Interview With Jamey Scott

Jamey's small but comfortable studio is where we initially met to view some cut scenes from an upcoming project. Although familiar with his work, I was still intrigued by the immensity of his productions as well as how his well-crafted orchestrations set each scene perfectly. Every episode was like a miniature movie, scored to evoke intense emotion and to draw the player deep into the virtual world. While enjoying Jamey's musical scores, I couldn’t help but wonder how he had arrived at this point in his musical journey…

I have a Bachelors Degree in Music from San Diego State University, where I studied jazz performance and general music composition. I knew video games were going to be the next big frontier and I wanted to set myself up in it early in my career. After I got my music together I got involved with a little multimedia developer who gave me a job and the opportunity to learn the requisite computer skills. I started working on small games, things like Compton’s and McGraw Hill kids learning programs.

Originally I was attracted to film work, mainly because of the money, but I got away from all of that. I’m pretty much through with chasing the dollar, and now I’m more interested now in the art itself. As a matter of fact, I’ve pretty much lost most of my desire to work in movies. Games are much more comfortable for me at the moment, and they continue to challenge me with their increasing complexity. Also, I love the autonomy involved. I mean, whereas you may have 20 or 30 people in a film working on the soundtrack, in a game it can be one person. And I like being that one person. Not only do I get to compose, but I love doing sound effects and creating the entire soundscape. With games I can have a vision, and with my knowledge, I can make that vision a reality, something that is difficult to do with movies.

I was working at a company called Echo Images, and they were working on a revamp of The Journeyman Project with Presto. While working with them, I got to know them pretty well, and when the opportunity came up to join them, I jumped at it. We enjoyed working with each other; in fact, we clicked almost immediately. I’ve been with them for 3 years now.

What advantages do you see being an in-house audio guy versus a freelancer?

For me, being an in-house composer and sound designer means working with a team, and I am more focused on the creation of the art. One of the things about working as a freelancer is that there is no communication. There is always this barrier between the two parties You work hard on a project, present your work to the producer, and whether or not they really like the work, they always tell you they do, and then they don’t hire you for any future projects. Nine times out of ten, they will use the stuff because they have to, as they’ve already invested the time and money, but they won’t be happy about it.

That’s not the case at all at Presto. I can have people listen to some music and if they don’t like it, they will tell me and I trust them to be honest with me. Then I have the opportunity to change it and make them happy. I’ll rework it until it’s right. For a good product we continue this process up until the end.

As far as business goes, I’m not as much of a mercenary as I would need to be if I were a freelance. I don’t do alot of freelance jobs. I’m much more focused on my day job because that is my priority. It has gotten to the point now that I am very motivated artistically, and I’m not going to slack off just because I have the in-house job.

Beneath is a cutting edge technology game we are currently doing. It is amazing being able to pull off a real-time environment on a 3D card like this. It looks fantastic. It re-creates the beauty of The Journeyman’s pre-rendered graphics, while taking the really big step into the real-time arena. Unfortunately, it looks like this project is going to be shelved for reasons I’m quite honestly not privy to. It’s certainly not because it’s a bad game, as the quality is extremely high and could realistically compete with the top games currently on the market.

Star Trek: The Hidden Evil is a game that takes place nine months after the story in the latest Star Trek movie, "Insurrection". We are doing a kind of sequel with a new story line, but you return to some of the places in the movie to gather information and look for clues. It’s pretty cool. It’s kind of in the style of the Grim Fandango, as it’s a real time engine and it has characters with pre-rendered backgrounds (the characters are able to walk in front of the backgrounds, giving a sense of a 3D environment). We are really pleased with it, and the game seems to be working out well. This will be the first project out of Activision with the Star Trek license.

Do you have any other ventures?

My time is pretty well-filled at the moment. I’ve dropped all of my freelance clients, and I stopped doing corporate work and just have been simply focusing on straight game projects. I’ve got a couple of opportunities to do some other outside game projects, and depending on how much commitment is required, will decide whether I do them or not.

I usually charged $1000 per finished minute. That’s for everything, whether it be voice-overs on top of music, sound effects, or just music. I don’t charge per layer because I tend to get very intricate. The detail contributes to the end quality whether it gets noticed or not. It’s just easier to charge one price.

No way. I burned out on that stuff along time ago. I was a professional musician for almost 7 years, playing every single night, 50 bucks a night, hauling my gear around from gig to gig, losing my hearing. I was always a little bit too analytical about the music. I found myself standing up there thinking about the music instead of entertaining the crowds. I slowly realized that it wasn’t exactly the best kind of work for me.

It’s pretty varied. Because my job consists of doing both sound design and music, it is rarely the same. For three months straight, I could be working on just the score. When that happens, I arrive in the morning, fire up the rig, and compose all day. With sound effects, there is alot more paperwork, a lot of diagnosing the sound requirements, putting together design documents, things of that sort. That is currently changing in our production process now, as it’s becoming part of the event list, and I am still a major contributor to that. Once I get that together, we go through the specifics of how it will be programmed, how it will be worked into the engine, how the sounds will be triggered, and so on. Finally get into the actual sound design process. For every day of sound design I get to do, it’s about two days of paperwork.

When we are putting the game together, alot of the things in the world aren’t actually there yet. After you build the world, you drop everything into it by instances. Alot of times the geometry will be there but the finished art and functionality won’t be there. I’ll have to call in the designer and have them explain what the thing is supposed to do. We discuss it in detail, I talk about my initial ideas, and we work it out. Sometimes tracking down the designer takes hours.

On other days, I make an effort to get through as much of my task list as I can. Sometimes it goes very quickly. I can put a sound together in 15 minutes, other times an hour. Depending on the resources I have, or if my sound palette doesn’t have what I am looking for, I have to search around or go out and actually record the sound myself. That alone can take hours. Where I work in Sorrento Valley, it can be kind of interesting. There are always jets flying overhead and if I go outside to record a Foley sound, I have to time it between those rockets flying by.

With Foley sounds, I generally just grab my mic and stomp on the ground, inside or outside. I’m getting to the point now, though, that I don’t do that as much because of the vast library I’ve collected.

My main thing is a Mac with Pro Tools and Digital Performer. I have a PC with Sound Forge and Nemesys’ GigaSampler. My hardware is a Mackie Digital 8 bus mixing board with the Mackie Surround Sound speaker system, an Emu E4XT sampler, Lexicon PCM-90 Reverb, Alesis EM5 drum machine and a bunch of guitar stuff that I never use anymore.

Pretty much anytime for me. I’m most creative when I just force myself to get out of the muck. Once I get going, the creativity just comes, everytime. Sometimes I just don’t feel like doing it so I have to force myself into it. I stop setting up the coffee pot, turn off the e-mail and just dig in. I’m a little lethargic in the mornings sometimes but once I get going, I’m OK. Once I get in the zone, nobody better interrupt me or call because I’ll bite their head off. When my wife calls, the first thing she’ll ask is if I’m in the zone or not. If I say yes, then she just hangs up without saying goodbye and tries again later. I’m kind of quirky like that.

Most of the music I write is ambient music, as I’m setting up a mood. For that I just write something, I don’t even know where it comes from. If I ever get totally stumped, I’ll listen to soundtracks I like from my favorite movie composers to get in the mood. Every once in a while, I’ll hear a passage that might spark me into a whole other thing. Most of the time, I’ll just come up with something and take it. There is always some minute spark that will set me off. I try not to imitate or steal from other composers, as my personal goal is to maintain a unique writing style. Although I’m inspired by certain composers, I never try to copy them. I prefer to ask myself, "Now how would I have scored that?"

One thing that motivates me when I’m writing is that I’m always looking for ways to stray from the diatonicism of a piece. If I’m writing something melodic, the first few bars will establish the tonality, then I will instantly shift. I rarely write constant diatonic music for underscore. With themes, I have stayed diatonic for sections, but I usually stray in B sections or what have you. This is just one of those aspects that establishes me as a stylistic writer rather than a chameleon composer.

When I score to animation, I never score to storyboards. I’ll look at them to see what’s coming down the pike, but when I sit down to do it, the movie has to be complete. I hate scoring to the beat of the scene editing and then having it changed after I’ve already done the music. If that happens, I have to start practically from scratch, so I insist the work be finished. When I score, I don’t just lay a bed of music, I reinforce the editing and the dramatization. One of the scenes I did this morning, some guys where climbing down a rope, real mysterious. So I started with some high violins and a subtle tremolo viola, and then as they get closer to the ground, the bass starts to fill out. I bring in the bassoons and French horns crescendo as they reach the bottom, to create some dramatic pacing. As the camera pulls back, you see that they were being watched the whole time. The volume slowly intensifies then suddenly drops out. This is how I pace a scene and dictate the emotional impact with music. It’s important to know what types of musical devices evoke certain emotions like fear, mystery, gloom, things of that sort, and then be able to incorporate those devices into your compositional style. Obviously, a lot of people don’t do that. Many so-called composers simply lay down a 2-minute synth string chord and this suffices for all of the emotions therein. However, I like to take on a lot more responsibility, really dig into scenes, and make an impact.

I feel that the more I write, the more dynamic I become. The stuff I’m doing now is more effective, I think than ever before. I definitely feel that I'm on a journey.

Well, there are lots of different types of sound effects. I am doing a lot of mechanical types of objects for Beneath, things in the world that you have to manipulate and puzzles you have to solve in order to progress through the game. There are a lot of machines, and with them I have to come up with unique types of engine sounds, so usually I will take stock engine sounds and sweeten them. I’ll put a very fast LFO filter that warbles the pitch, then I’ll mix in a ‘clunketty-clunk’ sound. The engines in one world of this game are very primitive and they have to sound rickety, so they can’t be polished sounding. Of course, none of those sounds exist in effects libraries. I have to go in and plot out on the frequency spectrum what I am going to focus on most. If it is an engine sound, its usually in the midrange, so using frequency cutoffs, I’ll add sounds right in that range so it fits like a puzzle within each other. To get my rumble, I’ve got straight low frequency rumbles in my palette that I usually create by pitch shifting something down very low, and pulling off all the highs. That can be really great for low frequency impact. The rumbles I make tend to be quantized loops that I will put some strange filter on. My sounds tend to be full frequency, sort of like the sounds James Cameron used for the Terminator movies, larger than life and totally unrealistic. That’s just my concept for sound effects. When you stick a key in a door, I don’t want to hear a tiny click, I want to hear CLICK-CLUNK. I want it to be huge, just a massive sound! For the most part, that’s what I go for. Sometimes an action may call for very slight, subtle sound effect and I do those too, but I get really excited when I get to make a huge robot walk or something like that.

Beneath is a game based about the turn of the century, during an H.G. Wells, Jules Verne type of era. When it comes to creatures in that game, the player might walk around a corner and find a 10-foot scorpion, or another giant, insect-type creature. For those, I invent exaggerated insect noises, maybe a high-pitch screech, but I’ll add some very low frequency sound to make it big. Sometimes, either I or other guys walking through the halls, will make mouth noises or blow their nose and then I tweak it accordingly. A lot of creatures have that comic gurgling kind of sound and most of the time it’s just my vocal sounds, layered and tweaked through the sampler.

Death sounds are always fun too. I have a palette of screaming animals that I use, mixing and matching. I’ll add crushing skeleton sounds to round it all off.

Oh yeah. It is a lot of fun. I look at sound design as a miniature musical composition. They can be very complex and I love that sort of thing.

As far as ambient sound effects go, I’ll take something very small, with no real discerning characteristics and use that. If it’s a deep cave, I’ll try something with a low, throbbing sound, with nothing recognizable to make it sound like the short loop that it is. Lava ambiance is very difficult to loop with all the gurgling and popping going on. You end up using longer loops so it doesn’t sound obvious. I had the programmers include a feature in the sound engine we often use. With a short two-second loop, we will access and play what we call stingers, various noises that are randomly selected to appear at different times, creating the illusion of a huge soundscape instead of a loop. We’ve been doing that since The Journeyman Project II -- Buried in Time.

As far as the sound effects process, I look at sound effects, ambiances, voice-overs and music as all the same thing. In my mind they all contribute to the single soundscape. Everything that happens in a timeline, I’m responsible for. A voice is one timbre. The music is another timbre. They will all eventually come together and I’d like them to sound like they belong together.

I don’t do outside effects projects. I don’t think alot of people understand my concept for sound effects, how I create unique effects and the time it usually takes. I’m not interested in pulling stuff off a CD and sending them the file. That’s not what this is about and I don’t like to do that sort of thing. Original creations are where my passions lay. If there is an opportunity for me to do very creative sound design, I’ll do it. I just want to stay away from using the library sounds that I’ve heard in every game for the past 5 years.

I use my Emulator E4, and gather together sounds that I think will work well in the game I’m working on. Since every game uses a different palette, I basically start from scratch each time. I’ve been building my own source sounds for years and I like to have them in the tool bag just in case. It’s kind of like shopping for shoes, to use a bad analogy. You decide on which outfits you want to wear and plan which shoes to buy from that. You just don’t go out and buy every shoe. I’m not a big shoe shopper. (laughs)

Putting together that initial palette is the most important step, getting together the sounds that will mix well together. Layering these sounds internally in the E4 works very well for me, more so than doing it on the computer. That way I can save my banks as a palette rather than having sources in various folders all over the computer. They are all looped, EQ’ed and noise filtered all to my specifications. That is basically how I do that.

Alot of times I’ll need extra sounds that I just don’t have. If I need a good rock thump sound, I’ll go outside, throw a big rock against the wall, take the recording back inside and pitch shift it down.

With the technology we are dealing with today the sky is the limit, but you can’t use everything in the world all the time. You narrow down your objects and find it becomes easier to work with. One of my college professors in an improvisation class taught me to try a different approach. Instead of using the 88 options in front of me on a keyboard, he limited me to just 5 notes to see what I could do within that limited range. It taught me a very valuable lesson. In the end, you can do more with just the 5 notes than 88. The smaller your palette, the more forced you are to be creative and to stretch yourself. I assign that concept to sound design too. Even though I keep every sound available, I usually limit myself on purpose. Right now, my world bank for Beneath is around 200 source sounds. I don’t load everything in the world. I use a very well-defined catalog of just what I need.

By keeping to the palette, you guarantee a type of homogeny to the game and in turn the sounds are believable and appear like they are meant to be there. You can’t just grab a sound library and hope the sounds fit. It has to all be consistent.

Yes, exactly. That is one advantage to doing it all on my sampler. I have my specific presets in my hardware reverb that I am very adamant about. I’ve used Lexi-verb, TC Megaverb, all the very high end reverbs and I have yet to find anything that sounds as deep and realistic as my Lexicon PCM90 hardware reverb. It may change in the future but for now I use this unit.

Exactly. I’ll have 3 or 4 presets I’ll use for everything, depending on whether the sound will be going off in a large or small room.

The way I’ve done it with Beneath, I knew in advance that we would be using a software reverb in the game so we trigger that as the character moves within different sized spaces. But just in case the player isn’t using compatible hardware, to keep the homogeny, I put a very low mix layer of reverb in the sounds. Now, at this point in the development process, they could change again, but because I have them all saved within my sampler, I can re-perform them easily with or without more environment processing.

Definitely the highest you can go, depending on the amount of storage space you have available. I generally stick with 44.1 kHz, but staying consistent is most important whether it’s 44, 22 or 11 kHz. 48 and 96 kHz are a waste of time, I think. Nobody even has speakers that can handle that kind of frequency range. Now, I am pretty adamant about using 24-bit because of all the processing and filtering I do. At 16-bits, after all the requantization, it starts to chop up the sound. With 24-bit you can go through alot of processing before you’ll have any degradation of sound. My sampler is only 16-bit, unfortunately, but when I stay all digital, through Pro Tools, I use 24-bit. I’ll keep it at 24-bit until I actually export it into the sound folder of the game.

That’s a problem alot of older game sound designers are dealing with. They are not able to go into TV and film work because all the sounds they’ve built up over the years are in a low sample rate and they just don’t fly.

Ambient sounds are always kept pretty low and they aren’t much of a worry. I don’t really labor too much over that, I guess I’m lucky that one sound doesn’t play when another is. The real major sounds are usually played very isolated. The sounds accompanying an earthquake, with pieces falling everywhere, are usually played in a very controlled moment of a game. One of the problems I do encounter, and I’m still learning as I go, is dealing with the music and effects competing. The music can’t be as complex as I tend to make it. The soundscape is already complex and what I now try to do is to remain mindful of places where the player will be exploring for awhile. The music mixes well in these cases. Otherwise it gets too intense with everything happening at once.

Yeah. I’m learning to give and take. Being the sound designer and the composer has forced me to deal with it. I want everything to be great and to stand on its own.

The big thing right now is creating the audio engine for Sprint, our in-house game development platform. A lot of companies are starting to license Quake engines and those types of things but we actually built ours from scratch. I had to build the concept for audio playback for that in advance. I worked on ideas we could implement now, have it work great and not shoot ourselves in the foot for the future. The SoundBlaster Live card, with the EAX processor – reverbs and stuff like that is kind of the first step for audio cards, kind of like how 3DFX was for the video card. The Voodoo iterations since then have really progressed gaming graphics to a high point. The SoundBlaster Live is the first iteration of that for sound. A good hardware reverb would work wonders, as we could get away from the software versions of it and give some relief to the CPU’s workload.

Our engine supports Dolby Surround Sound and is decoded on the fly with the full speaker compliment. Unfortunately, I don’t see people hooking up 4 or 5 speakers to their computers quite yet. It’s a great immersive experience but I don’t think people are motivated enough to make that jump. I’m developing for it, but I'm just not certain how it will be used in the future.

I can’t compose for that yet because the majority of the music is being played back in stereo. As soon as the majority becomes Surround, then I’ll compose for that. It will be really great when you can place the listener right in the middle with the orchestra. I’ve done several compositions with the instrumentation all around and I have to tell you, it rocks! It is so cool! Unfortunately, the only way it sounds that good is in Dolby Digital, as you need that type of separation.

I see the quality becoming more competitive, with the bar constantly raising. In the very near future, sound designers and musicians are going to have to put out serious quality work in order for the games to compete. The games that don’t have that ultra great sound are not going to be able to cut it in the marketplace.

I also see the level of composition mastery increasing. As far as the sound playback quality, I see it improving as well. The big computers can process high-fidelity sound more readily and people are expecting that now. If they hear noise or buzzing, it will be disappointing and the game review won’t be flattering.

Most of the sound cards you can buy for $50-100 are good quality. What needs to happen, though, is they need to get better technology into the sound cards and sell them cheaper. Here’s hoping for the future.

Probably none, unless I were to win one. Grammys are like a fashion show for pop stars. What matters to me is that the music I am writing is effective and it is working for you as the developer or publisher. For the most part, awards don’t mean much to me. I haven’t even watched the Grammys for over 20 years.

As far as legitimizing the craft, it would do alot in that sense, I think. Those that do it feel the music we write is as valid as on any movie or TV show. It would be nice to get out from behind the scenes, and to no longer be the bastard child of the music production world.

In the end, you need to be happy with the work you do, and with the work you submit. Everything peripheral is simply insignificant, whether it be an award or a bad review. For me, as long as I am pleased with the music I create, I’m not phased by exterior stimuli.

The most important thing is to develop a voice as a composer. Alot of people don’t have the capability of keeping their minds open long enough to study the masters and other types of music in order to learn the skills. The thing that will separate you from everybody else and make you marketable is the sound of your music. It’s very important. Why do John Williams, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, and James Horner all work consistently while there are a thousand other guys who only work here and there? These upper-echelon people not only have their politics intact, but they have their specific voice, which is a genuine commodity.

Alot of the up-and-coming need to get things together. They also need to diversify. One needs to have the composition down, the sound design skills together, and be able to program. The further you can go down the line, the better off you are going to be. If a game company doesn’t have to hire three different people, but can instead hire one in their place, that is appealing to the company.

If you are interested in working on an assembly line and doing sound work, you can do that. But if you are interested in becoming cutting edge, somebody that will stay in the field and become a sort of icon, then you really need to get it together. At least, that’s my opinion.

Yeah. I get a couple demos a week, although sometimes it’s almost insulting the materials they send. Often I’m left wondering 'What on earth makes them think this would be effective game music?' Sometimes its fairly good stuff, but without visualizing what kind of game it would be good for, they are just fooling themselves. When you send music to a game company, it has to have some sort of relevance to gaming. I know these guys are just trying to do their best, but it’s an extremely competitive field and you really have to have your sound together. When somebody is playing the game, they have to jive with that sound. From my perspective, game players are used to movies, and if you write movie music well you are going to make them happy. Techno is also a good way to go. If you write candy, pop music, it just won't cut it. Popular opinion of games, in general, is not influenced by the music. When the music is setting a scene well, it's almost transparent, which is when it is most effective.

Have a clue. Don’t accept standard rate stuff. One of the things I really love about working at Presto is not only do they have great artists, but the game designers have an idea about music. They know all the movie composers and all the films and they know exactly what they want to hear. I’m lucky in that sense. It’s like actually getting to work with someone instead of constantly trying to force your will on them.

Having them be well-educated in the ways of sound and having an idea of what they want is a big plus. Speaking our language is helpful too. The HalfLife guys sound is very hip, and the reason for that is they weren't the type of people who just settle for stock library sounds. Somebody put alot of work into the sound and it shows. They are distinct, unique sounding, and very cool.

Probably Beneath. I’m improving with every game I do, and this title is definitely the best work I’ve done so far.

Hang out with my wife, work out, read a bunch, and play with my dogs. My wife and I have a unique relationship. Family and friends are important.

Email: jscott@presto.com

Website: http://www.sdam.com/artists/jamey_scott

Presto website: http://www.presto.com

Aaron Marks (aBmajor@aol.com), when not interviewing game composers and sound designers, is actually one himself, as the proprietor of On Your Mark Music Productions.

Copyright © 2003 CMP Media Inc. All rights reserved.