Inside Cloud Imperium Games: Orchestral Recording Session

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] she up my name is Martin gay I'm the audio

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   director on Star Citizen now we just finished the first of our orchestral recording sessions and uh of course that's to satisfy the stretch goal that we reached back in November of 2012 and it was actually quite a surprise for us back in that in those days because we just set that as some far off achievement goal you know orchestral session you know we'll never have that but maybe off in the future what actually happened was on the last day of the fundraising month that's when we hit the goal of $6 million Pedro kamacho has been a part of the Star Citizen team a lot longer than anybody realizes Predator was inspired by this uh demo on October the 10th from the videos to to Chris flying around and his talk you know about what starid was going to turn out to be just to to hear uh Chris Robert's name for me was enough whatever he was doing he was back on games it had

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   to be huge and and excellent I was a huge Wing Commander Fan Pedro kacho was a Portuguese composer who divides his time between Games television theater and Real Performance music like his famous reent Enz decastro Pedro was already composed for over a dozen games but I think Star Citizen is his biggest project so far and Pedro immediately started composing and came up with more or less two or three minute demo of what would become the Star Citizen theme and he sent that to Chris and Chris really liked it and Pedro also helped us on the three commercials that we put out so far the Hornet the Aurora and the 300i which uh you know the music

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   sounds incredibly different in each one but it's all done by Pedro and Pedro is basically the composer on Star Citizen now it seems weird to be recording the orchestra so far ahead of the final release of the game most game projects they wait until the last minute so that they know exactly what the tune list is and how long every tune supposed to be and all that kind of stuff and in our case we're releasing Star Citizen in a series of vertical slices so we're recording the subset of tunes for space battle in this first session the process of creating the music starts with the initial asset list of what Tunes we're going to need and for space combat Chris and I basically went back to the old Wing Commander template and said you know we're going to need a tune for this part a tune for this part the music is going to vary according to how much damage you've got and things like that and uh so it's fully interactive and

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   once it's broken down into individual clips of you know a minimum length let's say um then we can approach someone like Pedro and say you know how long's it going to take to compose all this so once I received Direction from and Martin I'll make a sketch in MIDI and they respond if it's too fast or too slow then we go from there and then try to implement that track in the game so my mini workstation has all the notes from each instrument in your Orchestra individually sampled so when I combine them together they actually resemble very closely what a real Orchestra will sound like there's a the creation of the initial music if it's a theme or a texture then you have the orchestration which is the adapt for the large group of players composer is like making a black and white drawing and orchestr is

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   like coloring that drawing that's why I always orchestrate what I do because I want to be sure that in the orchestra session I hear the colors I had in my mind so for Star Citizen all the music you hear every note comes from Pedro when the time came to find an orchestra to actually play all these parts um we asked Pedro what do you think and he said well I really have a good feeling about this group in the Czech Republic called the capellan orchestra headed up by Peta Panic they are a freelance group of players mostly concert Masters and the principal soloists you know from different orchestras that get together to play these great scores for film trailers and video games and these musicians have never seen this music before they're not sent anything ahead of time it's the first time I've ever seen it and they're such good readers of

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   music that they can do a good take almost from the first few minutes the orchestral session is about 4 hours long and uh it can be any time of the day whatever we have booked uh in the case of our recent session it was in the evening from 8:00 p.m. to midnight and the orchestra players all came in you know by themselves from different places assembled and sat down opened their cases and uh they will start to play immediately and they see the first page of the score they get going they play the very first take all 75 positions going at once um it's quite possible that there'll be a perfect take right from the get-go um they need to warm up a little bit but you always record from the the get-go in case there's a great take the very first piece of music that Pedro submitted was the Star Citizen theme and uh when we have a theme we basically um encapsulate an entity and

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   all of its good sides and bad sides and details into one piece of music and so we can say when we're playing this piece of music you think of this entity whether it's a person a landscape a planet a nebula you know dangerous environment or you know just the entire franchise there are several key themes that will be used throughout all the composition of star SE and soundra these themes will be readapt to give a more adventurous or a more sad feeling to a certain moment of the game um for example star's main theme will be reused many times during Squadron 42 storyline in the most important key moments of your adventure our game is no different from a regular film record recing session in that it's

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   a bunch of takes um when you play a music CD of the score of a film or a game and each track sounds like it's complete it's actually several takes uh spliced together with a lot of editing skill and uh we have Engineers that listen to the orchestra as it's playing and make little paper check notes and that kind of stuff as the performance is going through and if they ever hear a a dull note or something that could be improved on they make a note the the rule of thumb is that you get between 5 and 7 minutes of final music end to end from each 4-Hour block which doesn't sound like a lot but it's 5 to 7 minutes of perfect music and uh so you need more than one session to get an entire game done and uh even our dog fighting module has about 15 minutes of music and uh I'm looking forward to that this is always

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    one of the most fun parts of the job for me it's not just artists and designers you get a violin player working in the game it's a great thing