I’ve been making music all my life. By the time I was a teenager I played multiple instruments and started producing my own songs in Ableton Live. Below you can find a couple of tracks I’ve made over the years.
Production
To give some idea of what a finished track would sound like, here are two remixes I did. The second track was my entry into an Andrew Huang remix competition, which ended up being published on his 2nd remix album.
Rogue Star
Rogue Star is a story heavy isometric RPG set in a sci-fi world. As level designer on the project, I sometimes accompanied the early version of a level with some custom music to set the tone. These rough drafts didn’t take me more than an hour to fully produce and I don’t consider them a shippable version, but they should give an idea of how I can quickly conceptualize background music for a game.
Barvesh Square is one of the central locations in the cyberpunk city of Sonnabor. Inhabited by the disenfranchised populi, the area is crowded, grimey, and dark. To convey this through the music, I wanted to combine the crowded DnB drums and grimey, dark bass guitar of these three soundtracks:
- Unreal Tournament – Foregone Destruction
- Halo CE – Walk in the woods
- PAYDAY 2 – Shadow Raid Theme
Aerum, on the other hand, has a totally different atmosphere. It is an alien desert planet, with a purple-beige color palette and a strong “other worldly” feel. To create a familiar “desert” sounding foundation, I used a steel string guitar with some simple blues chords, a lot of reverb, and a lot of silence. To make the percussion extra authentic, I took a handful of screws from my toolbox and shook them in front of the mic. Next, to add the “alien” aspect, I used a bottleneck slide to add an uncomfortable melody on top. The slightly off-tune pitch, and the resonance of the harmonic tone, are intended to add some alien unfamiliarity to the mix.
Vocals
As I wrote and produced my own music over the years, I’ve had many opportunities to train my vocal cords. The techniques I honed during this time, as well as the equipment I acquired, have also served me well when doing VO.