Muses of the Day/Musas de la Vida 2013-12: Paying Dues & Going For Broke My first full time job in recording came about in 1999, about 2 years after I started looking for work as a sound engineer in Puerto Rico. I worked in a small antiquated studio in Santurce. The owner payed me $125 a week to run all the radio advertising recordings. Since it was a dismal salary I only took the job on one condition: that my boss had to give me the freedom to go out and find side jobs or a full time job elsewhere whenever I decided to. I worked there for 6 months. About two months into my employment I already had logged two trips to Florida and, by the third month, was on my way to Los Angeles, California. One of my passions is playing video games and since the advent of Sonys Playstation I always wanted to score music for them. Video game scoring is a huge business so I took my crack at the job market where most video game companies reside. I visited about 12 companies, from boutiques to major corporations. Only one company, Activision, offered me a job as a game tester which is an entry level position. For the money they offered me I simply couldnt make the move to LA at the time. The only other opportunity was with this boutique game company which wanted to set up their own studio in-house. The offer fell through but we kept in contact. About a year later, when I already had my own studio, they e-mailed me one day to ask for a demo. They said they needed music for a character driven first/third person shooter about an elite platoon of soldiers whose missions involved rescuing hostages from terrorists camps all over the world. They explained the premise of the game and asked me to send them a 3 song demo. We agreed on a per-song fee for anything they approved and so I got to work. Since they hadnt yet developed any visual content I took the liberty of downloading footage from a similar game called Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake that was already available and scored the music for that video. I drew inspiration from my years of watching 70s and 80s TV dramas and cop shows with their orchestral arrangements. Basically, I developed two main melodic themes and composed, not three but, five musical pieces around them. This video contains a mix of the the five themes. It starts out with the main theme, titled Seek and Destroy, which would make a great opening for the game. It is followed by a frantic heavy metal version of the main theme which is more suited for when a firefight breaks out in the game. The third is a melancholic military march version of the first and second melodic themes which I wrote for the mission summary screen after each level. The fourth theme is a strident military march version for the mission select screen. And finally, the fifth theme is the Industrial version of Seek and Destroy. This one was written to ramp up the tension during gameplay. Unfortunately my music never made it to the game. But I took the shot and Im pretty happy with the results. While it is only a pre-production, mostly synthesized, demo I think it sounds pretty good and the soul of the music comes through loud and clear. And FYI, I havent ruled out recording and producing the whole of those compositions for alternate purposes.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 13:53:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015