Composer “Freaky DNA” Talks About Working on Retro City Rampage

Working on Brian's “Retro City Rampage” (RCR) game has been a blast! One could also say a “blast from the past” as I haven't really done much work with making tracker music since around 1993 or so when I did my first mod using Octamed on the Amiga. Octamed Pro was a free program on the coverdisk of Amiga Format magazine in 1992 : http://amr.abime.net/issue_595

I actually had a pretty strong dislike of techno at the time as I really only associated it with electronic pop dance music like C + C Music Factory (“Everybody dance now”) and similar groups. I was totally into Public Enemy at the time and most of the electronic dance music at the time seemed pretty weak. So, my first tracker song was called “Tech-NO!” It was pretty funny, with programmed beats and samples from Mighty Mouse. I still have the Amiga that I made it on but I think the mod file is sadly lost. I might have a recording on cassette tape somewhere though... It wasn't really until the Prodigy that I changed my mind and made electronic music “cool” for me.

For RCR I've basically been experimenting with different ideas and trying out different styles in the NES format. It's a really challenging thing to try to make things sound cool with just a couple of pulse waves, a triangle wave, a noise channel plus a really lo-fi sampled sound channel. My main method is to jam some stuff out on my acoustic guitar and then use the open source OpenMPT to program the notes in individually. I could also use a keyboard but find that I enjoy playing on the guitar a lot more than using the keyboard these days. From there I try modulating the sound with different commands to introduce more detail and variation on a main theme. After jamming a bit more on the guitar, I figure out the chorus and bridge sections to give the song a completed song structure. Then I'll try playing the song in the game and eventually polish the songs to fit the game play even closer.

It's been a real honour to share the soundtrack with two other great NES composers (Virt & Norrin Radd) and I'm really looking forward to how people react to the sound in the game once it's released!

For more information on my other video game audio work, have a look at my website at http://www.VideoGameAudio.com. In the upcoming months (when the time is right!), I'll be relaunching my music website with some NES tracks from the game at: http://FreakyDNA.com.

Leonard J. Paul Biography

Leonard Paul attained his Honours degree in Computer Science at Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada with an Extended Minor in Music concentrating in Electroacoustics. He began his work in video games on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System and has a fifteen year history in composing, sound design and coding for games working for companies such as Electronic Arts, Backbone Entertainment, Radical Entertainment, moderngroove entertainment, Rockstar Vancouver and Black Box Games. He has worked on over twenty major game titles since 1994, including award-winning AAA titles such as EA's NBA Jam, NHL11, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, NBA Live '95 as well as the indie award-winning title Retro City Rampage.

Freaky DNA actually started out as a live power-trio with three members: Leonard Paul, Patrick Mitchell and Lars Korb in 1996 after they had met in an electroacustics class at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. They discovered their name by picking out random word combinations and settled on the one that made them chuckle. They basically took turns playing the guitar, drums, bass guitar and an Oberheim Matrix 1000 synthesizer that Lars would commonly play on the floor cross-legged while groovin' to the beat. They practiced in Len's basement, garnering several music complaints - so many that they eventually filled up the basement box window with sand. They eventually went on to play such memorable gigs including being the warm-up band for a warehouse rave and in the corner of a falafel restaurant next to the deep freeze.

Sadly Lars moved to Germany and the band basically split up but Len and Lars continued to make music together over the internet and released several songs on Pigeon Records in Munich and Urban Guerilla Records in Hamburg. After a while Lars went on to make his own music as the Bugbreeder and Len continued with the Freaky DNA moniker and eventually released the earth-shattering jungle anthem "Big Ass Beats" on vinyl with Pigeon Records.

Len has continued to perform under the name Freaky DNA and has done gigs in the UK, Germany, Holland, Japan and Canada.

In recent years, he has broadened his attention within the field of game audio to include game audio education and spent five years as a full-time instructor of game audio at the Vancouver Film School and is currently a sessional instructor at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. He has published papers in academic journals and has contributed chapters to books focusing on video game audio such as Karen Collin's From Pacman to Pop Music. He is also a new media artist whose solo and collaborative work has been exhibited in cities including Surrey, Banff, Victoria, São Paulo, Zürich and San Jose. As an electronic music artist he has performed in cities such as Osaka, Berlin and Amsterdam.

Len is also a well-known documentary film composer, having scored the original music for the multi-award winning documentary "The Corporation" which remains the highest-grossing Canadian documentary in history to date with over 37,000 documented soundtrack downloads from Kikapu Records on Archive.org.

He is an internationally renowned speaker on the topic of video game audio and has been invited to speak at at the Game Developer's Conference no fewer than six times since 2003. The Audio Engineering Society, AMAZE Festival, Banff New Media Centre, Interactive Futures Conference and several universities have requested his lectures as the field of games continues to grow. In the past five years he has delivered lectures in Lyon, Berlin, Bogotá, London, Banff, San Francisco, San Jose, Porto, Angoulême and other locations around the world.

About Jake in his own words...

My name is Jacob, but please call me Jake. I release music as virt.

I have made music and sound effects for video games ranging from Game Boy Color to Xbox 360, and for any film studios that really need to sound like they're from the 80s. A few years back, I achieved my lifelong dream of writing music for official Contra and TMNT games, so I had to come up with a NEW dream, and that is to buy a house for my wife Kristi, and a big back yard for Nugget the hilarious puggle.

Like quite a few others working in the game industry — and most porn stars — I started out in various amateur “scenes”. Despite crazy work schedules, my passion for hobbyist work remains strong, because it's stupid fun and keeps my skills sharp. To this day, I hatch schemes with friends in the demo scene, chiptune, and fan remix communities. I try to give back by encouraging younger artists to be excellent to each other.

I spend a disturbing amount of time writing music for outdated game consoles, typically in ways which force the composer to craft every bit of expression through deliberate instructions. Attempting to capture the nuance of live instrumentation is really hard even with high-end synthesizers, let alone cheap ones soldered into toys from 1982. Where some might see these limitations as a bar to creativity, my favorite chip artists past and present treat them like a high-flying trapeze, making all the crazy flips look effortless. The ideal chiptune brings the sound out of the realm of kitschy retro bleepy 8-bit irony, and stands on its own as legitimately cool music.

Feel free to email me anytime to say hi; I promise I'll read it. I may or may not respond right away, and I apologize in advance. I tend to focus on the task at hand to the exclusion of everything else for 16 hour stretches, so I'm inhumanly productive and annoyingly hard to reach. Don't be afraid to pester me. Some day I'll hire a secretary, and I am extremely excited about that because it means I get to write downtempo jams for when the secretary puts you on hold.

For more information on Jake's work and to hear more of his music, head on over to: http://www.biglionmusic.com

A Rad Message From Norrin Radd

I can't even begin to describe how much fun it has been working on this project. Brian and Len initially sent me a message over myspace asking if I would be interested in making some music for the game, which I immediately thought had to be some sort of Macy's myspace scam to get me to click on a link or something. As I hesitantly clicked the link to the Vblank website, all it took was a single screen shot of the game to instantly win me over and sell me on the project. Amazingly, Vblank is based out of Vancouver, Canada which is only a stone's throw away from where I live, so I've had the great fortune of meeting up with these guys on multiple occasions to see the game in development and talk about the project at length. Games development has always been a huge dream of mine, so this was the closest thing I've had to meeting royalty haha.

I seem to draw a lot of parallels in what I like to do making NES music, and Brian's work on RCR. It's all about taking modern ideas, or any ideas really, and transcribing them in a way the composers and programmers for the original NES would have had to. Brian has taken a concept directly out of modern to gaming, and presented it in an entirely authentic 8bit NES style which is chalk full of references to the old style... Most of the time, people are happy with just resurrecting old game play ideas and presenting them in HD and slapping on multiplayer or something. This is quite literally the reverse, and done is such a charming way that I am extremely excited to be helping make the music for RCR.

In the last 5 years or so since I've been making music, I have been trying to take ideas from real genres of music, and create them in a way that conforms to the same limitations held by the original NES. Instead of a simple note for note conversion, this usually requires that you are constantly making decisions about how to interpret certain ideas in a way that matches the 8bit standard.

An example would be, if you are trying to create a metal track, you can't create a power chord unless you have all three of your melodic channels hitting a note in the chord. So you have to pick and choose where you want a power chord to be emphasized to make it sound like a metal song, and fill the spaces in between the power chord with everything else, like your bass line, or lead. For this particular example, the end result is a sound that I think was often hinted at in some of the NES games such as Contra, Shatterhand, and Mission Impossible. If you really listen to some of those old NES songs, you can really hear that they had ideas in their head of metal composition translated through the 8bit medium. The best part is, once you get used to interpreting musical ideas like this, you can apply it to any genre of music, and that's what I've been trying to do with all of my tracks for RCR.

Matt Creamer Biography

For more information on Matt's work and to hear more of his music, head on over to: http://www.myspace.com/norrinraddnesmetal

...and check out his NES-inspired albums!
http://www.iimusic.net/catalog/2010/04/norrin-radd-anomaly
http://www.iimusic.net/catalog/2007/08/melodia-di-infinita