The Sound Architect recently spoke to Alastair Lindsay, Music Production Manager – Creative Services Group WWSE at SCEE. Alastair is mainly a composer, who has also worked in most areas of audio including dialogue recording and sound design. As Music Production Manager of Creative Services Group, Alastair works with composers in the group, sources other composers and works collaboratively with the team to create fantastic games. Two of their recent successes are Wonderbook: Book of Spells and Wonderbook: Diggs Nightcrawler. Alastair himself has lent his talents to many successful projects over the years including The Getaway on PlayStation 2. We speak to Alastair about his career path, composing music, sourcing composers and advice for aspiring composers.
How did your journey into audio begin?
I always had an interest in audio from a young age, tried and failed to learn the guitar. Then in the early 1980’s my brother and I got a BBC Micro computer and the Music 500 add-on system, this is where I really started to find my interest in music. It was a pretty basic FM sound chip and you had to program the music in, but it was a good start which I found useful when I started working in the video games industry, we used to program the Saga Megadrive music in a very similar way. I didn’t take the music college route, instead went to art college for four years, but I always kept with writing music and building up the equipment I had, even playing in bands, which was great fun.
Unfortunately after finishing college it was very hard to get a job in what I’d studied for, but I got a lucky break in 1993 when a friend was doing a college project at a local video games company (Imagitec Design), he told me they were looking for someone to write music and create sound effects. I arranged an interview and took along one of my demo tapes. They gave me a weeks trial and after the second day offered me a full-time job. This was great, but I felt I was winging it so had to prove myself. One of the first games I worked on was Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar, this won an award at the 1994 CES and led to the company getting more work. Our boss kindly invested the money made into building a studio and buying more equipment, then at one point the boss was just like “Yes, I’m going to spend some money and build you a studio, here’s a pay rise” So it was like wow!
It’s kind of a strange journey though isn’t it? Like you say you started off with the usual band stuff, went to Art College, and then after writing music for slide shows you started writing music professionally.
Yeah I mean some of the stuff that I was doing for myself is pretty bad if I listen to it, I’ve got some cassettes still but thankfully nothing to play them on. It’s interesting; some people who go down the classical route are kind of steered into one direction. When you’re left to sort of fend for yourself, you learn different techniques. If you’ve got an ear for something I think you’re kind of naturally drawn to the right way of doing it anyway. I was kept on, I was there for 3 and a half years, and I fancied a bit of a change and wanted to move down to London. So I got a job at Psygnosis which was just changing over to Sony, the PlayStation1 was just about to come out, so it was 1996. That was up at Camden, it was just me doing SFX, Voice over, music everything. At Imagitec I was doing sound design as well, and that’s how it was back in the day, pretty much one audio guy. Thankfully it wasn’t the programmers doing it because even earlier they were. So I just missed that earlier kind of 8-bit type thing although I did do some mega-drive and a couple of Super Nintendo bits and bobs. When I came to Psygnosis it was me for a good few years until we merged with the Sony Soho studio, which now meant working with other audio guys. So still working on music, sound design, voice-over stuff. Kind of lent more to the voice-over stuff which was a bit of a nightmare, but I always really loved doing the music. While I was working there they funded me to study Music with The Open University. They allow us to do training and things like that which is really good, because they gave me a bit more grounding in that early period of music, like Baroque and Romantic. It was quite an in-depth, an intense course. It had an exam, it had monthly assignments, a summer school for a week. It was really enjoyable, hard work but I learnt a lot. That kind of helped me to the next kind of level. So having that understanding and analysis of that era of music was really good. So then it was about 97 as we were getting bigger as a team, I said I wanted to look after more of the music side of things. So on games on PlayStation2 like The Getaway I was doing the implementing and editing of the music, working with the composers to a degree. But also I was doing all the dialogue, not so much the sound design, but yeah you feel like you’re pulled in lots of different directions. I just felt the VO stuff was just, it’s quite tedious. All the variations, this that and the other, it just wasn’t for me. So I became Music Manager. So we were kind of hiring more composers as well from that time to now. I was still writing and writing and I did all the music and sound on Dropship on PlayStation2. Then probably the most recent one was probably Eyepet, I did all the music on that, with a little help from Richard Jacques. That was the end of doing a full project, as I was starting work on more and more projects with composers and other studios.
So where are you up to now?
It’s just a sort of gradual progression, I work in a group called the Creative Services Group and that’s audio (sound design, music production, music licensing), video, graphic design and motion graphics. We’re not a part of a development team but we work for all the teams. We’re like an external agency, so we work all over the world and not just the London studios. We’re quite a well-respected group actually doing some really cool stuff. We’ve got to a level where we can get the best people we want to work with on a project. Whether we want to manage these external people or work internally. Although one thing that I saw on the music side about 3 or 4 years ago, it was kind of under resourced. Eyepet was a bit basic and I wanted a bit more with the implementation. It took about 9 months solid writing for Eyepet, it was 3 hours’ worth of music. I wanted to just kind of push it to the next level. So I managed to get a team. At the current stage it’s me and two other guys in my team, Jim Fowler and Joe Thwaites. It’s kind of gone a bit old school, because they’re primarily composers but they also do the implementation. So we look at a game and design a music system, saying what will work and how the music will work. Then we write the music, implement it and so far it’s worked really well. The first project with the current team was the Wonderbook: Book of Spells. We got nominated for a Music and Sound Award for music, a GANG award for music, we missed out, Journey won those. As for the Audio Accomplishment Development award, we won that one. So we thought we must be doing something right. We started doing a lot more live stuff, so we recorded that with the 40 piece orchestra up at Air Studios. It was amazing, and everything right down to the orchestration and creating the manuscripts and the Sibelius scores, was all done as a team. It then went out to the copyist. I deal with getting the musicians through a booker and sorting out the studio and building up a relationship with the studios and getting the engineers in, basically getting together a good team.
So how do you guys get called in then because you’re an external internal group within Sony? So is someone working on a game and then they call you in, or do you approach projects?
It’s a bit of both really, we have to be pro-active and go in where people aren’t so familiar with us. So as well as our London Studios, of our big client is in Liverpool where we have our external development producers who look after all the third-party titles that are published through Sony. Those developers are all over the place, but they more often than not have an audio team. But not necessarily music guys. It’s just showing our expertise to them and being visible to them. Some guys, especially with the projects here in London, they come to us because we’re there and they know us and what we’ve done. It kind of varies really, but we’re getting asked to do more and more. Not just projects, but we work with our marketing and our regional HQ, which is next door pretty much, doing videos and promos and stuff. For example the 30 second short PlayStation4 trailer that came out before E3 that was all of our group, the graphics, music, sound design, everything. So you look at it and that’s gone out globally, so our stuff is getting everywhere. Those sorts of things never get credited but when it’s at things like E3 and press events, it’s just huge. We do more, some stuff for the PlayStation Blog, it’s all about building up relations within the company. I mean the big thing is doing the projects and really getting in and looking at what it needs, working with the creative directors on the teams, we like to have a two way process. Even from the concept stages they’re asking us advice and they’ve got some ideas what the music will sound like, it could be like sitting down with them and going through lots of existing music and then going “Right, why don’t we just write something we sort of know what you want and then see what you think” Having that resource internally is valuable I think. People really appreciate it, because at the concept stage it really kind of helps sell that project in. So that’s kind of where we are at the moment.
Yeah it’s picking up more and more isn’t it? You’ve just had Diggs Nightcrawler release haven’t you?
Yeah that was out in May, Jim Fowler wrote all that music himself, and he studied Jazz, that’s his thing. We recorded that live; we had to record that live. That came off the back of Wonderbook: Book of Spells. It was all based on the players, the bass player didn’t have any notes to play. They were improvising to the lead sheets on most of it. The pianist had a few improve things. We were very lucky to get the best players. We wanted the 1950’s sound so when it came to the mix, it was studio 1 at Air studios and recorded and mixed it. So we got the old half inch tape deck out, ran everything through Fairchild compressors, we used all analogue equipment. It wasn’t printed to tape but it was run through. We got it mastered there as well and it’s just brilliant. It’s also available on the PlayStation store to download.
With the Wonderbooks, was it a big risk with the music?
On the music, it wasn’t so much a risk, but we didn’t really know, same as the sound guys, how to approach it. What happens when you do this, if you turn the page, if you shut the book what happens because you don’t know what someone’s going to do. It was problem solving. So we had to come up with a set of rules. It always ends up simpler than it is. For Book of Spells it’s fairly straight forward. It was so modular, so you could chop and change wherever needed. You shut the book, it goes to the menu so you put the menu music back in. It’s difficult when you don’t see the mechanics of the game. Once that gets built up you get a much better idea of how to do it. All disciplines had very similar issues and not just audio.
Did you find a similar thing when you first worked with Eyepet?
Well there were many Eyetoy play games on the PlayStation2 that I worked on the majority of, but they were all just mini-games and fairly straight forward. Eyepet was more, not open world, but there was no set time to do things. It was a case with the music, how’s it going to work when you’re not really doing an activity with them? That was a bit of a challenge. It was a simple solution, but it could have worked better. It was to have 3 different states of music levels, the system just crossfades between them, plus a few other bits, for example if it went to sleep there’d be a lullaby. Looking back, I could have done it a bit better, but because there was only me, it was a time against getting it done.
You’ll always look back at older projects and say that though right?
Yeah, going forward that’s one thing we’re looking forward to is where can we go next? Like they said at Game Music Connect, what is the future? What are we going to do? I don’t see it as necessarily throwing more money at things and making things bigger and more music. It’s always going to be what’s appropriate for the game, music-wise and refining it.
Yeah I think too many people too caught up with the whole “More is better” mentality
Yeah it’s like some people are, not necessarily audio people, but there are too many influences from creative Directors or Marketeers who don’t really understand how things work to get the best for it.
They think they need a big composer, a big movie score…
And we need music all the time, exactly. You need to stand your ground and say this is our expertise, this is what we know. This is what we do and this is what we know. Although there is other things, depending on the delivery of music such as cloud gaming etc. I don’t know, I think sometimes things are over complicated. Our bottom line is just doing the best quality music; most appropriate music and getting the best compose for that. We have the luxury of all those people out there, within budget, to pick the person we think is most appropriate for the best music.
Appropriate is definitely the key word I think.
Yeah it’s got to work with it. It depends on the game and what it is. That’s the beauty with games it’s so diverse, from your big action games with movie scores, to the quirky little indies games. It doesn’t matter where on that spectrum, it’s still got to tell the story, have the mood or whatever. It’s getting better I think people are understanding that when it does work, it really works.
So how do you get into the industry?
It’s difficult, I mean going back to how I got into it. It just wouldn’t happen now. Now it’s so much more accessible to create music with a computer and a piece of software. It takes a lot of work; there are so many people out there who can write phenomenal music. In my experience it is right place right time. That’s how it’s been with working with people at Sony. Someone’s been recommended, then there’s nothing at that time but then something comes up and you think “Oh I was just talking with someone who would be good for this” Once you then work with someone, you’ll work with them again. The amount of projects is generally small, so it’s very difficult to work with new people as we just have a database full of people. So if a job comes in as well that is quite quick turnaround, then you just go with someone who you know will get it done.
So can people send you their demos?
Yeah someone came up to me at Game Music Connect. I said I’d listen to it. I did and I sent him some feedback, so he sent some stuff back based on my comments. I’ve put his name on the database and kept him on file. So if something does come up we might get him in. It does help by going to events though and not just sitting and expecting someone will just come knocking on your door. We expect pro-active people. When we contract someone to work with, it’s usually not big budget. We expect final things delivered. So that could be just stereo tracks, it could be stems that we implement into the game. They have to understand the elements. They will be briefed on that but a basic understanding helps. The key thing is they can deliver the final tracks that sound as good as they can. That does mean investing in buying the best sample libraries. They’re not cheap but the advantage is that there are so many good ones out there and a lot of them are doing smaller downloads so you can just buy a part of the library. We did the same, we just bought the Sable Strings, you just buy what you need at the time. You have to understand how to match things. I think having a good grounding in mixing and production is great. People who’ve done music production course tend to do much better. If people come straight out of classical training, sometimes they can write an amazing piece of music but they can’t send us a usable piece of music because it’s just too poorly produced. You have to understand both sides of it really, unless you have a budget to record it all live.
Even film composers I suppose have to understand the music production side now?
The thing is they work with producers and all that who deal with that side. It’s just the really big titles that get big film composers, and they are just few and far between. That’s a good point actually. I think this was also mentioned at Game Music Connect. I get the impression that a lot of composers who want to get into the industry are aiming too high. Lots of them want to write their orchestral action score, and it just wouldn’t happen from someone who’s unknown. They’re also the top of the triangle, the amount of those games are out, there aren’t many. You look around and all the mobile stuff and the indies scene, there’s a whole wealth of amazing and interesting games.
Some of them do better than the “AAA” titles.
Exactly, it’s just a more vibrant area really. It’s like going back to the 80’s, like Jesper Kyd said he made it in the demo scene. That demo scene is still going. Get in there, work with some people. Yeah it’s free but you need to be pro-active. Learn the tools like Wwise and FMOD and all that. Even things like Unity because it’s cheap and that runs on IOS and Android. The audio in it is basic but learn it. Go to those kind of events and try to get in from there. Once you start getting in there that’s how you build up your catalogue. It’s huge at the moment. That’s the big mistake, a lot of people want to work for Sony or Microsoft straight away. I mean even I work with composers from other areas like Film and TV who want to do games, but they also think because they’ve done this that and the other that they can just walk straight in. The way it’s going is, yes you have the high-end titles that cost a lot and make a lot, then there’s all the stuff at the bottom is quick and cheap and it’s doing well. It’s all the stuff in the middle where it’s not where the money is. So you have to start at the bottom, that’s where it is.
What would you say is your proudest project you worked on so far?
Wow throughout my whole career? Probably, one of the first one’s I did like Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar. Because from that it was actually released on a soundtrack CD. I don’t know whether it was one of the first, as it would have been mid 1994. You could buy it in the shops and my name was on the back with the other guys, and that was pretty cool. The ironic thing about that is I actually had a copy of the soundtrack. I was trying to look for it the other month and I couldn’t find it. So I bought it on Ebay! Not sure if the guy I bought it off twigged who was buying it. There are a few other things that I’ve written that I’m proud of. Then there are things that my team has done that I haven’t written that I’m really proud of because we get on so well as such a solid team.
I love how proud you are of your team.
Well they’re just so talented. It’s annoying really. They both studied at Bournemouth, and Leeds as well. It just shows that those two courses are great. If you want to study, don’t do a crappy course. You have to go where it’s at and Bournemouth or Leeds are great music courses. I’ve actually started writing more myself recently because I’ve had a period of a year 18 months of not really doing anything. You do forget, or you kind of go a bit stale. So now it’s really nice and I’m enjoying it a lot more now. I was always something I was conscious about at Sony. If I’m starting to manage this, that and the other, but it’s a natural thing and you just have to steer back towards it. I enjoy both sides now, especially now there are more of us. There’s not as much pressure and it took me a long time to realise “I don’t have to do that, I’ll delegate it”
Ok, so what was your most challenging project?
The Getaway and the stuff on the PlayStation2 were big projects. We were still finding our feet on what we could do. There was nothing, back then we didn’t really know what to do. Like getting actors and recording dialogue we hadn’t really done that before. It was very Ad Hoc which did make things very difficult at times. We did some cool things though. So dropping cars from cranes and recording stuff like that there were lots of human impact sounds so smashing up chickens with baseball bats, with carrots and celery stuffed up them for extra crunch. I think projects when you’re first starting off are always challenging, because until it comes together you don’t really know where you are with it. So it depends how early you’re involved on a projects. Usually quite late so it’s often quite rushed. It’s getting earlier and earlier like at the production stage, but that also means you don’t know where everything’s going yet. So you just have to go with it and there’ a point where it clicks, and you go “Oh I see where we are now”.
It must be better to be involved earlier though?
Yes definitely, though it depends. If it’s just a small simple game that doesn’t really need to much interaction and implementation then as long as you’ve got time to do it its fine. When you have to do something fairly complex, and you have to design something to make sure the code team know what’s going on, you’ve got the resources code-wise and you can stream those millions of files you’ve got and buffer that, stream that. You have to have it all locked down early on or it just falls over. If you get further down the line it’s too late. Having your spec up front is great, plus you can always do a much better job.
So the PlayStation2 titles were your most challenging titles?
Yeah but the music side was fairly straight forward because there was a lot of story so there were cut-scenes. Once they were done they were a known quantity. Then there was a lot of getting from A to B which was a lot of action loops. Then on foot with a lot of stealthy combat kind of stuff. It was using lots of stems. It’s when you want to do something more complex and stream a lot of things. SO you’ve got all your sounds there as well as nowadays the graphics as well, everything’s getting loaded in the background. It all needs to be addressed up front. Always ask for a bit higher up front as they’ll take some away.
What would be your ideal project to work on?
I’m not a big fan of all the big shooter stuff. I’d like to work on something fairly small and quirky. Something that’s a bit more creative really. So actually think “What can we do, but stylistically where can we go with the music”. Moving away from what we’ve done like classical, jazz etc. They’re all great types of music but it’s already a solid style. So just something we haven’t done before and would be quite different for a game.
Any particular type of game?
I don’t really play much to be honest. I always wanted to do a music based game. There’s a few out there like Rayman: Origins did some cool stuff with the music. Nothing like Guitar Hero or things like that, but something where music is integral to it, so we can be involved in the design for the game as well. Games like Limbo are different and a bit quirky, things like that. Quirky but where music is integral. We’ve always wanted to but never get time. We’ve got a couple of audio programmers as well, and graphic, so we could self-sufficiently create something. Maybe one day.
Tell us how it came about that you were invited to speak at Game Music Connect?
I know John really well through Develop and things like that. I’ve done a couple of interviews and articles for Develop magazine over the years. I also know Greg O’Connor Read, I’ve known him for years and I did a good few articles and interviews for him when he did the Music 4 Games website they used to do. So yeah John asked me if I wanted to do anything at Develop after I did one at the GDC. The one for GDC took ages to prepare so I asked some other guys if they were interested, but I said I was always interested in doing something like that, and yeah he just gave me a call and asked if I’d fancy doing this. It worked out quite well with Microsoft and Sony being on stage, but as I said to Paul Lipson, you take the platform out of the equation and we’re doing exactly the same thing. I found out at Develop as well and I spoke to some Microsoft guys there and it’s the same, we just want to make the most appropriate music for what we’re doing. It was an interesting thing to have a mix of people like me and Paul, Adele and all the guys from the publishers along with the composers. It was also great not to prepare anything, just answering questions on a panel. It’s so much easier than preparing. Those sort of events are great for getting out of your studio and meeting people that do the same thing. I hope it continues. I said to them I’m happy to be involved again and again.
Yeah definitely I agree it’s an event that should continue.
It was great for a first one but you can you see where it’s going. Game music is just getting bigger and bigger. I had two separate people that organise concerts. One in Germany and one somewhere else. I’d love to be involved in something like that.
For our final question what do you think lies in the future for game music?
It’s just going to get bigger and more popular. Just the demand for peoples’ interest in it, it’s definitely getting more mainstream. More concerts, more live events. That just shows there is a market there for it. Let’s push it, it doesn’t have to just stop once the game’s released, there’s a big market for it. Keep pushing it. I don’t think the whole throwing more money at it is the way to go. It’s not about bigger, brasher and more money, it’s about refining it. There are always some interesting little things that pop up in films, but video-games tend to play it too safe. It’s usually down to producers and a person without the necessary understanding and no-one is there to push the boundaries. A lot of the smaller companies, the indie developers are usually people who have been in the industry and are a bit more open-minded. For example doing a jazz big band for a score was cool.
Yeah bet, I always wanted to be a composer but then realised I was a much better sound designer.
It’s interesting you say that because I’ve heard a lot of composers who can’t write a great melody but write more ambient and textural type music. So push it the other way start going down the sound design route if you’re not confident with the music writing. On the sound design route it’s a slightly different route into games, but it’s slightly easier and there are more opportunities. There is more often an in-house sound designer. Whereas music it’s more freelance. You find a niche and it could cross over at some point down the line.
Alastair is a fantastic composer and gentleman, who we thoroughly enjoyed speaking to. Alastair was also part of a fantastic QnA panel with Microsoft’s Paul Lipson, which you can read about in our Game Music Connect Review. We look forward to hopefully seeing Alastair again at future events.
Interview by Sam Hughes
Uploaded 19/11/13