Tips for new audio designers composing video game music out of their comfort zone. Useful for producers as well, looking to put together design directions for their audio designers.
This year, I took some time to write out some tips on how to tackle a variety of different styles, and plan to continue to do so next year. It's been a lot of fun and hopefully useful to aspiring audio designers and for producers looking for a better lexicon to communicate to their audio designers.
While I’ve been in the audio design for video games business over a decade now, I know that there’s a heck of a lot more for me to learn. At first, I was very reluctant to break out of my initial niche genre: classic RPG scores. I swore those would be the only games I would make music for, but if that were the case, I’d have missed out on all these amazing opportunities to expand my composition skills and work on some very exciting projects. Once I started to make music for games I never thought I’d be making, I wondered what else I could do, so I started a personal project, just for fun. In it, I challenged myself to create some music I never dreamed I’d compose, or will ever have to. Polka music? Hip hop? Turns out, a lot of fun to compose!
Once I got over my initial fears of composing outside my comfort zone, I found there was a lot of challenge, but a lot of reward in doing so. I can safely say I can compose for any game (which I definitely could not do at the beginning of my career!), but so can anyone. All it takes is a little courage, a lot of listening, and the desire to be a well-rounded game audio composer.
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