carryonplease

So recently I've gotten a few gigs "scoring" games. I am confident in my ability to write music thematically and with relatively interesting harmonic and melody structure, but I'm having a little trouble getting the feel right for ambient/atmospheric music. I have always written very "phrasally" maybe too phrasally, which is pretty much the opposite of what atmospheric background music is like. So im struggling to composer a piece of music in this style Does anyone have any advice on how to think less in phrases and more in a through composed nature? delay the cadence? compose without a meter? less loops? more obscure rhythmic fragments? For example, I tried to write an ambient background track for one of the games I'm doing and it came out like this. I don't picture it being an underscore for a game. www.soundcloud.com/peter-mendola/ambient-v4 any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Cool that was a great answer! thanks!

Thanks for stopping by Winifred! Its cool to see some established professionals stop by now and then. God of War is one of my favorite games and the music is great as well! I am aspiring to a career path similar to yours (who isn't these days haha) This might be a tough question to answer since I am getting kind of deep in to it, but would you have anything to say if I asked you how you balanced creativity in your music with the necessity to not overwhelm the listener? Would you say most of your scores are through composed and develop a theme? I find myself stuck with phrasing stuff classically and when I hear most music for media it does not really follow a typical phrasal pattern a classically trained musician would be used to. unless i am wrong. haha

hey everyone, some updates and comments. I did just graduate with a bachelors in music business. I can definitely see factoring that into my price in the future. But this is literally my first project and I really like the game idea. The other thing is that, while I think if i had asked for 500-1000$ a minute, he would have been ok with that, (Now that we've negotiated a bit), except it might have taken another year to secure that kind of funding to put out the game. We ended up going with $100 a track, 10% royalty up to 40k (basically game revenue) and 100% of soundtrack sales. He offered me more because he wants exclusivity on the tracks. I'm cool with that as long as I can get the soundtrack sales. He'll also need sound design at some point so more $$$ for me! stewboy: I found this gig on the Kongregate forums, which is strange because usually projects there aren't that serious. I got lucky with this one, and he already gave his friend who needs game music my email ;) As far as internet gaming forums go, Kongregate takes most of the cake for the flash community. Newgrounds is even more "unprofessional". I have other sources for possible future projects, I have a bunch of friends working in video game sound design and stuff like that but this is a good start as far as when its out, it won't be until at least late fall, the funding project is supposed to start in late august. Also I'd appreciate some comments on one of the loops! it was one of the first submitted to the new system

Average track length will be between 1 and 2 minutes, and about half of them will loop. I ended up getting $75 per track :)

Yea I tried this hah, my professor said it was the way to go. Didn't work this time but i'll try harder next time.

So I thought I would let you all know how this turned out, in short, The guy offered me more money than I had originally asked for, which seemed pretty noble of him.

cool man you've done work with iPhone games? mind if I ask what you charged/were able to charge? I don't plan on this being my main area I write for but I can't turn anything down at the moment haha.

Haha geez, much appreciated Marius. You pretty much summed it all up. Today I decided to quote him $50 per track, which leaves me a little under what you have here for the creative fee. I considered doing it by the hour and I think that would be the best way to think about it next time but too late this time. In the end I would have quoted the same amount either way. I see what you mean about making people believe that I have worth but at this point I don't think I can charge for edits since I am not completely confident that my first judgement is always the best judgement anyway. But I see what you mean and the fee is small so I may do that anyway. The backend idea is great. I'll mention that. Just not sure if 10,000 is a realistic projection for them even if they think it might be a hit. I'll have to see if I can gauge that from them. As far as the soundtrack it will be digital. And I was thinking bandcamp. The "art" could even be an image from the game, and it could be sold as a digital download, which leaves little to no overhead (paypal fees maybe) I would also ask the game to link to it or at least advertise it on the main menu screen. Also, what about copyrights? I assume I should retain ownership since I'm not doing this through a publisher or anything

$2,500? haha geez, I wasn't planning on going over $500. I agree that I would want the flat, but I don't want to shoot myself later if it actually ends up selling. But then again you do have a good point with the whole "how will the actual bookkeeping be done" thing. He said he has future game plans so maybe that would also be a factor. I definitely think $2,500 is too much in this case though haha, I don't want to offend the guy.

So I have my first paying gig and its pretty substantial. I am to compose 14-15 8-bit songs for an iPhone game. The soundtrack will also be sold digitally separately. The "developer" said that since they are using crowd funding to fund the project he was pretty open to any kind of quote from me. I just don't know where to start...I can either ask for a portion of each sale and a small flat fee, or an upfront fee of like...$300 and nothing after that? The second way is probably not a good idea but I don't know much about the company doing the game and if it will really sell. Are my numbers way off?

It doesn't necessarily evoke Hawaii, or surfing images, but its a nice little piece! The final cadence could have been much stronger though. and very nice sounds! actually on a second listen it sounds like you may have left it unresolved on purpose.

This sounds great, its cool that you have the opportunity to get real recordings. I listened to it 3 times on my laptop speakers so I'm not sure if this is accurate but the strings are super quiet! (Or maybe the brass and clarinets just too loud) As far as the composition goes it seemed a little short, but I'm not really complaining or anything. The themes were there but I felt as though they could have been developed a bit more