The Music of BATTLETECH: Big Sound on a Budget

[Music] all right so you're in uh music of battletech big sound on a budget let's go over the agenda real quick um i'm basically going to start with uh the anatomy of the battle tech score i'm going to move on into how i built the team and how i hired the orchestras and that'll move us into budget and planning and then ways that we increased mileage uh using these recordings that we had but first you might be asking uh who am i that's kind of existential but my name is john everest i'm a freelance composer from seattle i mostly work in video games um and i've scored several games uh most notably dragon fall shadow one dragon fall uh shadow in hong kong uh necropolis and most recently battle tech the the one we're talking about today and i'm currently doing the music for v1

interactive which will probably be announcing some stuff in the next few months and then some other unannounced goodness as well but today as i said i'm going to mostly focus on battle tech and i'm going to dig as deep as i can into 30 and 30 minutes on how i record the score and try to help you with your next gig if you are getting a larger budget to work with larger ensembles but first have any of you played battle tech or know what battletech is all right so i'm going to play a little bit of the opening cinematic mike mccain the art directors in the crowd is going to get mad at me because i used old art but this will give you an idea of what battlestack is [Music]

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um so that's that's battletech um you get the gist it's kind of game of thrones in space little medieval with a lot of sci-fi elements basically giant robots uh punching each other in the face in space um so let's dig into the anatomy of the soundtrack um first it was 240 minutes of music it's about four hours of music 60 minutes of that was recorded with live ensembles um so we had a pretty decent ratio of what was kind of a largely

orchestral score we chose to record most of the score in europe spanning from germany hungary and all the way to latvia and of course back to seattle where we did some some recordings ourselves so first in germany uh that you saw in that opening we recorded with a 74-piece orchestra in the cpe bach chapel in in frankfurt um we recorded the full ensemble in a chapel uh to give it kind of the lush romantic sound we were going for for things like our main theme where all the players in the room together kind of have this this magic happen where you can kind of uh you know be one unit this was a two hour session we did it in a shared session format so for those of you that aren't familiar that's where you can actually split up the day with an orchestra with other composers and save a lot of money doing that so it's definitely a way to push your budget further so we've got about 20 minutes of

total music from from that two hour session so here's a dry clip from that session so you can get an idea of what it sounds like with all the added drums and and whatnot that i had on that opening cinematic [Music] so they sound great um nice and nice uh cohesive sound uh in that great chapel then the uh the rest for the majority of the rest of the score was done uh in budapest uh with a 66-piece orchestra for about a four hour session for that full kind of altogether 2d session and then we also had a two-hour session beyond that with just 41 strings we recorded the strings

only primarily to use later on for things like interactive stems but also to overdub existing material we had to create a larger sound with the string sections we did things like have string players put on their mutes in this in the second session split between them to to just add a little bit of a different sound we also did a solo cello there in budapest and so these sessions brought us about 40 minutes of additional music and um oh should have gone to that earlier sorry uh here's a little bit of that uh session this is just the strings in budapest [Music]

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landed on pretty pretty thick there um then they recorded in latvia with a 24-piece choir members of the latvian radio choir and we primarily use those to overlay existing tracks um add a little bit of you know variation to already coral arrangements here's a quick example of uh how i use them in a combat queue and it's i literally just asked them to kind of grunt over the track so i'm sure they were happy about that um and then we also in seattle recorded with the very talented vocalist emily ridgeway she did overlays and also solo voice work for us and then of course i did some of my own recordings myself

battle tech is kind of the whole aesthetic of battle tech is it's far in the future but that we have this aging technology they're using equipment that's just laying around repurposing it in different ways so i tried to create you know stuff that i just had lying around create something i called the freaking string which um i just bowed i i plucked i hit with things um and made some interesting noises to add a little bit of that like gritty texture to the to the score and here's a quick i'll just do a quick video of like a track that is primarily the frankenstein there's some piano and guitar over it but the rest of it is actually just this this weird box [Music]

you get the idea um yeah that's me and my sweatpants hitting garbage turning it into a percussion instrument pretty much whatever i could find and then of course this was all edited and implemented by me using wise was was the choice of middleware for us um so that's the gist of the anatomy of of the battletech score so let's dig a little bit deeper basic overview of how to pull this sort of thing off this is kind of the first big orchestral score for me so there's a lot of learning on my on my end um the goal of course is to avoid this feeling showing up and kind of being a little bit uh unprepared um it's always thrilling to record with orchestra but it's always scary i think you know it's a lot of things coming together at once um the perception is something like this this uh this photo where composers are kind of

this monolithic artist who's who's doing every little part of every piece along the way that's really not the case i mean this this was literally the last take of a session that i had for a demo i was recording and they forced me upon up on stage to conduct because i'm i'm not a conductor myself there's you know professional professionals i rely on to do those sorts of things for me since i feel like i'm better served back in the engineering room so it looks like i'm common collected but i'm terrified i am terrified and it's most likely that i have soiled my pants at this point um so that that concept that the composer is out here doing everything it's possible to do multiple wear multiple hats but i think that the reality is more something like this where that's my head in the middle there the

professional peter patrick is oops peter patrick is conducting over there you saw him in the the string queue that i played before and i'm basically surrounded by a team of professionals that are helping me bring my ideas to to life really [Music] um so what i'm trying to say is it takes a team not the a team but a team it might kind of feel like delegating is giving up some of your artistic soul but i think the reality is that's that's not the case i think for battletech i really felt like if i gave up gave up parts of it to other people it would feel less mine but i think the biggest lesson i learned from that is that you know collaboration to bring this these ideas to life is always a good thing so i probably should have hired additional composers to help me for such a massive scale for one person but i chose to suffer for some reason

[Music] so it takes a team what do i mean by that um for those that don't know um uh or have never done this before like i was in in your place uh several years ago um a team is made up of a bunch of people uh who's on your team these numbers are by no means gospel uh take them with a huge grain of salt they can be much cheaper much more expensive depends on so many different things but the team you know needs to be paid for their work hopefully you know anyone from an orchestrator score part and prep printing which is way more expensive than you think it is librarian conductor engineer music editing mixing pro tools operator implementation support midi mockup support remote soloists obviously additional composers it's it's a lot but it's necessary good thing for you though is if building a team sounds daunting there's actually producing and

contracting companies out there that can help build a team for you and so you know team within a team it's kind of like team inception companies like nashville music scoring down in nashville obviously dynamedian who i worked with in battle tech work a lot in eastern europe and are really great to help you book your sessions and manage the whole thing they even offer orchestration if you need it seattle music uh last year uh david sabi over there does amazing work works on a lot of great scores and then hollywood scoring does a lot of uh very very cool contracting work down in l.a there's others many also so you've uh got your orchestra figured out now you got a budget and plan i have kind of three basic overview tips for for uh budgeting and planning your orchestra session the one is just to do it early so when you get when you sign a contract um

or you're in the process of signing a contract with a studio try to build in some r d time into your uh into your agreement you know say you want to really approach the score and in the appropriate way and it takes time to do that you have to research the proper instrumentation you've got to build your templates start building your templates you've got to gather your bids from several different people interview subcontractors decide what composers you want to work with if you're having additional music you know i'd love to have one one month of of r d time uh sometimes you won't i mean most times you probably won't get that but um ask for it because you'd be surprised uh on top of that make sure you're you're setting aside enough funds for yourself and your team i know we're composers we love to suffer but you have to be very realistic about your project duration so fees associated with recording fees associated with running your business taxes health care savings this all the sample libraries you want to buy

um you know it's important you're in this for the long haul right um so building a buffer once you feel like you've comfortably established what it's going to cost to do this building in a buffer just helps you plan for those unforeseen circumstances um an example of that is the latvia choir that we worked with it was a really important queue it was one of the last ones in the game and i really wanted to nail it we just weren't getting it the way i wanted so i had to add another hour to the session and that you know that extra four grand comes out of me right so it's it's important to kind of build that in you can obviously set up a scenario where the the studio themselves are paying the contractors directly that can be preferred depending on how you like to operate but it also can slow things down too so just kind of a quick order of like a basic uh understanding of how expensive it is to record

uh by ranking la is typically most the most expensive london shortly after that in places like abbey road or air nashville is very competitive and top-notch players there's actually a discount going on right now where if you have a sessions above fifty thousand dollars you get a twenty five percent discount from the nashville uh department of commerce uh so that makes them very competitive uh seattle uh and then budapest which is where we chose record and then also you know prague is is on there too somewhere around and these are all these all mix around too depends on your your ensemble on your engineer on everything so keep that in mind um once you've got all that figured out and you're kind of pushing the edge of that budget there's a bunch of ways to increase mileage after you've got these recording sessions so you know you're always going to be

relying on your mock-ups the quality of your mock-ups to save you when things go wrong and the quality of the mock-up to extend the perception of how much live recording you have on a soundtrack so if you have good mockups you're really going to kind of save yourself from making a budget that small stick out as being small so here's an example we ran into a problem in budapest where it was in the end of the day we had a kind of like low and fanfarish moment that needed um a specific brass part that was actually uh that was not right on the paper um and we didn't have time to fix it and we also didn't have really the the correct orchestration to support what i was trying to do knowing or hearing the sound that you'll hear in a second i was like okay this is not working but then i remember my mock-up is actually it's probably going to save the day on

this one so i was able to go back and add the mock-up underneath take out as much as i could and then seamlessly kind of mix those together so that i could pull it off so here's that thanks [Music] i like that one better another way good mock-ups and overlays can give you extra mileage is they really allow you to reuse material in interesting ways and what i mean by that is you're in these recording sessions you've got tons

of material coming at you you've got you know multiple mics multiple takes all this stuff that you have access to that i would say if you're in a recording session really try to get your hands on as much of the material as possible because you can reuse it and and cool ways and these can be reused by by augmenting them so say you have just an isolated string part that you've got from a mic and you can put that as the basis for another track and start adding extra digital elements over it um and um here is the example of that is actually from the opening cinematic so the live players themselves playing the cue that i wrote it was originally going to be a much more delicate piece i decided to amplify it with with digital overlays um and we ended up we were able to use it in multiple places because basically there was a version that was kind of more quiet and then there was a version that was uh more amped up so here's you'll see when

i when i play the video this is live only [Music] it's basically two different songs [Music] right another way to increase mileage off your existing recordings is to use middleware so we use wise um and like i was saying before you have these these stems you've got just tons of tons of uh of stems and other recording takes that you can use and repurpose so reusing these recordings is a way of

increasing your mileage and they make this what is a relatively small budget go a lot further an example of that uh that we did with battletech was we had basically a 35 second piece uh 35 seconds like stem that was a combined mix of a take that we really didn't use um but i thought you know this could be a great basis for something in the game there's a moment where you're headed to a waypoint on the map and i knew we had data from the engine that basically told could tell wise the distance you were from that waypoint so attaching that to the rtpc i knew that the closer you got to this waypoint i could start to fade in extra digital elements that i'd added on this 35 second string in horn stem that basically allowed me to turn um turn what was the 30-second 35-second throwaway thing is kind of the basis for

part of the soundtrack that um is supposed to be kind of an epic moment of you going to get your ship for the first time so i'll play that for you here that's the basic stem there sfx are turned down by the way the percussion starts to come in a little bit you can see in wise it's just basically rtpcs with stems [Music] volume curve up top [Music] since stems start to kind of add in

[Music] so so turn a 35 second throw away stem into something that i could actually use another quick tip for increasing mileage with wise i use subtracts a lot in-wise so a sub-track if you don't know it's it's very i'm going through a very basic overview of what a subtract is but it's basically a way for wise to choose which essentially stems to play as a song continues to loop or when a song gets into a one-shot scenario so for battletech you're on your ship that's called the argo and each time you go into a new room i wanted to change the music ever so slightly and so that way the way i was going to do that was

we already had a switch for each for each room that the engine was going to send into wise and then each switch that would come into wise would actually tell the sub track what stems to play and it would play um basically changing the music making uh what was basically a two minute loop into a loop that's always kind of changing and evolving so i will play that right now too [Music] let me watch [Music]

[Music] so yeah so a way to take what does a two minute track and actually add a lot of variation just by adding subtracts and some of those subtracts are just you know stems from a solo chella recording or stems from our solos or our string sections and it's really good way to increase your mileage there so key takeaway i would say plan early build r d into your contract if you can gather your bids make sure you you work with entire team you can trust and rely on it's a creative effort it takes all people working together try to build in a budget buffer for things that go wrong if the studio is on the line for that budget um then you're fine make sure you use mockups that are convincing that you could ship as is and then try to find ways using

middleware to you to reuse recordings in interesting ways so that's all i have thanks for your time if you have questions i can take some questions [Applause] questions right thanks yeah you seem to have a lot of processing going on not necessarily in the music but in the producing of the score how did you keep track of all the different things that were going on and that were coming from different parts of the world and fitted together into one coherent piece yeah so i think for me for this particular product project um that's dynamedian helped a lot with that so they the the things that they helped me with was session contracting um booking um and then delivery of of uh editing of the edited live sessions so i would go in and we i

would sit there in the sessions and we would actually take notes on what takes that we liked i had a whole ledger of that myself but i relied mostly on on their session producer david christensen who's amazing to um work with him on getting the best takes possible and then digesting those you know over transfer files and tracking documents and stuff like that um so those those contractors help a lot i think doing it yourself is also possible but yeah i just didn't have the time to do that thanks yeah awesome job man um so i was curious uh what was it like hearing your notes played by real players for the first time how did that feel um it was it was terrifying and um exciting right because a lot of times especially when someone like me who didn't uh grow up um with any live players playing my music um it was exciting and and you're surprised at how things can turn out things that you think will be really easy to play can sometimes be a

lot more difficult um so it's another reason to why to hire a good orchestrator um or that things you think will be really difficult just turn out amazingly you know beautiful when you're like wow like i actually you know know what i'm doing a little bit uh how long did you have to from start to finish to produce all of that music so i was on the project for about just under three years i think um and so a lot of that initial stuff you know you're you're writing digital versions of the of the soundtrack and then setting up the basis for me because i was doing the implementation myself setting up the basis for the the game and its implementation structure and stuff um so a lot of the groundwork is kind of planning and and setting up the um the wise project and stuff and then you know the recording comes much later in the game uh we did record the main theme and some other stuff in germany about uh about a year and a half into that so we

had some recorded material um and then budapest was was about i think i think eight months before or six months before launch so you know good amount of time um i really love the blend of orchestral and electronic sounds um throughout i was wondering if you had any advice for uh kind of mixing those two uh sound qualities and making it sound cohesive and and unified yeah i agree i think it's i think they just go really well together especially um you know i'm not like an analog synth snob or anything like that but um there's something physical about synths analog sense in particular i mean soft sense also uh they just blend really well with strings i don't know what it is i'm not sure but uh yeah i think it's just trusting your ears and then also i think on that list too is like if if you um if your ears are deceiving you run it by a mixer and just say hey what what advice do you have or say you know i'll pay you for

a half an hour of looking through a few of my songs and we did we have a mixer for our cinematics which was which were a lot of hybrid stuff and he did a great job his name's chris burgess and he's also good he's really into analog sense too so he knows that sound but it just all comes down to trusting your ears you know if it sounds good to you it's probably going to sound good to some other people also all right we got time thanks guys