Another post about the preparation for the production of the series: Fields of Mars. This time I wanted to wax lyrical on the topic of music, why I think it's so important, and what I do as a result of that importance.
A common tip from experienced internet commentators of all natures is that audio quality is MUCH more important than video quality. And I agree entirely. Bad mic = bad video is a very effective rule of thumb for judging whether it's worth watching something. Yes all my early videos had a terrible mic, but that was because I was a terrible person with no respect for the ears of others.
Now in a narrative let's play, where story-based content plays a strong role, there is an additional concern: music quality. The mood and impact of narrative delivery hinges massively on the music used in the background (or deliberate lack thereof, perhaps).
Although aware of this, I was never too concerned with the music I used for narrative backgrounds, for a very simple reason: finding the perfect sound for a scene, WITHOUT spending any money or breaking (too many) laws, is far too time consuming for videos intended for regular, scheduled releases. So I generally just listen to bits of bobs of a collection of royalty free tracks, or tracks from the game's soundtrack, and pick the first one that has something like the right feel. And that works okay.
I changed my mind on doing this when it came time to make Nariko's Treasure. There were two reasons to change course: 1) the mod/game itself had low quality and repetitive music; 2) there was going to a lot more narrative than usual, so I needed lots of music with strong emotive effects to enhance everything.
Luckily for me I could draw on other games in the same setting, Nobunaga's Ambition and Kessen III, to provide some very high quality backing tracks covering all kinds of moods. And it definitely, to me, makes the videos an order of magnitude better to have spent all those hours finding and memorising the moods of those songs (so I can find the tracks I want quickly while editing).
Now back to Fields of Mars. This time there wasn't a big suite of high-production value, Japanese-made games I could draw amazing soundtrack pieces from. And at first this actually made me reconsider making the series at all, as I was so determined to use a unique soundtrack for it that didn't require much reliance on the Total War Attila soundtrack - especially as I'd already used that in an earlier series, The Second Messiah.
I had to accept that I couldn't get Nariko's Treasure tier music. But what even COULD I use? Not many games are set in the period of Attila, and I needed music from the PS3 era or later to avoid it clashing sound-wise with the game's own music. The same concern required it to be orchestral, ruling out one early contender: Spartan Total Warrior, which despite being set in antiquity had a weird electronic breakbeat-y soundtrack.
The only suitable game I could think of was Ryse: Son of Rome, which I did end up using in part. It was orchestral, and very very occasionally actually had music that evoked Roman themes. Mostly though it was intense, dark battle themes, which aren't very useful for a series where most of the narrative would be separate from the gameplay.
I kept looking around YouTube for games that were recent enough and had the sound I wanted - plus now a sound that fit at least somewhat with that of Ryse so that I could use different sources interchangeably for variety. Lots of old games, not many new. I actually did find the game I would eventually audio-pillage, but at that point I thought it was too 'gamey' for use in narrative backgrounds. Not really sure what I was thinking, but listening to tonnes of short snippets of music for hours on end can clearly cause minor insanity.
In the end, with my YouTube search exhausted, I was saved by the guiding light of Wikipedia, as always. It happened to have a list of games set in antiquity, which I could scan through for potential candidates. Again lots of them were old, and out of sheer laziness I didn't even check what most of them were (guessing that 'some old windows 95 game with midi music' would be the answer) but it ended up leading me right back to the one I would eventually choose: Europa Universalis: Rome.
Despite its slightly old sound (occasional use of not-the-best synth orchestral sounds being what I think I mean by that), it actually complimented what I had from Ryse very nicely. Being a game less focused on conflict, it had lots of sweeping, wonderous themes and slow, thoughtful pieces; it was exactly what Ryse didn't have, handy!
Paradox, the game's developer had very nicely put the soundtrack on YouTube, so it was easy to get access to it, albeit in the format of one giant >1hour mp3 file. So then came the process of going through that file and picking out individual tracks, deciding if they were usable, and if so, creating a new mp3 from them with names that would remind me what kind of scenes the track was appropriate for. Quite a tedious process, but less so than video editing; by contrast it seemed like a good way to feel productive for a couple of slow, end-of-the-day day hours last Tuesday.
By the end of all that I had a nice folder with all the songs I could use, allowing me to, the very next morning, start editing them into the series introduction video that will fill the first 10 or so minutes of the first episode. Glorious!
Now after all that I can't remember why I thought I needed to make a post about this, but since I already did, might as well actually post it. Music is important, that's the lesson. And spending more time researching and preparing background music than a regular LPer spends making an entire series is just another hallmark of the NLP process! (Disclaimer: except when I don't do that which is most of the time).