboarding and I realized that the storybeats during the main conflict were starting to outnumber the time allotted for them in their corresponding music segment. It actually gave me more freedom to add some variety into that part which was much needed. The other thing you might notice is that I’ve started playing with Volume Envelopes which is basically half of my virtual mixing board processThe second part of the virtual mixing is done in Sony Acid. Sony Acid is also what I use for mixing dialogue and soundtracks as a whole so it’s not just a unitasker for the sake of adjusting volume on my one exported WAV file; but in this case, that’s what I do. I export a WAV from Sonar and I import it into Acid and use its Volume Envelope to smooth out the volume over the entire mix so that there are not such drastic peaks and valleys as far as the volume is concerned.

So now after all that is done, I have a rendered audio file that I will use right through the process and maybe until its release if I don’t feel I need to change anything before that. Below are two audio files. One is the MIDI that I made first in JazzWare and the other is the audio that came from the rendering I just described above with Sonar, the VSTi’s, and Acid. Next stop – animatic.1: Rough MIDI2: Final Render