>> Ivan Tashev: Just about two years ago, we had a meeting here, this spot.
It was on fours of four I think where they went through all the sound
effects, how they recorded the car sounds and programmed that stuff. And the
fellow giving the talk purposely turned the music down so we could hear the
sound effects which would be natural because it was about the sound effects.
But I was thinking, well, that's really a shame. We really should hear
something about how all this music is done for this too. And I just happened
to know the guy who did all that music composing. And he's been
professionally composing for at least 20 years in games, roughly ten or so.
Is that about right? So he's got an interesting story to tell about doing
the recording for this game. And I'll give you Lance Hayes.
[Applause].
>> Lance Hayes: Good evening. So just a quick show of hands, who has
actually played any of the Forza titles? Wow. Well, I guess this is sort of
a -- maybe a biased environment. Forza 5? Any Forza 5? Yes, yes, there you
go. Sure. Well, Forza 4 tends to be the one that comes up the most. Forza
3 and 4 were very popular. Five obviously required a new box. Has taken a
little longer to catch on. But a lot of people have played it. So I'm going
to talk tonight about the sound track that I created for it. This is
independent of the car audio or most of the UI sound design. And I'm not
going to be talking about -- I worked on 3 and 4 as well, but this is
primarily about five. So if you have questions about 3 or 4, maybe save
them, we can talk afterwards or at one of the breaks, something like that.
So this talk actually starts with a little bit of audio. So I'm going to
play some music from the sound track so we can hear that. And then I'll go
into describing what we're listening to.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: Well, there we go. And we're back. So that is the track in
line bias which was done for -- this is actually a small clip that was used
as E three in 2014. No I'm sorry -- yeah. It was 2014. It was early in
2014. And the idea here was that we had created a bunch of music and
content. No, I'm sorry, it was 2013. It's 2015 and I'm already getting
confused. So 2013. We had actually created the sound track, but it wasn't
fully mixed yet. So what we're hearing here is actually a linear version of
what would eventually become a completely adaptive sound track. They mixed
this exclusively for that event because -- and that was actually one of the
reasons we had a fairly tight deadline is that we needed the content to be
ready for that event because there was a huge unveiling, a very big day for
the franchise. I'll play an example later on that actually uses the content
in a different way. So quickly, a little bit more about me, just because,
you know, I'm up here. Obviously I've been working in games for about ten
years now. I started in about 2005 doing small independent titles and I
actually was still working with that company up until recently but in the
meantime I had a chance to work on a host of other titles. My first AAA
experience was Forza Motorsport three and that was in about 2008 when I
started working for them. It was released in 2009. And from there, my
career kind of took off a little bit in the game space. I was able to work
or Microsoft Flight. I did some advertising work for them and a host of
other titles. And some people mentioned they wanted to be game composers.
How many hands for the game composition? Yeah. So when I was starting this,
the information out there was a little scant. There wasn't a heck of a lot.
Now obviously there are school programs that are coming together quite well.
There's a lot of books out there and but back then it was still, there was
information but it still felt like it was in the hands of the more of the
programmatic side and a little less in the hands of the composer and so I
think it's turning a little bit of a corner. Anyway, I stayed on and I wound
up working on four, and a whole bunch of hip soft small titles, small
independent titles. Things like that. So I've actually composed music for
over 23, I think 23 or 24 titles in that time. At the time I also do a lot
of licensing work so I've had an opportunity to have music in a bunch of
television projects and the billing break for in that category actually came
in about 2001. Warner Brothers licensed a whole bunch of my music for the
Matrix properties. Basically the ani matrix reloaded and revolutions, if you
have seen any of those, any of the bonus materials, the trailers, any of the
TV specials, I had a lot of work that was in those which kind of helped segue
into doing game work obviously. It was a nice leg up as far as that goes.
But if you have ever watched television, there's a chance you've heard my
work basically. At one point I was all over Discovery. And actually thanks
to Forza Motorsport 5, 1 of the tracks from the sound track was actually used
in McDonald's commercial at the end of 2013. I think in December of 2013.
>>:
Do you maintain the rights to that?
>> Lance Hayes: Work for higher, I get the residuals, yes. So that was
nice. That was a good quarter. I also do, besides lecturing, I also do
teaching and I write a blog or I was writing a blog for a company in England
and I thought we were done but they keep releasing my material that I had
given them so that kind of keeps coming up, which is fun. And then I do a
lot of lecturing. My last lecturing event was packs dev. I did packs dev
this summer. Game sound con. I do a lot of stuff. I also teach at the
graduate level for Pacific Northwest Film Scoring. I teach two classes for
them. Advanced MIDI one and the game music track that we do for the class.
I wanted to make sure I include a lot of content in the talk. This is
actually the launch trailer from 4 to 5. And it's not actually in the game
anywhere but it was pushed out on YouTube and has done extremely well. It
was a huge thing for them. I wound up doing -- the music from this is a
distillation of one of the race tracks. And the team that was actually
putting together the trailer took some of my music and basically took stems
out of it. Mixed it together. And then handed it back to me and asked me to
fix it, which was a very surreal experience. And their timings were kind of
off. They weren't musicians, which is pretty common. I'm sure we've all
experienced that if you work in audio. Someone who doesn't really know
anything with odd wrote gets involved and then all of a sudden it's a big
project. So I actually came back and mixed it for 7.1 as well as a stereo
mix on just the music and ran it through some processing and fixed all the
timing so this is the trailer for that.
>>:
Could you crank the volume?
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. I think so.
volume up a little bit. Thank you.
Do I have that here?
Could we bring the
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: So about 3 million hits on YouTube for that so far. It's
done pretty well. But it was a very -- it was an interesting experience to
come back and have all the content kind of jumbled up and trying to fix it
for this project. So I've got a timeline here that shows the work from Forza
3, 4, and 5. I'll be really brief about this part. So in 2008, I was
contacted by someone on the team for Forza and I want to see it was either
Mike Caviezel or Greg Shaw if anybody knows either one of those guys.
They're great. We started talking. They were looking for an electronic
sound track at the time for the project. So they brought me in. I was known
for electronic music mostly at the time. And they were looking for someone
who could do basically kind of a down tempo spa-like feel for the game. So
they brought me in. I came and I demoed some stuff for them. They looked
over some of my materials and before I knew it, I was actually learning how
to do implementation. I was doing all the UI sound design for the game and I
implemented it in FMOD for them. So it was kind of a pretty steep learning
curve but it was great. I had a lot of fun with that. And of course wound
up composing a sound track for it which was very juke box. They just needed
music that they could plug in that would be played in the background while
people were designing their cars, working on their cars, in the liveries and
stuff like that. They used licensed music at the time for all the race
sections. And they'd actually talked about 15 composers before they met me.
So actually I feel very fortunate that it worked out. It was a really great
gig and it's been a lot of fun working on the series. At the time I was
using sonar, reason, a lot of native instruments content and the arterial
view collection. If you're familiar with that. So a lot of analog sounding
synthesizer and a lot of -- almost -- everything was done virtually actually.
And that was just because at that point I was -- I run a full synthesizer
studio in my basement for years, and I've gotten exhausted with writing down
settings so I kind of moved over to full everything virtual by then. So some
time went by. I worked on some other projects from Microsoft. I was
fortunate enough to do some other work with the studio and then Turn 10
called again in 2010 and asked me to come back and work on Forza 4 and I met
the new audio director, Nick Wiswell who actually spoke on his work on Forza
four a couple years ago. So this was basically during that time period. And
they had me come back and do roughly the same treatment. They want more
electric music but there were also looking for a little adaptive content so
we did some adaptive work. I still turned on a lot of creating a bunch of
the UI sound design assets but they were implemented in a different way and
they had a much bigger team by that point. So the studio was going in the
audio department quite a bit and Nick brought a whole new vision to the
project that was very cinematic compared to what we had done in the previous
titles. Just to avoid discussion, up there in the corner, that's not from
Forza. Some of that is halo content. I actually wound up scoring this
trailer and I just thought it looked great so I put it up there. So if you
ever see this trailer, it's for Microsoft -- it's for one of their hiring
divisions and it was just a great bunch of footage so I thought I'd throw it
in there. So no embedding in this one. I actually wasn't part of the team
directly. I was a contractor exclusively and but I used a lot of the same
tools. Again reason, arterial. All the native instrument stuff I could
throw at it and a few custom plug-ins. And then a couple years later, still
contracting, doing a bunch of work. I got another call. This one was a
little more for boating which it basically -- Nick and I sat down and talked
and he asked for some suggestions. He was trying to come up with some ideas
for Forza 5. And he said, yeah, we'd like to talk to you about this project.
It's -- and they couldn't tell me at the time because I hasn't signed on yet.
They couldn't tell me it was the day one title but it turned out to be the
day one title for the XBox. So when the XBox one launched in November
of 2013, this was the game that was going to come out with it. So there was
absolutely no room for failure. We had to get everything in. It had to be
done on time. It had to be done well. It was like, you know, one of those
things where, well, I mean, you know, the term gun to the head came up quite
a bit. So it was definitely a challenge and we had a great time with it but
it was one of those, you know, we were sweating bullets a lot. Like if
things didn't go -- I refer to it as threading a needle at 300 miles an hour
as you were going by. It was like things just had to work the first time
perfectly. Because if they didn't, they were just going to get scrubbed. It
was out. So we had a lot of do or die stuff. Additional do to that, we were
actually working with new technology from FMOD. FMOD studio had not come
out. It was still in beta. So we were working with -- the technology for
the XBox, we didn't actually know everything about it yet. I say we like I
had to work on it. I was actually just doing music, but as part of the team
it was definitely pretty clear that there was a lot of wow, we are still not
sure what this can do and FMOD was in beta, so there was a whole level of
information there we didn't have all that working at a hundred percent the
whole time. So sometimes I was being asked to create content that we didn't
know if we'd be able to use so I had to make it as extensible as possible.
And that was a fun challenge.
>>:
Can you describe what FMOD is?
>> Lance Hayes: Oh, I'm sorry. FMOD, for anybody who is not familiar, and a
middle ware that allows you do adaptive scoring within a game and it works
with the FMOD engine which is put into the game and works with the game's
center brain basically.
>>:
[Indiscernible].
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
You know, I'm sure it does.
[Indiscernible].
>> Lance Hayes: No. All they we were featured on their website, Firelight
Technologies. They're Australian, and they featured us extensively on their
website when the game came out. They were like this actually worked. You
know. As opposed to like, oh, my God, crash and burn. No. It worked really
well. They actually pretty much, they had a team that was working
exclusively with Microsoft and particularly closely with Turn 10 the whole
time.
>>:
[Indiscernible] or something --
>> Lance Hayes: It looks a little like a DAU now. It used to be very, you
know, kind of, you know, a little bit spacier to look but it actually looks a
lot like a DAU now when you look at it. You can download it for free if you
just look up FMOD.org, I believe, go and you can download the entire FMOD
studio for free. For anybody who is learning how do game composition, I
highly recommend at least becoming peripherally, if not pretty well familiar
with either wise or FMOD. Those are great tools. And they're free. You can
download them. In fact, if the you're working with a team that's got unity
engine stuff they're doing, also it works with unity. You can actually use
score for a project. And if the project isn't expected to sell over a
hundred thousand dollars’ worth of content or something like that, you can
use it for free. So if you're working with a small developer who is putting
together a game, I would push to use a slightly more robust middle ware
engine. And again, you can come up and talk about that later if you like.
So yeah. So in addition to everything else, we're going to do a completely
adaptive sound track for the entire thing which they had never done. We were
also doing it with a live orchestra, which they had never done.
>>:
[Indiscernible].
>> Lance Hayes: Adaptive. Sorry. An adaptive sound track is one in which
depending on where the player is in the game and depending on where the game
engine is and depending on a number of factors, you play back a score or a
sound design that is basically being engineered by the game long with your
actions. So as you hit a button, and you start your car, the car sound comes
on. If you have a section of music that's supposed to be very low intensity,
it will play until you do something that suddenly ramps up the intensity.
Sometimes I take it for granted that I know this stuff. So anyway, we did
deliver on time. We did it within budget. Highlights for me included
working with a live orchestra which was amazing. Several actually, actually
several different groups. We went across the country and recorded with three
different organizations. Plus we did stuff in Seattle. It was five studios
involved total. And I got to do 7-1 surround mixing in my studio, which was
a blast. I had a great time with that. So anybody who does surround mixing
will know it's a lot of fun. It was kind of a crazy challenge. I had to
write about 140 minutes of music in about 14 weeks which anybody who composes
may recognize that as a pretty -- and there was times -- there was changes
that kept coming up, so there were days where I was composing five minutes of
music and finish out the door which was, yeah, kind of challenging. But we
got it done. So it worked out great, and I had the opportunity to work with
another composer, John Broomhall in England. And I'll talk about that more
as we go. So just looking at the overview for the production for Forza 5,
basically it was a huge chance for the entire, as a launch title, it was a
chance for them to redirection and reaffirm what they were trying to do with
the game. Both as a more of earlier titles but also completely new content
and create a whole new direction for it at the same time. So it was supposed
to also usher in a whole new generation of racing titles which it has and
it's an opportunities, it's not without its risks but it was a lot of fun to
do. For me, it was an opportunity to work with the Forza, the enterprise in
a way I had never done before. Being able to actually approach it this way
was really exciting. I tested the limits of technology with FMOD, which
again was still coming together at the time. The studio was not released
fully so the team at Firelight was fantastic working closely with Turn 10.
And then of course bringing in the live players made for a very exciting
process. The preproduction for the project was very, very involved. So I
want to say I was brought in -- hang on here. I think it was mid 2012. And
they were trying to create a different flavor with this. They wanted to
create a sort of a -- the journey basically is what it was called. So
basically you would go from your home space in the game to the travel section
to the pre-race to the race and then you would go to the rewards section at
the end. They were all going to have their own distinct flavor and each
section was going to be unique. The first three sections were sort of
stitched together, basically seamlessly sync up. Race and rewards sync
together to some extent. And they all had their own intensity and flavor.
And so we were trying to create an arrange of composition that would allow us
to showcase that and show this arc basically. So in so doing, they basically
created some design templates and some concepts and they came to me and said
how do we make this work and work all together, and we kind of came up with
concepts together but we worked for about three months. I rewrote the same
piece of music maybe 30 times in the end where I literally had made hundreds
of stems and recreated whole sections because as we were coming through, they
were trying to -- they were not only trying to figure out what the box could
do, they were trying to figure out what FMOD could do. They were also trying
to figure out the best way to get this to all work together. So they just
had me basically creating content and just sort of throwing it at them and
can you rewrite and can we try this, a new tempo. Almost distill the entire
concept but it took three months. The plan was I would come in and start
writing right after that, but the way things worked and because of the
technology considerations and this changes that were happening, I didn't
actually get back in for about 3 or 4 months and so I started in December and
I had 14 weeks to write the 140 minutes of music. So we had come up with a
bunch of concepts but it did get down to a pretty hardcore writings clip at
the very end there. And then basically part of what Chase Combs who I worked
with on this, who was actually the audio implementer for a lot of the
project, he actually did a whole bunch of techno considerations. He created
a bunch of content beforehand and he basically did a lot of work in Visio to
tell kind of imagine where it was all going to wind up. He did stuff with
FMOD and put it all together and then we took the prototypes that I had
created and put them all together. I've got the date here. It was August of
2012 and then I was back out of there by September, October. Instead of
coming back right after that, I didn't come back until January. That's
right. But we did create just a ton of variations and temp tracks and all
kinds of stuff some of which actually made it into the final game. And as we
were going, some of the early concepts that stayed with us, we decided to use
female choir, strings, percussion, piano and electronics. And we were able
to work, as I said, with John Broomhall who is an English composer. Anybody
play Transport Tycoon? So you may remember that it had sort of a jazzy sound
track to it. That was John. He actually just rerecorded that entire sound
track with live musicians. That one was down with general MIDI back in the
early '90s I think. So if you get a chance to play, it's amazing. He did
some great stuff. So we were working on a transatlantic arrangement and it
was very intense. I also had an assistant who actually had been a student of
mine at Pacific northwest film scoring who came in and helped but between
John, we were between 180 minutes of music. There were at least 2000 music
stems for the whole project for music. And I say that, sound sort of like,
that's nothing. And it isn't until you look for music it's a lot. It's
actually a lot of music stems. And we had to do things like pull out and
strip out everything single like snare drum line, all the high hat parts all
the pretty much all the strings had to be separated into 2 to 4 sections and
all this stuff and we've spit it all back out and then basically the engine
took over and we did a bunch of adaptive content that way. And we had the
chance to travel across country to record a bunch of this which I'll talk
about. So here's some examples of the story arc going from home space which
is where basically your journey in the game starts and you go from the home
space to travel. The home space, the idea was it's basically full of desire.
It's all about intimacy. It's all about you and the car. Sort of like that
video that we just saw, it's sort of for car enthusiasts, this stuff is
catnip. They'll spend forever in Forza mode and it's a huge big deal to
them. So every track that I created had a musical theme. So as you go
through each of the 18 tracks and going through the home space travel and
whatnot, there are themes that travel through all of it and they would bounce
between piano, choir, strings, depending on where you were in the particular
part of the mix. The idea was that at least somewhere in there, you were
going to hear the theme. And it kind of works. In the game it's nice to
hear the -- it will kind of carry through with sort of a -- they're using a
couple bars, they were fairly short because we didn't know how long people
would spend in a particular area so we couldn't do fairly long drown out
elements. And additionally because of our writing clip because we were going
to quickly, a lot of times the themes were just basically just whatever I
wrote, that's what the theme was going to be because there wasn't time to
necessarily go back and do a whole bunch of iteration at that point. So
here's an example of home space.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: At its simplest form there's a lot of electronic content in
there. As well as string. There wasn't percussion in the first part. And
choir. So it was basically kind of electronic and it was supposed to be an
homage to the first 3 or 4 titles. And I think it worked out pretty well.
And then the idea was that as you went around the home space, the music mix
changes dramatically. We had 12 stems of content that were played in what's
called a vertical remix in that section which I've got examples of later.
But basically the idea was you would segue into the electronics and other
things as you went around the different parts of the garage. So for a lot of
that, I was really influenced by Howard Hanson stuff, Möller, even come
Carter Burwell little bit here and there. It's really just designed to be
ambient beautiful simple straightforward music with a lot of the female
choir. And a lot of electronic influences things like 4-AD, Lucene, Tyco,
things like that. Then you move on to travel. So for the travel section, it
was about discovery, adventure, the battle basically is kind of commencing.
You're getting ready to go to the track and you're going to go race. Since
the cars are kind of the protagonists of this project, well they are the
protagonists of the project, this is where you're kind of getting ready to go
out and travel to new location and go experience an entirely different sound.
So as it would build the excitement and anticipation, we also -- we start
including acoustic percussion at this stage. And it was a hybrid sort of
cinematic flavor for these sections, and here's an example of it.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: So that's travel. And from there you would want to pre-race
which essentially was -- this is where you're actually getting -- this ramps
up the excitement pretty bit. It's all preparation for the actual race
itself. And for this stuff I actually sort of looked at some very operatic
stuff. I was listening to a lot of Verdi's Requiem, some Shostakovich,
things like that. So it got very bold and exciting. But the idea was that
it was very driving. This is where the percussion kicks in. We worked with
MB Gordy on the percussion. Battle Star Galactica. He's a session guy down
in LA and he just did an amazing job. Played straight for like 14 hours or
2 days. Just playing percussion. He's like everything that wasn't played by
me that was electronic. Pretty amazing stuff. Here's an example.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: So that's pre-race. And then it goes into race which is
actually fairly complex. The most complex mix in the entire thing was home
space just because we had so many layers we were working with but race was
also fairly complex as well. With race, it was all about striving. It's
very aggressive and supposed to be very motivating. And it was also very
adaptive. So I think we had seven layers on this. Percussion, electronics,
strings, no choir, and lots of percussion layers, including percussion that I
had played in the studio that was all sample-based and then of course MB
Gordy stuff on top of that. And so we had like a lot of percussion by the
time we were done. And the idea was that it would basically be cinematic
action and try to really maximize the excitement for the scenes that are
happening. And it would change directly very quickly as necessary. So we
were doing like a set of vertical remix so in parts of it we would have
everything would be playing, including in lead guitar stuff so it would just
get really exciting. If you were out in front, you're doing great, the whole
thing went nuts. If you were like basically at the back of the pack and you
pulled over to the gravel and you were kind of checking your ear, you were
going to get nothing but like a little bit of a drowning synth and some kind
of pulsing stuff going, what are you doing? Hello. I used to refer to it as
the door ajar mode. The door is ajar. The door is ajar. What are you
doing? You should be in this race. And so but here's an example. I think
this is pretty much everything playing at once. We had percussion,
electronic music, acoustic strings, synthetic and regular orchestral stems
and electric guitar here.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: One of the things they asked for when we were working on the
racetracks with a they want to have music that was thematic flavored, so a
lot of the string lines would have to be very broad and very cinematic. So
that was one of the things we were creating a lot of when we were doing this
project. So after a while -- oh, the other thing is, at one point we kind of
tried a concept where I was doing a lot of eight note triplets at like 140
BPM which is pretty hard. So I got really good at playing eight note
triplets after a while, but we didn't use any of it. They wound up going
with electric guitar instead. So they wound up singing like the Olympics as
part of the lead lines. It was good practice, though. I'm pretty good at
eight note triplets now. At high speed. So rewards. This is where you
basically have finished the race and win, lose, or draw, you are going to get
this kind of anthem of like, wow, we did it. And it's sort of a pleasant
sort of surviving the battle flavor but they didn't want it to be too
congratulatory because you might have lost. You might really be bad at this.
And so they didn't want you to think, wow, hey, no matter how badly you do.
So it was more of contemplative I think and what we talked about. So it had
sort of a pop flavor, a little bit pop string flavor to it. Basically I was
using a lot of piano for this stuff I was relying on more like an Elton John
Beatles pop-esque kind of thing with a little bit of Puccini thrown in just
for fun.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: So that's rewards and then the idea being that you would
just kind of carry on. Also a lot of these things had sort of an unresolved
flavor to them. So it would sort of push you into the next section because
they wanted you to keep going back to race. Did you have a question?
>>: I have a dumb question. Can you sit at this 14 hours a day or do you
have to walk around the block every so often?
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Yeah.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
When I'm composing?
Oh.
Yeah, I would go play with my kids a lot.
Seems like it's very intense work.
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes, it is. I remember actually
afterwards, my wife who has at one point been an LMP, a licensed massage
therapist, she's like, man, your back is a mess. You better get done with
this project. So yeah. It's pretty intense. But you just have to hit the
deadlines. And it's really critical that you hit the deadlines for stuff.
>>:
Coffee and cigarettes?
>> Lance Hayes: No cigarettes anymore. Quit smoking years and years ago.
Pretty much wholly, I think. But lots of coffee. So just quickly wanted
touch on that dynamic music for the race. I'll actually show some of that
with the live demo after we get back from the break. The player could
basically play the race music all the way through and they may never hear
whole sections of it. The idea was it was really based on your performance
in the game. How well you were doing, what lap, and your proximity to the
other cars. So player feedback was a huge part of the concept behind the
race. The feeling with the Turn 10 team is that anything that doesn't
provide feedback in some capacity is probably not optimal, particularly in
the race environment because they've spent as long tailoring the concepts of
the feedback in your joy stick, the feedback to the way you perform when
you're playing and the sound. Everything is designed to tell you how you're
doing. Otherwise, players won't use it. They've realized the players will
simply turn off whole content sections. If they don't like it, they'll get
rid of it. So the music had to perform on that level. So as I said, we
actually created -- it had six active stem layers. It was a combination of
live and acoustic. So one of the things that we did was if you're in last
place, you get that really low throbbing synth stuff that's just not, you're
just not performing well. But one of the other things we created too was if
you were passing someone and you were getting close to them, you would
actually get a series of string as wells that were all tremolo strings and
what I did was I created objectives of cello and violin that were playing up
front, across about 3 or 4 objective range and they would play these brazing
and lowering -- it was basically just tremolos done in a sample library. And
I would play it back and it was following the chords of the songs from the
tracks themselves and it would just be layered to the background. And as
soon as you came close to passing someone, this would -- you'd get this kind
of buzzing humming of bees kind of sound. It was really cool. It worked
really well. And it actually is in the game. So that worked out pretty
well. We tried a bunch of different sounds but the problem is most of them
sounded like your car was having a problem. So if you were tapping on the
cello volume or something, people would think, is the panel on my car loose?
So we came up with the tremolo thing as a good solution for that. If you're
in first place, originally was eight note triplets, which didn't happen. But
we eventually had a lead electronic guitar -- electric guitar that would
basically play over the entire mix and it would play the lead line from the
strings generally speaking. Talking a little bit more about the Forza sound
itself, obviously synthesizer, we used live orchestra for this one. I think
it's been said that the sound of Forza is really about the car engines, but
that's not entirely true. There's a lot of people who really get into the
music and really into the sound design of the game. And it's a huge part of
the experience for a lot of players. There's actually been a lot of people
who have asked what is the Forza sound. It depends. For the three that I
worked on, the first two were about spa mellow kind of ambient music. This
one was very much a cinematic flavor. So kind of depends on where they go
with the title. For the one we were doing, it was designing an intimacy for
Forza 5. And that's what they really wanted to emphasize. How did we go
about that? Well, there was a whole bunch of production concepts that had to
also come over across from Forza 3 and 4. Obviously the spa feel from Forza
3 was really important. It transitioned to a more cinematic flavor in Forza
4 and then basically became fully cinematic and very much an emotional
storytelling arc in five. So we have different layers we talked about for
the pre-race and everything else, and the idea basically being that this was
going to allow us to create a consistent sound across the entire game. So
the common denominators were wide stereo feel ambient music and much of the
sound was using the same synth arrangement I've used in past titles so it had
a touchstone with previous editions of the game which made that a lot easier
to maintain that quality of sound. As we went through, we were doing certain
production techniques. I was using the same DAU across all three of them for
my mixes. With Forza 5, we actually wound up working out of so many studios
that the sound became a little less I'd say consistent but it actually -- we
kind of tried to approach it the same way. I helped the team that was mixing
the sound track, we talked about some of the things I had done on the sound
track with my projects, and there was a lot of back and forth. And I was
using the same synthesizers across all three of the version game. I wound up
actually remixing all of John's stuff so for John's 40 minutes of music that
he did, I wound up doing all the synth mixes out of my studio so we'd have a
consistent flavor that way. I would say I actually spent a lot of time using
CSAD and the mood emulations and stuff for a lot of that. So yes, we just
talk about that. The signal tape was very consistent across all of them.
And they definitely wanted to make sure it sounded not alien to the rest of
the series. They wanted to have some consistency across the entire series.
So that helped a lot. Using the same DAU was a big touch. That was a big
part of it. Sonar, by the way, I like sonar. Any sonar users out there?
Yeah. I like sonar a lot. It's great. For the actual recordings
themselves, we were able to travel across country. So in this picture, this
was actually MB Gordy's setup at Sonic Fuel in LA. Christopher Leonard's
facility, it's a really nice place. Great floors. The bamboo floors are
really nice. And if you can see it here, these Tycos in the back here are
the ones he actually used for Battle Star Galactica, which I'm a huge fan of.
Kind of like, oh, that great. And then the Toms. He had a huge collection
of Toms. This doesn't include the room that had all the hand percussion that
he used for the project, which is a lot of fun. But we wound up working out
of Skywalker and here. Well, let's see, yeah. Skywalker and Avatar as well
in New York.
>>:
Is the garbage can a garbage can?
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah, no, he plays that.
some really cool stuff with it.
He did play it.
He actually did
>>:
Looks really shiny.
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. It's kinds of big too. And probably reverberating.
He did wind up using that. All the electronics were done in my studio of
course. And then we had central mixing and sound lab here in Redmond where
they actually brought all the keys back and brought it all together. And
that was mixed for the game and also for any of the publicity materials. But
it was really -- it was a very big challenge trying to think about all of
those concepts going into it and how we could kind of gel it all together
from the composer's chair so we mocked up everything. That was the other
thing is we mocked up everything that's in the game. Every version of all
this, I have a synth mockup at home that was used in the game at least
initially. The idea was that we'd switch them out 1 to 1. Once we got done
with the recording sessions, going across country, we literally took the
mocks and we switched them out for the live sessions. So that's the reason
it had to work. Because it wasn't going to work otherwise. So this is an
example of career video. One of my other jobs on the project, I came back at
the end and wound up mixing all the career videos. So if you have played the
game, you go into the career videos, and you basically get a chance to listen
to one of the top mirror guys talk about how awesome or how awful these cars
are and they basically do it to a sound track of either my music or a hybrid
remix of one of mine or John's tracks. And then you basically get a bunch of
sound design on VO work that I did in my studio. So this is what those sound
like.
>> Audio played: This group demonstrates what engineers can do within
they're allowed to go completely mad. There's nothing here you should not
experience at least once. Just about every kind of configuration is here.
Some have their engines in the middle, some in the front. Some have rear
drive. Some send their horsepowers to all four corners. All however do have
one thing in common. They all look as fast as they're supposed to be. Some
people say that the [indiscernible] and the [indiscernible] are racing cars
with stereos but that isn't necessarily so. Road cars maybe more powerful
than racers but they're often softer and kinder and squiggier. No doubt this
is a very good place to spend rather than more time than you should.
>> Lance Hayes: Those were a lot of fun to work on. There was about 60 of
them. And of course like everything else in the game, the deadline was
pretty tight. We still hasn't gotten all the content together. We used a
lot of stuff from IRIS. Anybody familiar with IRIS as a design tool? Yeah.
It's great. And then there was also a bunch of content that was actually
from damage. I liked damage at the time. It was still kind of new. And I
basically put all that together, mixed it in the studio. And we had to
reorganize all the VO because it was pretty much just recorded at a clip so
we had to fix all of that. So that was a pretty exciting project. So the
electronic music concepts for the game I kind of touched on a little bit.
Obviously Amon Tobin, Tangerine Dream was a huge influence. Glitch mob.
Used nothing but plug-ins. Here's kind of after collection of some of the
stuff. Some of these are just grabbed because they were available when I put
the project together. But you can see that basically, there was -- I don't
know how many different synths we wound up using on it but we did try and
create a signature sound as much as possible. And something that's familiar
but new. The electronic scores, they were originally designed as background
and one of the things that they had found over the course of the series was
that people liked the music so much that they would listen to it for hours
and hours and hours. So we had to make sure that this was listenable to some
degree for hours and hours and hours as you go through the game. And one of
the things that kind of came up, we decided the cord of the sound had to be a
little chilly, little bit of ambiguity and even main a little ruthless
because it's all about competition. So the game's music and particularly the
sound sets I was using tend to be a little cooler, a little bit more -- maybe
a little bit more esoteric. Maybe more craft work than -- I don't know.
They had a definite kind of flavor to it. So if you listen to the game,
there's a lot of really cool synthetic elements. For the actual recording
process, so this is obviously the hybrid stuff. This is us as Skywalker.
There's me with Leslie Ann, the famous Leslie Ann. And the Skywalker strings
with some amazing people behind us that played on the projects. Again, we
were trying to make it familiar but new. And carry on the journey the whole
time, still chilly and full of desire. Here we go. This is the actual
recording process. So obviously we did three studios in two states in about
a month. This is at the very end of actually the compositional stage. And
people have asked, how do you do that? How does that happen like that when
you're under those kinds of deadlines? Well, we were fortunate enough to
work with Paul Lipson over at Microsoft. He's at 343 now I believe. He
basically decided on a mixed location sessions because at the time we didn't
actually have a lot of time and there really wasn't a way to get everything
we needed in one place. Just wasn't going to happen. So we basically wound
up booking sessions like I said in California, two in California, one in had
LA, one in Marin County. And the other one in New York. And they were
pretty much back to back. We might have had a week between some of them.
But they were very intense and very quick. We had to get done pretty much
seamlessly. So at the very end of the writing project, nearly the end, we
were heading off or work with Lennie Moore who was will the arranger who
worked on the project. He would take the MIDI files that we turned in and
basically transcriptions to sheet music for the musicians to play back and
send us notes if there was a problem or they didn't quite gel. For the most
part we pretty much just handed it off and he printed it out. There really
wasn't a lot of time to go over it. We were writing so much music and only
had two weeks to get it all done. He was fantastic. It worked out really
well. We had Michael Roache who actually did pro-tool sessions and prep for
us. I should point out the first session we did was the percussion session.
We scheduled it that way on purpose because the writing was still happening.
We had the tempos for everything, but we didn't actually have all the parts
done by the time the first session rolled around because of booking and time.
So when we were down at Sonic Fuel, I actually was writing on the way back
and forth and then I got back to the studio and finished up some rewrites
that they needed and then we sent everything off. So literally, we were
joking when we got to Skywalker, the ink was still wet when he was handing it
out to the players. It was like that. He was literally printing stuff out
like half an hour before it had to get on the stands. And he would come back
and go is this right. My assistant and I were going over it like really -yeah, that seems about right. Let's do it. Let's go. Just nuts. So little
stressful. I can just sort of feel it in the back of my mind. Just thinking
about it. It was fun, we had a great time. So but just speaking of the
facilities themselves, so Skywalker, like I said, we were fortunate to work
with Leslie Ann Jones. You've probably heard her work and may not have
realized it. She's been on a lot of projects. Remarkable, remarkable woman.
They did the whole thing on a Neve 88 R so for any Neve fans, it was an
amazing board. It just looked great. It did everything they needed to.
I've seen here interview about it a couple of times and it's just
unbelievable. That was definitely a kick. Her assistant, André Zweers was
amazing. He managed all the tape content for them and managed all the
sessions that she was busily recording. Anybody that knows that studio or
facility is probably familiar with the fact that it was a lot of work for
Star Wars, a lot of anything George Lucas practices probably gone through
there at some point. The scoring is pretty remarkable. It's got a series of
baffles in it that allow them to change the reverb time just a little over
two and a half, three seconds at the most and down to less than a second at
the bottom of that. Pretty impressive. We had it open for like epic so it
was as big as it could go. It was amazing. And the food and the lunches are
great. If you ever get a chance to go, it's -- they really take care of
people. They make it an experience. You go and it's just sort of a little
magical. As studio sessions go, it's pretty hard to beat the experience.
It's pretty cool. But we had a great time and we were fortunate enough to
work with Marco D'Ambrosio.
>>: I would have expected all of the development for the game was released
to be sort of undercover. Seems like it was pretty explicit. People knew
what they were doing.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Yeah.
As far as the music?
In general.
>> Lance Hayes: Well, we knew what we were trying to accomplish, and that
changed a lot. We were training direction moderately regularly at one point.
By the end, we knew where we were headed but there was whole sections of the
game, just because of the technology and the middle ware not being fully
prepared yet that we were still kind of blah. You know. So we were just
being very nimble. We were trying to be as nimble as we could. We changed
direction a lot. Does that answer the question?
>>:
Yeah, I guess.
>> Lance Hayes: It was kind of a thrill for me to work with Marco because
he'd actually scored some films. Vampire hunter D? Any fans of vampire
hunter D out there? Yeah. So he scored that and he was actually our
conductor on the project and I was like whoa whoa. I was totally nerding out
to that. It was pretty awesome. So this is some of the Skywalker sessions.
Just strings.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: And I was telling Leslie that just being in the booth with
her, the sound in the booth was better than like actual live sessions that
I've been to. It was like being in the room wasn't necessarily as good as
being in the booth. It was unbelievable. So that was a lot of fun. The
next stop for us was Sonic Fuel. We had MB Gordy whose résumé is
unbelievable. Transformers. Despicable Me. You hear him all the time
actually. And he was a super nice guy. He actually played drums for I think
the Doobie Brothers at one point. And he would just tell us these stories
like, oh, yeah, we were doing this thing and I'm like, I've gotten -- I have
nothing. I'm just going to listen. It was great he was a lot of fun.
Really nice guy. Amazing, amazing recording artist. And like I said, he
played for like 14 hours. 12 hours I think. I don't remember. With breaks
and everything, it came into a long day, but oh, my gosh. He would just play
everything himself. And he would track and he would go over our sheet music
and he was like oh, so looks like you're doing something here in 8, 12 time.
Do we have the music for that yet? No? Okay. I'll make something up. And
we would just play through it and do this amazing stuff. And it was just
brilliant. It was a lot of fun. We had Jeff Vaughn, engineering, along with
Keith Ukrisna. I'm probably destroying his name. Poor guy. But yeah. They
were amazing. Did a great job. This is Christopher Leonard's facility.
It's newer. It's down in LA. Very cool little place.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: Kind of amazing. He was very good at that stuff. So our
next stop, our last stop on the session tour, if you will, was Avatar in New
York which had been a power station. So anybody that heard anything out of
the 80s, probably heard this place. But I was looking over, I went over the
Wikipedia article to find out who had recorded there and it was -- the list
was like Queen, Bruce Springsteen, Esperanza Spalding, David Bowie, chick,
Diana crawl, pretty much everybody. And then it's growing again. It's
becoming a real mecca for people. And we had the opportunity to work there
with the New York Film Chorale who was brilliant. Dwayne condone actually
was the director and he actually spoke at GVC where I found out he'd also
been in LA for years. He worked on a whole bunch of films that I was
familiar with. He was very fast, very good. Real talented guy. And they
had the whole thing running through their SSL. It was a 9000 J board what
was really nice. Sounded really, really great. It's funny because at one
point Rory had to dip out to go record Aretha Franklin for the live feed
to -- she was doing a live presentation for either the -- one of the singing
shows. But she was being piped into LA at the time from New York. So he's
like, oh, I gotta go take care of this thing and come back. I bumped into
Yoko Ono while we were which was very weird. I walked out, I was going to
get coffee and I nearly tripped over here and I'm like oh. The thing is when
you see someone famous, you think you know them because you've seen them your
whole life, and so I'm like, oh, God, who is this? I know who this is. I
can remember her name. Wait a minute, I don't know you. You're Yoko Ono.
Weird. So it was like that kind of an event. It was pretty amazing.
Kathryn [indiscernible] was the woman who put this whole session together for
us. She was brilliant and the whole thing went off without a hitch. We were
very fortunate to partner with her. This is the choir.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: So it was just altos and sopranos for that but it turned out
really well. We actually didn't have the double track. The way they mixed
everything in with the sound track was pretty clear so that was good. Then
of course we recorded out here locally. How are we doing for time? Are we
okay?
>>:
Quarter to 9:00.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Okay.
What time did you want to break?
Soon.
>> Lance Hayes: Soon. Okay. Maybe after this we'll take a break. So all
the electronic layers were obviously produced here in Seattle or in my studio
and then the guitar was done over at Sound Lab which was actually really a
lot of fun. And again we were trying to put everything together. So this is
actually the mix. So what we're going to hear at the end of all this is
actually all these tracks mixed together as one section. But this is the
piano and some of the electronics that were mixed up.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: I'm a skillful piano player. Actually I didn't pick -- this
is a mix that was actually done by Chase. He liked the way the mix turned
out at the end. I was kind of like oh, man, I did other stuff that was
kludgy. But okay. It's all good. The soundtrack was actually mixed by the
very talented Jon Rook and Mike Caviezel. Stan Mike had also played guitar
on it. So we interacted a bit on that. It was kind of their baby. But it
did make it to the first round of the Grammies. It didn't make it to the
final stage where you people are actually voting on those right now but I was
pleasantly surprised that it actually got that far. So that was nice.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: So that's what that sounded like sewn together. And that
was the end product of all the different sessions. We did that for -- that's
a very short amount of like 1, 10-minute track that was then done 18
different ways. So pretty involved. I guess I can talk about working with
stem Zach when we get back if you like. Would you rather do that? Take the
break? Okay. We'll take a break and everybody can kind of mix and mingle
and say hi.
>> Lance Hayes: So stems. I just want to talk about the stems quickly and
some of the implementation choices as well as I can. This is actually
Chase's area when we do the talk. There was thousands of stems for the game
and the integration was pretty involved. I'll skip through these a little
bit just so you could see what we had to deal with here. He did a lot of
mixing with as soon as possible shots and stem markers. His transitions were
all done by game parameters. So he had to do this for every track. This is
FMOD. So this is FMOD. For anybody that's not familiar, this is actually -it looks great now. It's very much like a mixer. If you aren't familiar
with it, it's -- that part of the learning curve is pretty shallow so that's
nice. If you have any background in DAU development or any kind of mixing
background, that's kind of where it ends though and the rest you have to
start getting into some pretty deep implementation concepts. Here's another
example. He did the modular music system for it. Again, he would explain
this in greater detail if he were here but just to give you a taste of it,
you'll maybe start to recognize some of this, for instance, if we were in
home space and they wanted to leave home space and go to travel, it would
bring up a whole new section of travel music, which would be down here.
Transition to travel, to pre-race, and so forth as you go across. It was
basically crazy involved. You had to do these for each of the tracks
individually. This was the passing setup we had. So included if you had
gone to pitting or you had gone the wrong way, you got a last lap and that
would take you to the whole section of bad, good, excellent. And then
pitting over there. And each one of those would have a bunch of choices that
were basically a decision tree based on how you were performing and what you
were doing in the game that would then create a mix based on that using the
stems, the six layers of stems that we had created.
>>:
[Indiscernible]?
>> Lance Hayes: They imply that you have to -- basically if you do a certain
action, if the game gets a call from the player that it has to do a certain
action, it goes from say -- I don't have a laser pointer here. Let me see if
this will work. Maybe. Oh, yeah, okay, here we go. So if we go to this
one, it says to pitting, it will send you over to the pitting section. And
then you have all the decision tree of elements that are going to come into
play at that point. It could send you back to the bad part of the race, it
could send you to the good part of the race. You could leave the race
altogether. And within those, the mix, as you can see here, it's actually
fairly straightforward. It affects the mix for different parts of anything
from the percussion to -- not in this slide but the strings, all those things
were being impacted by your decisions. I wish I had a more detailed
explanation of that, but this was Chase's area. Just thought it was pretty
impressive stuff. Maybe we'll have Chase or he works for Microsoft. He can
always come in and do this and talk about it. Brilliant guy. Did great
work. Just a couple quick things. This is an example. We were talking
about vertical mixing. And this is the on home space and this is how 12
stems were mixed in the game to actually play back so that as you move
through the menu, you can hear the music. So in that first example, we heard
the track inline bias when I played that first video that we watched, the
very beginning, that was a linear mix. This is actually an adaptive mix
that's pulled directly from the game by the player. And I'll do an example
here a little bit on the box in a bit. But right now this is the -- so this
is actually the same track mixed live in the game.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: So as you can hear, they got pretty close with the linear
mix that they had done originally. Doesn't sound dissimilar to what you wind
up hearing in the game. And it will be a little easier for me to walk you
through, do a little live demonstration as well. Just wanted to quickly talk
about the team. I've mentioned some of the folks involved. Little more
detail. That's me obviously I was the lead composer upon the project. Like
you wouldn't know. We also had the chance -- this is Nick who gave a talk
here a couple years ago on Forza 4. He was the lead audio director.
Basically just for what it's worth, he basically assembled the entire team.
It was his decisions that led to the final soundtrack and the way it sounded
along with the sound design. Nick has a lot of irons in a lot of fire on
those projects and he lives and breathes this stuff. He did an amazing job.
So really a lot of fun working with him. I also had the chance to work with
Chase who did all the implementation. He was the audio lead as well. He
worked with a lot of the contractors helping put together design concepts and
I was often answering to Chase. He had Nick would trade off on a lot of
concepts that they were working on. Paul Lipson was our music director.
Brilliant guy. Came up from pure mind and had just started with Microsoft.
He hasn't been with them too long I think when we started working together.
He was the music director on the project and he put together all the
orchestra sessions for us as well as played guitar and acted as session
manager when we were actually at the sued I don't evens. This is my
assistant Matthew Steele, brilliant guy. Good string player. Does a lot of
independent game content, dungeons of dread more. If anybody's ever played
that, that's one of his sound tracks. This is John, who is the co-composer,
John Broomhall from England. Brilliant guy. If you know anything about game
audio, he's been around a long time. Game music connect is his baby over in
England buffer considered going to England to see that. Huge composer event.
He puts that together. Lennie Moore. Very talented arranger. Great guy.
Really good partner to have on the project. Very fast. Very, very fast.
And of course the orchestras were a big part of the sound. From MB Gordy to
the Skywalker symphony and the New York Film Chorale. So I just want to make
sure I gave a little thanks there. Basically again, the first couple of
Forzas I worked on were very cool and cold and kind of very synthetic and of
course by this one, things had changed much more cinematically and this is
the intro with Clarkson which is hard to beat the top year guys for
narration. That was a really nice choice. So it speaks for itself.
Audio played: Cars. To some they're just transport. A convenient
alternative to highly flammable dirigibles or walking. But you, you
understand cars are for more than this. They are our history. They mark the
moments by which we define decades. Cars are some of the most intoxicating,
most beautiful things ever forged by mankind. They represent the glory of
technology, the essence of freedom, and have been the weapons in some of our
most griping sporting battles. They grip us, they cheer us on, they hold us
as heros. So this is about the love of all things four-wheeled and fast.
This is a shrine to power, to speed, to metal made beautiful. This is where
dreams are driven. Welcome to Forza.
>> Lance Hayes: It's pretty affecting. Especially for a game about cars if
you think about it. You feel like, wow, this is important.
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes: But yeah. So obviously they had gone from a very cold
almost sterile synthesizer flavor to really kind of embracing the warmth of a
full orchestra and it was a nice transition I think for the franchise.
Quickly, just a quick list of people that I wanted to thank that were
involved in this production or the project itself. So Nick Wiswell. Sherman
arch balanced who is the audio dev lead. John Broomhall, Paul Lipson I
mentioned. Lennie. Michael Roache, Matthew, David Nichols, one of the audio
guys over there who is a fan and a friend. Firelight Technologies.
Obviously they did a great job making sure that we didn't get completely
destroyed on this because it could have gone all kinds of ways and they did a
fantastic job. And then of course Chase Coombs. I want to mention him. He
was a senior audio lead, still is over at Turn ten. And he created a lot of
slide content, some of the music mixes that we heard tonight. So with that,
I want to do a quick live demo of the game itself so you can kind of see how
it actually works when you start it up. Did I lose the screen? There we go.
It was lost. Let's see if we can get it back. Let me try this again. I'm
sure it will work. It worked earlier when we were setting up. And? Ah,
there we go. So when you first start Forza, you actually get exposed to
that ->>:
[Indiscernible] go to the menu.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Oh, okay.
On this over here?
This is from XBox.
>> Lance Hayes: There it is. You can tell my kids use this box a lot. A
lot of mine crafting going on in the house. So this is actually the track
trailer so if you stop playing the game, or you walk away for a little bit,
this mix plays.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
Yeah.
And as soon as you do anything, presumably -- maybe not.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
And now?
It may not be synced.
Hang on.
Let me sign in real quick.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: Well, it looks great. This is the actual game. Actually
it's video footage in the game. Oh, well. Maybe I'm not doing a demo.
We'll see here. Try it one more time.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
here.
[Laughter].
Well, any suggestions?
>> Lance Hayes:
goes. Oh, no.
Maybe I should just restart it I guess.
>>:
If only someone from Microsoft were
Wait, there it
Press a number or something?
>> Lance Hayes:
And now?
Let me try restarting the controller, see if that helps.
[Audio played.]
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes: There it is.
That's okay. He's off line.
Okay.
I had to restart the controller.
Okay.
>>: Good demo.
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
How many of these cars are actual real cars that --
>> Lance Hayes:
are made up.
>>:
We're getting lots of time with that theme.
Oh, they're all real.
They're all real cars.
None of these
And how many could we afford?
>> Lance Hayes: Well, there's a Pacer in here and stuff. Things that I
could afford are in here. They don't have -- I think in Forza 4, they had
like 400 cars. Including things like a Prius and old Volkswagon bugs. They
have a bunch of custom old vintage cars and stuff like that. I'll show you.
This we can't afford. This is too expensive for any of us. I'm not getting
any audio either. Hang on. Of course the music has turned itself off for
some reason. Kind of the reason we're here.
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes: The sound design is very nice. I might have to go to
settings. Within the game, usually come up when we were doing the race, but
I don't remember turning it off so I'm not sure why. I don't know. Nope.
It's all working. We're getting sound is the worst part. Well. We can go
into the paint shop. Let me try the career and see if anything comes up
here.
>>: Do you have a start button menu in the game? Well, if you go to the
race, you can actually -- hang on. Let me see if I can do that from there.
This is complete, but if I go to a race, we'll take this. This should be
interesting.
Audio played:
Alps.
We return to Switzerland to an event in the wintery Bernese
>> Lance Hayes: Right now there's a bunch of exciting music playing
somewhere, just not on here.
>>:
Virtual.
>> Lance Hayes: Yes, it's very virtual. Just imagine it. You could listen
to me talk long enough, should be playing right into your head. Oh, man.
[Humming].
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes:
[Laughter].
Just imagine.
>> Lance Hayes: This is underscoring the
mean, really. This is really pretty much
have to start the race and then pause the
think it's a weird thing. Going to start
importance of music in games. I
-- ah, there's the -- I think you
race before it can start too. I
the race.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
Oh, there's the audio.
Menu music is on.
Wow, well, yeah.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: Right now I'm getting a partial mix. Not a lead obviously.
If I slow down and just suck, the music should subside a little bit.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
Lose the strings.
And then --
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
synths.
[Audio played.]
If I do it right, we should just get down to just some
>> Lance Hayes: Now, if I was able to catch up with them, I'd start hearing
strings again. But it's unlikely at this point. We'll see.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
[Laughter].
>>:
Well, anyway, you get the idea.
I'm terrible at this.
[Indiscernible].
>> Lance Hayes:
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We don't need to see that replay.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
[Laughter]
>>: Since the car sound effect is so loud during the race time, as a
composer, what strategies did you use to make something meaningful around
that?
>> Lance Hayes: Well, we had issues with the midrange. It was always a
problem with these games. I think I got something in my eye. But the
midrange has always been a problem because the cars are so throaty. They're
so right in the middle of the mix. So traditionally for the games with the
licensed content, the audio generally like if they had rock tracks or
something like that during the races, you just couldn't hear it. It would be
gone. But I noticed the drum and base stool outside pretty well. So I did a
lot of the composing based around a lot of low-end cello and string
combinations and all the strings pretty much every else pushed to the high
end so we leave that notch out of the middle. The percussion that MB did was
essentially very trailer related to it stayed out of the midrange. It was
kind of scooped. But the rest of it, we just kind of mixed it as the tracks
required. The home space and the travel and whatnot are actually just kind
of mixed very flat. They're kind of a standard soundtrack mix, but the race
really did require a lot of special handling.
>>:
[Indiscernible] or vice versa?
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. A little bit. I think as you could hear it there,
the music mix is actually really low for the races. That's because they
figured that the people would want mostly feedback from the cars. So the mix
is a little quiet for the races but you can hear it and it's in there,
especially for the percussion and stuff really comes through nicely. If
you're by yourself on the track, you can really hear it. So if you're way
out in front, you can hear the music great. But otherwise it does a little
quieter.
>>:
[Indiscernible].
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes: [Indiscernible]. I have all the assists turned on, maybe,
and if I have the AI driving my car ->>:
[Indiscernible] help us?
>> Lance Hayes: It might. I'll try that, I guess. Hang on. We'll try this
real quick. See if we can get the music for the home space. While we're
doing that, does anybody have any other questions?
>>: I have a few. So first after, in the Skywalker session with the
strings, it sounded like there were multiple different stems of strings.
Like did you do two separate passes or did you ->> Lance Hayes:
intensity.
>>:
Yeah, we did.
We did sort of a low intensity and a high
Completely separate music that was kind of based around --
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. Basically it was sort of the idea was we'd have a
couple layers of content that way. Of course there was also a few instances
of like a third or a fourth pass where we might have some alternate parts
that would get brought in for a few things. For the most part, it was
usually two passes for most of it.
>>:
And this is something that you precomposed or was it like on the spot?
>> Lance Hayes: No, no, no, we determined it way ahead of time. We had it
all mocked up. The idea was -- again we had sort of the 1-to-1 mockup where
we were trying to do as much as we could. We tried to get all the mockups to
be just a switch out. It was so little time at the end. It was literally we
were going to have to get it all done and they were pushing it out the door
weeks later, including mixing the soundtrack and everything. Yeah. Did you
have another question?
>>: Yeah. Along the same lines, working with MB Gordy, how did that exactly
work? Did you transcribe every single thing for minimum?
>> Lance Hayes: No, no, no. Was it the general treatment where we actually
had parts? No, it was more like Hans Zimmer where it was play fast and
powerful through here. Kind of stuff. So there was very little
transcription. It was mostly -- I played everything. I mocked up all the
percussion stuff. And then he played it way better than me.
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes: So he kind of knew from what I had mocked up in tempos and
the general feel that we were trying to get but like you heard, all the big
race climax and stuff, just very powerful cinematic driving kind of
percussion. And we would stem it out and get lots of layers of that and have
some stuff that was slower like down to like 8th notes and quarter notes and
stuff. It was just kind of tapping along. So if you really stopped and
you're really behind in the race, it will come in at that point, but the rest
of it was really like, da da da da da da, powerful stuff.
>>:
He would sort of get the riff and decide percussion.
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. And we'd okay it, but he got what we wanted really,
really quickly. It's his bread and butter. He's totally in his wheel house
with that. Pretty cool.
>>:
Does this make you want to actually score a film some day?
>> Lance Hayes: I'd love to score a film. Sure. Anybody wants me to score
their film for if they know someone who needs a film scored, let me know.
>>:
Did the players hear the mockups before they played the parts in.
>> Lance Hayes: No. We actually tried to do that but there were some issues
because the timeline was so short that we didn't have a chance to get the
mockups in a lot of the pro-tool sessions properly. So we just abandoned
that completely. There were originally going to be parts like the piano
parts and stuff would have been playing along in the sessions. But know,
they were doing it dry. So we had the singers cue off the strings and we had
the strings cue off themselves pretty much. There were a few moments where
I'm like a little bit errrrr, but overall it was great. It turned out very
well considering.
>>:
[Indiscernible].
>> Lance Hayes: For my parts?
What's it going to do here?
>>:
No.
It's going.
Yeah.
And now it's not enjoying
Just hold the power button.
I tried that.
If you like actually hold it for a long time.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Oh, it's plugged in.
You turned off the XBox completely?
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
And then they were mixed by the team.
Is it plugged in.
>> Lance Hayes:
itself tonight.
>>:
Yes.
Oh, do a hard reboot?
Yeah.
>> Lance Hayes:
Yes.
There.
See if that works.
Any other questions?
Yes.
>>: Lance, can you talk a little bit about the workflow with -- you've got
these stems. It looked like some of them, I couldn't tell from the thing,
but maybe 4 to 8-bar snippets, right? At the string session, were you
recording those in snippets?
>> Lance Hayes: Yes, we were. In fact, for the home space, I had two 16s
and a 32. So two 16 sections and B 32. Well.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: There it is. And in a actually was pre-regimented across
the entire project because from the implementation standpoint they really
wanted to have a lot of consistency so we had they called it bridge chorus
and, you know and verse. So we had the same setup for each track that way.
So all the home spaces had 2, 16s and a 32. And all the racetracks were also
I think 2, 16s and a 32. And then the travel pre-race and the rewards were
all pretty much just either 1 or 2 parts. Originally they were going to be
adaptive but they turned out to be linear mixes for those.
>>: Was a consistent tempo across -- like how many different tempos did you
have in the game?
>> Lance Hayes: So for home space, pre-race and -- home
pre-race, we did have the same tempo. We'll see if this
usually was facial slow. Somewhere between like 80 -- I
115 or 120 was our max. And so they tend to be a little
space travel and
works. Which
think it was 90 to
bit mellower.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: Got that anyway. And then the race was usually much faster.
And then rewards, didn't really matter. It was just going to get flown in.
Oh, wait. It's me it's me.
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Yay.
[Indiscernible] let's not think about it I guess.
Oh.
[Applause].
>> Lance Hayes:
Hard reboot for the win.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
What's your mascot over there?
Do you guys have a mascot?
Dragon.
>> Lance Hayes:
[Audio played.]
It's dragons?
Okay.
Go dragons.
>> Lance Hayes: So yes, what we're hearing now is actually a mix that's
designed for the home space. And as I go in here, we first hear strings and
then we get introduced to some of the choir and some of the synth pads.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
just pads.
Now if I go and walk around the car, it gets dropped down to
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: If I get in the car, which if you haven't seen this, this is
kind of fun. There it is.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: I'm on the wrong side of the car to start it.
I don't have that up here do I?
Yeah, yeah.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: There we go. Okay. So this is the interior of the vehicle.
And we're getting a unique mix for the inside of the car. I'll go around to
the other side because I forget, this was actually an English version of this
vehicle.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: I think it's actually up as loud as it will go here. Hang
on. Can we get the volume turned up a little bit? Do you know? Maybe not.
Well, it does get louder once I get back out to the races and stuff.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: So again, we can hear pretty much a unique mix here, and
then if I start it. Probably making you all nauseous, aren't I? There I go.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: Now, if I step out of the car, the mix changes a little bit.
If I go to the Forza Vista mode which is right here, or if I change the
tires, I can do that. Let me go to the Forza Vista mode.
Audio played:
>> Lance Hayes:
In an effort to bring back the Japanese legacy of -[Indiscernible] music and the voice [indiscernible].
Audio played: -- Subaru and Toyota teamed up to create a brand new fun to
drive sports car. The goal of the joint effort was to focus on the joy of
driving, making a vehicle with superior handling and feel. As one of the
engineers put it, first of car had to have superb control and second was that
the car had to look cool. Originally Subaru was only going to provide the
engine, but the prototype was such a success that the two companies decided
to launch the car together. The result was one car for three brands. The
Subaru BRZ, the Scion FRS, and the Toyota GT 86. The cars were universally
praised for balancing power with nimble handling. Top Gears Jeremy Clarkson
voted the Toyota GT 86 his 2013 car of the year.
>> Lance Hayes: So then the music comes back up after the docking is
finished. So that is an example of a live DSP effect where they actually had
ducking built in. You don't know where the music is going to be when that
happens. I could go back in right now and start doing it again so it
actually has to be a live effect. If I go into the livery, for instance, and
start painting, so you see the music has kind of died down again. I go here.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: And an homage to the earlier titles, we get kind of more of
an electronic mix, electronic percussion. Little more sample heavy. And I
can start doing terrible things to this car.
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes:
[Laughter]
Oh, yeah.
Mint green.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: There's somebody at Toyota right now who is throwing up.
They're like oh, God. No. What are you doing? That is -- that is -welcome to Miami Vice. How about that?
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: That's pretty bad. Although I'm sure someone probably would
really love that. That person is not me.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
So you go back out and you get back to the screens.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: You go to leap select.
career videos. Let's try this.
And this is where we'll hear those
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
And I can go back to a race.
Try this.
Audio played: We head back to beautiful Barcelona to challenge the circuit
to Catalunya once again.
>> Lance Hayes:
So the travel music kicks in at this point.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
back in.
And then we get pre-race.
This is the pre-race music coming
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
Which stops when you start the race.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: No music starts until I think you get to the first turn.
Oh, little percussion. [Indiscernible].
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: I thought that was a pretty good turn.
paying for this car.
I'm not -- I'm not
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
[Laughter].
Oh, no.
>> Lance Hayes:
And look at that, I have a crown isn't that nice?
>>:
[Indiscernible] did you say you can?
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Yes, you can.
What are your options?
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
But you know, you get the idea.
Your options are to turn the music off.
Could we turn the sound --
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. We can do that. Wait a minute. Well, no. No. You
can't turn off the sound design. I think they found that no one wants do
that. That's how you judge the -- [indiscernible].
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
That's how you judge the performance of the car in the race.
No, no, I get it.
>>:
We need an Easter egg.
>> Lance Hayes: Yes. Well, I think I've shown you enough of the race.
don't need to see any more of that.
[Laughter].
You
>> Lance Hayes: So now we're going to be -- here's the rewards music that
comes in at the end of the race.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: [Indiscernible]. I don't know how that happened. It was
that way when I picked it up in the garage. Whoa. Yeah. I think I'm losing
my BMW endorsement right now.
[Laughter]
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: It was a rental. I don't know.
going to fire me right here. Oh, God. Oh, God.
This is the first he's
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: This is the rewards music.
get out of the race.
And the reward is, yeah, well,
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
I guess we can continue.
There we go.
[Indiscernible].
>> Lance Hayes:
pretty much.
Yeah.
Exactly.
It's all part of the day at the races,
Okay.
So then they take you back out here.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
Off question?
>>: Yeah. Is there [indiscernible] each type of music like from the menu to
the travel to the race or is it just each one is kind of random and they kind
of work together or is it like do you have a sort of through line for each
set?
>> Lance Hayes: Let's see. How did that work? Well, we did have -actually the funny thing is in 4 to 3 and 4 I was limited. I could only do
everything in the key of B. Because that's where all the sound design was
headed. Thank you. But with Forza 5, they were kind of like, no, just go
crazy. We want it to be cinematic. We want it to be exciting. So I got to
do modulation changes mid part. It was great. It was actually a lot of fun.
It was kind of nice to be able to exercise that. I on got really good at D.
Kind of like, you know, 8th quarter notes or 8th triplets. I was really good
at that too. But it was definitely one of those things where they were kind
of trying to broaden the scope of what it would sound like. They wanted it
to be a little bit incongruous and exciting. So it was never like oh, you've
got to rerun it. No. No. They were just open about that. Does that answer
the question?
>>:
Yeah.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Anybody else?
Any other questions?
I wanted to take you back to the beginning of your presentation.
>> Lance Hayes:
Okay.
>>: It's a hard question to ask because it's a hard question to answer.
What made you the right guy for this job?
>> Lance Hayes: Well, I think on Forza 3, I had a pretty strong background
with electronic music. I'd done a lot of fairly high profile projects and
they were looking for someone who could do work that was in the style that I
had actually gotten famous for which was sort of ambient drum and base stuff
and ambient sort of spa-like down tempo-y kind of material. And it just kind
of -- I was just a good fit for the project. Once I got in there and was
able do other work for them, I think they realized that I was a valuable
asset and they decided to continue to use me for the rest of the project and
then for future projects I was a top consideration. I think it was a little
bit of luck. I think I was just the right person at the right time and the
right place. They used junky XL for the previous editions and he was
obviously -- he's not hurting for work. So it was one of those things where
I just got lucky to some extent and I took advantage. Opportunity as much as
I could.
>>: Could I ask before that previous question, which was in the menus, not
in the racing, but in the menus themselves, when you have UI sound effects
which I seem to recall they are pitched. They tend to be musically oriented.
They're not mechanical or real world sound effects. They're pitch musical in
the Forza 3 and 4 they kept to the key of D so everything would sync. So on
this one, as the composer of all that menu music and those different modes
and where there is UI, did you -- how do you approach that or did you just
abandon it and what was your thought process?
>> Lance Hayes: They handled the UI on this one. I didn't actually touch
the UI sound design for this. And I -- from my understanding from hearing is
that a lot of it was -- there's a tone quality to some of it but it's almost
atonal compared to the previous editions. The previous edition, we called it
the Biorg treatment where I would come in and create these cord clusters and
they were really rich synth pads and stuff like that. And they basically
cherry picked their favorite elements of how to use those or like in Forza 3,
I put them in. But in this one, it sounds like they're a lot simpler and
they don't have quite the tonal quality. So they kind of -- they decided to
exchange a really elaborate UI sound design scape for a more robust music
scape.
>>: And did you in the process of putting this all together, when did you -once it was implemented and you got to actually play it on your development
system, would you be listening to it with the UI sound effect or were you
listening to it like in a vacuum?
>> Lance Hayes: For me as the composer, I think with this one, unlike the
previous editions, I was really just focusing on the music. So I was turning
it in and I didn't hear the finished product until I would go to the studio
at Turn ten and then they'd be like, wow, it actually works. They came up
with tonal quality sound that I think worked really nicely for the sound
design. It didn't ever really clash.
>>:
Were they then vamping on your music then?
>> Lance Hayes: No. There was no way you could do that because the 18
tracks were originally -- they were originally going to be scheduled for
individual racetracks. But they abandoned that because it became kind of
monotonous. We were playing one for extended periods of time or you got
stuck. Then you wind up really having to spend a lot of time in that one
space and having the same music over might be a little much so they decided
to make the music -- I just transitions from one set to the next but it's
always the same for travel and pre-race, et cetera. Does that answer the
question?
>>: But the travel and pre-race though is that tied to the track then or is
that -- in other words every time you're in the pre-race part for whatever
car you pick and whatever track, before you pick the track, then those sound
effects and that background music is that predetermined? I mean, you
specify ->> Lance Hayes: The sound effects are the same throughout the entire game.
The music is -- no, it's not. They were originally going to do that. They
were going to basically anchor them to those individual tracks but they
decided not to. Actually if I sit here long enough it will transition to a
new piece of music.
>>:
I see, okay.
>> Lance Hayes: Wherever you go into, it will play the travel for that
track. If I sit here long enough, it plays them for about 4 or 5 minutes.
And the home space is varied enough that it will kind of -- you wouldn't
really notice it.
>>:
Do you know if they use [indiscernible]?
>> Lance Hayes: I don't know. Everything in this game is custom.
didn't use any preexisting content.
>>:
And when you say custom, [indiscernible] of that car.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Yes.
I mean, those are not real.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Of individual cars?
The car you see, that's the engine they recorded?
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
They
Those are virtual cars.
Right.
But in real life, they give you the exact experience of that car.
>> Lance Hayes: [Indiscernible]. They've got thousands of car recordings
that are all done [indiscernible] but as far as the actual -- as far as the
FMOD engine goes, they didn't use any of the existing metrics or tools. They
actually created their own custom content. They have an audio developer who
works on staff who actually helps sync the FMOD engine up with the audio
engine and stuff. They have a lot of [indiscernible].
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
Any other questions?
>>: Did I understand right? You say that in the -- at home, cycle to
another song but then if you can continue on to the next part, then you're
getting [indiscernible] what started at home. So basically the same track is
evolving. So when you say 18, basically 18 journeys.
>> Lance Hayes: 18 journeys, yes. 18 full journeys but each journey
consists of a unique home space travel pre-race race and rewards section.
Once you're in that, so like here it's just transitioned to a new piece. If
I go into travel from here, it will play the travel that's associated with
this home space.
>>:
So at home, it's basically jukeboxed.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Basically, yeah.
And once you start --
>> Lance Hayes: Once you get going, it doesn't jukebox anymore. They
considered that but I think it got completely untenable. There was just too
many options basically. This worked out fine because there's so many
variations. 18 different tracks.
>>:
And [indiscernible] challenging in this context.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
Right, it is, yes.
Not to mention engines.
>> Lance Hayes:
[Laughter]
Yes.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes: So yes, in this case obviously the track being the music
track versus of racetrack, yes.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
Any other questions?
>>: When you were showing the schema for the FMOD layout, you had sections
that were chorus or instrumental or the stems looked like they were stereo
but were they actually some stems within those that could be modified during
the composition from within the engine, an engine? So did choir
[indiscernible] three ways?
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. Originally, for all the strings and choir, we had
them separated out into multiple tracks. I think to aid in implementation
because we wound up with so many stems. I think they eventually kind of
consolidated some of that so we didn't wind up with quite so many options.
It wound up being a little more simplified. But it depends on where you are.
I think for the most part, the choir is pretty much one set of tracks. But
the strings are definitely multiple tracks, especially in the race section.
The high and the low strings would be playing at different times. There's an
intensity layer.
[Audio played.]
>> Lance Hayes:
So a little of both if that answers the question.
>>: And what percentage of the CPU of the game is engine itself?
17 percent?
>> Lance Hayes: Oh, I couldn't tell you actually. That is an internal
battle that goes on to the end when they launch of game I think. That's one
of the big things. So anybody that's getting into game audio, you're going
to find that there's a whole lot of battling that goes on where people are
trying to figure out how much the rest of the company can take away from the
audio department. How little they can give you before you can't do your job
anymore.
[Laughter]
>>:
[Indiscernible].
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. Exactly. They basically try and pair it down till
you have starvation rations of CPU power and storage to work with. So I
actually don't know what they got. Nick is a rather foreboding gentleman.
I'm guessing he might have done better in some things than I would have done
for instance. I'm very accommodating. I'm a freelancer, so I'd be like,
well, I think we can do it with one percent of the CPU I guess. Do you that?
How many cycles is that? Is that even possible?
[Laughter].
>> Lance Hayes: But I know they got enough to make everything work surround.
It's all surround stems. For the home space. And it's like 12 stems, they
weren't competing with a lot. Obviously in here you're just looking at a
car. The visuals aren't terribly involved. You don't have a lot of AI
happening. So I think they were given free reign and I think they did okay
in the race section which was pretty intensive. Follow-up on that.
>>:
So this game launched on disk, correct.
>> Lance Hayes:
UBS but you could also download it.
Either way.
>>: So I guess my question is how much memory did you have?
stems strictly for the music.
>> Lance Hayes:
>>:
You had 2,000
How much of the box were we using for memory?
Yeah.
>> Lance Hayes: Again, that's another issue that
I don't know. And I think because the box wasn't
any of the specs. I knew more about the XBox 360
for a while but I still don't know too much about
was just out of my hands.
-- I didn't certainly have
because I'd worked with it
the XBox internals.
>>: I was just wondering what your delivery format to Microsoft and what
they ended up putting into the game that got pressed down.
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. I believe they did compress it. I was delivering
24-bit 48 K on everything. And I think at some point, there was some stuff
they wanted in 16 for like trailers and stuff. They didn't need it at 24.
But yeah, 24-bit for a lot of the stuff. And I think -- I know they compress
I had. I don't know if it was proprietary compression or if they used -- I'm
pretty sure it was a proprietary compression of some kind but I don't know.
I'm just the composer. I don't mess with that stuff.
>>: Did you end up working with an assistant composer [indiscernible]?
Well, my assistant was actually one of my former students. He'd been at my
first year of teaching at Pacific Northwest. Really talented guy and he was
totally into game audio and really had studied it. Done work on the side.
And he graduated and we were talking and I was like this project was coming
up and I need a new assistant and there he was. Worked out. It was right
place, right time, I guess.
>>:
The second --
>> Lance Hayes: And John. John was picked by Nick. They went way back.
Nick's from England. Liver pool specifically. And he had John had worked on
projects in the past and John brought a whole bunch of -- he brought a whole
bunch of stuff to the game. Not only was he the composer but he also did
some music direction and he was a brilliant guy to work with.
>>:
So he did additional sets of music or was it like --
>> Lance Hayes: He helped consolidate some of the stems and he was working
with Chase on some of the implementation stuff to some extent. That was kind
of outside the scope of what I was dealing with but he had his finger in a
lot of the different pis of the project.
[Audio played.]
>>: So once you did the mixing 7.1, then after that it was starting. There
is no dynamic movement of some instruments or sound sources. Everything
is ->> Lance Hayes: The 7.1 was not done adaptively. It was all baked. The
choice of certain stems might have changed the positioning of certain things.
But I don't think they did too much of that. My impression was that a lot of
it was -- the music was designed to sit in a certain space in the mix and
they wanted it to stay there. They wanted it to be cinematic. They didn't
want it to be distracting. I did work for XBox fitness and I did a bunch of
the music for that and they asked me to do -- they wanted to go crazy with
the mix on that. So the 7.mix did I for that was actually very dynamic and
changed around plus I gave them all the stems so they actually were using
that in a different capacity in the game itself where it was actually being
mixed dynamically. So if you play the -- if anybody has an XBox one and I'm
in terrible shape so I wouldn't have any idea, but evidently if you go into
this game and you do the exercise routines, there's a bunch of music that I
created that's in the beginning that is mixed dynamically in the 7.1 field.
>>: There is some great implication of having dynamic spatial content of
the -- even for the music part.
>> Lance Hayes: Absolutely. Yeah, you can do amazing stuff. I think a lot
of it kind depends on like the CPU arguments and all that, how much power
they have do that versus just back and static track or something. But yeah,
I imagine you could.
>>: It's also the game. For a racing game, again, from the sound effects,
that's the essence of it. So you need all that spatialization sound to pull
it off. Throw spatialization music on top of it.
>> Lance Hayes: I think they decided to go with very similar. Yeah. They
didn't want to -- obviously because the cars, when you're sitting in the car,
you're getting car audio engine in the back. You're getting wheel squealing
in the back speakers and stuff. It's very distinctive, very specific. There
are literally players who sit around in these sound systems, and they know
exactly what's happening with their car based on the rear right wheel is
starting to use traction dynamically. And it actually is working to that
extent. The game is that dynamic. Yeah.
>>:
What kind of monitors do you have in your studio, speakers.
>> Lance Hayes: I got the 120. KH 120. Very fond of those. I use those
for my surround setup and then actually I heard them at Skywalker and I was
like what are those? Those are great. And it turns out on my budget,
they're not inexpensive but they're not horribly expensive speakers compared
to the next layer up which I thought they were comparable sonically so I'm
fond of those. Really great.
>>: Is there a mastering stage in a project like this? You're talk a lot
about mixing and I'm just kind of curious how you can do thousands of mixes
and maintain.
>> Lance Hayes: It was actually sound lab. They did some mastering on the
way out. But the stems also I think -- I believe there was like some hard
limiting and a few other things just to make sure nothing got out of control.
But in a game like this, the music is really so much quieter than the engines
that I don't think they have that problem. I think a lot of it came down to
the mix that was done at sound lab and they basically just played it back at
a 1 to 1. I don't think they did a heck of a lot of post processing in the
game. And they have a lot of people who worked really hard on that. That's
kind of their specialty too. That's a team that really knows how to maximize
the potential of some stems that are going to play back in a game because
they do it all day long. 365. That answer the question?
>>: Did you do mix for 7.1 instead of separately or the game console
[indiscernible] engine of XBox One [indiscernible] 7.1.
>> Lance Hayes: Well, the 7.1 I did for the YouTube trailer separately. So
I did a stereo mix for them and gave them a 7.1. Because they weren't going
to go through Dolby. It was just going to go out on the web. Or possibly
used internally. They didn't know at the time where it was going to wind up
so they wanted a 7.1 mix. All the career videos I did in 7.1 of all the
sound design and voiceover and music, those were done just in 7.1. I turned
them in as 7.1 stems and they would basically use the Dolby hold down on all
of that.
>>: You mentioned you had [indiscernible] strings [indiscernible] pass
people. I'm wondering is that just like an eight layer or something that's
just always playing?
>> Lance Hayes: It was the 6th layer. It just plays constantly. Like I
said, it's a vertical remix so everything is basically looping and playing
constantly, it's just a question of what's being shown to you basically.
You're getting this exposure via mix. So that was just -- that lives back
there. If you were to go and pull out all of stems, there's some really
annoying tremolo stems that never stop. But it works great in this little -did a little bit of e cuing, too. As it got closer, it would get brighter
and then it would drop off. They handled it really nicely.
>>:
So the actual samples of like [indiscernible].
>> Lance Hayes: Yeah. The whole time. You can imagine that was a lot of
fun to put together. I would usually take the tonic and a few other -- I
would try and keep it as simple as possible because it was really like -- it
was a bit harsh. Any other questions?
>>: Not your area but I'm wondering if there's a reason why they went with
FMOD in whatever the beta of other [indiscernible] proprietary.
>> Lance Hayes: I can't speak to that. I know they've had a relationship
with FMOD for a long time. I know that 3 and 4 were done in FMOD. That's
pretty much the extent of what I know about it. I think they had tried to
maximize what they could do as far as existing code I think as well as -- but
I honestly couldn't say. It's just my guesswork. It worked out really well
for both of them too. The other upside to that was that FMOD used them as
obviously a big success story. So when they launched FMOD, turn ten was all
over the front page of the site for a long time and they have some really
good residual, and they have a great work relationship with them. Anybody
else? Well, I guess that's the talk then. So thank you very much.
[Applause]