WARNER/CHAPPELL PRODUCTION MUSIC
IS OWNED BY LEGENDARY MUSIC PUBLISHER WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC. The
company unites successful independents NonStop Music, 615 Music, Groove Addicts, CPM,
V–The Production Library and many more.
With offices across the globe including London,Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Salt Lake
City, Nashville, Hamburg and Stockholm in
addition to world-class recording facilities in
Nashville and Salt Lake City, Warner/Chappell Production Music’s brands have composed works for countless well-known TV
shows, films, and companies, including the
“Today” Show, ESPN, Disney, Capital One,
DirecTV, British Open Royal & Ancient, World
Cup South Africa, Motorola, Subway, Major League
Baseball, Cox Communications, SPEED
Channel and Volkswagen. Warner/Chappell
Production Music brands are the recipients
of many industry awards including multiple EMMY Awards, Telly, Addy and Promax
THE SECRET IS OUT. UTAH HAS THE EXPERT TALENT, FACILITIES
AND EXPERIENCE FOR WORLD-CLASS MUSIC SCORING. THE
GROWING TRACK RECORD IS EVIDENCE OF SUCCESS. YOU
CAN SAMPLE THE RESULTS FOR YOURSELF BY LISTENING
HERE: WWW.SOUNDCLOUD.COM/UTAHMUSICSCORING
Awards.
More @ www.WarnerChappellpm.com
MUSIC FOR VIDEO GAMES IS A HIGHLY SPECIALIZED
FIELD, DEMANDING CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY,
EXPERIENCED TALENT AND SUBSTANTIAL CAPITAL
INFRASTRUCTURE.
“We’ve seen an exponential
increase in the amount of video
game music done in Utah over
the past 5 years,” says Marshall
Moore, Director of the Utah Film
Commission. “Our talent and
technical expertise are second to
none. And with facilities like Warner/Chappell’s LA East recording
studio in town, we’re starting to
attract a lot of attention.”
One of the most recent games
to score in Utah was Heroes of
Might and Magic: The Forgotten
Wars, developed and published
76
by global gaming giant Ubisoft
Entertainment ($1.5B annual revenue).
“We chose Salt Lake City because of the beautiful music recorded here over the years,” says
Ubisoft’s Director of Audio Services, Aurelien Baguerre. “Listening to the exquisite Riders of
Rohan score recorded in Utah
last summer really solidified the
decision.”
Ubisoft asked Chance Thomas,
who composed the Riders of
Rohan score and has a track record of producing award-winning
music in Utah, to manage their
recording process. “I’ve been recording in Salt Lake City for many
years,” he said. “I also record
in Los Angeles and Seattle, but
some projects are just a better fit
for the musical ecosystem here.”
Images courtesy of Ubisoft
Utah has developed expert resources in these spaces, so it’s
no surprise that top video game
titles like World of Warcraft, Lord
of the Rings, Infinity Blade, Dungeons and Dragons and many
others are coming to Utah for
their music.
77
MIGHT & MAGIC
DUEL OF CHAMPIONS
MOTU
Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts
motu.com
Release date — March 23, 2013
Developer — Ubisoft Quebec
MOTU is a leading developer of computer -based
audio and video production hardware and software. MOTU was founded in 1980 and has been
developing audio, video and music technology
products since 1984.
Might & Magic Duel of Champions is an online strategy card game set in the fantastic
Might & Magic universe. Choose a hero and
build his army with Creatures, Spells and Fortune cards to defeat your opponents in epic
battles. The unique Battleground of Duel of
Champions creates an action-filled gameplay that fits any style of players. Enter tournaments, measure your strength against top
players, earn gold and get new boosters for
your deck!
Inspired by the Macintosh when it first appeared,
engineers at MOTU developed one of the Macintosh's first music programs ever. Performer®, the
music industry standard for MIDI sequencing, began shipping in 1985.
Images courtesy of Ubisoft
MOTU products serve a wide range of users, from
consumers to enterprise-level installations in music, broadcast, film, gaming and other entertainment industries.
78
The symphonic nature of music in Might
& Magic required finding an orchestra
with deep experience in studio recording. There is a fundamental difference
between an orchestra that gives an
exhilarating live performance versus an
orchestra that can deliver in the studio.
Many orchestral musicians who sound
wonderful onstage are totally lost in a
recording session.
In the recording studio, musicians wear
headphones carrying a metronome-like
click and critical accompanying tracks.
The musicians’ performance must match
those tracks in intensity, timing and intonation. The Utah Film Orchestra has
done thousands of such recording ses-
sions over the years. This depth of experience ranks them among the most
recorded orchestras in the world.
A spacious recording studio was needed
with a beautiful resonant sound, vintage
microphones and the latest recording
equipment. Warner/Chappell recently
set up shop near downtown Salt Lake.
Their studio, known as LA East, has a
large sound stage with a rich wooden
resonance and all the top gear.
Ubisoft provided a music budget that
was sufficient for live recording, but in
a disciplined way without extravagance.
This also played into the decision. Musician, engineer and studio rates in Utah
are among the lowest in America but still
provide a living wage because of the low
cost of living.
With the composer, orchestra, recording
studio and engineering team selected, it
was time to move into production. The
schedule allowed only five weeks from
first written note to final mix. There was
no room for error.
Thomas started by producing sophisticated mock-ups of each composition in
his digital studio. “Think of a mock-up as
the musical equivalent of an animatic,”
he explains. “My writing studio has thousands of orchestral, contemporary and
futuristic sounds for this – all accessible at the click of a mouse and playable
from a piano keyboard.”
The mock-ups take shape using a
specialized scoring program from MOTU,
a Cambridge Massachusetts technology
company specializing in digital composition tools. As musical ideas flow from
the composer’s inspiration, digital samples of violins, horns, timpani and bouzouki fill the screen. Soon it sounds as if
an entire symphony orchestra is playing
alongside a Middle-eastern ensemble,
with a chorus of baritones chanting in
the background. Even this early in the
process, the flavor and power of the
score are becoming clear.
Ubisoft checks in with the composer
on a regular basis to monitor progress.
When the composition of each track is
79
finished, Chance uploads it to the development team in Quebec for review, then
starts on the next piece. Any requested
changes are discussed by phone and Internet with revisions uploaded within the
next day or two. In just under three weeks,
the entire score is written and approved.
With composition complete, key digital
data from each piece of music is transferred into Pro Tools, an industry standard
platform for recording, editing and mixing
music. This transferal must be frame-accurate, as each piece of music may contain dozens of perfectly aligned virtual
music tracks. Any imperfections in orientation will throw off the rhythmic balance
and impact of the score. To keep things
synchronized, the studio employs a pair of
Apple’s MacPro towers slaved to an AVID
SyncHD.
FINALE
Finale is the world-wide industry
standard in music notation software.
Anywhere music appears on the
printed page, Finale likely created
those pages. Finale helps the
choir to sing, the band to march,
the students to learn, and the
orchestra to raise the excitement
level in the latest blockbuster
movie.
80
Sheet music preparation is also underway
using another widely used software package, Finale. Chance imports data from
the MOTU program into each Finale file,
transforming digital bits into staves and
notes formatted like a conductor’s score.
Articulations for each musician have to be
input by hand, a long and tedious process.
Louder, softer, smooth, abrupt, bowing
type, bow position, bow direction, muted
or unmuted, sectional divisions, etc. And
that’s just for the strings. Woodwinds,
brass, choir and soloists all require similar
attention. Inputting the proper articulations insures that the musicians and singers will accurately reproduce the composer’s creative ideas.
Behind the scenes, studio contractor
Jenn Sprague has been steadily working
the phones to bring together each of the
sixty-five talented musicians and singers
requested for the upcoming sessions.
The studio is booked for two full days of
recording, with a few hours of overflow
on a third day for overdubbing. Ubisoft
Audio Director Aurelien Baguerre secures
his flight so he can attend the sessions.
Everything is set.
On the day of recording, Chance arrives
at the studio early. Bass player Ben Henderson is already there, warming up with
long, steady strokes. A film crew wanders onto the stage, checking the lighting and staking out vantage points for a
documentary about the making of this
music score. Three stereo pairs of expensive microphones are perched precariously high overhead, their cables joining
dozens of others from sectional mics and
headphones snaking across the floor. An
assistant walks out and begins placing
sheet music on stands while members of
the orchestra start to file in.
Recording an orchestra and choir is an
invigorating and pressure-packed situation. With musicians, engineers and studio time billable by the hour, every tick
of the clock represents a sizable dollar
amount. Time and money must be managed shrewdly. Likewise, the energy level of the performers must also be closely
monitored. Brass players and singers only
have so many takes in them over a 3 hour
stretch before their vitality starts to ebb.
Having a veteran at the helm is critical.
The first session begins with a few words
of introduction from the composer and
an explanation about the nature and feel
of the game. Keep in mind, none of the
musicians or singers have seen or heard
a note of the music until that very day.
Every musician in the studio must be an
expert at sight reading. They run through
the first piece twice and are ready to record.
Contemporary recording processes allow
any mistake in a musician’s performance
to be fixed by performing only that part
again. This procedure, called punching-in,
keeps the previous performance until the
engineer punches-in record mode. The
new performance is recorded until the
engineer punches-out of record, and the
previous performance continues uninterrupted. The process of recording and
punching as necessary continues until the
entire piece of music sounds flawless.
With recording complete, Chance takes
all of the audio tracks back to his studio
HUGEsound, and begins to edit each part
of the score, track-by-track. By now there
are hundreds of tracks to sort through,
including playlists of multiple takes. The
goal of editing is to find the best possible take of all the various components
and weave them together into the most
cohesive and emotionally powerful performance. HUGEsound’s editing suite
includes a pair of digital mixers, high-end
studio monitors and a MacPro tower running Pro Tools.
Even after all the tracks are edited, the
music still needs to be mixed. Might &
Magic was mixed at The Pod, a top mixing studio near downtown Salt Lake City
known for chart-toppers like Kaskade,
Late Night Alumni and Neon Trees. The
studio is dominated by its large ATC monitors and racks of analog EQ’s, compressors and high-end pre-amps.
Lexicon’s flagship 960L controller sits
prominently atop one of the racks. Yet,
there is no mixing console in the studio.
Only a comfortable padded chair and a
track ball facing a large flat screen fastened to the wall. All mixing is done using
Avid’s PT10 virtual mixing console displayed on the screen.
The sound of the strings is sharpened
with precision equalization and filtering.
They’re sweetened with digital delays and
reverbs. The brass section is split wide left
and right across the stereo spectrum, with
a doubling effect added to the French
horns. Percussion tracks are run through
compression algorithms in virtual plugins to pack more of a punch. The fretted
instruments, woodwinds and choir all get
their own similar special treatment in the
mix. Pitch shifting, detuning, chorusing
and a host of other effects and processes shape and mold the nuances of every sound, striving to balance ear-candy
impact with emotional resonance. Composer, mixer and audio director are all involved.
It’s a long process, but the final product
is worth every effort. The music score is
carefully encoded and uploaded to Might
& Magic’s producer Stephane Jankowski. After listening to the entire score he
writes back and gushes, “I just heard
the mixed recordings, few seconds ago.
Damn, it’s epic!”
The secret is out. Utah has the expert
talent, facilities and experience for worldclass music scoring. The growing track
record is evidence of success. You can
sample the results for yourself by listening
here: www.SoundCloud.com/UtahMusicScoring
CHANCE THOMAS
Chance is a multiple award-winning
composer, creative director and music
producer. His music has underscored
both professional honors and commercial success, including an OSCAR, an
EMMY, several GANG Awards, and billions of dollars in video game and film
sales worldwide.
He is a passionate advocate for game
music, having led the movement which
first brought game music into the Grammy Awards. He helped found the Game
Audio Network Guild and the Music and
Sound Peer Committees for the Academy of Interactive Arts and Science.
He speaks regularly at Universities,
music schools and industry events on
game music production and business
topics. He serves on the Board of Directors for G.A.N.G. and on the Audio
Advisory Board for GDC.
81