With 'Volume 1' of BF music I prefer not to have the publicity campaign before each story, because it eats into the time, the longer the trailer is. I'm happy to say than in Volume two there are no trailers.

When I did the Marian Conspiracy I wanted authentic period music, I wanted no synth at all, and what I heard was recorders in my head, so I looked around to try and find sample discs.

So I went online to a site that supplies sample discs for the Akai, I found a disc of period instruments. Very old drum kits, reed instruments, recorders, it was exactly what I was looking for. I phoned up the British distributor and said "Do you have Early Patches?" and apparently it had only just come in, I was possibly the first person in Britain to order a copy.. 

I used it on Marian Conspiracy, which was the first one where I just used the GigaSampler and nothing else at all. 

Giga Sampler comes with a converter program which will read the Akai disc and convert it into GigaSampler format.

So I'll record each section individually, and that way I'm not putting such a load on Cakewalk or GigaSampler, because I archive all the tracks I'm not using, even the midi tracks I'm not using. 

With a 2-minute cue, there'd be about 2 minutes worth of strings, 2 minutes worth of tremolo, whatever, various brass parts, harp, timpani, percussion. 

I'm now using a program called GigaStudio which can play up to 64 instruments at a time, plus a reverb. The reverb isn't very good but it's useful to get an idea of how all the instruments blend, because otherwise it's too cold. 

And then once I've recorded all of those I switch off GigaSampler, and run the recorded tracks through different reverbs, so one string has one effect on it, and another string has a different reverb to blend. 

I've archived all the midi and I'm just dealing with the audio recordings, the tracks are going through different reverbs and EQs, just to balance them up as if it were a real orchestra, and all of the instruments are panned in to their respective positions in an orchestra. 

So once the music is all recorded I give it a global EQ, a very, very light compression, do a mix down and put it in the episode file, and then, with the vectors, mix the music up and down as required throughout the scene. 

When doing the music, I'll do a mix down of the dialog, effects, everything in the section that I want to do the music to and I'll put it into my midi file, then mark the hit points, "doctor comes in here, vortisaur screams here, console goes bang here etc.". .

Having placed the markers I can decide on the tempo I want, and change it whenever I need to. Once I change the tempos the markers will begin to slide backwards and forwards, because they will always occur at the same _time_
What I've also started doing is archiving each finished track, making up a music CD from each story, This came in handy when they decided to release a music CD later on.

There were two tracks from Phantasmagoria that I had to remix, because when I'd mixed it down earlier I'd accidentally caught the beginning of the Gentlemen's Club background music track.

It seems to have gone down OK, and Jason's looking to do another one. I was quite pleased with the music for Fires of Vulcan.

When I do these plays I get terribly involved, quite emotionally involved in them as well, because I'm living in these locations for 6 weeks, so I was in Pompeii for 6 weeks, and on the R101 for 6 weeks etc...
It gets towards the end that I know what the locations look like, I know what they sound like, so what I'm trying to do is build it so the listener visits these places and hears it as I do.

Back to Justyce

The longest continuous piece of music I've ever written, 15 minutes, is the closing section of Justyce, and although in the final thing it's mixed out in a couple of places, it actually goes on, and it was a mammoth effort to do that. 

I enjoyed doing the music for that one as it was just a brilliant story, a brilliant, doom-laden climax to a season. The way Nick got out of the paradox was very clever, Nick's very good at doing that, sort of winding up just when you think there is no way out, "oh, look there it is", something pops up that you never thought of before. .