Global Game Jam And New Projects To Work On

Hello everyone! I know it's been awhile since I've made a post, but now I've got quite a few new things to put up. This last weekend, I was part of something called Global Game Jam. It's a game making competition where you get about 48 hours to make a game (whether board game or video game) and hopefully come out with something that is at least a prototype, and should be based on a theme. 2014's theme for this year was "we do not see things as they are, but as we are". For my first year, I choose to be part of "Team Blink", and worked on the game Ego-Boost, a game about fighting projections of your own ego, which get stronger the further in the game you get, since the better you do, the more powerful your ego. I worked on the audio, alongside two other audio engineers, Nolan Hansen and Luke Grady. It was a blast working with them, and we did a great job. In fact, in the 48 hour competition, we created 30 mins worth of music for the game, 7 individual tracks. Our group did well, and we were awarded the top prizes for Audio (yay!) and Game Play, and honorable mention for Theme and Overall.

I wanted to post here mostly about the music however, and the process of our teams work. We started off around 10 PM on Friday with setting up our equipment. Nolan had a guitar, bass guitar and an amp, while I was using reason and a keyboard for drums, and Luke worked with Pro-tools and garage band. We came up with 12 songs to make, and began working on some of them. The tricky part about the music, is that there are different emotions: Rage, Fear, Pride, ect. Each of these emotions could be a power used by the player, so what we wanted to do, was create a track for each one, so that it could play when they were using that particular power.

Egotistical was the first song we made, as it was going to be the default power up. Nolan used the guitar and the bass to lay down some tracks, and after he did that I put in a drum track in using the Boom plug-in for ProTools. After I added it and did some minor editing, Luke produced a wet track with effects, EQing, and compressors. This became the pattern for the weekend and how most of the music was produced.

Of course, as with any project, we got better as we got along. After awhile, I realized that the Boom plug-in was not enough, and I used reason to create custom drums loops. But even that had issues, so eventually, I started creating entirely constructed and played drum tracks through Reason. The results were much better and made our music much better.

There were also two songs of note. Despair was the song that would be played when the player's health got low and they were nearly gone. It was created by Luke last semester as a personal project, and it worked so well that he let us use it. Nolan put down some guitars for the background, and I put some cymbal rolls and looped it, but otherwise that was his work. Another song was Envy, which I made myself in about 30 mins or so. We were crunched for time, and we need a song for this emotion, so I created a totally electronic track for the piece.

As with all projects, things didn't always go as planned. We didn't get all 12 tracks we had planned. Emotions that we thought we'd have were scrapped, and other game design issues arose. However, we made it work and our team did well, getting first place in Audio. Below is a playlist of the music we created, and is available for download if you would like. Artwork is by Chris Leonhardt and Paula Rodriguez.



Also feel free to check out my SoundCloud account, which has a link to it on the right hand side of the blog. It has my other songs I've made and will be where I post all my audio work.

Also, it is likely that my team will be continuing the game, with the possibility of us forming an indie game design group. If this is the case, we will likely revisit these songs and make newer cleaner versions of them. While I am proud of these versions as well, we only had 48 hours to make them, so we couldn't put too much time on any one song. I have also discussed with another team who produced a game and wishes to continue, and have agreed to help them create music for their game too. If more comes from it, I will post my work for that game here as well.

Finally, another project I'm working on now is the Han Zimmer Wants You contest, which is to remix a track created by Hans Zimmer. I will keep you up to date on that as well. That's it for my projects for now. With school going on however, and all these other projects, I am not going to do much for the time being with my Review blog. I will post there later saying the same thing, but unless someone gives me some suggestions for it, I will not be posting there often.

Remember you can find my on Twitter, Soundcloud and Youtube by clicking on the links on the right hand side!

DSU Holiday Animation

Here is an animation made by my friends Breanne Butters and AJ De Groot for a competition for creating a holiday greeting for Dakota State University. I created the song which is called Carol of the Tech. The music won audience choice award at the end of the semester Animation Screening. Please let me know what you think!

Mixing The One

        So, for class we have been working on a mixing project. We had a choice between several songs to mix, and of course I decided to pick the song that had over 4 dozen tracks. What can I say, I love a challenge. What really attracted me to this song however was that it sounded so great and I really wanted my chance to put my own spin on it. The song I mixed is called "The One" by a group called Memnoir. You can get these tracks on this website and download a zip drive of the tracks unedited just as I did. I'm using Pro-Tools 10 for this project.

        The first thing I had to do with this project was to organize the tracks. When you have over 50 tracks, if you don't have some clear way to tell them apart, you get lost so easily. So what I did was I grouped all the similar tracks together and then color coded them so I could identify the groups quickly. Here is a picture of some of the tracks:

        After I had something I could look at without completely doubting my choice in song to mix, I took a look at the tracks and saw that there was a lot of repeat tracks with similar content. So I decided to do some panning to make room for all of these tracks and give it a bigger and fuller feeling.

        After I had my tracks panned and in a format I could look at, I turned my attention to mixing the various aspects of the mix--starting with the drums. I muted all the other tracks and focused solely on the drums for awhile, mixing them to sound good alone. I spent a lot of time on the toms especially to get the sound I wanted from them, much crisper and clearer than the original tracks. I also upped their power towards the end to give the feeling of highly boosted base. After that, I did some further edits to make it fit with the song as a whole.

        I then took a look at the vocals and worked on getting to a place I was happy with. I added reverb to several tracks to add to the voice and make the vocals fuller. After cleaning up the vocals, I turned to the synth tracks and added some automation in order to get the volume levels to the point that they were part of the mix but not dominating it at any point.

        After this point, I found out that I had been missing something critical to my mix. When I looked over the tracks, I listened to the guitars which were marked as DI (Direct Input), and heard how quiet it was and that there really wasn't much there. I was disappointed but moved onto the rest of the mix and forgot about it, ignoring it for the time. But I had my professor take a look at my mix and found out that because it was a DI track, there was a plug-in that Pro-Tools had that would allow me to make it sound like an electric guitar track. This really lived up the track, and then I added reverb and automated it so it was active at specific points to make the guitar feel less like a DI track and more like it was recorded in a real room.

        After I had my tracks mostly done with, I then added some more Aux tracks with reverb, delays, and chorus effects. When I finished this, I realized that what I was left with was a lot of really loud tracks that kept clipping in various places. So I went through the tracks and lowered volumes, and used automation to keep the tracks from clipping at all. Here is a screen shot that shows some of the automation I used:

        Going into the Automation a bit more, one of the things I did was notice that the guitar tracks were at some points too loud, but if I turned them down then they would be too quite at other points. So I automated it so that when I needed it to, it would quite down so they didn't over power the vocals, and then when the vocals got stronger, it would get louder again.

        After that, I did some final automations such as a fade out for several tracks, compressed several of the tracks and put a maximizer on the master track. After that I was finished and bounced the track. I hope you enjoy listening to it, as I put a lot of work into the mix!

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! This is a place for me to post about stuff related to my work or my opinions on other works. A bit of introduction of myself, I'm an audio and video student studying at Dakota State University though I'm natively from Iowa. While I'm mainly here for video production related classes, I've been mostly taking audio production classes, so that's what a lot of my posts will be about for some time.

On this blog, I plan to post about some major projects I work on for my classes and person projects. My goals right now are to do some remixes at some point for competitions, as well as just some fun composition stuff. Any time I do make something and I can, I will post it here for you to enjoy and/or tell me what you think about it. I'd love some constructive criticism so I can improve my skill and come up with new ideas. I will revival that I'm currently working on a major mix using stems I got for a song called "The One" by a band called Memnoir. It's a good song but well over 2 dozen stems to work with. Quite a challenge and I will work on a post describing my process with working on it soon.

I also plan to put some other information such as my resume and more available as well, and a link to another blog I'm starting that's focused on reviews. Please be sure to check that one out as well! I can also be found on twitter at jaredscottmills, so please find and follow me there where I will post updates about my work and my reviews.

I hope that you enjoy this blog and that eventually more people will find it once I get some content on here.