sonofableep

after four days of uninterrupted thanksgiving gluttony and sloth, i return to work ready and eager to tackle the challenges of the coming week.  it’s a big week here at ol’ zenimax, and i’ve got a lot on my plate.  no matter!  i’m charged up!  let’s do this!  hell, i’m looking forward to it!

except i can’t login.  dammit.  reboot.  okay, now i can login, but my user profile has been completely wiped.  double-dammit.  well, i can’t worry about that now…i’ve got a lot on my plate, remember?  right.  okay, let’s just temporarily config a few things, reboot, and…oh nos, here comes CHKDSK!  oh cripes.

okay, chkdsk hits 100%, claiming to fix a few errors along the way.  fine.  but why are my screens black?  and why are the internal fans speeding up…and up…and up…GOOD LORD SHE’S GONNA BLOW!  aigh!  power down!  and stare at the black screens listen to the silence of my dormant machine.

now what?  the mind scrambles madly for a plan B, C, and D (i’ve got a lot on my plate, you see).  grab some work software and go write music at home for the week?  dredge up some old stuff written for something else?  throw in the compositional towel and license some existing music?  as alternate plans go, those all suck.  let me try and boot this sucker one more time…

okay, logging in.  okay, still no user profile, but if i never logout or shutdown, maybe i can get some work done.  oh look…most of my config files for things like Sonar, Audition, etc. went down with the user profile ship, and IT can’t seem to find them.  so my super-tweaked-and-customized DAW is now staring at me going, “hello brad!  i see this is your first time using this software.  let me give you a guided tour of our features…”.

didn’t i just write an “i hate PC DAWs” blurb last week?  shame to have to write another so soon.

it’s things like this that inspire me to keep trying to infuse non-traditional instrumentation and performance techniques into the often traditional realm of video game music.  look at that thing!  listen to that thing!  it may be a little gimmicky, but still…the ability to have those kinds of timbres on the receiving end of real-time musicality is awesome.  good luck trying to reproduce that with sample libraries and a keyboard controller.

that video sent me scurrying back to this one, another fine example of rethinking composition and instrumentation.  and for a video game, no less!  the score for inFamous is one of my current favorites, and a go-to reference when i need to remind myself there can be more to MMO music than orchestras, choirs, and big ethnic percussion.

working in this way results in a number of excellent truisms.  1) your music is bound to sound unlike anything else.  2) you’re inspired / forced to write differently, kicking you out of your comfort zone, your habitual compositional crutches left behind.  3) you can perform it…really *play* the stuff and come away with a truly musical delivery.  4) and clearly, that shit’s just fun as hell.

i did a little of that sort of thing on warhammer – having performers do a variety of unnatural things to their beloved instruments in the name of “art” – but never went so far as to *invent* whole new instruments.  i just might have to start perusing junkyards and pawnshops…

dear game company CEOs.  put a kitchen / cafeteria in your studio.  you’ll be so glad you did!  at the place where i work there is a fully-staffed full-service kitchen with a large galley eating area.  i eat lunch there every day.  and sometimes breakfast.  and sometimes dinner.  and sometimes midnite snack.  i’m perfectly happy to never leave the building.  i’m perfectly happy to use my daily dining time as a series of team meetings.  and the bottomless supply of complementary caffeinated beverages is really neat!  and so is warm cookie snacktime!  so i really think you should do it!

(also, consider free access to exercise equipment.  your employees are going to need it.)

riddle me this: if my OS is getting more awesome with each iteration, and my music software gets a +1 version number every year, and my hardware is keeping pace with moore’s law…how come i still experience the same basic DAW (digital audio workstation) problems in 2009 that i had in 1999?  by now i should be composing music by waving my hands in front of some levitating plasma orb, not trying to track down why my sequencer is having audio dropouts.

there seems to be a zero-sum game between improvements and impediments going on here.  is there some kind of efficiency squad over at microsoft that works to free up OS overhead…only to have the apps team fill it all right back up?  do the authors of my music software view ever-increasing computing power as justification for adding superfluous eye candy and features of increasingly limited appeal, while simultaneously de-prioritizing things like “optimization” and “stability”?  hey, who needs to optimize when CPUs will be twice as fast by the time this thing actually ships, right?  i guess the flip side to moore’s law is, “every two years software & operating systems can safely double in bloat and inefficiency”.

and longevity?  i can pull out a ’59 les paul (in the alternate universe where i own one), plug it in, and it will make the same beautiful noises it made a decade ago.  but there’s no guarantee that my favorite synth plugin will work five years from now.  some incompatibility is sure to crop up between future versions of the OS, the host software, the 3rd party authorization scheme, the plugin itself…*something* will fail, rendering said plugin obsolete.  that’s nutty.  you’d certainly think twice before buying a particular mic / instrument / etc. if you knew it had an expiration date, but that’s just the way it goes with DAWs.

somebody reading this is probably thinking, “run protools on a mac, dummy”.  well yeah, maybe.  but then i’d miss out on all the fun of spyware and viruses.

it’s hard to get the creative juices flowing when the creative juices are comprised solely of snot.

which is another way of saying – my prolonged sickness has got my head in such a fog that i can’t even compose my usual less-than-profound ‘dear diary’ drivel, much less any worthwhile snatch of music.

which is another way of saying – see ya monday.

much has been written about the benefits of telecommuting – arguments including everything from easing traffic congestion & environmental impact, to the freedom to work in your bathrobe, to productivity skyrocketing without your own personal Lumbergh constantly dropping by.  those first two hit close to home for me, as my “onsite” is currently 100 miles from my “offsite” (i cross three state lines on my drive to work), and i’m a big fan of hanging out in my undies.  so sitting 100 miles from work any given wednesday writing music in my delicates suits me just fine.  as for the third argument, i personally don’t have any Lumberghs in my life (hallelujah), so productivity is about the same either way.  (hm, come to think of it…*i* am probably the Lumbergh to a couple folks around the office.  they too probably wholeheartedly endorse the concept of my telecommuting.)

well today i’ve got another argument for telecommuting: the “i’m-sick-as-a-dog-but-this-shit’s-got-to-get-done” argument.  the mind is willing, but the body is in open revolt.  so fire up the IM, email, and sequencer, grab a box of tissues and a bucket to catch the saliva & mucas running unchecked from the front of my head, and we’re off!  let’s just hope my muse isn’t as lightheaded and woozy as i am, else everything i write might come out sounding like the end of a day in the life.

oh look.  EA has done the understaffed game studios of the world another favor by making more dev talent available for the second time in as many weeks.  at least it’s comforting to know “that the Pandemic brand and franchises will live on”, even if the jobs of the Pandemic employees don’t.

i suppose it’s possible that in taking the short view, one might be tempted to think EA is justified in these kinds of actions, perhaps even making Good Business Decisions.  but in taking the long view – in looking over the history of EA in toto and counting up how many good companies they’re chewed up and spat out – one starts to see a pattern indicative of anything but business savvy.  a co-worker summed up said pattern thusly:

1. Buy somewhat successful game company.
2. Assure the public that nothing will change with the studio internally and they will continue to make great games.
3. Slowly grind-away what makes that studio unique until all the talented people get fed up and leave.
4. Close the new pile of suck studio and claim the cost-savings on your next quarterly report.
5. Rinse, repeat.

is it just me, or does EA seem unable to look forward *or* backward more than about 18 months?

(or, snarky ending #2) i can see the onion headline now: “Electronic Arts foiled in attempt to shut down studio it does not even own”.

wow.  just…wow.

that was me in 1997, thinking i knew what the hell i was doing.  i remember being kinda proud of that, having written and played all the parts, thinking it was all metal and stuff…expecting that it would really pump players up before they entered the game.  sure, it was a bit of a departure from the reverential character of Air Warrior II’s orchestral theme, but hey it’s almost 2000, right?  let’s kick this franchise in the ass!

it wasn’t until a year or two later that the Air Warrior III producer (who, bless his heart, had greenlit this bold new musical direction with a “why the hell not?” attitude) let me in on a little secret: the players *hated* it.  they felt we weren’t treating the franchise with the proper respect, or something.  he related this with a gleeful smile, letting my withering ego know that he didn’t give a piss one way or the other.  seems he found the whole dust-up rather amusing.  i, on the other hand, failed to see the humor in the situation.

well it may have taken 12 years, but…EL OH EFFING EL!  good lord, did you watch that thing?  what in hells bells was that all about?  how did that possibily go out the front door as The Title Theme for Air Warrior III?  nice synth part, jackass.  and was that…was that a *gong* i heard at the end??

man oh man…here’s hoping 2021 doesn’t find me laughing up blood at my 2009 output.

ya know how when you’re watching an opera, and you can’t understand a word, and it’s all heavy and awesome and stuff?  but then you see one with subtitles, or worse still…in english, and it’s suddenly not so heavy or awesome and stuff?  yeah?  that phenomenon pretty much shapes my whole relationship to music with singing in games.

(for the purposes of this discussion, the definition of “music” does not extend to popular music licensed for inclusion in a game.  most of that tripe isn’t music anyway.  ooooh!  aren’t i edgy and superior!  and self-aware to boot!)

lots of game music, particularly in the fantasy genre, tends to heap on the faux-latin choir cheese.  it’s a quick and easy way to evoke a sense of Serious Drama And Epicness…but it’s also tired as hell, and always leaves me wondering what the deuece is actually being said.  once i typed something perfectly silly into an english-to-latin translator just looking to generate something “scary” for a necromancer to chant…and that shit worked like a charm!  so hey, i get it.  and i’m not above doing it myself.  i’m just sayin’.

now if you have music sung in english, you run the risk of putting the gamer’s focus on the music and not on the game (but perhaps that’s desired effect?).  and your lyrics better be damned good.  i’d hate to have any of *my* 8th-grade-level poetry be subject to judgement in that manner.  and if the player has to hear your ditty again and again?  i’m just sayin’.  (also, the audio guy in me reflexively cringes at the inherent localization issues…which have no bearing here, but i can’t help myself.)

there’s always the “gibberish” option – which can have the effect of the faux-latin stuff without the baggage of begging interpretation.  on the other hand, you run the risk of it being a bit silly.  i’m just,  you know, sayin’.

and then there’s the “wordless vocal”.  think “ethereal female clad in white flowing robes standing just to the right of Yanni during the big encore”.  it sidesteps all the pitfalls of the other options, though by the same token doesn’t communicate much of anything except a vague sense of mood.  but hey, if it’s good enough for Yanni, it’s good enough for me.

having said all that, it’s a safe bet i’ll be using all of the above at one point or another in the near future.  so, uh, yeah.  shut up brad.

unsubbed Aion.  the promise of awesome gameplay (promised not just by Aion marketing but also by trusted friends) once i finally ground my way to PvP just wasn’t enough to make the effort worth it.  i’ve got a few days left before my login poops out, so i’ll fly around a little bit more and take in one of the prettiest MMOs i’ve ever seen.

i feel ever-so-slightly like the reviewers that play an MMO for a week and then proceed to write an “in depth and comprehensive review”.  like i haven’t given it a fair shake and all that.  but the feeling will pass, probably sooner than the migraines i’ve gotten from one of the worst sounding MMOs i’ve ever heard.