Making My Own Music (Inside Video Game Music)IVGM 003 - Tim Shiel, Nay – Duet
Originally posted on October 11, 2014 In this episode, I talk with Tim Shiel, a composer from Melbourne Australia who wrote the Duet soundtrack. We talk about his song Nay. In my interview with Tim Shiel, we cover the following: His musical background playing grunge music in high school, and then releasing music under the name Faux Pas How he toured with Gotye in 2011 and 2012 for the Making Mirrors tour The five-minute video of Gotye and Tim made by Abelton about how they used the software during live shows His radio show Something More on Double J (now triple j) How he went from wanting to get into game music to getting the Duet soundtrack gig Inspired by Indie Game: The Movie and Jim Guthrie’s story which led to meeting the folks from Kumobius The Duet game, and how it appeals to hard-core gamers and to casual gamers Tim made a lot of Duet sounds on the OP-1 from Teenage Engineering He uses a Nord Stage 2 as his MIDI controller as well as use the Nord sound library The music for Duet is laid-back “atmospheric” dance music. Tim talks about getting it to fit into the game, to sound decent on an iPhone speaker but great on headphones, and to stand alone as a soundtrack album Tim talks about making the loops long (three to five minutes) with different sections I briefly talk about the form of Nay. After having the “A” note in the bass for the whole song, near the end there is two measures of F and two measures of G before returning to A. Tim talks about the tension-release I then played “Nay” Tim talks about the “rewind” sounds that play when your red or blue game balls hit a block He used a reverse reverb trick on the voiceover with a lot of side-chain compression Some of Tim’s favorite games include the Mass Effect series, Pool of Radiance (Commodore 64). He really likes the music on Rymdkapsel (music by Niklas Ström) Tim’s latest EP is called Time Shield available at timshiel.bandcamp.com (as well as many other releases). He is now working on the soundtrack for GameLoading: Rise Of The Indies, a feature-length documentary film and with a project called Telling with Ben Abraham Is there a game composer you’d like to hear from? Let me know and I will reach out to them for an interview. Email tsnivelymusic@gmail.com. You can hear my music at TomSnively.com on the Music page. You can try Match Em and Molecular Music Box by finding the links on tomsnively.com.
