00:05Musica
00:50My name is Martin Galway, I'm the audio director on Star Citizen.
00:54Now we just finished the first of our orchestral recording sessions and of course that's to satisfy the stretch goal
01:00that we reached back in November of 2012 and it was actually quite a surprise for us back in those
01:07days because we just set that as some far off achievement goal, the orchestral session, you know we'll never have
01:12that but maybe off in the future.
01:14What actually happened was on the last day of the fundraising month that's when we hit the goal of six
01:18million dollars.
01:20Pedro Camacho has been a part of the Star Citizen team a lot longer than anybody realises. Pedro was inspired
01:26by this demo on October the 10th from the videos to Chris flying around and his talk about what Star
01:33Citizen was going to turn out to be.
01:34Just to hear Chris Roberts name for me was enough, whatever he was doing, he was back in games, it
01:42had to be huge and excellent. I was a huge Wing Commander fan.
01:48Pedro Camacho was a Portuguese composer who divides his time between games, television, theatre and real performance music, like his
01:56famous Requiem to Ines de Castro.
02:05Pedro was already composed for over a dozen games but I think Star Citizen is his biggest project so far.
02:11And Pedro immediately started composing and came up with more or less two or three minute demo of what would
02:17become the Star Citizen theme and he sent that to Chris and Chris really liked it.
02:22And Pedro also helped us on the three commercials that we've put out so far, the Hornet, the Aurora and
02:28the 300i which, you know, the music all sounds incredibly different in each one but it's all done by Pedro.
02:32And Pedro is basically the composer on Star Citizen now.
02:36It seems weird to be recording the orchestra so far ahead of the final release of the game.
02:40Most game projects, they wait until the last minute so that they know exactly what the tune list is and
02:44how long every tune is supposed to be and all that kind of stuff.
02:48And in our case, we're releasing Star Citizen in a series of vertical slices.
02:52So we're recording the subset of tunes for Space Battle in this first session.
02:57The process of creating the music starts with the initial asset list of what tunes we're going to need.
03:03And for Space Combat, Chris and I basically went back to the old Wing Commander template and said, you know,
03:08we're going to need a tune for this part, a tune for this part.
03:10The music is going to vary according to how much damage you've got and things like that.
03:15And so it's fully interactive.
03:17And once it's broken down into individual clips of, you know, a minimum length, let's say, then we can approach
03:23someone like Pedro and say, you know, how long is it going to take to compose all this?
03:27So once I receive direction from Chris and Martin, I'll make a sketch in MIDI and they respond if it's
03:34too fast or too slow.
03:35Then we go from there and then try to implement that track in the game.
03:39So my MIDI workstation has all the notes from each instrument in the orchestra individually sampled.
03:46So when I combine them together, they actually resemble very closely what a real orchestra will sound like.
03:53There's the creation of the initial music. If it's a theme or a texture, then you have the orchestration, which
03:59is the adaptation for the large group of players.
04:02Composer is like making a black and white drawing and orchestrate is like coloring that drawing.
04:07That's why I always orchestrate what I do, because I want to be sure that in the orchestra session, I
04:14hear the colors I had in my mind.
04:16So for Star Citizen, all the music you hear, every note comes from Pedro.
04:21When the time came to find an orchestra to actually play all these parts, we asked Pedro, what do you
04:27think?
04:27And he said, well, I really have a good feeling about this group in the Czech Republic called the Capellan
04:32Orchestra, headed up by Petr Polojanic.
04:35They are a freelance group of players, mostly concert masters and the principal soloists, you know, from different orchestras that
04:41get together to play these great scores for film trailers and video games.
04:46And these musicians have never seen this music before. They're not sent anything ahead of time.
04:50It's the first time they've ever seen it. And they're such good readers of music that they can do a
04:54good take almost from the first few minutes.
04:57The orchestral session is about four hours long, and it can be any time of the day, whatever we have
05:02booked.
05:03In the case of our recent session, it was in the evening from 8 p.m. to midnight.
05:07And the orchestra players all came in, you know, by themselves from different places, assembled and sat down and opened
05:13their cases.
05:14And they would start to play immediately. And they see the first page of the score, they get going, they
05:20play the very first take, all 75 musicians going at once.
05:24It's quite possible that they'll be a perfect take right from the get-go.
05:28They need to warm up a little bit, but you always record from the get-go in case there's a
05:32great take.
05:32The very first piece of music that Pedro submitted was the Star Citizen theme.
05:36And when we have a theme, we basically encapsulate an entity and all of its good sides and bad sides
05:45and details into one piece of music.
05:46And so we can say, when we're playing this piece of music, you think of this entity, whether it's a
05:52person, a landscape, a planet, a nebula, you know, dangerous environment, or, you know, just the entire franchise.
05:59There are several key themes that will be used throughout all the composition of Star Citizen Soudra.
06:06These themes will be readapted to give a more adventurous or more sad feeling to a certain moment of the
06:14game.
06:15For example, Star Citizen's main theme will be reused many times during Squadron 42's storyline in the most important key
06:24moments of your adventure.
06:26Our game is no different from a regular film recording session in that it's a bunch of takes.
06:32When you play a music CD of the score of a film or a game and each track sounds like
06:37it's complete,
06:38it's actually several takes spliced together with a lot of editing skill.
06:43And we have engineers that listen to the orchestra as it's playing and make little paper-check notes and that
06:49kind of stuff as the performance is going through.
06:51And if they ever hear a dull note or something that could be improved on, they make a note.
06:57The rule of thumb is that you get between five and seven minutes of final music end-to-end from
07:02each four-hour block,
07:03which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's five to seven minutes of perfect music.
07:07And so you need more than one session to get an entire game done.
07:10And even our dogfighting module has about 15 minutes of music, and I'm looking forward to that.
07:18This is always one of the most fun parts of the job for me.
07:21It's not just artists and designers. You get a violin player working in the game. It's a great thing.
07:25That's a great thing.
