My first attempt

Post by **West** » November 3rd, 2006, 3:28 pm

All right, here is my first piece of music written with BfW in mind. It's not finished of course, it's not even a minute long. It should also be noted that it's mainly an experiment. It was written in a more-or-less improvised fashion during my attempts at beating Edirol Orchestral into submission, and I haven't paid any really serious attention to the arrangements (the timpani part was even copied & pasted -- shame on me!). If anyone likes this and wants me to continue working on it, I will of course have to fix a lot of things, but right now I was more concerned with jotting some musical ideas down and capturing a "feel".

What about this "feel" then? Well, in my initial thread someone mentioned something about needing music for an orc campaign, and I think that sort of stuck at the back of my head. The music turned out dark, warlike and almost barbaric. Don't ask me how the section at 0:40 fits in though; it sounds totally un-orcish and more like something discarded from a Spielberg movie. Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

Now, this little thing does not really sound like gameplay music though. It has more of an "opening credits" feel. But I suppose I could put it in the middle of a longer piece instead, maybe something slower and more ominous that slowly builds up to this theme.

Opinions?

Post by **zookeeper** » November 3rd, 2006, 3:41 pm

Awesome!

I like this very much, please continue working on it.

Post by **West** » November 3rd, 2006, 3:58 pm

Glad you like it

Post by **TimothyP** » November 3rd, 2006, 4:33 pm

So far so good, west!

I think campaign designers would love to have this kind of music in their campaigns.

Give this some more flesh and it could work out quite well. Toward the end, it got a little off track, as you mentioned, so maybe clip that out and keep going with the intensity you started with.

Anyway, this is definitely in the right direction! Keep going! BTW, if you didn't read the guidelines thread, we aim to keep the music around 3-4 minutes in length. Don't go shorter, but longer is okay. You probably already knew this.

Your music and samples are both better than anything else we've received in a long time. Thanks for your work!

--Timothy

Naeddyr · Post by **Naeddyr** » November 3rd, 2006, 6:03 pm

Man, that is awesome. It would fit perfectly into Final Fantasy Tactics, though.

The instrument sound samples sound similar to the one's found in that game, even.

Post by **Jetrel** » November 3rd, 2006, 7:59 pm

Nice.

Post by **vonHalenbach** » November 3rd, 2006, 8:25 pm

Wow.
You are pretty good. I like to hear more from you. I agree with you, that this pice is quite fast for a campaign background. I suggest a march as the correct tempo and some bongos, grunts and sounds of feetstamps for the right orcish atmosphere if you can do that.

Post by **zookeeper** » November 3rd, 2006, 10:08 pm

vonHalenbach wrote:some bongos, grunts and sounds of feetstamps for the right orcish atmosphere if you can do that.

I could imagine an occasional grunt sound and footstamp working quite nicely (when made to sound like a big orc horde is making those). I can help make those, if you want to include such stuff. I actually already made one set of such mass grunts using the existing orc sounds, and to me it sounds almost good enough to be useable on the background (I wouldn't pause the music almost completely and have these few grunts and stamps with some wardrums, the quality of these probably isn't good enough for that). The problem is that I need somewhat complicated means of getting them recorded/rendered to a file in stereo (due to an unregistered Renoise and the fact that my soundcard apparently can't record stereo). Tell me if you'd like to use something like this and I'll look if I can manage it.

Post by **TimothyP** » November 3rd, 2006, 11:21 pm

I have a feeling the noises will come off goofy. It seems you would need high quality vocal samples to make this sound good. I've thought of using something like grunts before, or marching feet sounds. The problem is finding samples like this without hiring humans to record it!

For now, if you don't have quality samples in this style, just stick with music. It's holding its own for now quite well.

--Timothy

Post by **West** » November 4th, 2006, 5:13 am

TimothyP wrote:BTW, if you didn't read the guidelines thread, we aim to keep the music around 3-4 minutes in length. Don't go shorter, but longer is okay. You probably already knew this.

Yeah, I remember reading something about that. 3-4 minutes shouldn't be a problem as I'm working on an softer intro for the piece [i.e. coming up with various snippets of music and discarding them again; I'm no good at mellower stuff].

TimothyP wrote:Your music and samples are both better than anything else we've received in a long time. Thanks for your work!

Hey, no problem, I'm just glad to help. And it's much more fun and rewarding writing orchestral stuff when you have a clear goal in mind.

zookeeper wrote:I could imagine an occasional grunt sound and footstamp working quite nicely (when made to sound like a big orc horde is making those). I can help make those, if you want to include such stuff.

Well, uh, I dunno. Thanks for the offer but I agree with Timothy, it might sound goofy. Besides, even if it would work, I'm not sure this will actually end up as an "orc theme". Somehow it feels too... busy and up-tempo. I think an orc song should be slower with a straight, steady pulse -- yes, a marching song, though not a traditional military march of course. Somehow I don't see orcs marching to a 6/8 meter...

If I do write some orc theme later on, we could give the grunts & feet thing a try though.