So, what’s happened since I dropped off the planet?

Lots, actually, but only a few things are really worth mentioning, and I’ll do that in bullets, because I’m feeling neat, tidy, and list-like today.

• Someone actually validated my least-popular blog where I said you should work for free.  Until I read that, I’d been wondering if I was all wrong… now I know I’m not.
• Siphon Spirit is going strong, though our release is looking farther and farther away, thanks to feature creep. But it will be awesome, I assure you.  One thing I’m incredibly happy about is that I’m getting to use XACT for the first time, and finding it really helpful.
• Violet Kiss (the website is down, apparently) was finished — I may have mentioned that — and is being submitted to film festivals around the country.  If you’re interested in seeing it, let me know, and I can try to find out the dates and locations.
• I participated in the 48 Hour Film Project, and though my team didn’t win, I had a great time. You can watch the final video here, and our practice run here.

And now, the bigger news.

In Salt Lake City, there is a gaming and electronics expo called Geex (if you’re in Utah, are a games publisher, or an electronics manufacturer, you should check it out), where, at the very least, there were a bunch of sweet game tournaments and contests, one of which was a Game-in-a-day, where I wrote music and sound effects for a small number of games (two with music, three with sound effects).  My official team came in third place, and one of the teams I did sound for came in first.

Rick Bradshaw, Dave Matney, Chance Thomas

But that’s not the big news… See, at Geex, there were a myriad of panels, one of which was Audio in Games, featuring some pretty big names in the local, and even global, game audio community.

Hosting the panel was Mike Neilsen, from Wahoo / NinjaBee, who did a great job and kept things rolling.  On the panel with me were Rick Bradshaw, a sound designer from Disney Interactive, and Chance Thomas, from HUGEsound.

My initial thoughts on the panel were that it would be dull, and we’d have maybe ten people in the crowd, and we’d probably end up finishing early because of lack of interest.

Boy, was I wrong… there were probably 20-30 people in the crowd,with every one of them asking incredibly good questions and keeping things moving — Mike only had to step in a few times to offer new topics.  We were given an hour, but since we were the final panel of the day, we ended up going somewhere between 30-40 minutes over.

The best part of the panel experience, in my opinion, was that there was a mutual respect between us, and we all seemed to really get along.  Though Mike and I only have a few years experience, against Brad and Chance’s twenty-plus years each, both Mike and I were able to have valuable input, with none of us really taking center stage.  I particularly liked that, for almost every question, the panel would end up discussing it like we were talking over coffee — someone would ask a question, one panelist would offer their opinion, then turn to the rest of the panel, and we’d discuss it with each other.  It felt really nice to shoot shop with people who have far more experience and shipped titles under their belts, and not feel like I was the odd man out.

So, now what?

Back to working on Siphon Spirit, most likely, as well as a few MonkeyEgg projects that haven’t really taken off.  I’m also working on a bid piece for a short horror film, and I should be officially compiling my demo reel over the next couple of weeks.  In the mean time, I’ll try to update here, more often… and I’ll get some music uploaded so you can hear what I did for the Geex Game-in-a-day.

Related posts:

1. One Hour Audio pt. 1
2. Global Game Jam, 2010
3. Guerilla Marketing for Modern Composers: First Things First

Why the long break, you ask? (Well, I assume you asked, or will ask)  I’ve been busy.  Not with writing music, but with playing it.

All last week, with the exception of Tuesday and Wednesday (of which I only remember Tuesday… no idea what I did mid-week) I was either practicing for, or actually performing, a Good Friday presentation for K2 the CHurch, which was stellar.

Then I took the weekend to recoup, and last night I returned to my sequencers.  Hopefully I’ll have something to show you by my next blog.

Until then, check out Mike Rut; he’s the worship leader and artistic director for K2, and one hell of a guitar player.  It was truly a pleasure to work with him, both recording and performing.

Related posts:

1. Churches, Finale

Speaking of getting things done, I’ve had trouble, lately, writing anything that I feel fits the projects I’m supposed to be working on.  I don’t know what it is, but, though I’m still writing music, nothing seems like it fits.   So,  I’ve been playing with tons of loops (specifically, Cosmo D’s loop pack, which I HIGHLY recommend, and it’s got me thinking in styles and keys I’ve been unintentionally avoiding.

So… without further adieu… my loops:

Download audio file (Versus-1.mp3)

Download audio file (Versus-2.mp3)

Download audio file (Versus-3.mp3)

These first three were my freshman attempt at really developing anything worthwhile around melodic loops.  I’ve used rhythmic loops before (and you’ll see that I use them a bit later, too), but I’ve always been a bit hesitant with melodic loops.  These three are presented in the order I made them, so you can see my improvements.

Download audio file (Wednesday-Loop.mp3)

As is indicated by the title, I wrote this Wednesday night.  Again, it’s just loops with a guitar under-track that I threw down, and I really think this is something I could clean up and develop further into a video game track.

Download audio file (Wednesday-Loop-2.mp3)

This is the second loop I wrote on Wednesday, and I started moving away from looped drum tracks to programming my own, which I’m getting more and more comfortable with as time goes on.  Again, I think I could develop this into something good.

Download audio file (Wednesday-Loop-3.mp3)

This is the third track I wrote on Wednesday, and I’m particularly happy with it because it’s a venture into a style that I’ve NEVER written in, also, I think it sounds pretty good.

Download audio file (Thursday-Loop-1.mp3)

By Thursday, I felt I had pretty much exhausted myself with loops (not entirely true, Cosmo D’s comes with 3000 loops, so there’s no way I could really exhaust myself), but I wanted to give it one last go.  I like this track a lot, too, but I don’t know if I’ll ever use it for something.

All in all, working with loops is a blast, but it’s not something I could seriously use as a technique to write a melody (as a counter melody, MAYBE).  Luckily, I think all this play opened up my mind, and I can get back to writing what I need to be writing.

That’s all for now. ►►

Related posts:

1. Churches: The First Video
2. Huge!

In fact, I was treating it as a pipe dream — something that would be nice to have, but not something I could ever get.  And that was effecting everything I was doing outside the actual music and sound design.

Once I realized it, I made a vow to myself and the world (via my Twitter account):

[Dave Matney] will be living entirely off money made through music and sound design by 2013.

On January 16th, 2013, I will be turning 30, and I don’t want to be the 30 year old that doesn’t at least have a foot in the door toward the career of his dreams.  The career I’ve been working toward since I was six years old when  I first started writing goofy little songs on my mom’s piano. (Sure, I wanted to be a rock star, but, in 1989, I didn’t know people even made video games, I just thought they existed.)

So, I need to make some changes.

First off, I’m done working for free.

I’ve advocated working for free in the past, despite all evidence to the contrary, and I’m now realizing that I was wrong.  With few exceptions (Open Source projects, for example, where everything is strictly voluntary, or one-time personal favors), no one should ever work for free. Even if you’re working for a church or other non-profit, you can still get a letter of charitable contribution, which is a tax write off.

So, it comes down to this: If the person I’m doing the project for is getting paid, and/or if anyone else working on the project is getting paid, I am getting paid. I understand each project is different — students don’t have the kind of money a corporation has, and some projects pay on the back end instead of up front — but the fact of the matter is I have worked twenty-one years of my life toward this goal, and I deserve it.

Second, I’m done taking on new work until my demo reels are complete.

I have enough experience, and almost enough footage, to put together a demo reel.  So, as I polish off my plate I will begin the process of putting together my demo reels, both for sound design and music.  I need to show the world that I am worth what I am charging.

Finally, I will be overhauling my site, and blogging regularly.

My brother and I have been kicking around ideas for this site since I started it, and that’s been keeping me from moving forward with business cards and such, as I’ve been waiting to get everything properly, and uniformly, branded.  So, when I roll out my completed demo reel, I will roll out a new site.

In the mean time, and even after then, I will be blogging regularly.  Not every day, but I will promise at least weekly updates.  I won’t be don’t weekly links, and sometimes my weekly updates will be slightly anorexic, but there will be a weekly touch down from me.  Probably every Friday.

All in all, I think these are the best moves for me, my family, and my career. And, like I said, by my 30th birthday, I will be living entirely off money generated from music and sound design (and, if possible, game design and game writing, but that’s not my focus.)

Here’s to moving forward. ►►

Related posts:

1. Guerilla Marketing for Modern Composers: First Things First
2. Global Game Jam, 2010
3. Recommended Readings: Related Links from Around the Web (July 22, 2009 ed.)

HUGE! from Brandon Thomas Irwin on Vimeo.

This video easily signifies my greatest work, to date.  Brandon gave me a spoken-word version of the poem over a year ago, and asked me to write music, because he was going to make a video for his girlfriend, Abbey.  He didn’t know, at the time, that he was going to propose, but I knew exactly what it was going to be when I listened to it.

I haven’t talked about this, because it was supposed to be a secret.  I’m still not sure how Brandon got Abbey to be in a couple of the scenes without her being wise to it’s end purpose, but I’ve gotta say, it’s pretty awesome.

Eric Santoro played drums, but, otherwise I wrote, sequenced, and recorded all the music.

Related posts:

1. Churches, Finale
2. Electric Tech-Hop
3. Churches: The First Video

This year’s theme was “Deception,” and the area restraints were “Trades, Raids, or Maids.”  Some teams were formed before the opening night, which I feel took away from the overall experience, but those teams still had the experience of cranking out a game in 48 hours.

I was officially part of one team–made up of Tim Tillotson, Mark Schmelzenbach, and Jacob Kinney– at the start, with a self-imposed time limit of being done at Saturday by noon, which worked just fine for me, because I wanted to do audio for as many people as I could. We cranked out as much as we could, and when noon came around we saw that we weren’t close to finishing our project, but we saw an end in sight, so Mark and Tim both agreed they could work ’til 3, which we worked to and had to simply cut our losses; it was close, but it still wasn’t a playable game.  With Tim saying he was going to work on it a bit more that night –which he did– he, Mark, and Jacob all went their separate ways, and I stayed behind to do sound for anyone else who wanted it.

I could give you tons of stories, but I’ll just get onto the games and audio.

First up, is The Ant Thieves, the game that my team put together. You can play it here.

I am really happy with my audio for this game… I took The Ants Go Marching, and blended it with the James Bond and Mission Impossible themes, for an ant-spy feel.  I made two versions, one with a subdued chord progression and one made to feel victorious.  As for sound design, I pitched up a scream sound and made a “stomp” sound with some impacts and a drum, then added some distortion.

Download audio file (Ant-Walk-Normal.mp3)

Download audio file (Ant-Walk-Victory.mp3)

Next up, Treasure Raiders is an XBox 360 game with a rock-paper-scissors mechanic and some campy art.  It should be mentioned that none of the people on their team were artists.   I hung out with these guys almost exclusively after my team left. You can download the Windows version of the game from the link above, or you can wait for it to show up in the XBox Live Arcade (it won’t be free… but all the money is going to charity.)

I had a lot of fun writing the music for this project.  They wanted something like Castle Crashers, giving the game a cheesy epic feel, and I was loving me some French Horns when I wrote the music.  As for sound design, I tried to use musical instruments for as much of it as I could, to keep the campy feel, but had to resort to recorded sounds for the combat.

Download audio file (Title-Track.mp3)

Third up is Dust Bunnies. I really don’t know what to tell you about this team.  They were mostly ITT Tech students, with two exceptions.  Every time I went into their room, I never knew what to expect; someone could be sleeping on the floor, or someone could be rapping, and over the Saturday-to-Sunday crunch, they had rap music videos projected on their wall.  It was a blast, and you can play it here.

These boys didn’t know what they wanted… they first asked for elevator music, and then something by Ry Cooder.  By the end of it, they had settled on a Sim City-sounding reggae tune that I had actually cast aside, because I didn’t think they’d want it.  I’m glad they did, though.. I always ove writing reggae.  For sound design, I took two vacuum tracks, layered them, and trimmed them so the start and stop would be shorter, and cleaner.

Download audio file (Dust-Bunnies-Dub.mp3)

Finally, I did sound design for two additional games.

For the first one, Maid of Discontent, built entirely by one man, the sound was almost an afterthought.  He had asked me for two sound effects earlier in the night, but he insisted it wasn’t a big deal, so I focused on everything else.  If he hadn’t had trouble uploading the file, I don’t think I would have even been able to get the two sounds in.  Yeah, that’s right… two sounds.  A coin dropping into a vending machine, and a door closing, both FreeSound sounds that I simply cleaned up and balanced out.

The second sound-design-only game, and final game I worked on, was ConRaid, a fun flash game where you hide crowns from raiding orcs.  I feel I had more making these sound effects than any other project, due to their simplicity and speed.  I simply played guitar, then bitcrushed and downsampled them ’til I was happy.  Because of their melodic roots, they give the game a sense of having a soundtrack, even though there’s not one there.  You can play it here.

Oh, and one more thing:

The games posted in this entry use the following sound files from Freesound (http://www.freesound.org):

Woman Scream AAA, Thijs loud scream, from thanvannispen
Wilhelm from SweetNeo85
Scream Boom 01 from studiorat
Scream from analogchill
banda fort sample from snog
Door Creak Short from Percy Duke
Single Coin Return from tweeterdj

I’ll happily do this again, next year.

Related posts:

1. Time to start taking myself seriously.
2. Oh, wow… you’re still here.
3. Final Burn 2009

I wrote the music and sound effects for it (which I will be uploading here as I get them cleaned up for the final release), and I must say I’m really excited about how it all turned out.

That said, here’s a link to the installer, if you’d like to play the game, yourself.

http://www.davematney.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/SiphonSpiritDemo.zip

As always, let me know what you think.

Download audio file (One-Hour-Audio-pt.-2.mp3)

Related posts:

1. One Hour Audio pt. 1
2. Churches, Finale
3. Global Game Jam, 2010

The reason I’ve finally given in to what I know I SHOULD do is the Global Game Jam, which is coming up in almost exactly a month from today. I’ve got to be fast for that, especially given that I’ll be one of few composers, if not the only one, available for that event, and I suspect I’ll be approached by more than one group to make music for their games.

Also, in composing, I’ve heard that you get paid by project, not by hour you put into something (which makes sense), so the less time you can spend on each project, the more you can make in the long run.

So, I gave myself an hour to start from scratch and write everything I could on one idea, followed by 10 minutes to do final arranging, mixing, and mastering. It was chaotic, loop based, and, overall, turned into something I could probably use in the future with a little refining.

Download audio file (1-Hour-Audio-1.mp3)

Let me know what you think.

Related posts:

1. One Hour Audio pt. 2
2. Churches, Finale
3. Global Game Jam, 2010

The issue with Komplete was my own fault; I opened (at least) one of the instruments as a plugin before I opened it as a stand alone version. I don’t remember that being written anywhere obvious in the installation manual or anything, but it’s what happened. And, admittedly, I’ve been fighting with this since the day I got Komplete. That is, until two weekends ago when I started the LLLOOONNNGGG process of uninstalling all NI products, and reinstalling them, opening them, updating them, and opening them again. It’s taken 2 weeks, because I have a life away from this particular computer (though you’d never know it.)

The issue with Sonar is simply this: it’s a demo version, and it’s not made to run in Vista. Yeah, I run Vista. So, it crashes unexpectedly, and without consistency. Luckily, it’s that time of year where both Christmas and my birthday fall, and hopefully I’ll be able to move away from demo products, or at least some of them.

Well, because of the battling, while I’ve been doing all this mucking around to get my computer back to where I can work on Violet Kiss (which I’ll be doing minutes after I hit Publish, get a beer, grab my guitar and stuff from the car, and… well… about 30 minutes to an hour after I hit Publish), I’ve been playing around with Ableton Live (Live Lite, to be honest… another demo product, but with A LOT better support).

I’m still not a Live expert, but I no longer hate the program now that I know 3rd party Live Sets exist. But one thing I can now do is ReWire Sonar and Live together, which opens up a new realm of possibilities — Live Lite is limited to 8 audio tracks, which just isn’t enough for large projects, but it IS enough to bring a smattering of Live-exclusive sounds into a larger, Sonar-hosted, project.

So, this is my first experiment with ReWire.

Download audio file (ReWire-Project.mp3)

All melodic instruments are played in Sonar, while the percussion is in Live. Sonar was the Master, Live the slave, though the only thing that really changed there was which program I used to bounce this down.

The music box sound is from Kore, and so is the reverse delay; The bass is from Massive. There are 3 different drum kits used, Carbonized, Latin Percussion, and a Bright British kick… everything but Carbonized was ran through a delay, and Carbonized has it’s own.

Also… regular listeners to this blog will recognize the melody from the Churches – New York track. I’ve been kicking this melody around for awhile, and I initially intended it for a PARPG song, which is where the music box tracks came together. Now I’ve pretty much kicked this melody around to the point of never being able to use it again (which isn’t a bad thing.)

As always, let me know what you think.

Related posts:

1. Electric Tech-Hop
2. Monkey Egg
3. Churches, Finale