Episode 5: Gordon McGladdery, Studio Director, Composer and Game Designer at A Shell in the Pit

Transcript

(music: intro)

Nick Charney Kaye
Welcome to the XJ music podcast where we investigate new possibilities and background music for video games, live streaming, and environments. I’m founder Nick Charney Kaye, here with co founder Jamal Whitaker. We’re joined today by Gordon McGladdery, a video game industry veteran and founder of the audio design studio A Shell In The Pit, who has a long list of really cool titles in their portfolio. Welcome to the show, Gordon.

Gordon McGladdery
Thanks for having me, guys.

Nick Charney Kaye
You know that we’ve been working on some music middleware, similar to what composers have been hacking together in Wwise or FMOD, except that XJ is focused entirely on music. Before we get into that, for background, just tell us a little bit about your history, composing music for video games, in Wwise or FMOD or whatever approaches you use,

Gordon McGladdery
I originally wanted to work in film, then I went to film school. While I was in film school, I kind of learned about the game audio landscape, because we had a course on it. And I learned about what indie games were doing, and got very excited by that specifically. This was 2011 and I landed a game called Rogue Legacy, which wound up doing fairly well. And another game called Shellrazer, which was a mobile game that did all right, as well. So I got very lucky with the people I connected with early on. And that accelerated things for me, and also showed me that there was a career here. But in contrast, also the people were really nice, like, I really enjoyed the folks I was working with, despite not being a you know, a serious gamer or anything, but mainly because I hadn’t seen what the indie game scene was up to. And that a lot of the same, you know, artistic goals that you can achieve working in film you can achieve in games as well. Mainly, what I was aware of was were huge, triple A titles and things like that. And then by contrast, I worked on a couple of short films, and they were goddamn nightmares. And the people in the people were liars.

Nick Charney Kaye
Rough.

Gordon McGladdery
They were not great. So yeah, I think a lot when a lot of people are starting out, you know, you just go where you go where the opportunities are. And that’s the the opportunities and the better work environment was in games. So that’s the avenue I went up pursuing. As far as like the actual dynamic music goes, Rogue Legacy was in XNA. So we had to use their system. And the music for that game is really not dynamic at all. I think I, we tried to do that. But we just wound up, it was just better to have just like, loops of songs that were catchy. And that worked for that type of game. Yeah. And then from there on out, my next title that comes to mind that I did dynamic music on was an early devolver title called Okhlos. And we used FMOD for that. Same thing, mainly, I just tried to write catchy songs. But we actually did do more dynamic stuff with that. It’s a mob game where you start with one character, and then you walk up to other characters and the more characters you collected, the more mayhem you cause has different behaviors within the music system. So you’d start it mainly layering instruments, didn’t do that much like horizontal hopping from section to section, it was mainly just bring it bringing things up and down. So nothing too fancy. I think probably the next sort of like, big couple of markers. Wanderer Song would be the biggest one, I think. And that was a GameMaker game, which did not support middleware. And so we built our own in GameMaker, and that’s where I learned, it was like, an insane bootcamp for specifically composing for dynamic systems. So that they can be implemented in a simple system, but in a pretty highly dynamic way. So just knowing a how to write a song because my system is usually just like just write a good song, and then figure out the dynamic stuff later. So I would just write a song that I was thought that was good and that Greg liked. And then I would take that and break that out into its dynamic chunks. And then using information like loop length, tempo, and splitting the tempo up just seeing how how many seconds and milliseconds a bar is when transitions can happen. I would be able to send Greg, you know, folder full of files, list of directions. And then we could get those playing pretty nicely in a GameMaker game. And I think to this day, it’s probably the most complex dynamic system GameMaker has ever seen. And I wrote 100 songs for it. So it was, it was a serious bootcamp. And I can take a tune from non dynamic to dynamic pretty quickly now. And that can go in just any, any engine, native without middleware if required. But it also allows me to plan a lot better for when I am using middleware. And then Stela was another one, game by Skybox labs I did. Very proud of the soundtrack on that it was a much more cinematic game. And that’s where I learned a few more techniques on how to do things like switching from rhythm driven music to non driven driven music, and a game that moves forward linearly, but has these you know, different sections and has to feel cinematic where we can’t just play a catchy loop. It has to it has moments that have to be hit, they have to be hit on time. And so that was a really fun one to work on as well. And then from there on Rogue Legacy to some stuff for Five Nights at Freddy’s recently that was pretty simple, not not much going on on the dynamic side of things. Rogue Legacy 2, again, we didn’t do much in the way of dynamic stuff, except for the bass tracks. I got really crazy with dynamic music on bass tracks. Figured out a few FMOD tricks that I am not sure anyone else had figured out yet. You know, just working on our game Fish Game. Surprisingly, non dynamic music for game that’s come from an audio studio.

Nick Charney Kaye
Cool, yeah.

Gordon McGladdery
A few other things in the works. But yeah, mainly I’ve done no dynamic music implementation in Wwise. None of the games that I’ve composed for I have called for it. We do tons of games in Wwise, other people in my team have done dynamic music in Wwise, but I’ve never touched it. I’m a I’m an FMOD boy.

Nick Charney Kaye
Oh, cool.

Jamal Whitaker
What is your favorite aspect of using a middleware that allows you to like come up with, you know, tricks for dynamic music, like FMOD versus just using pre recorded tracks? Do you have a preference at all?

Gordon McGladdery
Well, I like having a toolkit that is open ended. That’s how you can discover those tricks where it is and Wwise does the same thing. You know, it’s a it’s a logic system. Rather than being incredibly preset, I do have some pretty preset ways of doing things now like I have, I have systems that I am like, pretty sure I can solve most problems with in FMOD. And I’m not using it to its to its full capabilities by a longshot either. I’m running a business now, two businesses and have two kids. So I actually am not even doing as much music as I would like these days. But yeah, I think I think the logic system approach is something I really enjoy. That’s when you can, yeah, make these discoveries, share them with other people see what see how people have solved the same problem in a different way, that kind of thing.

Jamal Whitaker
So how do you collaborate with other game music composers? And how do you collaborate on music composition with the other elements of the game sound design with

Gordon McGladdery
Other composers? I haven’t done a terrible, really large amount of it. But Rogue Legacy 2, specifically was Judson and me, Tettix is his artist’s name. We did, because on Rogue Legacy 1, we were two composers, but we were working kind of completely separately. Basically, what happened is, I was new, not very fast. There was a sound designer working on it. He had to take a job at EA for visa reasons. So I took over sound design and I wasn’t really able to keep up with music and sound design. So we brought another composer on who was one that Cellar Door games had worked with in the past. But we didn’t really collaborate. We just kind of wrote our own disparate tunes. And it was noticeable like one song one song was by Tettix and one was by me, and it was a less cohesive experience. So when Rogue Legacy 2 production started, we were like, Hey, let’s, let’s collaborate more. So we did more pre-production, like we created a couple of contact kits, we chose a few instruments that we would both use. And we still went ahead and wrote our own songs. But then we would kind of sort of make cameos on one another’s tracks as well. One was Judson kind of it was almost a cover but not quite of one of my Rogue Legacy 2 tracks. There were was another one where or we collaborated quite significantly when Johnson contributed like entire rhythm sections and just other instrument layers to one of the final, or the final boss track. And yes, we just didn’t weren’t planning focused on tonality. And then also since like Judson is kind of a wunderkind, he’s like a professional graphic designer, he designs his own board games. And music is another thing he does. But since music is like one of the only things I do, I do have a bit more technical background. And he tends to he’s very, he’s more jazz minded. So we had to like, keep it in simple keys. And make things a little more cohesive on that front. So just more communication.

Jamal Whitaker
Got it. Well, before you drop this gem about being able to do things in FMOD that nobody else has, I won’t ask the magician to share his tricks.

Gordon McGladdery
Oh, I’ll share it. I’ve shared it on Twitter and stuff.

Nick Charney Kaye
Cool.

Gordon McGladdery
The one I discovered that made production faster for me, with very little downside is, so you know, when you’re making loops, and sometimes if you’re creating a drone loop, it can be almost impossible to export it and have it loop perfectly like you almost always get a tick, I found that with an FMOD, if you put the sound so you didn’t make a loop, you just played the drone, full eight bars or whatever and let it tail out, you just put that into an event. And then you use the event in an encapsulated form. And then loop that, but shorten it a tiny bit so that it’s just a titch inside the loop bracket and then give it an envelope so that it has, you know, four second release or three second release, that it will then loop perfectly. And you can do that with anything. So I was like, Oh, I don’t have to export loops anymore, at all, if I don’t want to. So no more fiddling with finding the perfect loops. The only downside is it uses one extra voice on the system. So might be a problem for very, very busy games. But for most games, or if you’re doing it like a bunch in one event. But other than that, it’s like not that big of a deal. So that one was cool. And then I think the other trick which I oh yeah, one thing I was using for those boss tracks and Rogue Legacy was using one melodic loop, or a layer of melodic loops, they might be fading up and down or whatever, that might be 16 bars. And then within that I would have percussion loops that were you know, increasing in intensity or orals, totally different. But I would be using an encapsulated event in the 16 bar melodic loops, so that you can jump the playhead around within it, and it’s not going to restart it, it’ll just keep playing it. But if you advance from one, one of the percussion loops to another percussion loop, you can get an entirely new percussion bass, which can change the entire character of what’s playing right now. Without having to change everything. That was when I used pretty heavily on Rogue Legacy 2 as well. Cool, probably like hard to picture without FMOD in front of you.

Nick Charney Kaye
Got it, enough background like talking about it that I’m following what you’re saying.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah.

Nick Charney Kaye
I’m kind of curious to just like intro another conversation. Because what has been so interesting for us, I mean, we built something that does something really specific in the space that we’re talking about right now. But it’s sort of twofold. Like when I sent you the link before and you’d mentioned it doesn’t really look like something you’d use. So on the one hand, I want to hear about that really actually love to hear about that. And also, part of it is to just see if we’ve even communicated what XJ is or does.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah, that was gonna be my first question is like, can you explain to me what it does better? Because I’m not actually sure I was catching it entirely. Cool.

Nick Charney Kaye
From the top. It’s two pieces very similar to something like FMOD, there’s a desktop workstation where you work composing music, and then there’s a runtime and we’re working on getting the runtime down into this little C++ playback module that is as portable as possible. So actually, one possible use might be if you’ve got a team that’s doing all of the effects for a game and FMOD, you would use XJ music just as a plugin.

Gordon McGladdery
Okay.

Nick Charney Kaye
All the music is coming from just this one voice in there. And then within the workstation in terms of what XJ is as a music system. It’s actually really similar to a lot of the things you were just describing where it’s not generating music for you. It’s even confusing to be in a world now where, like generative AI is rampant right. And that’s the the main thing that this gets misinterpreted as, but no, you really is for handcrafted music. It’s something like you said, you write a great song, and then you work from there. And whether it’s stems is how some people think about it, or just like a more atomic level, taking your percussion loops and getting them in there, all the different background sounds and, and we have different modes of the instruments and programs that you can use within XJ whether you want to work more in terms of loops, or you want to have things that are triggered on chords, but it’s really it’s a toolkit for specifically representing music, and then playing it back dynamically where it’s kind of a setup of like memes or tags that you send from the game to the engine to tell it where where to be in your composition, and then an intensity slider that you’re using to just like activate and deactivate layers.

Gordon McGladdery
Okay. And so you’re composing in XJ. Yeah, I mean, in the sense, so not in the DAW?

Nick Charney Kaye
You’re gonna still have a DAW.

Gordon McGladdery
Okay.

Nick Charney Kaye
Which I’m sure you do, right? What, side by side with FMOD?

Gordon McGladdery
Oh, yeah, no, I do the vast majority of my work, yeah, in Ableton.

Nick Charney Kaye
Tight.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah.

Nick Charney Kaye
Yeah, it’s just once you get to the point of implementing it-

Gordon McGladdery
Tight.

Nick Charney Kaye
Yeah, that we’re hoping to give composers a toolkit that is like very music specific. So you don’t have to hack a lot of the same things together.

Gordon McGladdery
Makes sense. So in XJ, I’d be bringing my loops and my files in. And then I saw the interface. I think one of the things I like about FMOD is that and this is again, like my brain maybe not being the perfect match is like I’m I do very poorly with abstraction. Yeah. Like I could never what’s what are the things that chip musicians obviously is, like, FamiTracker.

Nick Charney Kaye
Oh, trackers,.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah, trackers, like, I can’t, I can’t hack that stuff.

Nick Charney Kaye
Got it.

Gordon McGladdery
Like, if I can’t see like, the waveforms that are playing and like the MIDI notes that you’re playing on a pretty linear scale, like I get lost very quickly. Is there are there plans for like that kind of visualization? Or is it looked like it was quite a matrix-y, modular remembering which part is which thing. And mixing them accordingly in real time?

Nick Charney Kaye
That’s interesting and really cool bit of feedback. In one sense. Yes. So the interface that we’ve been demoing so far, and is just this kind of playback mode, like The Matrix, the look is almost like a debugger where you’re right, just seeing like all the layers playing at once. And you’re seeing the way that XJ’s like fabricating these segments of music one at a time. Yeah, there are other modes in the workstation. And it’s stuff that we’re actually just banging the last kinks out of, and are looking forward to demoing. But that bit of feedback is really cool in terms of thinking more and more about how we can show all the pieces working together in that mode and not just let’s say a beat.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah.

Nick Charney Kaye
Because right now it’s sort of program by program.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah it is definitely a my my brain and not all brains thing, but it is a lot of brains maybe, or some some brains. Because why is this sort of similar? And that’s one of the reasons I’ve, I wouldn’t say I’ve shied away because it’s never actually the opportunity has arisen, but their dynamic music system is also a little bit more abstracted than FMOD, you know, doesn’t look as much like a DAW in Ableton, like I don’t even ever use session view I only use view. Right even Session View is like too much for how my head works.

Nick Charney Kaye
That’s cool. Definitely makes sense. Well, yeah, I mean, along that lines what you were talking about, just like your process, and I see you’re sitting in the studio, you’ve got instruments behind you. And I don’t know, music is human, it comes from this place of wanting to just express yourself freely and not be hindered by the tool. So yeah, that is interesting. Like you said, you work starting in Ableton why question would just be like what other tools have you use there? Sort of How did you arrive at that?

Gordon McGladdery
At Ableton?

Nick Charney Kaye
Yeah.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah, I’ve been using it since probably 2008-2009. Before that, I wasn’t you know, really into it. I was just messing around. didn’t know anything about engineering but going all the way back to Fruity Loops, I think.

Nick Charney Kaye
Cool Edit!

Gordon McGladdery
Cool Edit Pro was my first one. Of course not actually pro because it was pirated. Fruity Loops. I think I started on Fruity Loops 2. Well, FL now of course have tinkered with Cubase then Reason yeah, I was I was dabbling in Reason and around the same time I got into Ableton I was messing with reason. So I was doing a bit of rewire and things there but yeah landed landed on Ableton that’s what I do all my composition but I use Reaper for any sound design stuff and I use it for mastering.

Nick Charney Kaye
Reaper?

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah

Nick Charney Kaye
Reaper sort of has this other side life has been something that tracker people are really into right is that that’s just like a different mode different view mode it has?

Gordon McGladdery
It’s for more technically focused people like it’s a steep learning curve. But it’s you can customize it so much. It’s really popular in the game audio sound effects community, because you can make it incredibly efficient. And that’s that’s why I use it for mastering is because the filtering options in the export, they have a render matrix for exporting, where you can basically just you only have to hit export once and everything comes out named. Whereas in Ableton when I’m mastering, I have to export everything individually, and I have to name it name every file individually, similar with with Pro Tools even as well. So for when you’re doing sound effects, if you’ve got a sound effects session that you just designed 50 assets for. Yeah, there’s almost no other choice. But it’s, once you know about it, you know, there are ways you can like, you know, bounce in place in Pro Tools, and then whatever was Command K to just export the highlighted groups and stuff. But it’s still, Reaper just makes things a lot faster on that front. And yeah, there’s some other cool mastering things to do with it depends on how you lay out your mastering sessions. Like I like to have a track with one track per song with the same chain on it, but I’ll make some tweaks to the chain. And that can drive up the CPU a lot. And Reaper makes it pretty easy to automate just shutting off shutting off the chain if it’s not actively playing anything, that kind of stuff. So, yeah, it’s a great DAW.

Nick Charney Kaye
Do you use that also, like working with music assets? How much have you found that those same kind of workflow problems come up there?

Gordon McGladdery
Since when I’m writing for games, like the songs kind of trickle out like one by one, so I don’t have to export a bunch of stuff at once. So I’ll have all my raw raw assets. And then they’ll also be in game, just not mastered in game I like to leave everything till the end of the game, and then master everything and when passing makes the cohesion easier to achieve. Because I haven’t forgotten what I’ve done. Because, you know, game developments can take years. But also I’ve like gotten better at things. So I started the mastering session two years ago, and then I am finishing it now. I have to redo it anyway. So I will Yeah, just go through all my sessions, bounce out everything, bring it all into Reaper for mastering. And then because it’s dynamic music a lot of the time you know, even if it’s a 20-30 song soundtrack, like the dynamic pieces will be hundreds of files. So I have to add makes that a lot more efficient as well, that bouncing process.

Nick Charney Kaye
Got it? Do you save the implementation part in FMOD for last after that? Or would you have a rough version of that?

Gordon McGladdery
I’ll have everything implemented, but it will be implemented as raw files. So the music will have to be will have to be remixed in FMOD afterwards. But since I’ve mastered it and the loudness is all good, now, it should be able to just grab one level for all and apply that to every track. But usually that won’t be up to me, that’ll be up to the audio director to actually do the mixing. So not my problem, right? It tried to not make it a problem either.

Nick Charney Kaye
Music has to get folded into this larger problem with like the whole game mix and the leveling.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah, that’s another thing I like doing with FMOD, and that’s just another getting a toolkit thing is, and I do it a lot in my music mixing now too, is just using a whole lot of side chaining to create these hierarchies. And, within an FMOD, if I’m an audio director on an F on a game, I can, you know, put VO at the very top of the hierarchy and it can compress every track below it. And music is actually kind of like, fourth a lot of the time because your view is more important than your music, your your key sound effects are more important than your music, your HUD and UI is more important than your music. So while we all as composers think music is like really great, it can’t be in the top of the mix. A lot of a lot of things are more important for player communication. But then using that side chaining hierarchy, you know, if you do it right and ever really sounds like the music is getting turned down that much. And it’s nice and reactive. It doesn’t preempt. It works well, you know, not unlike wise does with what’s it called? HD something system.

Nick Charney Kaye
That’s cool. Yeah, you know, the question for us is what’s it going to take to just get a few very talented people to try this crazy thing that we built? You know?

Gordon McGladdery
Oh, I think a lot of people will be interested in trying. My question I remember that I’d forgotten before was from what I saw in the demo. It’s definitely relies more on the generative even though it’s not it’s playing your music, but it’s you know, it’s generating new combinations of things. Myself and a lot of people I know, we actually demand a great deal of control over when things happen. Within game, there are certain parts of the game where the generative aspect is, is desirable and wanted long periods of open worlds menu things all depends on the menu. Because sometimes the menu is like important to convey the theme song. Whereas other parts, like we really want to get the hook to drive that into the players brains. And if we’re assembling things semi randomly, it can be harder to find that hook. And I’m wondering if Yeah, what your thoughts are on that, or if there are plans for that?

Nick Charney Kaye
Well let Jamal respond to that first. I have some specific thoughts, too.

Jamal Whitaker
Even just in the last couple of months, as we’ve been working on the extra music workstation, I think we’ve implemented a lot of different aspects of control. Whereas, you know, maybe even six months ago, there was more focus on the generative music side of things. Yeah. Right now on the demonstration that I’ve been putting together, as we head up into GDC, and everything, all the events surrounding that, and want to like show the workstation off, we’ve just been doing a lot of work, like I said, on just really getting the ability to maintain that control. If you want to have sections of your game where you have, it’s just strictly reliant on generative sounds and generative music, we can totally do that in the workstation. And then if you want pretty much total control, I think, is that right attorney, we’ve got so many systems that we’ve been just in the last couple of months that we’ve put together that it really enhancing that control. Yeah,

Nick Charney Kaye
I think that nails it. Over this journey of the last few years, where we started off was more of this novel, kind of, it’ll surprise you, right, as a composer, and every piece of feedback has led in the other direction of what you’re saying. It’s like, no, we’ve got a really specific idea of what we want, the piece that we’re solving is just to make it dynamic with what the player is doing, right? And then I’d say there’s the minor details where maybe instead of having one transition, I know I’ve been playing cyberpunk the new Phantom Liberty expansion recently, and loving that. And it’s like this massive game that they put a huge amount of effort into. And yet every single time that I’m triggering combat, the lead in is just exactly the same. Yeah, you know, I’m thinking, Well, we know exactly where we’re going and when we’re going there. But maybe there’s eight different versions of that transition that you uploaded, and they’re not going to be used at random, wherever there’s just eight different options for that specific moment. And different intensity levels. That’s really what we’ve been focusing on now. It’s like, you do have total control over what’s being used when you really just have this option of providing a bunch of different options for, you know, individual pieces, and it’s mostly stuff like transitional sounds, maybe perk loops. Whereas a hook to your point, that’s gonna be something that you have the most control over. Maybe you just have like three different renditions of something that different intensity levels. But yeah, control has really been the whole direction that that’s gone into talking to video game composers.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah, I could see that for sure. I’d be curious to see how that’s progressing.

Nick Charney Kaye
Cool. We’re continuing to work on it. We’re going to be at GDC. I don’t know. Are you coming down for GDC?

Gordon McGladdery
Yup!

Nick Charney Kaye
Nice. we’ll holler at you and see where you’re at for that. There’s some events that are hosted by SF game development here in Jordan shoots that we’re going to be at, we’ll communicate ab out all that. But I know you’re super busy dude, and won’t keep you any longer. But it’s really been a pleasure speaking with you, and thanks for sharing your thoughts and your background on this.

Gordon McGladdery
Yeah. Nice to chat with you guys, too. And yeah, see you in San Francisco. Sweet.

Jamal Whitaker
Awesome. Thank you so much, man.

Gordon McGladdery
Cheers, guys.

(music: outro)

Nick Charney Kaye
If you’re interested in realizing new possibilities and background music for video games, live streaming or environments, get at us. Here at XJ, we believe music is human.

Jamal Whitaker
Something that artists can even dream of. Now it’s at our fingertips.