BenVersluis.com

It should be no secret (by now) that I’m first a foremost a nerd. Whether it be recording/music gear, technology, or video games, I’m a nerd.

I’ve followed Blizzard and played their games since my Dad first intorduced me to Warcraft II. Since then, I’ve been somewhat of a Blizzard fanboy. I’ve purchased all the games, played them to death (I’m still playing World of Warcraft), and have always loved the music and sound design.

When I saw that the Echoes of War set would go on sale, I immediately pre-ordered the “Legendary” edition: 2 music CDs, 1 behind-the-scenes DVD, several art cards, and a pretty lengthy booklet containing information about some of the key musicians on the recording and some really nice commentary about the whole process.

So here’s what I think about the set as an audio engineer/normal guy and not so much as a musician/theory guy:

The Music: Well, assuming you bought either versions of this set, this is probably why. The music is amazing. Its moving, its epic, its huge. You can really tell, in listening, how much love, blood, sweat, and tears went into this project. From the scoring to the composition to the actual recording…its simply amazing. Being familiar with all of the universes covered (Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft), the music really took me back at times. I can remember being younger and playing Warcraft II matches against my neighbors on my awesome 56k modem.

Going back to the overall quality of the music and the recordings, you can tell that the musicians chosen for this project were some of the best in the world. Because, as you know, good players are the base of any good recording.

The music is amazing. It is the reason you should be buying this now.

The DVD: The icing on cake. It’s around 50 minutes long and full of awesome content. You get to meet a lot of the key players in this project: from the composer, to the arrangers, to some of the recording engineers behind the console at the studio. Its just awesome.

My favorite part about the whole DVD was the theme of “challenge.” None of what these people did is easy. From concept to planning to execution. Its all very difficult.

They even talk about the difficulties of an acutal recording session at times. The interviewees talk about recording for three hours and MAYBE getting ten minutes of music (and that’s pretty generous). Long days, frustration, and little-big-mistakes (turning a page too loudly while tracking) are all very good depictions of what real, efficient, professional recording sessions are all about. Not all recording sessions are Auto Tune and drugs.

The Booklet: This is a nice addition. I won’t go on and on about it, but it was really nice to read about the musicians who made this happen. It was packed with info about the songs and what game universe they’re from. It even contains some nice commentary from a one Nick Kolan. It’s not the best part of the package, but since when were the liner notes the reason you bought a recording?

Overall, this package proved what I already knew: the recording engineers behind this and all Blizzard products have my dream job. I want to do what they do…badly.

All jealously aside, this is an amazing project spanning quite some time and involving people from all around the World.

If you’re a fan of Blizzard and the music in the games, you NEED this in your life. You wouldn’t be a fanboy without it.

Go here to buy this. Now.

Oh. My. God.

I don’t know how many of you who read this (if any) are life-long gamers, but I am. I’m also a huge Blizzard fan (from Warcraft 2 and on), so when I read this post, my heart nearly skipped a beat.

What you see above is a year-long International project consisting of music from Blizzard spanning ALL of their titles: the Warcraft universe games, Diablo, Starcraft…it goes on.

It comes out on November 22 in two versions: a regular for $30 (90 minutes of music) and a “special edition” that includes CDs, DVDs, and art books for $50 (the SE is available now in limited numbers). Quite cheap when you think about all that you’re getting.

PS: Check out the Kotaku post for some nice studio pictures.

I think we’re all aware that Metallica released a new album awhile ago. Did you also know that the CD version you buy in stores is plagued by clipping and distortion due to multiple stages of brickwall limiting? Well, it is. 

Did you also know that the Guitar Hero version sounds better than the CD version? If you don’t think so, check out the video below:

There’s some great notes on the Mastering Media blog about the waveform anaylsis of Metallica’s new disk (note: keep in mind that, when talking about digital audio, 0dBFS is the end of the road…it’s the ceiling of digital recording and it sounds HORRIBLE when signal reaches this level)

I just skipped through 3 random songs and the highest I saw on the meter was -4,3 dB RMS (-1,3 RMS in AES17 norm), looking at the realtime RMS meter with Wavelab’s default time constants.

Wavelab’s global analysis (with its default time constants) reports -2,93 RMS [+0,07 in AES17] RMS in one of those tracks.

Most of the album (looking at the meters) sits between -7 and -5 (between -4 and -2 in AES17).

You remember that popular myth that mastering will “make your record sound the same across different systems”? I now get the point. Death Magnetic (although apparently not introduced through mastering) sounds thin and distorted on my laptop speakers. And it sounds thin and distorted in my mastering studio. There’s always a silver lining

I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else.

Unless you’ve been living underneath an Internet-less rock for the past few months, you probably know that Spore, the new game from The Sims creator Will Wright at Maxis, is a pretty epic universe indeed.

Such a massive enviroment calls for some massive sound design. Maxis (and Wright) seemed to put a lot of thought and care into the sound team (headquartered in Emeryville, CA). The sound team consisted of six people (when Spore was published; there had been several more sound team members throughout the five years of the game’s development).

Considering that the creations of Spore are, sometimes, animal like (and always creature like), Kent Jolly, audio director, says that the team used hundreds of animal recordings - from sound libraries to recording trained Hollywood animals used in movies. Jolly and his partner, sound designer Mike Cormier, carried around a couple of Sound Devices 722 recorders, one with a Schoeps M/S setup, the other with a Sennheiser shotgun.

One of the most interesting aspects of the sound design in Spore is the generative music implemented into the actual game by Cliff Martinez and Brian Eno.

On the music inside the game:

“Brian was involved in a  lot of general music design with me [Jolly], so he came here and I also went to London and worked in his studio.” … “He’d come with his Mac and Logic and he’d be generating sounds. We sould sample them, get them in as instruments into the game and play with them together. 

There are two kinds of generative music in the game. One is sort of MIDI note-based—that happened much more here from samples made by Brian by ourselves. But there’s also a whole area that’s more like Brian’s ambient music, where he made it using software he called ‘Shuffler’ [note: this is, supposedly, Eno's custom-built MaxMSP patch]. The software was based on earilier pieces where he would make 10 CDs and they’d all have a set of tracks, and then he’d set them on ‘random shuffle’ and they’d play randomly and we’d make ambient music that way. We re-created that system in the game, especially in the space game: When you go to a planet, [there's a music] system there that plays a different sample every 10 to 30 seconds, and this group [of samples] has this volume range and this pan setting, and a whole group of those forms one track. You end up wending through these tracks that are changing all the time.”

“Unlike a lot of games, most of it is not looped—it’s being generated in real time. There might be chunks of drum loops that are being re-sequenced randomly, and then all the pads and other sounds are basically MIDI but we’re generating them randomly.”

And, once out of the space universe in the game, you enter into what Jolly calls the “Civ game.” Where your creature/animal can start colonies, cities, etc.

“[In the] Civ game, the user gets some control over the music: You can pick beats—some were made by Brian, some were made by me and my assistant Aaron McLeran, and then reprocessed and changed—and then you can pick a melody instrument and design your own little melody, and also pick up ambience tracks. Using a note editor, you can set the tempo, get rid of notes, change the length of how they play…and there’s an algorithm [built in] that will randomly form melodies.”

The note editor was concieved and built by Jolly, Eno, Wright, and engineer Cyril Saint Girons.

So, as you can see, this kind of sound and music design takes up a lot of resources (”days of stuff on there. It’s more than two gigs of compressed audio”). So what’s the sample rate and bit depth?

“At one point, we thought we might have to go to 22k for all our samples, but in the end we didn’t have to. Some of them are 22k, but morst of the voices are 44[k] MP3 and most of the music is 44[k] MP3.”

“It [the stereo mix] gets multed out to surround, but we did very little in 5.1 for CPU reasons.”

Two gigs of compressed audio? An entire generative music score? Despite all the launch problems [DRM and otherwise], this makes me want to pick the game up.

Oh, and as a last side-note, the DAW of choice in the Maxis offices was Pro Tools for the sound design, and Logic (as stated above) for music.

Quotes taken from the Mix article “The World of Spore,” by Blair Jackson {9/08)

My birthday is next week so my fiancee bought me a Nintendo DS. A few weeks earlier, I had imported the Korg DS10 game cart (Japanese version; American version comes out in October according to Amazon). I’ve been playing around with it endlessly for the last week and found it to be a pretty powerful little app.

Neddless to say, it was nice when I saw Kotaku’s story about the DS10 today. It’s about the first “album” produced using the DS10. Check it out here. Among the DS album, you can also find a really nice DJ mix using music performed entirely on the DS10.

The album and the mix are actually very entertaining. They sound like pumped up 8-bit chiptune songs, and with some mixing love I think the tracks coming out of it could be amazing.

I can’t wait to pump some audio out of my DS and into Pro Tools so I can play around with some tracks.

There’s a new interview up with Tetsuya Shibata, Kota Suzuki, and Wataru Hokoyama, three of the audio post-production guys on Resident Evil 5.

Among topics in the article are why they recorded the large-scale orchestras in Hollywood instead of Tokyo and this gem, which doesn’t seem to be a popular opinion judging from the other guys’ answers:

Kota Suzuki: I get the impression that production at western, particularly American developers are ahead of those in Japan. But, I think that more and more in Japan, the process of making video game music is becoming specialized. More and more Japanese production companies are working together with foreign companies, and sound production quality in Japan is approaching that of the west.

Anyways, click here to read the full article. It’s really good.

If you scour the internet for multi-tracks, you’ve probably seen the Beatles’ four tracks, the complete sessions for “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and just about any other type of multi-track recording you could think of.

Well, add the entire setlist of Rock Band and all the Guitar Hero games to that list.

Apparently some guy somewhere figured out how to open up the afformentioned games and grab the .mogg files: the Ogg Vorbis files inside the game. When you pull those from game and drop them in Audacity, all of the sudden you have a multi-track session from one of the games. Now, you should know that the MTRs aren’t 32 track MTRs, rather a few stereo tracks and a few mono, usually totaling around 10 (maybe a few more). So you get the printed stems of the songs.

I won’t link to the site that directly links to downloads for all these songs (it’s still illegal, you know) but here’s a slightly edited (for grammar and clarity) FAQ that was posted on the blog that broke all these songs to the internet:

All of the .mogg files open in Audacity.

First two tracks will always be stereo tracks but will be split into mono in Audacity.

The typical tracklist for these .moggs are:
1. Kick (stereo)
2. Snare (stereo)
3. Overhead/room mics
4. Bass
5. Guitar(s)
6. Lead Vox
7. Everything else (strings, synths, backing vox, etc)

A lot of the MTRs are covers. They should be clearly labeled as such.

The original multi-tracks were taken by Rock Band’s developer pre-mastering. The developers (or a studio that works for them) mastered all the material inside of Rock Band.

I’ve grabbed a lot of these files and it’s pretty cool. My only concern is that a lot of the masters clip pretty relentlessly. A friend of mine suggested it was the engineering, but I’m not willing to bet on that. I think, if anything, the clipping occured from transfering the masters from Rock Band to some guys computer.

All-in-all, this is a pretty cool hack. I’m sure Harmonix won’t be stoked to find out this is happening, but it’s cool for the rest of the world. If you’re interested, go try and search for the blog to find the tracks. I guarantee you it will take about five minutes in Google.

EDIT 10/21 - Commentor Samwise had this to say:

Hey man, they peak cause they are all playing at once at an almost mastered volume. The truth is the OUTPUT is peaking, not the individual tracks. If you can pull them up in something like Pro Tools (although Audacity works fine, it just takes longer), pan them all out, and lower them all, it won’t peak…

Hope I helped 

And he’s totally correct. I did this with a few of the tracks I downloaded and it instantly sounded better.

Developer Cavia showed the Korg DS-10 at this year’s E3 in LA. The DS-10 is a Nintendo DS copy of the famous Korg MS-10. You can connect up to 8 DSes together via ad hoc wireless to have one giant synth jam sessions!

The software features the full range of musical notes, which is pretty amazing. You can also create songs from one to five minutes long.

The DS-10 will also feature Korg’s Kaoss Pad so you can endlessly tweak your sounds.

It’d be really cool if they could integrate some type “export” feature for this. Maybe they can integrate this somehow with the Wii so you can create music and then drop it on that system? Either way, if I buy a DS, I will buy this.

You can check out this preview video for the DS-10: