{"id":25899,"date":"2015-02-12T08:38:22","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T13:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25899"},"modified":"2015-02-12T12:41:08","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T17:41:08","slug":"project-button-masher-unatco-office-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25899","title":{"rendered":"Project Button Masher: UNATCO Office Party"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And so we come to the end of the project. This was an interesting exercise, and it pushed me into doing a lot of new things. So regardless of how good the music is (or isn&#8217;t) it was still a success for my purposes.<\/p>\n<p>This week I&#8217;m going to attempt to make something that would feel like it belongs in the Deus Ex soundtrack:<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2yDVM77lGlM\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2yDVM77lGlM'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Notable characteristics:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The particular sound of the late-90&#8217;s UMX music. This technology was used in Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Deus Ex, and has a pretty distinctive sound. If I had to describe it, I&#8217;d say it sounded like the mid 90&#8217;s synth MIDI music, but with lots of chorus effects. (More on that below.)\n<li>Lots of climbing and descending sequences of notes.\n<li>There is some really mild gliding and pitch-bending going on in a lot of tracks. That&#8217;s when a long note goes slightly out of tune &#8211; or glides to a different note &#8211;  during its duration. I&#8217;ve fiddled with this, but I don&#8217;t think I really nailed it. Sounds interesting when it works, though.\n<li>Echo effects. Nothing says &#8220;moody cyberpunk&#8221; like echoing synths.\n<\/ol>\n<p>For the purposes of making something Deus Ex-ish, I made a track that has both a slow ambient part and a faster section with drums. In the game it would often shift between the two styles when you entered or ended combat, but here I&#8217;ve just worked both into the same song.<\/p>\n<p>The result: <!--more--><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/190280542&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This track kind of freaks me out. I mapped out the section that begins at 19 seconds and when I was done it sounded so familiar I was scared it came from my memory and not my creativity. I ended up listening to the Deus Ex soundtrack looking for that part, worried I&#8217;d accidentally ripped it off. So I either nailed the sound of Deus Ex, or I plagiarized it. If I did, it was unintentional. <\/p>\n<p>So this is either my best success so far, or my greatest failure. <\/p>\n<p>Track map:<\/p>\n<p><table   class=\"\" cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' border='0' align='center'><tr><td><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/track_map_unatco.jpg' class='insetimage'   alt='track_map_unatco.jpg' title='track_map_unatco.jpg'\/><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>What I learned:<\/p>\n<p>The Deus Ex and Unreal soundtracks have a particular sound that I&#8217;ve always thought of as &#8220;synth strings&#8221;. They don&#8217;t really sound like strings. I mean, they&#8217;re just synthesizer noises. But there was always something about them that made me think of orchestral strings. In my fumbling around, I finally figured out that sound is just the &#8220;chorus&#8221; effect. It&#8217;s actually pretty simple: Take the sound of one note being played and make copies of it. Now, if you stacked them perfectly on top of each other it would just make the note louder. But if you time-shift them ever so slightly, then it sounds like many instruments are all playing the same note. (It might also do teeny tiny pitch-shift, I don&#8217;t know.) <\/p>\n<p>You can add this effect to any instrument you like, although it&#8217;s really most effective on very &#8220;pure&#8221; sounds. If you use chorus on something with a lot of different frequencies (say, a distortion guitar) it doesn&#8217;t work very well. The layers of distortion end up getting mushed together and turn into white noise. <\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s it for my attempts to immitate game soundtracks. I have one last novelty track left for next week, where I&#8217;ll wrap this series up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And so we come to the end of the project. This was an interesting exercise, and it pushed me into doing a lot of new things. So regardless of how good the music is (or isn&#8217;t) it was still a success for my purposes. This week I&#8217;m going to attempt to make something that would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[468],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}