Some advanced tips about mixing

Oh Lord in Heaven. It’s been what? Over a week? I am truly sorry for my lack of discipline and how I neglected this blog. I’m not gonna lie, it wasn’t because I was busy (I was busy, but not to the point where I couldn’t update this blog), or because I was sick. I was just lazy just didn’t feel like writing any posts, or I couldn’t think of any. So once again, I am sorry. I will try to update more this week. Last week was a little hectic. This week should be a bit calmer.

This is more like an advanced tip. Not advanced tips with an ‘s’. But it’s a very important tip, so listen carefully.

The overall goal in mixing, NOT COMPOSING, is to confuse the brain. If you confuse the brain in composing, then you have a bad song. But when confusing the brain in mixing, it will — for some reason — jazz up your tunes quite a bit. Why? Who knows, that’s just how the brain works. Have you ever listened to a song, and the song sounds awesome, but you can’t put your finger on what sounds so good? Or just listened to a song that “works?” Well, I’m gonna show you the sciences of how that happens, and how you can do it too.

I have come to a conclusion that the reason this phenomenon happens is mostly do to panning. If I haven’t said this before, I’ll say it now: panning makes or breaks your song. Panning is the equivalent of a bassline in musical composition. That is, it is the glue of your song. How can something stick if there is no glue? REMEMBER THAT!

So how does panning do it? How does it confuse our mind, and make everything work? The answer is the sound wave itself…

This is a sound sample. It can also be called a wav or wave, respectively. Before we look at the wave itself, let’s try and figure what type of basic sound wave it is, not what the sound is itself. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. On the top left-hand corner, we have the sampling rate; it’s at a standard 44100Hz (Hz = Hertz). And below the word Format, we have what we’re looking for. The icon that says “32″ indicates bitrate, which is the overall quality for wav files. The sqaure shaped icon with the two little squares (referring to speakers) tells us its stereo, meaning it is comprised of two sound channels. That’s what we want to know. You see, it’s very important that we know whether it’s stereo or not. If it isn’t stereo, we want it stereo, even if it’s just a little bit stereo. In many cases it should not be drastic, as that would sound weird, especially for the bass.

So now let’s look at the scope itself. The scope is the sound wave you see. What sound does this make? That’s one thing you might have been wondering. The sound is a kick drum. An ordinary bass drum sound. However, it has a special sort of “groove” that makes it sound good. But “what” is the question… First off, you’ll notice that there are actually two lines to the scope. A blue and red line; these indicate left and right speakers. Keep in mind the length of this sound is only .6 seconds, so it will just sound mono to the human ear.

Now this is where the key part of the groove comes in. Look how much divided space the blue and red lines are. No, it is not normally like that; in fact, let me show you what this sound looks like, when unmixed, and unprocessed.

Wow! Doesn’t that look different? You can’t even see the two lines; they appear as one! As you can tell by the square icon under Format, it is indeed stereo, but it looks like just one line, meaning mono! Not only that, but the impact doesn’t look nearly as large neither, for those you who can read scope.

OKAY STOP OFF TOPIC TIME

Okay, this will be a little off-topic. When mixing, one thing you simply MUST know, is how to read sound. Yes, “read” sound. You read the sound you see in those pictures, and to be honest, it’s like learning a whole new language. You just have to keep looking at wave samples and such, and you get good at it. Obviously, you won’t be able to play a whole song in your mind that you’ve never heard before and have only seen the scope, but you need to be able to figure out basic sounds. Kicks like I am showing you here are pretty easy; they go quickly up, and slowly down. Natural kick such as this tend to look more distorted, while digital kicks look almost exactly like sine waves.

OKAY BACK ON TOPIC

Anyways, back to the groove. Take a look at the below picture:

This is a zoomed in portion where the source of the kick is. In fact, this is the part where you hear the most bass. Now, notice the highlighted part. The highlighted part is the very core of this kick. And right at it, both waves are crossing each other in an almost perpendicular fashion, do you see? THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT. That right there confuses the living shit out of your brain. It hears one sound cross to one ear while the other crosses to your other ear. Your brain just goes nuts. This is the source of a good sound, cross panning right at the core of your sound sample. Even if you have to manually build it, (which I don’t recommend because it’s time consuming and doesn’t come out natural) it will still be worth it.

How can you make this yourself? Well, it varies from sound to sound. Try equalizing, adding reverb, using dub delay, things like that and take a look at the sound source. Samples like a bass drum kick shown here that are used all the time should have some sort of perpendicular crossing. Trial and error folks, trial and error.

Now, you may think this is a bunch of bullshit. Well, I can’t stop you from thinking that. So fine. Take it like that. But you will be missing out on some musical gold, I promise you that.

Sorry for no posts this weekend

Lots of personal stuff happened this weekend so I didn’t really have time to write up anything. Sorry. Hopefully I’ll get something posted tomorrow.

Video Game Music That Never made it to NG — Part 2

Finally. I am writing this. Sorry it took so long. But first off, I would like to say: WOW! Thanks for the view spike! 27 hits in one day! It may not sound like much, but my last two blogs I had were lucky to get 3 hits in a day! Thanks a lot people for reading! It really helps motivate me to write these. Anyways, here’s part deux, enjoy.

Teehee Valley Theme (Mario & Luigi: Super Star Saga) — I liked this one a lot. Didn’t take me long to make neither. The lead is a synth string combined with a flute, and it begins with some marcato strings too. The percussion is some conga samples I found searching the netz.

Ayla’s Theme (Chrono Trigger) — SNEEK PEAK GUISE!!! This one I shall upload this one to NG very soon. Why not now? I want to upload it when Chrono Trigger DS comes out as an homage to it. I am very pleased with the overall outcome…except for the compression. The trumpet is in the -3DB no-safe zone for starters, and I didn’t even throw in Limiter or Maximus. Maybe I shall change that before I upload it to NG.

Big Blue (F-Zero Melee Remix) — A remix I did…for a remix. I made this one a long time ago, and as you can tell, the age shows. It’s not horrible, worth a listen, but that’s about it. You might like it better than I do…A lot of people have. You can’t beat that guitar solo, but man, if only I knew what I know now… I could make it sound so much better. I could always go back and update it, but I rarely do that, because I have a firm belief that once you finish it, it’s done.

Zeal Palace Remix (Chrono Trigger) A little hip-hop, synthy remix of Zeal Palace. Another homage I’ll be uploading to NG soon for Chrono Trigger DS’s release! So here’s your sneak peak. The sitar is recorded midi. If only I could afford Sounds of India…

Some Kirby 64 Theme — Yeah, I don’t remember what it was! LOL! I made this is one a long time ago so that’s why! How do you like the synths though? Are they delicious? Hm? Hmm? HMMM? Mah wooden synth is delicious!

Metroid Techno (Brinstar Melee Remix) — You can understand why I don’t upload remixes OF remixes, right? Anyways, this one is just awesome! It works so well! I would kudos myself, but then I would look like an arrogant fool. My only complaint is that weak snare…but I think everything else makes up for it.

Alright! That’s it! I guess I should upload some of my OWN work now huh? Then the haters won’t get mad me… Well, look forward to that soon!

How is video game music made? Let’s take a look

This post was inspired by a recent search engine entry (yes, I can view what you are searching for to get to my site).

Well, video game music starts with a beep, and then a boop, and the some more beeps, and then another boop.

No, unfortunately, making video game music is not that easy.

Anyways, I’ll start from the beginning. Back in the day, as in, the 1980′s, video game composers were very limited in what they could do with music. First of all, up until the 6th Generation of Consoles, video games music was, for the most part, midi based. What is midi? Well, try to think of a midi as real-time music. That is, midi does not contain raw sound wave data like .wav or .mp3 files do. Instead it contains information so that the computer or console can play the music. Think of it like a music box — The swindle on a music box does not play the music, it only contains the information so that the music box itself can play the tune.

The reason sound was midi-based was because it took up far less memory, which was a big issue back in 80′s and early 90s. Regular sound files would have taken up so much memory that there would not be any room for graphics! So you would have great music, but nothing to look at! Especially for RPGs. Nowadays, CDs contain tons of memory, so we don’t need to use midis. So basically, midi-based sound systems in games used a series of sound channels. These sound channels not only produced music, but sound FX as well (I wish I could tell you how the Sound FX part works, but I don’t know myself…lol). Have you ever played an old NES game and noticed that sometimes the music would become…”less” when a sound effect played? That’s because each sound channel could only play one sound at a time, so one of the music generators — that’s anything that makes sound — had to mute itself temporarily so the sound effect could play.

The 8-bit Era still used the traditional way of midis and sound channels as its predecessors had. Music in the 8-bit Era was pretty limited for the most part. The NES is most well-known console of this time, so let’s use it as the example. The NES contains only 4 channels of sound. As I said earlier, no two sounds can play over the same channel, so this meant you could only have four different instruments playing at once! Even worse, you couldn’t even decide what instruments they were…if you wanted to even call them instruments. So sound channels 1 and 2 were Square wave channels. A square wave, is literally, a sound wave that looks like a square when viewed under an O-scope. The square wave is what started the whole “retro sound” scene in the first place. These channels served as the harmony and melody. The third channel is a triangle wave. Triangle waves tend to make a very deep sound, so it served as the bass sound. The fourth channel offered percussion…in the form of white noise. White noise is the static you hear on your TV when it can’t pick up a signal. This sound was used to make very meager drums. (If you want to even call them that)

By the 16 Bit Era, video game music had evolved much. I will use the Super NES as an example, but of course, it doesn’t really matter whom I choose since it was very similar to the Genesis. The SNES now had 8 channels instead of four like the NES, and you could actually choose what instruments you wanted for each channel; for example, if you wanted a timpani roll in channel 7, you would get your Goddamn timpani roll. So now, not only could you play 8 different sounds at once, but you weren’t limited to pulse waveforms anymore. Woot. Early games were still developing midi banks to use for this, so the sounds were still very synth-like, such as in Super Mario World, but by the time games like Chrono Trigger had come out, sound was very realistic…for its time, heh. What is a midi bank you ask? A midi bank is basically where you store all your instruments you will be using (well, their virtual data at least). I’m not sure how much instrument data you could store on the cartridge, but it was a lot. Sound FX were also played on these channels as well. I’m not to sure how that works though… Anyways, in addition to all this, you could also add 1 FX filter over all the channels; so now, you could give your sound reverb, delay, and other cool effects. Definably a big help.

The N64 and PS1 were two very different systems in terms of music, so let’s start with the N64 first, shall we? The N64 still used cartridges, which meant that it was still very much limited in the music you could compose for it. However, it was far more accessible than the SNES. In fact, it was pretty much just as good as the PC midi system. Many games actually used PC midi’s as well. I remember Pokémon snap did… Later though, special banks were made to ensure the best quality for the N64. The N64 also had enough memory to support pre-recorded sound effects! This means that sound effects were stored as recorded, low quality, sound files; they weren’t midi based like before.

The PS1 used CDs. This was a huge advancement, because CD’s allowed far more memory. This meant that you could now store music as a compressed file format and not a midi anymore! From here, music was now made a completely different way — the computer. In fact, this style continues on to today in video game music (mostly). Programs like FL Studio (hint, hint) are now used to make awesome digital video game music. Many soundtracks were even orchestrated, such as Halo and Super Mario Galaxy! These days, taking up too much memory isn’t a big deal for sound anymore, now that discs have so much space.

If you’re interested in making video game music, you should start by getting FL Studio, as I guarantee it will get you the closest to video game sound you could get. You can download the demo free at their site. Anyways, you should look at the demo projects to learn more if you have no idea what you are doing. I’ll be posting tutorials and tips about using FL Studio later, so stick around.

–DmNt

PS: Sorry if this just discussed video game music history and not actually making it, but making it is really just like making any other music from a digital perspective.