Archived Rare Life Profile: Musician

by Lerako on Apr 2nd, 2012

Hmm… what do I do at Rare? There’s a good question!

I’m the musician responsible for Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie, DK64, Perfect Dark and Banjo-Tooie. I did all the audio for some of these games (the Banjo ones) and just music for the others.

My daily things-to-do list goes something along the lines of:
1. Consulting with the game’s designer about what he wants to hear in the various levels and mini-games.
2. Looking at what the artists have drawn to get a feel for the music required.
3. Consulting with the programmers to see if they have put in the sound effects I’ve already supplied, and finding out if there are any new ones that they need.
4. Composing music and sourcing sound effects for the above.
5. Playing through various bits of the game to see if the mix of the music and effects is okay, and asking the appropriate programmer to alter anything that I feel isn’t right.

The equipment I am currently using (for those of you out there that care) is as follows:

1. PC running CubaseVST score, Sound Forge, development kit for the appropriate console. Various other bits and pieces of software doing weird and wonderful things.
2. Roland JV1080 with extra sound cards, Roland S-760 Sampler, EMU ProteusFX, EMU UltraProteus, SoundScape hard disk recorder (I’m bored already) and loads of CD-ROMs full of all manner of lovely sounds for you to hear.

Obviously on the N64 memory is a bit on the tight side, although it is a lot better now than when I first started doing Goldeneye and we had next to nothing. Banjo-Kazooie had 2 megabytes of audio and Banjo-Tooie has 4 Megabytes (those are the figures for when it’s compressed in the game). I suppose I probably get around 4:1 compression. We have to resample the audio to much lower rates to fit it all in. For those of you that know, CD quality is 44.1Khz but I would say that most of the audio is probably 16Khz or below. As you resample stuff it gets duller in quality, but we have some cunning little in-house gadgets that enable us to squeeze every last drop of brightness out of those poor little samples so that they sound as sparkling as they can.

We have a studio here in Rare land and that’s where we get anybody (who’s willing) to make strange noises so I can sample them and put them in the game, e.g. I did the voice for Mumbo, a Banjo programmer did the voices for Banjo and Kazooie, Conker’s designer and artist did Grunty, etc. etc. I’ve been trying to think of a particularly amusing thing I used to make a noise for a game but I can’t think of anything offhand. Actually I can think of something semi-amusing: the voice for the mechanical whale in Banjo-Kazooie was most of Banjo’s samples played randomly at a very low pitch… the motto of this story is, if you want to keep a programmer happy, re-use things and tell him it’s saving lots of his precious memory – it works every time!

In the studio we have a Foley sound stage, which comprises of various panels in the floor that we can lift up and fill full of sand and dirt etc. and then record people walking in it, or anything else for that matter. We also have a large library of sound effects CDs that we can go through to find the more hard-to-get noises (it tends to get a bit messy when we’re firing the Rare bazooka in the studio!)

For those of you out there who would like to be a games composer, here are a few things that we look for that might help you:
Listen to as many different musical styles as possible and try to pick out what makes them sound the way they do.
Being able to write a good tune is the most important thing. You can teach anyone the technology but you can’t show them how to write a memorable melody.
It doesn’t matter if you have a degree or any formal training, your musical ability is what you will be judged on.
Get to know how to work a PC, a sequencer package like Cubase, a sampler etc. etc.
Try and imagine what a tune would sound like for a fighting game like Killer Instinct or a game like Banjo. You can learn a lot from trying to copy people who are currently composing for video games, it gives you an idea of what’s going on.
Above all keep trying! I sent five tapes in to Rare without hearing anything… erm… just a minute, maybe they were trying to tell me something… okay okay, so they gave me the job out of pity, I admit it!

Well… this is some of what I get up to here at Rare, I hope you’re still awake and haven’t dozed off!

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