00:00Peggy Dodici
00:31I started when I was 13, 14, playing bass, come from a really musical family.
00:37My first involvement with music was in church.
00:41I studied percussion from middle school through college, actually, and played tuba.
00:45Picked up guitar in middle school because we had an acoustic laying around.
00:49A friend of mine had a bass. I actually wanted to play bass at first.
00:52Then he told me, no, I'm the bassist. You can't play bass.
00:55So I figured, alright, I'll pick up the thing that looks the most like the bass
00:59and that happened to be the guitar.
01:00Never had any lessons. Kind of, you know, was a total power chord guy.
01:05Was in like a Nirvana cover band. All that good stuff.
01:16NoteTracker transcribes all the music that all the guitars and basses are doing in a given song
01:21and also creates progression that will take someone from the first time they've ever played guitar,
01:27get them through the song and having fun,
01:29and eventually get them playing the entire song note to note as it was recorded.
01:33The way we note track a song is we just load in an mp3.
01:36The game just knows what the notes are.
01:39And then we just sit back for two weeks and do nothing.
01:45No, for real. It's actually a very time consuming process.
01:48And it's quite the endeavor. We get official assets from the licensors.
01:53We get the wave, the audio file, and then we have to first tempo map. It's beat mapping.
01:57And once we're done with that, we have to sit and listen to the recording
02:00and track every single note in every single position.
02:04And that takes a considerable amount of time. Then we enter into a review process.
02:10We use all the tools at our disposal to get it right.
02:13And then we go in and polish, polish, polish, and double check and re-review.
02:19Come back and do it again.
02:21And that's really where all of this experience that everybody on the team has comes into play.
02:26We got guys who come from a strong jazz background.
02:29We got guys who are heavy into metal. Heavy metal.
02:34We got guys who are studio technical guys who know how to go in and make a record, make it
02:40sound super pro and polished.
02:42We come from the conservatory setting ourselves mostly.
02:45We both studied composition.
02:47Born on the Bayou. Not a technically difficult song to play. Really straightforward.
02:51But it was really, really hard to note track because it's this kind of loose, strummy style of playing.
02:58There's this sort of difficult balance you have to reach between like,
03:02OK, here's exactly what's going on note for note in the song,
03:05versus here is something that it makes sense to teach a person to play.
03:10Something we've really tried to do in both games, but especially in Rocksmith 2014,
03:16is to make it one global unified sound experience.
03:23And the audio design really has a lot to do with gluing that all together.
03:27At the end of the first game, we were, again, looking for ways to make it better.
03:31And one thing that we wish we would have done more
03:35is kind of give somebody more of a space to learn how to improvise and kind of create their own
03:40sound.
03:41And so we thought, well, what if we make AI musicians?
03:43So we started with a drummer. We started with just one drummer that, when you played some stuff,
03:49the drummer listened to you and played along with you.
03:51The next step was we made a bassist and a guitar player and an organ player.
03:55We kind of saw like, yes, this is the arena we were talking about.
04:00So that's what session mode is.
04:02In our audio engine, we actually made a sampler.
04:05I said, well, there's no way I can do all this. This is ridiculous.
04:09It took me two days to do one riff. And we need like thousands.
04:13Immediately did I realize that we needed composers.
04:15And so we got six guys. They make all the riffs that are going to power the sampler instrument.
04:21We had this big sheet of all of the different instruments that we're going to be writing for.
04:26There'd be an example of like a song or a band and a song title or something to look at.
04:31And then when we'd actually get to those, he'd send us a few more songs.
04:35Yeah.
04:35Or we'd totally not listen to them and just do our own thing.
04:38It's interesting to not have the kind of standard writing process that you would think would work.
04:45It's kind of like the tested, tried and true things don't work all the time.
04:49So there's a lot of experimentation at the beginning.
04:51Like I remember I was working on the blues guitar and there were things for when it would play chords
04:57to make it really sound sort of realistic.
04:59It needed to be kind of slopped up.
05:02So all of the chords that I ended up writing, I ended up zooming way in and like moving each
05:07note up and down.
05:08So you could really hear if it was an upstroke or a downstroke and delaying the different strings so you
05:13could hear each string hit.
05:15Coming from like a general album mixing or like song mixing perspective, you have one guitar, it's playing at one
05:22velocity, one bass, you have one drum kit, maybe you have a keyboard.
05:25But they're not moving targets, they're not going anywhere.
05:28So you can confidently say, yeah, I'm going to filter this thing here and here, give some room to the
05:32bass here.
05:32You can sculpt this thing and it's not getting away from you. It's like a painting.
05:38Session mode is a painting while you're on acid.
05:42Mixing session mode was the coolest mixing project I've ever done in my life.
05:47Okay, all of a sudden we have all these instruments that need to work sonically with one another because you
05:52can pick any combination.
05:54It needs to match what you're doing.
05:57And as you get more intense, the volumes need to come up.
06:00And that was just quite a beast of a task that like I said was just so much fun.
06:10There's a lot of people who know a lot of different things about a lot of different areas of music
06:14and there's also a shared common vocabulary about music so that we can all talk and understand and know what
06:21we're saying and communicate that to the players so that they understand how musicians talk to each other.
06:43What is this?
06:45Uh, mine is not scotch.
06:47Hahahaha
Commenti