MICK GORDON: His productivity system for crunch, composing with crappy sounds, and the problem with orchestral scores

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Drum Forge. Drum Forge is a forward-thinking developer of audio tools and software for musicians and producers alike. Founded on the idea that great drum sounds should be obtainable for everyone, we focus on your originality, drum forge, it's your sound. And now

Speaker 2 (00:00:20):

Your host, Eyal Levi. Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. I am Eyal Levi and I'm very excited about this episode because we're going to talk to someone that've been trying to get on here for I think eight months and something like that. And we've just been playing schedule tag, schedule hell, and we could finally do it. I'm very, very happy about it. It's a man named Mick Gordon, and if you've heard of him then you know that he single-handedly made industrial music cool again. He's behind the incredible soundtrack for the Game, doom for the Reboot and all kinds of other games too, like Wolfenstein New Order, Wolfenstein, the Old Blood Prey, Wolfenstein two, the New Colossus. He's got a long list of credits in the video game world, all kinds of awards. BAFTA Game Awards, 2017 best music for Doom Dice Awards, outstanding achievement in original musical composition for Doom. Just the list goes on and normally I don't care about awards or anything, but I think that in this case they're very, very well deserved because man, that soundtrack is just so sick and I just want to say thank you for coming on,

Speaker 3 (00:01:48):

Dude. Thank you so much for having me. It's great, isn't it? I can't believe it's been probably eight months or something since we started talking about this stuff. Yeah, that's really crazy, isn't it? So I never really understood, I think how kind of busy people get right. A project will come along and it'll tie a schedule completely up for three or four months, and then I'll finish that project and then I'll get back to everybody that emailed me during that period. And at that point, they're all on projects that are going to take three or four months and just to line up schedule so we can do something so simple as to sit down and have a chat for a while is super, super difficult. It's really, really weird. So man, thank you so much. I'm such a huge fan of the podcast. I really love the work that you guys have been doing and thank

Speaker 2 (00:02:29):

You.

Speaker 3 (00:02:30):

And a lot of my buddies have been on your podcast and chatting with you and things like that. So it is a real great, great pleasure and privilege for me to be sitting here and chatting with you, man. So thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (00:02:39):

Hey man, thank you. And let me ask you something, you actually just talked about something that I'm very curious about. I remember that when I was studying up on some of my favorite soundtrack composers, I read in an interview with Danny Elman once where he said that before he starts working on a movie soundtrack, he has a going away party with his friends. Yeah, he'll have an actual going away party, but he doesn't actually go anywhere. He just goes to his basement or whatever and he doesn't see them for three months or something while he's writing whatever movie he's working on.

Speaker 4 (00:03:22):

But

Speaker 2 (00:03:22):

Yeah, he does that every time. Apparently his going away parties are an actual thing. So do you completely shut yourself off or do you have a basic amount of communication that you do? How far into the cave do you go?

Speaker 3 (00:03:38):

Well, it depends. It depends on the project, depends on what we're doing. So I've been in some sort of low level of high level stress for about 13, 14 years on various different projects and just a slow burn. Yeah, just a pretty slow burn when you start a project, right? There's a big period whenever you're starting a video game project where you're just basically trying to figure out what you're going to try and do. So that process can take months and months and months, and that's a lot of communication. It's a lot of back and forth. It's a lot of Skype calls, it's a lots of visits into studios, hanging out with people and trying to figure out what we are going to do, what direction is the game going to head in. And seriously, that aspect of the project can take up 90, 95% of the time, it really can.

(00:04:20):

And this period we're still working, we're still making music and stuff like that, and we're trying out different ideas and trying to see what sort of sound we want to capture and what sort of thing we want to represent in the project or whatever that might be. But then for that sort of last 5% to 10% or whatever it is of the time that we have left, it's just insane. And it can be just days and days and days and days and days turn into weeks and weeks and weeks can turn into months and months where it's completely solid. It's all you think about. You crash out at nighttime for about four or five hours of sleep and then you get straight back up and you work on it again all day. And that can drag on a really sort of troublesome project, can drag on that for months, sometimes years, other projects, sometimes it's not too bad. The project I'm finishing up at the moment, we're probably going to do about six weeks of that stuff. And what do we

Speaker 2 (00:05:09):

Do six weeks after? How long of

Speaker 3 (00:05:12):

About 18 months? That

Speaker 2 (00:05:13):

Initial phase,

Speaker 3 (00:05:14):

About 18 months. So we've been trying to figure out what we're going to do for about 18 months for this project and then now that we've got all the little bits are in place and we can see the path and we can see what we're going to try and do. Now it's sit down and really get stuck into it for six weeks, which I haven't really done before. Most of the time it's usually about three months. It's usually a three month period we call a crunch in the industry. It's like crunching on time. So yeah, that's that kind of period there. But do I have a going away party or things like that? No, I definitely don't have going away parties. That sounds pretty cool. And it's pretty solid, so it's pretty absolute lack of communication. I'll disappear for a couple of weeks. I try to still do a bit of exercise and I try to still get at least some decent sleep each night. But yeah, it's pretty solid. It can get pretty solid.

Speaker 2 (00:06:01):

So to any of your friends out there who are listening, they shouldn't take it personally if you don't get

Speaker 3 (00:06:08):

Back. I've been doing this for so long, I don't think I have any friends anymore, dude. Oh man. So real. No, I think it's just different. That's it. I don't have a big group of social friends. We all hang out and go to bars and stuff. I just don't have that because I don't have the time really. I mean, I've got a lot of bunch of really good buddies that I might see once or twice a year, and usually that's when everybody's schedules are quiet and down and we're going to get together and celebrate a little bit and you kind of de-stress a little bit, which is nice. But yeah, I mean, I dunno, it's one of those things if you really want to get stuck into something, you really want to do something and dedicate your life to something, I guess you've really got to do that fully.

Speaker 2 (00:06:53):

Absolutely. There's no way around that.

Speaker 3 (00:06:54):

Yeah, so a lot of my buddies and friends are all doing the same sort of thing. They're working in the music industry, so

Speaker 2 (00:07:00):

Everyone gets it.

Speaker 3 (00:07:01):

Yeah, exactly. They're working in the music industry, they're making video games, they're working in software design, they're running gyms or whatever it might be, but they're busy. They're busy, busy types. They're really pouring their lives into the thing that they're dedicating themselves to. So there's not a lot of time for that sort of social side of things, which is cool.

Speaker 2 (00:07:22):

Yeah, yeah, I agree. It is cool. So when you say you try to get some decent sleep, I've been on tears like that for multiple weeks on end where the rest of the world fades out and all I have is the project, so I know exactly what you're talking about and my sleep has gotten absolutely destroyed. It's just turned, the concept of days melts away for me and then it just turns into something like where eventually bedtime is noon,

Speaker 4 (00:07:55):

You're

Speaker 2 (00:07:55):

Getting up at 4:00 PM and it is kind of unhealthy. So how do you keep it healthy? I'm a lot better about it now, by the way.

Speaker 3 (00:08:05):

That's the thing is that you've got to run through the gauntlet a couple of times to figure out what your body can and can't do, right? And I guess as you get older to pull that old cliche out of the woodwork or whatever, it changes. You really can't do that sort of thing anymore. So

(00:08:19):

The worst off I've ever had, I was working on a project and we were so tight on the deadline, I had a week to do this really big theme for this character and I was so behind and everything went wrong. You can have the best laid out plans. You can sit down and say on Monday, this is going to happen Tuesday, this is going to happen by Wednesday. We'll have this finished by Thursday. We'll have that done by Friday. We'll be fine, we'll finish it, it'll be sent off, everything will be fine. And of course, by the time you sit down on Monday, you're dealing with a whole bunch of plugin conflicts or somebody doesn't send you the file on time or they send you the file, but it's the wrong file or you sit down, you just can't have any ideas, nothing's working. You break a guitars string, whatever it might be.

(00:08:58):

There's all these unplanned problems that seem to pop up, and I had a week of this stuff and I didn't sleep. I kid you I didn't sleep for about four days, which I didn't even think was really humanly possible. By the last day. I was taking a nap every half hour just to lay down and stop the room from spinning. And I was forced into this situation because I had this immovable deadline on Friday, which was a flight. I had to get on a plane in Melbourne and fly all the way to Vegas to Las Vegas. So that for me is about a 14, 15 hour flight. And by then this thing that we were working on needed to be out into the world and for sale and in people's hands. So it was just such a bizarre situation of schedules where I really couldn't do anything to get around it and everything started going wrong and it was a real hell of a leak and I literally, I wrapped up the track and I ran a quick compressor over it and things like that bounced out each little bit that I needed to bounce out and I hit send on the email to the people I was working with one foot in the taxi ready to go.

(00:10:11):

It was that tight ready to go to the airport. It was that tight, that deadline. And then I crashed out on a plane for 14 hours. I landed in Vegas, I opened up laptop and I had a whole bunch of changes to get through, so it was straight back to work.

(00:10:23):

Now I'm not telling this story as a sense of pride or something like that. Honestly, that is stupid. It is so bad. It's so bad for your health, it's so bad for your body, it's so bad for the people around you. It's so bad for your stress, but that's how bad it can get and I really, really, really, really work to avoid those situations now. So the method that I've come up with to solve these sort of problems now is a lot more planning. Now, I know I said before that we can have the best laid plans and things go wrong, but the idea of a proper plan is that you adjust the plan as things go wrong. So the trouble, yeah, the trouble I fell into that four day awake problem, that thing that I just told you about was that I tried to stick to my plan throughout the week. So when things went wrong on Monday, I said, well, I'll still stick to the original plan, but now I've got two days worth of stuff to do on Tuesday. And then when Tuesday went wrong, I said, well, that's okay. I'll just stick to the original plan. But now we've got three days worth of tasks to get through on Wednesday, and that's just not how you can do it, right?

(00:11:31):

If you lose Monday, you slice out whatever Monday costs you and you just don't do that stuff. You've got to readjust and change perspective a little bit, change priorities and adjust as you go.

Speaker 2 (00:11:43):

At the end of the day too, it's important to realize which element of what you have to do that week is going to get the most bang for the buck, which of all those tasks you have to do, if you broke it down to three tasks, just say out of 15, what are the three tasks that will generate the most results or the most progress or the most whatever profit? Either way you look at it. I find that in those types of situations, that's what I start to shift my mindset to because you're absolutely right. I think planning is fantastic, but if you don't alter the plan to match reality, you're basically going to drive into a wall.

Speaker 4 (00:12:30):

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (00:12:31):

So you absolutely have to account for what's actually happening in real life and make decisions as to what items you need to prioritize in order to get the most results because the clock does keep ticking, and I think a scenario that goes perfectly to plan is just as random as the shit that goes wrong when you have a plan. It is one of those things where random stuff happens and it could randomly all go well, but I do think it's random when it all

Speaker 3 (00:13:09):

Goes well. Yeah, no, that's so true. That's so true. And I think planning, we can't treat planning as the first part of the process, right? Planning is a constant part of the process. You are always working through it. You don't plan at the beginning and then work to that. You're constantly adjusting it as you go. I'm also a bit more of a fan these days of making a better decision at the start, even if it takes a little bit more time. We just work through those different possibilities to see what's actually going to be the better decision. Whereas I used to just make a decision and run with it and try and make it work, whereas, whereas now I try to try and actually change things up as we go. But yeah, so that's the importance of it. But I mean, how does that work on a day-to-day structure thing?

(00:13:51):

So I kind of use this technique called blocking, which is where I divide the day up into two hour blocks. So I have three, two hour blocks in the morning, and then I have two hour blocks in the afternoon. I have an hour and a half break for lunch, and then I have a half hour break before the two blocks in the afternoon start, and the blocks themselves are broken up with 30 minutes of rest time. You could best describe it as time where you're not working, and the idea of that is when you sit down to do that two hours of task, two hours of work, that's all you are focusing on. So all social media gets switched off, all YouTubes get switched off, the phone gets switched off, all of that stuff gets locked away outside of the room. And you focus

Speaker 2 (00:14:38):

Physically, physically

Speaker 3 (00:14:39):

Out the room. Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely. If that thing buzzes, I don't even want to know about it for the two hours while I'm sitting down working on something, I don't even want to think about anything else, nothing else, nothing else. So all that stuff gets physically locked out of the room and then I focus on that task for two hours and it's quite easy to do. It's really not so crazy to do, right? I set up a little timer, I time it for two hours. When those two hours are done, that's when you do leave the room and you do go check Twitter or whatever it is you kind of desiring to do at the time when you do have your break, you have your social break, you have your mental break and things like that. And then after that half hour, which I find is pretty good enough to kind of reset where you're thinking your current way of thinking, you jump straight back in and do another two hours and it sounds pretty intense, but you're able to get so much more work and focused on that way rather than having a 50% focus on your work and a 50% focus on the other things that are going on around you in life.

(00:15:37):

It's not always possible to do that sort of thing, but that's the general philosophy that I try to approach each day with. I also write down what I'm going to do with each two hour block. So when I sit down for the morning blocks, for example, the three two hour blocks that I have in the morning, I will write down what task I need to complete by the time that two hours is up. Now, if I haven't got the task finished by that two hours, then we readjust the plan, right? Readjust from there. We either bump it into the next one or we leave it and we come back to it tomorrow. But there's a couple of interesting things that happen when you're working like that. Number one is that you really get good at doing a task in two hours. So if you need to edit a drum part, for example, you can spend days doing that, but if you sit down and you say, I'm only going to do this for two hours and that's my schedule, that's all the time I have in the world to dedicate to it, you will find a way to identify the most important elements of that drum edit to focus on within that two hours, and that stops you from spending two weeks on that drum edit, right?

Speaker 2 (00:16:35):

Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (00:16:36):

The other thing that's really good about, it's when you finish those two hours, it forces you out of that situation. You change your mental perspective, you gain more perspective on the project that you're actually working on. So when you actually come back to do the second block of time, you've got a sort of renewed perspective on it. I know I've just said perspective a lot, but the idea is that it kind of gets you out. I dunno about you and I dunno about anybody else, but I can really get buried and laser focused on something stupid and I've spent two days, two days tweaking a kick drum sound before and it's not better at the end of those two days. It's just different. It's

Speaker 2 (00:17:10):

Just different, right?

Speaker 3 (00:17:11):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:17:14):

This is something that we talk about on the podcast all the time and that we tell our subscribers on now the mix all the time is, for instance, when you're mixing a song for a client, the first thing you want to do is get it out the door as quickly as possible and to the client, you get it sounding balanced and like a song. But before you sit there and try to get the best snare drum sound on the planet and spend five days on the snare, get it just sounding like a song and send it to the client because they're going to have their own opinions. And so no matter what you do and how long you tweak out this crazy delay tale or whatever, they're going to want changes.

Speaker 4 (00:17:57):

And

Speaker 2 (00:17:57):

So you're wasting your time. So just set a deadline, meaning a couple hours, get it done, and move on with your life.

Speaker 3 (00:18:07):

Yeah. Yeah. I think you get really good at just kind of falling forward I guess you'd say, right? Rather than sitting there and becoming hesitant about any decision you're going to make and whether it's going to work or whether you need two days on that kick drum or whatever. You just settle onto something and work with it and then you can always come back to it later. You can always come back to it later. I mean, of course we do that, especially when we're mixing as well. You can have the best sounding kick drum in the world, but the moment you put that snare drum up, all of a sudden that kick drum sounds terrible. So you've got to get used to working in context, and I think especially if we're talking specifically about mixing your role on a project is definitely one of context within everything else, you are not God on the project. You are working with so many other people. You are working with the musicians that have written it, the engineer who's recorded it. You're even working with the listeners who are going to listen to it afterwards of all of these things need to be taken into consideration when you're working on a project. And so that's the thing, you just kind of get good at rolling with it and working with these people.

Speaker 2 (00:19:11):

So you sound like a super efficient human being and I can just tell from the way that you structure your thoughts in speech down to what you're actually talking about, that you are an efficiency master. Were you always like that? Do you have military family or did you go to, where does this come from?

Speaker 3 (00:19:35):

That's a really interesting question, man. I don't think I've ever been asked that question. I really liked that stuff and I'm glad you mentioned that. I mean, that's cool. Thank you very much. I think I can always be more efficient, but who knows, right? But I appreciate that. Thank you. I don't know, I think if I look at it, my mom was really organized. She was super, super organized and I think I picked up a lot from her. My mother, I did a lot of martial arts when I was younger, and the martial arts that we did was very super disciplined. So it was a lot of kicks and punches and all that sort of fun stuff that we associate with martial arts now. But there was also a lot of standing in one place with your arms out to your sides for 10 minutes when you're seven years old.

(00:20:13):

And of course a lot of people might think of that as torture or something as such, but to me it, it was kind of like a form of discipline. It was this mental challenge of being able to stand there in a single place, standing up dead straight and with your arms straight out by your sides. If you try to do that for two minutes, it's agony. Your shoulders just get so jacked up. We were kind of forced to sit there for five minutes, 10 minutes or something like that. But what happens is you start to practice these sort of mental challenges of where you're putting yourself somewhere else, you realize it's just the pain in your shoulder. There's probably a reason for that pain, but it's really not life-threatening pain, so you kind of just figure out a way to get through it. Yeah, so I did that for a bunch of years.

(00:20:53):

I don't know, man. I think anybody who has an approach to music is going to have some level of predetermined discipline already because the actual act of sitting down and doing something so unnatural as learning to play an instrument, right? There is nothing in life that we do that is similar to playing a bass guitar or playing drums or playing a saxophone. There's absolutely nothing in life that is naturally similar to that. The finger dexterity, you need to be a cool bass player or whatever is insane. The wrist mobility you need, the coordination you be to be a drummer is crazy, and our bodies can adapt to that. But it takes time when you're learning to play an instrument, the part that they don't tell you is that you're going to suck for years and you're going to sit down and play that guitar or those drums or whatever it might be, and you're going to suck and you're going to suck for a long time.

(00:21:44):

You're going to see all these people around you that are so much better than you and you are going to suck, but you've still got to find a way to go back to it and practice it a little bit more and work on it for a little while. Over time you get used to it. I mean, if I had kids, I'd totally be getting them into playing instruments and stuff like that because the life lessons that you can learn from the ability to sit down and focus on something and practice for a while, you can carry that to so many other elements in life. You really can.

Speaker 2 (00:22:14):

So sounds like you got it from a very young age too.

Speaker 3 (00:22:17):

Yeah, I think so. I, yeah, I think if I looked at my mom definitely had that sort of thing. I had martial arts when I was younger. I did army stuff for a little while.

Speaker 2 (00:22:26):

Boom, there it is.

Speaker 3 (00:22:28):

Discipline stuff as well. But yeah, I mean that's not saying anybody who does military training or whatever is going to end up with discipline and things as well because kind of forced upon you in a military situation. It really is. Yeah, I dunno, man, that's a good question. What do you think your discipline stuff, your ability to run, mixing tutorials and podcasts and then do all your own work as well, I mean that takes a lot of time and effort and scheduling and things like that. Where does it come from for you?

Speaker 2 (00:22:56):

Fear? At first it was fear of not getting things done, which drove me to go on these insane stretches like we were talking about earlier, just to get things done And see, the thing is my dad, he's a symphony conductor, but he was also in the military, and so he's a super intense fellow. And so I think that it was just ground into my brain from a very young age that you need to work your ass off and you need to sit down and get things done. Now the thing is that I've always had the, I don't know, the energy or the spark to sit down and do things, but it's not until recently that I started to really work on efficiency

Speaker 4 (00:23:53):

And

Speaker 2 (00:23:53):

Organization because I noticed that working with fear as a motivator ended up working into corners a lot

Speaker 3 (00:24:02):

Because

Speaker 2 (00:24:02):

I would just work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. And then by luck, I guess through having some skills, I would come out at the other end with the project,

(00:24:14):

But I always felt like it was a giant house of cards where if one thing went wrong, the whole project would collapse. So then a few years ago I started to work on efficiency techniques all the way down to what kind of templates I would use for mixing that had all the pre routings and the simple things like that. But you start adding one simple thing here to one aspect of your life, then switching from to-do lists to outcome-based thinking. I do the block thing like you do as well once you start, it's not one big thing that makes you an efficiency machine. It's a bunch of little things done over the period of time. And that reminds me, I wanted to say to people who are hearing about this block method, the block method basically saved my life.

(00:25:12):

I mean, not really, I wasn't dying or anything, but it saved me in terms of when I figured it out. It's what provided me with, I guess the structure to be able to create this company that I have now and to get out of situations that I felt were holding me back. It was the only way that I could do all the different things that I do, and I'm now kind of living my dreams. So it is very, very powerful. But for those of you who are hearing about this and are like, how am I going to do two hours, start with 10 minutes,

(00:25:53):

Start with 10 minutes, the most important thing is that you get rid of all the distractions, and for those 10 minutes, all you're doing is that one thing that you set out to work on. And once you're 10 minutes, no big deal, go to 15 before it, you'll be at two hours. And then when you could do two hours of dedicated focus, then you're really going to be accomplishing things. So I feel like I got a lot done and I accomplished a lot through my twenties just through being a neanderthal about it and just being brutal. But I started to get a lot more quality out of my life when I stopped being that way and I started to get super organized. So for me, it was more about, it's not that I was obsessed with it, it's more that I wanted to get more out of life, and I realized that bludgeoning, it wasn't going to get me there.

Speaker 3 (00:26:57):

So well put, man, that's really, really, really well put. I'm so glad you're sharing that sort of stuff. That's really cool. Really, really cool. Well, thanks. Well, yeah, it's a fascinating thing.

Speaker 2 (00:27:08):

It is because I mean, how many people do you know who can bludgeon their way through work? I know quite a few, but it is almost like if you don't have that kind of outcome based structure, it's almost there's a chaos element or a random element to where you end up. And I'm not okay with that. And let me make sure that being clear about something we said earlier with planning that you should plan, but don't stick to your plans. They're written in stone. You need to keep adjusting. So obviously if you have an outcome for a block, like you said, if you don't accomplish what you set out for that if block, you definitely do need to readjust. Don't just keep driving into the wall over and over beating your head into the wall over and over.

Speaker 3 (00:28:04):

It took me a while to understand too that if you don't get that task done in the two hours that you set aside to do it, it's not a failure. It's just the way things happen. I've never, I think from beginning from starting to do this blocking method, I don't think I've ever achieved something in two hours the way I intended it to. But you get something, you get something that you can work with and you certainly get a lot more than if you didn't do anything for two hours, right? That's the obvious point there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's also worth being said that too. This is the thing that I find works for me in my current situation.

(00:28:42):

It's not going to work for everybody in their situation. If you have other responsibilities, that needs to be factored into the time as well because it's easy when I'm saying, I was saying before, I don't have friends, I don't go see anybody and all this sort of thing, and it makes me sound like a real jerk. And that's just because the way my life is structured now is I don't have those responsibilities of al things. I don't have dependences or relying on me for things. I don't have another job that I have to run off and work to or commit to. I don't have classes. I've got a teacher or any of this sort of thing. So I'm able to do that. But I understand too, very much so as well that that's a very, very specialized, unique sort of situation. It's not for everybody.

(00:29:26):

So you've just got to kind of find what works for you. And honestly, if you can find two hours a day to dedicate to anything, you're going to see a drastic improvement in life. We all remember back to those years when we were a teenager practicing our instrument or whatever it might've been, or having all this spare time to do anything. And then as we get older, this sort of spare time starts to disappear. So it becomes a real challenge to try and find a way that works in a modern life, especially in 2017. In a modern life that's very, very difficult to do, but there's alsos of different ways. I've seen other people do it. I've seen people that do three weeks on, three weeks off. So they will work solidly for three weeks and then they will have three weeks off where they don't do anything. They will not work on a single project, and then when they come back, they'll do another three weeks and they work seven days a week, probably 20 hours a day to get their tasks done, right. And it's just a different way of doing it. I dunno if I could sustain that. Then there's other people, I mean there's people that really like to get up super early in the morning. There's people like to you sleep all day and then get up in the afternoon and do it. Whatever you find that works for you really

Speaker 2 (00:30:28):

Well, all those different methods aside, I feel like no matter what, probably if you looked at what each one of those people was doing, the one thing that would probably tie them all together is the level of focus that they applied when actually working.

Speaker 3 (00:30:49):

Yeah, that's so true. I've got a buddy who he's one of those times that you would say is a really bright light and a bright light burns really, really bright. He's that sort of type and he's a genius. He's really, really great. And he will sit down and work on a track for 48 hours straight and he'll sit down and start that track for 48 hours and he will finish that track at the end of 48 hours and he'll release it and it'll be a hit and he'll tour it around and make a big, big splash of money out of it and everybody will love it. And he's done this numerous times, but then he won't touch a computer for six months. And it's interesting, the level of focus that he sits down for that 48 hours to work on that great track or whatever, burns him out for weeks for months and he might seep into months and months on end of deep depression afterwards. Right? It's pretty insane. It's pretty crazy. So yeah, everybody's different.

Speaker 2 (00:31:44):

Well, creativity is definitely a finite resource

(00:31:50):

And you definitely need to recharge it. And it's very, very interesting that you point out your friend that sometimes needs months and he actually does harm to his mental state and his physiology by going into a depression. He gets tapped out that hard. But I mean that's what happens when you choose to focus your brain that hard and use the creativity muscle that hard. There is a price you have to pay, which basically manifests in recovery time. You have to recover. I feel like with the way that you do things, it seems like a very reasonable way to go about it to where you can, by the way that you structure it. I feel like it's structured in a way that you can actually keep it going day after day after day after day without killing yourself, without getting

Speaker 3 (00:32:48):

Honestly

Speaker 2 (00:32:49):

Getting depressed.

Speaker 3 (00:32:50):

And that's probably driven by the necessity, the type of work that I'm finding myself doing too. So when I start a project, I'm putting my name on a very scary looking contract that says I'm going to have a whole bunch of music delivered on a certain date and come hell or high water, I really need to make sure I hit that date. And so what you said before about creativity being a finite resource, that's so true, and I definitely disagree with the fact that these people might say they can switch it on and switch it off. Bullshit. You can definitely switch the ability to make music on. Definitely. I can sit down and bring up some drums and bring up my favorite chord progression and bring up my favorite sounds or whatever it might be. I can make a track. Absolutely. Is it going to be good?

(00:33:29):

Is it going to be interesting? Is it going to be creative? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. It's just going to be exercising the skill of making music, and that's not what I'm trying to do. So a lot of the time these schedules and things that I'm working to, as I said, they can't be moved. There's a big pressure. And not only that, but that's just not like my role, but my role is in consideration of all the other roles on the team as well. Sometimes these teams have 2, 3, 4, 500 people on them and each one of them is working around your schedule and I'm working in turn around their schedule. Often the marketing side of things is very, very important these days too. And marketing dates need to be hit. We need to make sure we have that game ready to show off at E three. We need to make sure we have this trailer ready for games comp. We need to make sure the shipping data is not going to move in October. And so I needed to find a way through necessity to be able to replicate the ability to work on somewhat of a creative level in a predictable manner. So that's how that came about.

Speaker 2 (00:34:27):

And that's very different than when you're working with artists in a band situation or with a record label because those deadlines are much more malleable. They just are. I mean, I always feel like when dealing with a label deadline that it is not real. I don't want to sound bad and I don't want to give people the wrong idea. You should get your work done on time. But I've just seen records delayed so many times and that I just feel like they're relative. It's kind like a aim for this date sort of thing. But in your world, these companies are huge, and like you said, these teams will have hundreds of people on them. You can't mess around with those dates

Speaker 3 (00:35:20):

And

Speaker 2 (00:35:20):

There's a whole industry behind it. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:35:22):

There is. And there's several industries too. So say for example, when we finish the game, we print the game, we need to send that game to the equivalent of a printing press where basically they make a whole bunch of copies on it and put it in the boxes and send it around the world. So that needs to be hit on a certain time because that process itself takes a certain amount of time that can take a month. And then once that's out into the shops, the shops themselves are expecting gig to get that game on a certain date. They've got their posters up, they've got their pre-orders that they're selling, they've got people expecting that game to turn up. They've probably got their midnight launch organized. So all that stuff needs to be organized and stuck to as well. So there's all these things. It is multiple different industries that are in play here.

(00:36:02):

And we find too that then there's the market changes. So Christmas obviously is a huge period, especially for any toy manufacturer or anybody in the entertainment business or whatever. But Christmas is a huge thing. Christmas is that one time of the year where everybody will give themselves the reason to spend a little bit more money than they normally would, and that's when they usually go out and watch movies or buy video games or new music or whatever it might be, a new guitar. So that sort of stuff needs to be hit as well. If we're shipping in January, nobody has any money left now we're living with regret. We ate too much food over Christmas. We're not going out, we're saving money. So if you release your game during that period, you're not going to make the sales that you expected to. So yeah, it's very, very legitimate. It's very, very important.

Speaker 2 (00:36:43):

Now, question about your history, which is did you know what you were getting yourself into?

Speaker 3 (00:36:49):

It's kind of weird because it's always changing, so I don't really know what I'm getting myself into every day really.

Speaker 2 (00:36:55):

Well, I mean in a macro sense about your corner of the music industry, which is, I don't know if it's really the music industry, it's the video game industry, but did you know what you were signing up for at the outset?

Speaker 3 (00:37:12):

Yeah, not really. I don't think anybody does. I mean, it's difficult, right? Because there's not one industry that you can really point to and say, ah, that's the game industry. It's really just a bunch of programmers who've learned different skills. There's a bunch of artists that have learned different skills. There's a bunch of designers that have learned different skills, a bunch of sound people, marketing people, producers, and they've all got different skills. And these people come together to make a game that's not really the game industry as such, because each one of those teams is completely different because of all those outside influences that every single person brings into it. It's not like working for a local city government where they have a policy in place which everybody turns up on time, goes home at a certain time, gets paid per hour, whatever. It's not like that.

(00:37:55):

There's no industry. That's why I think there's a complete failure of say, unionism and things as well, because it's impossible to define what working in the game industry is. From a macro level though, as you said before, I'd heard about crazy deadlines and I remember reading stories about people working really, really hard to get a project done. And I think when I was younger, I just kind of stupidly looked at that as a noble sacrifice to buy a ticket to get into the industry. I had to work for four days straight. I had to kill myself for this job, and that's really not the case. It's really, really silly to approach something like that. I'd be interested too. I mean, you said something very interesting before where you were, you were motivated by fear to do something right? And so that's interesting. I can kind of relate to that. I wonder if that sort of noble sacrifice came into your mind as well, or were you doing it for a different fear? Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:38:50):

No, absolutely. I can totally relate to that. I kind of had a running competition with myself, which how many days can I work without taking a day off? And once you get past 90 days, then you're really a man or something, stuff like that. How many hours straight was this session? All those kinds of thoughts just to prove to myself that I can fucking do this like a beast. And the fear was like the fear of fucking up the project, the fear of ending up working at the gas station at the age of 45, the fear of just so much fear. It just drove me to pull those hours. And I did look at it like a noble sacrifice.

(00:39:44):

Now the thing that I think is an interesting question is, so you did that stuff. I did that stuff just about everyone I know that's successful has done that stuff. They get to a point where they're like, I don't do that stuff anymore. There's a trajectory or an arc to every successful music person story, which is that they get to a point where they will no longer work 24 hours a day, eight days a week, and then they typically say, you shouldn't do that. But is that really true? Do you think that you would've had same success if you hadn't done that in the I initial years? And

Speaker 3 (00:40:28):

I'm not so sure it's so difficult to answer a hypothetical like that because we just can't go back and test differently. It certainly, I think anybody in this industry that we're working in, and I'm talking about any entertainment industry, you don't fall into it. You don't accidentally end up doing what you're doing. You do it by intention and somewhat by design, and then you are reliant on luck and other factors that are outside of your control. And I think that probably has a lot more to do with it than anything else. I mean, if I had been born five years earlier, for example, I wouldn't have met the revolution in internet speeds that have allowed somebody like myself who's living all the way down in Australia to be able to send this vast amount of data. I would be five years older by the time that came, and I'd probably would've been in a different industry by then. At the same time, if I was born five years later, that internet boom would've happened before my time, and I probably would've grown up trying to learn how to play guitar based on videos on YouTube rather than going along to jazz lessons, for example. That was the only way, and purchasing tab books of Stevie Raven and licks

Speaker 4 (00:41:42):

That

Speaker 3 (00:41:43):

Took six weeks to arrive and things right. Now I can jump on YouTube and I can learn how to play Little Wing instead. And it's just different. It's not like better or worse, but it's just different. I'm in this situation because of that luck, and the danger I think happens a lot of time when anybody reaches some level of whatever you might label as success, whatever that might be labeled as if somebody reaches that point, the biggest mistake they can make is to say, this is because of me. This is because of the decisions I made. This was my design. You are so reliant on so many things that are outside of your control, where you are born, how much money you grew up with, a month of the year that you were born in can have a huge difference whether you've suffered any sort of disease or accident through your life.

(00:42:34):

I mean, if I'd broke my wrist at the age of five, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. And at the five years old, that would make no sense whatsoever, but you'd just be doing something different. So it's very difficult to say like, oh, we're at this stage because of the decisions that I've made, because you're reliant on so many different factors within that. Of course, the things that you do have control over are how much you can dedicate yourself to something. So when that opportunity does arrive, when that luck falls into line and that opportunity does land in your lap, what you do with it, that's certainly something that you can have control over. And that's when you can say, look, okay, am I going to kind of fob this off and not treat it seriously, or am I going to work four days straight to try and get this thing done? What will that lead to?

Speaker 2 (00:43:16):

Exactly. That's where the fear comes in because when you acknowledge that there's that much luck involved, which there is, and when the opportunity does show up, you don't want it to be the last one.

Speaker 3 (00:43:30):

Yeah, yeah, totally. So the best thing I could say, it's obviously difficult to talk about this stuff unless you've lived through those sort of situations as well, and I understand everybody, there's a lot of people that are just trying to, might be of a younger age and trying to figure out what they're wanting to do with their lives, and they can hear people like us talking about this sort of thing and think, well, I mean, if that's the case, I have no control over it. What do I do? And that's not the message that I'm trying to get across either.

Speaker 2 (00:43:52):

No, no. You have a lot of control. There's just certain things that, there's just certain things like who you're going to meet,

Speaker 3 (00:44:00):

For

Speaker 2 (00:44:00):

Instance, who you're going to meet that's going to have a crucial role in your life, whether you get hit by a car, things like that.

Speaker 3 (00:44:08):

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (00:44:09):

All those things, big or small that you can't control do ultimately end up greatly influencing where your life goes, but those things shouldn't be the reason that you don't work your ass off.

Speaker 3 (00:44:24):

Yeah, totally. Totally. Oh, no, please go.

Speaker 2 (00:44:27):

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 3 (00:44:27):

No, I was just going to say, yeah, we just did that thing we did.

(00:44:33):

All I was going to say is you just got to do stuff. Just make a decision on something. Go with something, dedicate yourself to something. And this is what people mean when they say, if you are passionate about something, it will pay off. You don't know how you don't know when you don't know what that will do. You don't know that skill that you are practicing when you're 18 years old is going to come back into play in something completely unrelated when you're 28 years old. But everything you do kind of accumulates together. So just do stuff, don't sit around and wait for it to happen. Do things, get involved with things

Speaker 2 (00:45:10):

Actively live life.

Speaker 3 (00:45:11):

Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 (00:45:13):

Well, the reason I say that is because I think back to all the things that I did say as a teenager, not just the music stuff. My parents would send me to these business conferences back then. So I remember being 17 and going to Hartford, Connecticut and sitting in these business conferences, learning all about engineering win-win solutions, and I was sitting there thinking, why on earth by doing this shit? So at 17, I just wanted to be playing guitar and trying to find a girlfriend and writing a concerto, but learning all that stuff, going to business, conferences from a very young age, all these different things, like actually living an active life with intention, a lot of those things came to fruition or greatly influenced what I'm doing now. For instance, it's all in the DNA. So I do think that people should do more than just music.

Speaker 4 (00:46:19):

I

Speaker 2 (00:46:19):

Will say that too. It is at least helped me a lot. So you have martial arts, you did army stuff, I'm sure you did other stuff as well with your life. It sounds like you've had a very full life besides just the music part of it.

Speaker 3 (00:46:36):

Yeah, I guess. I mean, I like getting out and doing things too, right? I think what's interesting is that music itself has become such a desk ridden job now, right? You're really stuck to a desk and you're staring at a computer. It's the funniest thing when people say, oh, so you work in video game industry, so do you play video games all day? And I'm like, no, no, no, don't play video games all day at all. I do sit at a computer all day and they're like, oh, so you must play games as well, right? I'm like, no. By the end of the day, after I've been standing in front of a computer for 18 hours, the last damn thing I want to do is to sit down and play another bloody video game and stare at another screen. So I really love getting out.

(00:47:11):

I love doing more sort of physical stuff. I love doing hiking things and getting out and being physical and enjoying the world a little bit, especially the natural world. I love that sort of stuff, man, that's really cool. That sort of keeps me going, and I find I look forward to a lot of that stuff as well, because it's so different to standing in front of a computer and tweaking plugins and settings and stuff like that. And same again, that's not to say that I'm not passionate about music and say that therefore I'm passionate about something else, and that music has become the job. It's not like that at all. It's just that your human brain isn't a computer. It really isn't. And you can't treat yourself some sort of industrial machine that you just feed fuel into, and it just keeps pumping out some very predictable result.

(00:47:48):

It doesn't, your body's this organic creepy thing that just, it's unpredictable and it needs stimuli to keep going. The equivalent interestingly, is we don't do it to animals. If we look an animal in a concrete room with a window and feed food under the desk or whatever, it's like that's animal cruelty. But we do that to ourselves every day. And of course, anybody would look at that situation and go, well, an animal would go insane. An animal would get depressed, an animal would get crazy, an animal would get aggressive. And humans, we try to do that ourselves to each other, and you can't do that. So you've got to go find something else. You've got to have some sort of outside influence. But the interestingly too, as you said there too, all these things kind of accumulate over time and help each other out. So the solutions that you come across to solve a problem in some other element of your life will somehow influence the decision you're making on a song one day. And even what you choose to write about as a musician needs to come from somewhere outside of the room in what you're writing. So

Speaker 2 (00:48:58):

Absolutely. If not, it just starts to sound like scale exercises.

Speaker 3 (00:49:03):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:49:04):

That super lame music, school music.

(00:49:10):

I remember when I went to music school, I was around a bunch of dudes who were very technically gifted. And by the way, I don't think that technique means bad music. I know a lot of very technically gifted musicians who write amazing music, but I was around a lot of very technically gifted musicians who just wrote garbage. So the worst music I've ever heard, it's the fastest, worst music I've ever heard. And my theory was just that it's because they never did anything besides go to the practice room. And so if all your subconscious has to work off of is your dorm room, the practice room, and your guitar teacher's room, your music's not going to be very

Speaker 3 (00:49:59):

Interesting. It's interesting. I deal with that every day. It's really quite fascinating. So with video games, a lot of the job of music in a video game is to enhance the mood that you want the player to feel in whatever situation they're going to be in. And video games are inherently pretty narrow, so it's a lot of fighting and saving people and shooting other baddies and all this sort of stuff. It's pretty narrow. We're not dealing with deep, complex emotions that you might find in a book. For example, what's really fascinating is so many times in the past I've sat down with a bunch of developers and they're like, you've got your sword. You've just run down the creepy hallway past the dead skeletons, and you come out into this vast chasm and you're going to fight this giant octopus, right? I'm like, cool, easy. No worries. And they're like, so what we want is a big orchestral film score. And I'm like, why? I've never held a sword, and I'm never going to fight a giant octopus before I get that. But I've been in a fight before, and this is the emotion that we're trying to portray here. We're trying to portray, look, you are the individual there. Your opponent is a lot bigger than you. They're kind of scary than you. You're kind of scared.

(00:51:11):

And that's the emotion that we're trying to get across here. Now, when I was going into a fight, when I'm a teenager, I haven't got a film score in my ears. I'm listening to Mega death, or I'm listening to bulls on parade or something to psych myself up, right? It's funny, if you watch MMA fighters, when they're going on stage before they entered the octagon, and when they've got their earbuds in, they're listening to some music. I doubt they've got Han Zimmer playing in their ears, right? They've probably got Eminem playing in their ears or something.

Speaker 2 (00:51:40):

Or death metal or something.

Speaker 3 (00:51:41):

Yeah, exactly. Whatever it might be. But that stuff shaped the way I feel about certain situations, not Stravinsky. And I do get that at that period in time, listening to Stravinsky or another brilliant composer, from whichever period we may choose from, they were reflecting the world that they lived in. But I don't understand that world. I wasn't around that time. I wasn't in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and writing music like that I wasn't, and writing music that was being inspired by invasions of Russia and things, I don't understand that. And I feel it's very inappropriate for me to take the end product of what they did and apply that to something that I'm doing now. It just doesn't make sense to me at all.

Speaker 2 (00:52:34):

So that's a great, great way to put it, by the way. So I'll tell you, when I heard the Doom soundtrack, for instance, for the first time, I was like, wow, this is not what I was expecting

Speaker 3 (00:52:49):

At

Speaker 2 (00:52:49):

All. This is awesome, but this is not what I was expecting. It's kind of like nine inch Nails meets Slipknot meets ministry, meets badass video game stuff. It was just cool. It was just cool stuff. And I was like, wow, this really does actually make sense for this game

Speaker 4 (00:53:09):

And

Speaker 2 (00:53:09):

This is badass stuff. I was surprised because I wasn't expecting to hear metal like that. I wasn't expecting to hear future metal. And now that you explain it like that, that's the feeling you're trying to get across in that way for the modern day that you live in.

Speaker 3 (00:53:31):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:53:32):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:53:32):

Yeah, totally. Yeah, and I think of it when I was a teenager and I'm into a fight in my ears, I was blasting mega death when I might've been splitting up with my teenage girlfriend. I wasn't listening to some sappy film score to make me feel better or whatever I might put some other music on. That kind of inspired me at the time, and that reflects the feeling that I had then. And that's all I'm trying to do because that's what I understand. I don't understand music from the 20th century symphony composers. I don't understand it. I can look at it on a page and I can understand it, and that's not a word I'm talking about. I understand it on a technical level, but why they chose the notes that they chose, I don't understand. I don't understand because I'm not of that period.

(00:54:17):

I'm not of the period of Beethoven writing the equivalent of pop music at that time, or Mozart writing these catchy melodies for the Austrian aristocracy to listen to make themselves feel better about their lives in Europe. At the time, I don't understand that because not of that period. So if I take that music and I put it over something from now, to me it always has a disconnect. And I have a lot of trouble with that with movies and with other video games. If I'm playing Call of Duty something or whatever, something that might even be reflecting modern troubles and modern issues, but the music sounds like it's from the 20th century or whatever, it's a complete disconnect for me. And it feels more like a superficial attempt to identify with film as an art rather than an audience on an emotional level.

Speaker 2 (00:55:05):

It's interesting that you say this because lately when I've been listening to orchestral soundtracks, I've started to feel, and everyone listening, forgive me for saying this, but I've started to feel like the purely orchestral soundtracks don't make sense to me anymore.

Speaker 3 (00:55:25):

Sure.

Speaker 2 (00:55:25):

They're starting to feel really, really dated in a way that is making it hard for me to get into the movies anymore if there's no sort of futuristic element to it or current element, at least to the music, it's almost like I can't get into it as much, so I know exactly what you're talking about.

Speaker 3 (00:55:51):

And

Speaker 2 (00:55:52):

I mean, we're just moving past, we are way past the 20th century now,

Speaker 3 (00:55:55):

Right? Yeah. And of course there is a role for that sort of thing. If I'm watching a period drama and it is set in that sort of period, then of course I'm going to expect to hear that sort of music. It's going to identify with that because I mean, the visuals themselves, I don't understand. Again, I didn't grow up in that period, so I dunno what the visuals would've been like. So it's always somebody's interpretation of what that looked like. And of course we do that with sound. We make an interpretation of what we believed that they might've listened to. So that makes perfect sense there. In regards, I find it rather disconnecting when you might find a film that is a period piece but has say, modern music to try and identify to a modern audience. I find that conflicting as well. I find it kind of bizarre. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I mean, I think Quentin Tarantino can pull that off, but I

Speaker 2 (00:56:40):

Was about to say he could do it,

Speaker 3 (00:56:41):

Right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that's the thing. So it's interesting you mentioned that as well. You don't feel an emotional connection to that stuff when you are watching the film. It kind of takes you out of the story in a way, and it doesn't serve its role in the best way it can.

Speaker 2 (00:56:58):

Yeah. I'm actually even starting to feel less of a connection to pure orchestral music. The stuff that I grew up with around my dad, I've been feeling this way for years, actually, especially in the past 10 years. I go to an orchestral concert and I'm just like, God, this sounds so old. And it's weird because I am not diminishing the artistic merit of any of it. Obviously. Obviously the greatest minds of their Time wrote those pieces that have stood the test of time, and they're incredible. You can't fuck with Gustav Mahler, but it just sounds so old to me now that I have a hard time relating to it. So even outside of video games or movies, just on a purely musical level, I'm having a harder and harder time relating to it. And so I can completely understand people who were born past the year 2000, for instance, not being able to relate to that kind of music at all.

Speaker 3 (00:58:07):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think what's happened too is an interesting thing is within film, and you definitely find it in video games, is that you find a weird situation where people, so I'm talking about people working in the film or working in the game are simply reflecting on an emotional level, other films and video games. So what I mean by that is we get situations in a movie that could only happen in a movie. There is nothing realistic about it whatsoever, but we're meant to have some sort of emotional response to that because we've seen that scene in a movie so many times before, and it's the same in a video game level. I'm never going to grab a sword and go find a giant octopus, but I've probably played that same level in 20 bloody video games over the last couple of years. So when as a creator, all we're doing is taking influence from the realm in which we're working in, we run that danger of just reflecting that stuff. We're just holding a mirror up to that stuff. We're not bringing any outside influence in. And I think it's quite interesting when we do come across a video game or a film that touches us on a more deeper level, it's because it's reaching from somewhere outside of the film industry or the game industry.

Speaker 2 (00:59:16):

It's funny, I couldn't stop thinking of when you were talking about movies, basically using themselves as an emotional reference. Is how many movies have you seen where a guy is just like, this is the last mission. This is my last time.

Speaker 3 (00:59:38):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then what are you, you're a cliche, right? It you've become a cliche.

Speaker 2 (00:59:44):

Yeah. So I've got some questions here from our crowd.

Speaker 3 (00:59:51):

Cool.

Speaker 2 (00:59:52):

That I'd like to get into because I've got quite a few, if you don't mind answering.

Speaker 3 (00:59:55):

Yeah, of course. Absolutely. I'd be happy to.

Speaker 2 (00:59:57):

There are actually really, really excited that you're here, and I'm going to try to skip ones that I think you've probably been asked 8 million times or that we already covered, but some of them I just have to ask. Sure, man. So Tyler Rodriguez was wondering how did you find yourself in the world of making video games soundtracks?

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):

Yeah, it's a cool question, Tyler. So super convinced version. This is many, many years of stuff, of course, as you can imagine. But I finished up with school, I tried to go to a conservatory of music, but I found it wasn't really what I was interested in studying because of probably those similar reasons. It was reflecting music over a time that I don't understand. At that period, home computing setups were quite relatively cheap, and home music making software was starting to get cheap. And I started looking at it. I was like, man, I might actually be able to make music from home now for the first time ever. I don't need to go into a big recording studio. This is really, really just the verge of this sort of stuff. These things were cheap, they were consumer. So I started fooling around with that stuff and I made some music and I was like, well, what do I do with this stuff?

(01:01:07):

And it honestly was pretty crap. It wasn't good enough to go on the radio, it wasn't good enough to be in a movie, but it was really into video games. And I was like, oh man, maybe I could find some work in video games. And at that time, there was about 40 different companies in Australia that were making video games, but there was really nobody here that was doing music. And for me, it was a really interesting kind of opportunity staring at me in the face. If I got pretty good with making music on a computer at home, maybe I could get work in the video games. So I started doing this sort of stuff. I'd printed to a CD and I'd send these CDs out to video game companies. And after a while, surprisingly and luck, I started getting some callbacks. I started doing a couple of jobs from there. When

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):

You say after a while, what do you mean?

Speaker 3 (01:01:50):

It was probably about two or three years.

Speaker 2 (01:01:52):

So two or three years of sending these CDs. Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):

Yes. Yeah. And during that period, I was supporting myself by teaching guitar and playing in local cover bands. That's kind of how I was making money at that time.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):

So you didn't give up after sending the first one?

Speaker 3 (01:02:07):

No, and I dunno why, because a lot of the times you'd get them back and they'd still be wrapped up in plastic or whatever, and they'd say, sorry, we listened to your album, but we don't really like it. And of course, they're still wrapped in plastic or they just wouldn't get back to you. But I realize now that that was just timing and maybe they didn't need music or any of that sort of thing. There's all sorts of reasons. But anyway, after a while, I started getting enough video game work to be able to give away the guitar teaching and give away the gigging. And then I was able to really focus on that stuff and go, okay, well, this is starting to work now. This is starting to gain momentum, so I'd buy more computer equipment and better sound equipment and go from there.

(01:02:43):

And then things started really happening when I started to travel to San Francisco each year to do a game developers conference, GDC, it was called, still called. And that's where all these video game companies from all around the world converge on San Francisco for about a week, and they just discuss video games. It's a big conference and there's like 20,000 people that did go each year. It's absolutely huge. It's about 30,000 now. It's absolutely massive. And I started going there and I started meeting different people, and I picked up a mentor, and I still consider him to be my mentor now, and I feel like everything I know I learned from him. His name's Charles Deanan. He's been in the industry for a long, long time, and he's an absolute genius with sound design. He's very much more of a sound designer, although he's written some pretty cool music and things in the past as well.

(01:03:27):

But his sonic mixing skills is really cool, and I learned a lot from him. And I worked pretty solidly with him for a few number of years, especially he was an EA at the time. So I was working on the nefa speed franchise and different bits and pieces, and then just kind of branched out from there. Once that stage happened, I was pretty good with some skills that I had under my belt because of that period and had some credits and things and was able to reach out to people on bigger projects, and they wouldn't ignore me to my great surprise. Of course. Yeah. And that's a super condensed version. I hope that kind of answers the questions,

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):

But it does, and it's just interesting. So you put yourself out there and you didn't get discouraged, so you put yourself out there for years consistently, you networked for years consistently, and you found yourself the right mentorship. I mean, that kind of checks off all the right boxes, in my opinion.

Speaker 3 (01:04:24):

Cool.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):

That's awesome, dude. Phil skata is wondering, how long did it take you to complete the Doom soundtrack?

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):

Hey, Phil. I worked on Doom for about 18 months. It took about 10 years to get on Doom. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):

Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:04:39):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):

So Franklin Biles was wondering what advice would you give people who want to write for video games as well?

Speaker 3 (01:04:46):

Yeah, cool. So Franklin, that's a really cool question, dude. I'd say at this stage, the most important thing is to be unique and to write memorable music. Sadly, just the ability to make music isn't enough anymore. When I started, it kind of was, and I know that sort of sounds like me spitting on the industry a little bit, but I mean, games back then were a lot lower quality than they are now. Now.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):

Well, things change.

Speaker 3 (01:05:12):

Yeah, absolutely. Now they're multiple a hundred million dollars budgets and they have Hollywood actors and Hollywood writers. It's huge now. It's absolutely massive. So what you are competing with now isn't just the ability to write music, it's the ability to write really good music that's kind of catchy that people like that's appropriate to the video game. That's a skill that takes time. I'd practice identifying with music. So these sort of funny things that I used to do, and these sound really, really cringey and corny, but just bear with me. But you want to practice not the ability just to be able to play scales up and down whatever instrument it is or whatever it might be. You don't just want to practice compressing things in your door or whatever it is. However you've come into music, you want to practice the ability of making things that feel a certain way.

(01:06:05):

So one of the skills and drills that I used to practice was I'd play a chord, like a random chord. I'd just put my fingers on the fretboard and I'd just play something. And I wasn't really concerned what the notes were, but I'd close my eyes and I'd play this chord, and then I'd write down what feelings it would give me. And to start off with, it was like, oh, this chord feels sad, or this chord feels happy. And of course, that's the basic difference between minor and major chords that everybody discusses. But after a while, when you practice that a little bit more, and I'm saying, do it 15 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever, 20 minutes a day, you can do it in the radio. If you just put a song on and listen when you're driving in a car or whatever, you can do that sort of thing.

(01:06:45):

How is this chord making me feel? Or how is this sound making me feel? But after a while, you're not like, oh, this makes me feel sad. You are saying, this makes me feel like I'm on the train and I'm taking that first bend to the left in the snowy winter after I'm leaving my girlfriend behind who I haven't seen for 18 months. And that one specific chord summarizes that feeling and nothing else does, nothing else comes close. And you move one of those notes by a semitone, and then you're in a completely different universe, a completely different feeling. And so my kind of biggest advice would be to really tap into how music makes you feel, not just the technicalities behind making the music.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):

That's the stuff that those guys I told you about at my music school were not doing. So that's some great advice, and it makes me think of a story, well, not a story. I used to be obsessed with the Beatles to a certain degree, music from another century that I actually really related to at one point in time. I still love their songs, but I remember John Lennon saying that he didn't know any theory or anything like that, but if his producer said to do something that sounded like birds, he would know the right chord,

Speaker 3 (01:08:07):

Right? Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):

Or something that sounded like a sunrise or

Speaker 3 (01:08:12):

Something.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):

He know the right chords.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):

And people often dismiss those phrases and instead look at the notes of the chord and how that chord resolves to the next chord, and then how the melody written over the top of that chord resolves into the next chord. But honestly, all that stuff is bullshit. If you don't understand the feeling behind why they did those things. You can analyze that stuff as much as you like, but the ability to create a feeling was what John Lenon, Paul McCartney and the other guys did so well. Right? Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):

Absolutely. I mean, that's what it took to basically change the world, is to tap into feelings.

Speaker 3 (01:08:51):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):

And the best soundtracks ever, the ones that are the most memorable, are they conjure feelings?

Speaker 3 (01:08:59):

Totally.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):

So I don't think anything you said is corny. So here's a question from Dave Vol, which is, what is your mindset when creating these compositions? I've noticed with Doom and Wolfenstein stuff, you seem to write a method actor with lots of imagery of the project you're working on using patch 6, 6, 6 on your gear, hiding satanic imagery in the doom tracks using gear like hellfire, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (01:09:25):

Yeah, that's cool, man. So what's the mental, yeah, that's a really interesting question for me. I've kind of spoken a little bit about this before, so I'm probably just going to reiterate, but I hope that's okay. I mean, because I think there's an important yes. Yeah, I think there's an important lesson here is that you are not one musician. So when you take on a project, you are pouring all of your outside influences into that project solely and 100% for the duration of that project. When you leave that project, of course you've accumulated a few new skills, but you've got to forget everything. So when I'm approaching Doom, I need to forget Wolfenstein. When I'm approaching Wolfenstein, I need to forget doom. They need to be separate. And of course, we might arrive in a similar place that might sound similar, but you go through a giant journey to reach that point.

(01:10:18):

So what do I do? Well, I get really kind of obsessed with it. So with Doom, it was doing everything from blocking out all sunlight in the room and creating this dark cave-like environment and lighting candles. I found some really great old books at this book fair that's local of them, writing about witchcraft and satanism and things from turn of the century stuff. And I read all that and I'd get obsessed with that. And you do whatever you can to get your body thinking about doom on a subconscious level. And I know, again, that probably sounds like really corny and cringy or whatever, but you've got to get to the point where every musical decision you make is appropriate to the project that you are working on. On a subconscious level. It's not a fight anymore. It becomes natural. So you haven't practiced the ability to make music. You've practiced doom. That is your skill. And then when Doom finishes and you jump on a different project, you unlearn all of that stuff and you relearn for the new project. You get obsessed in whatever that new project might be, and you practice the ability to make music for that project. So that's the kind of mental state, and that goes beyond a certain effects processor or using a certain patch on a keyboard or whatever. All that stuff is honestly superficial. You've got to be thinking of it on a deeper level.

Speaker 2 (01:11:37):

It's interesting, what I just thought about was how, at least when working with bands, the production schedules have gotten so quick that it's almost like that goes out the window. I feel like that 18 month period that you talked about leading up to the six weeks where you lay it all down

Speaker 4 (01:11:56):

Or

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):

The three months where you lay it all down. So during that 18 month period, are you basically, is that when you're learning what doom is basically?

Speaker 3 (01:12:08):

Yes, precisely. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:12):

It just makes me think if producers just had more time with bands these days to find out what their actual artistic message really was.

Speaker 3 (01:12:26):

Yeah, I think I, it's so difficult as a band too, especially if you're coming in and you haven't worked with a producer before. You're kind of nervous. You don't want to express yourself too much and you don't want to step on any toes. You want to be polite, and then you just want to get yourself out the door and done. But it's really important to be very vocal about what you want, what you feel. And even though you might not have 18 months to work on a project, if you are 18 years old, you've had 18 years of experience that you're putting into this music that you're making. Music is just the superficial thing that you're using to express your deep emotions from the last 18 years. So you've already learned that if you're writing music from you, that's what people want to talk about when they say writing music from the soul or whatever.

(01:13:09):

It's a difficult way to talk about it, but you are writing from your own experiences. You're writing from your past loves and lost and fights and successes and failures and all this sort of thing. And it's important to discuss that stuff with the producer. And honestly, if your producer doesn't want to hear that stuff, find a different producer, seriously, find a different pursuit producer. Read into some of those stories about Ross Robinson pulling out these amazing performances from Jonathan Davis and things and the corn records and stuff, and the stuff he'd do, pok him with needles and strip him nude. And so he was vulnerable and stuff like this. He was doing a lot to try and draw out those deep, dark feelings that might've been in there. And if your producer's not interested in that, find a different producer. Seriously, find a different producer. They haven't got your best interest at heart in that case.

Speaker 2 (01:14:00):

Completely agree. So here's one from Nick Matzke, which is, what are your thoughts on the way guys had to compose for the old school game systems like NES or Genesis or SNES, being that they had such limited audio technology but came up with arguably some of the best game music of all time?

Speaker 3 (01:14:20):

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree, Nick. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):

Yeah, he goes on. He says, my thoughts have always been that the limited technology forced them to really come up with catchy melodies and kick ass tunes and not rely on sounds or productions. It was all about the music.

Speaker 3 (01:14:35):

Yeah, that's totally true. Absolutely. When all you've got is a noise wave form and a square wave form to work with, you're going to get really clever with how you use that stuff because those two things inherently sound absolutely horrible. So when you've got to turn those two horrible sounds into listenable music, man, if you can come up with Super Mario Brothers theme using that stuff, you're a genius, right? So yeah, I think so. Nowadays, if we jump on a project, I can have anything I want. I can have a full orchestra, I can have the most bizarre things. I can have Soviet synthesizers from 30 years ago shipped over from the Ukraine just to make a certain sound or whatever. We can do whatever we want but doesn't make better music. I completely disagree. I don't think it makes better music at all. And of course, it's no hidden secret that limitations breed creativity, that's a given.

(01:15:24):

That's an absolute given. And that's probably a lesson that you can learn whenever you're working on one of your own projects too, is you can just write down a couple of restrictions that you're going to, or not only necessarily restrictions, but I remember Trent Rennar talking about he feels that, I dunno if he still feels this way, but I know at the time he was feeling that any new box that he bought, so any new drum machine, any new guitar pedal, any new synthesizer, any box, anything that makes a sound had a song in it. And I think what he meant by that is that he would buy it and just explore it a hundred percent and find whatever sound he could pull out of it. And whatever sounds could be inspired from that sort of thing would inspire full songs. And I think there's something cool about that as well. So yeah, totally agree. Nick. Good question, buddy.

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):

Here's one from Oscar Weston, which is when creating the Doom soundtrack, did you ever have a moment where you were just experimenting and suddenly came up with a sound or something along those lines that just made you go, oh shit, this has to go in the soundtrack?

Speaker 3 (01:16:25):

I think I tried to do that for everything. I mean, that's the idea. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:16:29):

I was about to say, when wouldn't you do that?

Speaker 3 (01:16:31):

Yeah, I'm never like, this sound is terrible. It doesn't fit doom, so I better put it in. It's never like, this sucks, let's use

Speaker 2 (01:16:37):

It.

Speaker 3 (01:16:37):

But yeah, I think Doom was all about experimenting with different boxes and pedals and channels and gear and techniques and stuff like that. And the reason that that experimentation took place was to try and engineer situations like that where you'd have all these boxes set up on the floor and you'd tap something and this sound would come out. And I still have no idea how that sound came about, but I just made sure I was recording everything and you'd take enough of those amazing cool sounds that would just naturally come out or whatever thing you'd set up and use those and use those things to make the music. So I think that was pretty much the whole thing. There was a bunch of stuff I didn't end up using, and I learned a lot about the importance of music when making really noisy tracks. And what I mean by that is that if you're really distorting the hell out of something to the point where the melody is gone, then you've destroyed the music.

(01:17:36):

You've really thrown that baby out with the bath water. All you've got is a bunch of white noise then, which is not interesting. It's the underlying music that needs to come through. And that's why I kind of explored with a lot more distortion boxes and pedals and analog distortion versus plugins, because I find plugins, when you really start cranking the plugin, all it does is just becomes like a fuzzy noisy mess, and the actual underlying notes starts to disappear. Whereas I can line up five distortion pedals on the ground and run a note through it, and the note still comes through really quite clearly and really quite interesting ways. So yeah, that's a cool question though, dude. That was cool.

Speaker 2 (01:18:17):

Here's one from ba, which is, do you have any advice on how to mix low tune guitars with bassy synths and impacts like on Doom without overloading the songs with low end?

Speaker 3 (01:18:29):

Yeah, this is a really cool question, basil. So this is really important super rudimentary mixing stuff, but so just bear with me. But the importance is identifying the role of what instrument does in the mix. So you've got to pick out of that what instrument is going to play the role of the bass, and if it's the nine string guitars, then you focus on creating the bass to be nice and focused in the nine string guitars, and you make sure you take that bass out of anything that's not the nine string guitars. If you think it's the synth, then you focus on having the bass and the synths really solid and you start taking out the bass from those guitars and the other elements there. Honestly, on doom, I found that I was not getting the low end from the guitars in the most interesting way.

(01:19:21):

I was getting low end from synth in a lot more interesting ways that applied to the Doom Project for sure. I'm not saying this is for everything, and please don't read any of this stuff as gospel as the way to do things. This was just for this project. Then honestly, if I soloed up some of the multi-tracks from Doom, and you heard the guitar tracks, some of them have no bass under like 300 hertz. They are just the most narrow mid rangey honky things. But when combined with the synths and the sub underneath and the kick drum and all the other bits that are going on, that creates the full sound.

Speaker 2 (01:19:56):

Yeah. So one big conglomerate sound.

Speaker 3 (01:19:58):

Yeah, I think you've hit it there actually. You've explained there exactly what I was trying to get across is that you've got to think about it as one sound. I don't think about a mix as guitars, synths, bass drums, kick drums, snare drum, whatever, vocals. I think about it as one instrument. It's one thing working together. I'm never thinking about things in isolation. I'm never thinking about that. It's always how these things fit together to create one sound, a unified sound.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):

I can totally hear that too. So here's a question from Dave Vol, another one, which is, I've seen you talk about using the Cali 76 pedal as your two bus compressor. I'm curious how you accomplished this on an entire mix as it's a mono instrument pedal with quarter inch ins and outs.

Speaker 3 (01:20:43):

Yeah, totally. So the use of the Cali 76 happens in a couple of different ways. I can kind of talk you through a couple of different ways that I treat it. So with Doom, what I would do is get the mix sounding in a really nice way or well, to doom doom, nothing in doom is nice, but in a way that I'd kind usually just with a plugin on the end, usually just with an 1176 plugin or something like that. From there, once I had that, I would print the stereo mix and I would run the left channel and the right channel one after another through the 76. Now of course, everybody's screaming, oh my God, but what are you worried about phase issues and things getting out of syn and out of time? Absolutely, and I don't care. I really don't care. I would set it up and I would run the five minute track through it, and then I would stop, and then I'd run the five minute track through it again from the other side, and I'd line them up if the base started to move a little bit to the left, I didn't care, I don't care.

(01:21:40):

And I was like, I know I probably should, but I just don't care. So that was kind of it. But why I love the 1176 is that I find it compresses in a really interesting way. It really smashes, but I love the input and output transformer, and I would clip the input and output transfer, sorry, the output transformer. I would clip that on the way out, and that gives it a really nice, it acts as a limiter in the same sort of way, so it's not just compressing the signal, but it limits the peaks as well in a really cool way that not like a limiter does inside the computer. So that's how that was. So I don't mix with it on, I do have two of them, but they don't sound the same. So you can't really set up a left and right on the mix bus and kind of mix into it as you would like a proper bus compressor.

(01:22:24):

So that's kind of that. What I've moved to a lot more now is using more analog equipment on the bookends of the project. So I use analog equipment to create the sounds in the beginning, and then it goes into the computer and I manipulate it and do things with it inside the computer, and then while I'm mixing, I have it running out to a couple of different boxes. It goes through a Culture Vulture super 15, and then it goes into a the We Audio Dion 500 series compressor, which is great because you can control that from a plugin. So I dunno if any guys have seen it, but you can hook it up via USB and me twiddling the knob on the plugin changes the hardware. It's really, really super cool.

Speaker 2 (01:23:09):

I've seen it. It's really

Speaker 3 (01:23:10):

Cool. Yeah, it's awesome. And it's a great sounding compressor too. It's really, really cool. It's not just a novelty thing, it's a really awesome sounding compressor, and that's it. And then it goes back into the computer after that and then runs through a couple of different more plugins just for that. So yeah, so I hope that answers the question, dude.

Speaker 2 (01:23:24):

I think. So here's one from Akron Hill, which is do you compose the music first, then do sound design, or do you have your sound design inspire you with so many complex layers of complex synth sounds? How do you know when to say when? Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:23:38):

That's a good question. There is a process to it, and I definitely follow a process. I don't randomly make sounds and then try and make a song out of that. I've never found that works, never found that works at all, because what happens is you start sacrificing musical decisions in order to highlight the sound design, and that's not music that's just showing off. That's like scale music to me. It's the equivalent of playing scales really fast, just showing off sound design stuff. So what I do is I sit down with the most crappy preset sounds I can find. Usually it's a noise thing for drums and it's square waves and the worst sounding sounds I can make, and I will write a track using those crappy sounds. And when I say write a track, I mean it's just a bare bones track. It's a basic groove, which is the most important thing.

(01:24:27):

Then we have a melody and I call progressions and things like that. I have the track there. Then once I'm settled on that and I can get away with a musical solid sort of feeling from that, I will go about creating sounds that best represent that. So I'll have my melody and then I'll go, well, how can we represent this melody? What sort of interesting things can we do to represent this melody? And that's when the sound design aspect comes into it. Same with drums. It's like, okay, so that thing would play the role of a kick drum. This thing would play the role of a snare drum. What's some interesting things we could do? We don't always have to have a kick drum. We don't always have to have a snare drum. Sometimes it can be just something that represents that role in the song and illustrates a groove. But every decision from a sound design side always comes back to, does it illustrate the original song in a way?

Speaker 2 (01:25:16):

So make good music first?

Speaker 3 (01:25:18):

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:19):

Then figure out how it sounds.

Speaker 3 (01:25:21):

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:25:22):

So final question, and this is from Sean O'Shaughnessy, which is how do you know when you found the balance between repetitions of parts for longer sections of gameplay and still have enough unique material? Do songs tend to build from a single riff slash theme, or do you often find yourself mapping out the whole tune and then fleshing it out?

Speaker 3 (01:25:42):

Right. That's a really cool question, and that actually, this is the difference I find with video game music compared to any other sort of thing. So with the video game, what happens is that we write the song and the song, I might split it into say what I would call like a verse and a chorus or a bridge and all that sort of thing. So you've got a song, it might be a five minute track. And then what happens is that we break that song apart into all sorts of different bits and pieces. So you might literally just take out the verse and the chorus, or you might actually take out the individual stems from each part. Then what we do is we throw that stuff into the video game. We use some complex tools to get it into the game, but essentially what we're doing then is trying to recreate the mix in the game.

(01:26:26):

So when the music is playing back in the video game, it's not like a stereo wave file that's playing back. Usually it's every individual part that is playing back together. It's like a big multi-track. Imagine it like that. And the technology we use has gotten so good that I can have bus compressors, I can have effects distortions, I can have echoes and things running in the game in the background, you don't know this stuff's happening, but it's happening there in the background. It's like having pro tools running in the background of the video game. And so when we have that, what we can do is change things based on what the player is doing. So if the fight that the player is in gets a more intense, we can push up the volume of the guitars or the drums or whatever it might be. If it's getting less intense, then we can change to a different section of the song and drop to a different, more intense version.

(01:27:10):

So the reason we do this is so it's reactive. So when the player does something, it reacts to what they're doing, and it actually feels a bit more interesting that way it doesn't feel so static. But it also aids in getting around the issue of repetition, which is what you originally asked about. We used to write a 32nd or a minute long loop, and that loop would just continuously play in the background, and you'd have to write a really interesting piece of music to be able to listen to it over and over again for 50 hours and not get bored with it. So this is kind of the way that we kind of get around that. So yeah, so the tools that we use aid in our avoidance of repetition these days.

Speaker 2 (01:27:46):

Great answer. And Mick, thank you so much for coming on. I am glad that, glad we did this. I'm glad that we kept emailing each other until it actually happened.

Speaker 3 (01:27:59):

Yeah, right back at you, man. Thank you so much for taking the time to have a chat. I hope it's not like eight months before we get to speak again.

Speaker 2 (01:28:05):

Likewise. We should do this again sometime and keep in touch. I've had a great time speaking to you, and thank you again for coming on,

Speaker 3 (01:28:12):

Dude. Thank you. Thank you very much. And hello to all the listeners, and thanks for tuning in the value of your podcast. And now the mix is so important. And if I could just leave everybody on, one little final thought of advice or whatever that might be is to do something that I've been trying to do this year a lot, which is improve the quality of information that you're absorbing. Tutorials on the internet, on YouTube, on Reddit, on forums are terrible. And if you are trying to learn, you don't have the necessary skills and knowledge to be able to define what's a good tutorial and what's a bad tutorial. But if you're able to take your music career a little bit more seriously and find a couple of spare dollars and purchase a subscription to a place, and I'm not doing this as a shout out or any of that sort of thing, but yeah, I didn't pay him for this.

(01:29:00):

Yeah, I mean, just improve the quality of information that you are divulging. So signing up to nail the mix or a magazine subscription to sound on sound or those sort of things, the quality of filtered information that you're able to absorb that way is going to help you so much more than browsing forums and hearing opinions from internet experts. So yeah. Yeah. Good job, dude. I mean, well done in all your successes and things like that. Well done. Thank, and thanks so much for having me on today. It's been really, really great to speak to you. Likewise, thank you. The Unstoppable Recording

Speaker 1 (01:29:32):

Sheen podcast is brought to you by Drum Forge. Drum Forge is a forward-thinking developer of audio tools and software for musicians and producers alike. Founded on the idea that great drum sound should be obtainable for everyone, we focus on your originality, drum forge. It's your sound. Go to drum forge.com for more info to ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit nail the mix.com/podcast and subscribe today.