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5. Keep refocusing. Fight for objectivity. Here's a scenario we're all familiar with: you're composing away, and before you know it you're micro-tweaking things like a dotted 16th note's key velocity, and asking yourself "should the cowbell reverb diffusion be at 64.5% or 65%?" When you catch yourself doing this excessively, you're in trouble! We recommend the following: Leave the room. Grab a soda. Read your mail. Go for a quick walk. When you come back in ten minutes, you'll have a dose of objectivity that will probably make you ask yourself at least once, "what the heck was I thinking there?" And if you're anything like us, you'll probably discover that the cowbell was entirely the wrong idea in the first place! The biggest opportunity for objectivity you'll get while working on such a tight deadline is when you're away from it overnight and hear it first thing next morning. This is the ultimate time to take that deep breath, listen to your work-in-progress, and ask yourself, "OK, what the heck do I have here?" Odds are good you'll hear it like you've never heard it before. You may be pleasantly (or unpleasantly!) surprised at how different it sounds, probably hear that some spots you were agonizing over are actually fine, whereas other areas will need some serious work. Also, it's key to find ways to revitalize your objectivity. Have someone else listen and comment. Play it on different speakers. Bring up the tempo. Change the key. Anything to hear it with objectivity. 6. Err on the simple, and let the music, not the tweaking, do the talking.There are a thousand different ways to make effective music. You can use a double orchestra and choir like Orff's "Carmina Burana". You can play a one-note solo like Carlos Santana. You can compose a piece as complex as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or a melody as simple as Bach's "Air on a G String". Musically, most agree, these are all masterpieces. Complexity has nothing to do with quality. This also applies to your work. Occasionally you'll want to do something big and complex, and occasionally you'll want to say it simply. However, under a tight deadline, it makes sense to at least start with something simple. You can always make it more complex if there's time, but if you start simple, you're less likely to get trapped a corner compositionally. Another part of this advice is perhaps less obvious. In electronic music, we have many tools available to us. We can tweak practically every little thing. And tweaking can really help sometimes. But if you find yourself spending more time tweaking than writing, odds are there's something wrong with your music. If you find yourself thinking "that melody will work great if only all the velocities are just so, and the aftertouch, and the modulation, and ….etc., etc…" you should probably take a good hard look at the melody. It's probably not working. The best music stands up under the worst of conditions. "My Funny Valentine" sounds good on the worst answering machine tape. Beethoven worked on an AM radio in 1930. Of course, it can be fun to tweak, and sometimes it's vital. But under tight deadlines, try to fix problems with musical editing, and less parameter tweaking. 7. Practice makes perfect.Working under terribly tight deadlines can be very frightening. But the more you do it, the more you'll sharpen your skills, and the more rationally you'll be able to think through what seem like impossible conditions! One thing that's useful to do is to pretend there's a tough deadline there when there actually isn't. It's great practice for honing all the techniques you'll use when there is one. So try it yourself. If you've got two weeks to get something done, set up a schedule that will get it finished in a week and see what happens. We can almost guarantee you'll learn something that comes in very handy in the probably not-so-distant future! Again, we stress that all the above are just ideas that we've found to work for us. The more you do it, the more you'll discover what works for you. Happy composing! Keith Zizza is the Music Director at Impressions Games, where he has worked on such titles as Lords of The Realm II, Civil War Generals, and Lords of Magic. He has also worked for Fostex as a digital audio specialist and has spent many years as a composer for multimedia, radio and television commercials. Henry Beckett is a composer for Impressions Games, a Belding award winner and Clio nominee as a jingle composer, runner up in the Barry Mann Songwriting Scholarship competition, and Professor of Music Synthesis at Berklee College of Music. Both are working on the music for Impressions Games next release, Pharaoh, due out the Fall of 99. |
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