Originally Posted in the Dev Pub
The content presented below was originally brewed in the oak barrels of the Dev Pub forums. After allowing this thread time to properly age, it is now ready for public consumption and has thusly been moved into this forum for all to enjoy. Please note that finely aged Dev Pub threads may contain outdated designs and information. That said, we still encourage you to leave feedback as we'd love to get some new opinions on all this.
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A New Track With New Samples!
Recently, we've been considering upgrading our entire music sample library to higher quality instruments and, as it happens, Neal decided it was indeed time to upgrade. So I'm happy to report that the soundtrack will now be using samples from the Vienna Symphonic Library! This is a big improvement over the samples that we were using in the prototype's music, which many of you may already be familiar with.
To put these new samples through their paces, we made a new piece for the Kynseed soundtrack and, in terms of sample quality, it can hardly get any better. In fact, we now have over 79 gigabytes worth of samples to make the Kynseed soundtrack the best it can be. (Just try loading all of that into your RAM. :D)
As for the track linked below, well...it's a mystery! The location in the game where this track is to play hasn't been locked down by the team yet. But for me as a composer, it'd be really interesting to see where you, the backers, think this song might fit. Close your eyes and listen, then tell me what you see. As always, I hope the track will spark your imagination and appetite for more Kynseed. Enjoy!
What Are These 'Samples' We Speak Of?
So what exactly are 'samples'? Glad you asked! So let's start with the basics: each Kynseed track is assembled using MIDI. In general, MIDI often refers to synthesized music typically made on a computer or electronic device but these days it's come to have a fairly broad meaning. (Most video games have been using some form of MIDI since the olden days!) So when I'm assembling a track using MIDI, what I'm actually doing is putting together a set of instructions. Those instructions tell the computer which audio samples to play and in which way to play them. Then I put effects over it (reverb, volume mastering, etc.) and record the output of these instructions, typically as a traditional WAV or MP3 file. I suppose you might say that if music is like making a game, then MIDI is the raw code you don't ever see while playing.
But here's the thing with MIDI music. If you want the MIDI music to sound like it was recorded with a live orchestra, then the only way to do this is to actually record the music with real musicians and real instruments. One...note...at...a time. This, effectively, is what a sample is. It's a live recording of one musician playing one note on one instrument. And there's thousands of these individual recordings. Those recordings are known as 'samples'. So then, in my trusty MIDI program, I can take all these individual recordings of individual instruments playing individual notes and assemble them in any way I want. Thus, I can create new music with previously recorded notes and in the end it can often sound very similar to a live orchestra recording, just without the significant cost of hiring an orchestra and organizing a recording session!
On the technical side, the track above has 15 individual instrument tracks: 5 for the strings, then there's guitar, ukulele, 5 oboe tracks (of various types of oboes), celesta, glockenspiel, and finally a harp. I've left the entire brass section out of this track to get the right 'vibe' for the location. The beauty of having so many new instruments to choose from is that you can give each track a very distinct feeling by carefully selecting which instruments to include and which ones to leave out.
The interesting thing is that each of these samples doesn't just include each note from each instrument, but it also includes different ways that each note can be played, with different styles and with different emphasis. So I'm sure you can imagine it takes a loooong time to do record all these samples with an entire orchestra and takes up quite a bit of harddisk space too! :scared: But now that we have this new sample library, we'll be able to leverage the power of this orchestra and make Kynseed's soundtrack truly special.
