Jamey Scott: A Studio To-Die-For, A Musical Journey To Live For
‘MUSIC TO MY EARS’: The work of Jamey Scott
Music for animation or video games calls for unique skills and abilities, such as those of successful composer Jamey Scott. What goes into those fantastic sounds you enjoy when playing your favourite video game? Why is music for animation different than live-action film scores? And what does it take to succeed in this competitive creative arena? Here is a look at how Jamey does his thing.
Once you are on composer Jamey Scott’s website at http://www.jameyscott.com you can hear a 10-minute sample of his music playing in the background. The encounter will quickly convince you that Jamey is a musical talent to be reckoned with. Driving beats with ruby-throated synth-tones, cascading-, symphonic-, or classical form modalities with a live-orchestra sound in crystal-clear qualities of horns and strings, thematic styles and genres, moods of humour, multi-cultural, Country Western, Hard Rock, and layered textures of sounds that evoke the “Spy Spoof”-films of the 60’s as easily as a modern game show theme or a swing-band—it’s a “Tour de Force” of the talent and skills of Jamey Scott. Those are the same skills that Jamey has put to work in numerous popular video games and animated shorts, making him a sought-after contributor for all kinds of projects.
Scott, in his mid-30’s, is at a time in his life when many years of work and study are blossoming into a career to be envied. Educated at San Diego State University in California, where he played with the jazz band and created compositions and arrangements for jazz performances, the composer’s traditional background in pen-and-paper musical notation preceded computers by a number of years.
“My training was traditional,” he explains. “I started before computers facilitated the process, with notation and live orchestra. For me, the artistic revolution came in the analog world of pen-and-paper. I could score a symphony in my head, without having to touch any computer.” The artist admits that working with computers provides immediate creative gratification. Proficient himself on keyboards, guitar, drums and other instruments, (such as a MIDI wind controller), he still insists on hiring skilled performers for many projects. “There is no substitute for a trained musician,” he explains. “Musicians bring music to life.”
The result for the past 12 years has been music for video games like Jak3, Enter the Matrix, Myst 3: Exile, Whacked!, Star Trek: Hidden Evil, The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time, Shadowbane, Unreal Tournament 2003, and many others. In addition, Jamey Scott is a multiple Emmy award-winning composer for animation, film, and television, and has provided music for very popular short-form animated projects like ‘Eternal Gaze’ by animator Sam Chen, Brian Taylor’s ‘Rustboy’, ‘Vacant Planet’ by Chris Neuhahn, and many others. “I make my money in games, and then I play in animation,” he says. “My primary interest in animation is artistic rather than financial.”
The newly constructed 5.1. surround theatre is Jamey’s second home and full equipped mixing and recording facility, located in Burbank, California. The studio features Chris Pelonis’ custom designed loudspeakers and amplifiers, a ProTools HD2 production DAW, an isolated machine room and a comfortable instrument recording booth.
Considering himself a ‘sound engineer’ or ‘recording artist’ as well as a composer, Scott adds that an efficient, comfortable work environment is very important for the success of his projects. With a ‘to-die-for’ studio of his, he does a lot of work ‘in the box’, meaning he does not use a lot of out-board mixers and so on, instead creating much of what he does on four powerful computers that have all his tools, hence reducing the computer to a sheer recording medium. The result – a creative system that is highly functional and flexible for almost any kind of application. “My studio has tremendous acoustic accuracy, ensuring that what I hear from my speakers when I’m mixing music will sound good everywhere,” he commented.
The music and the magic – The music for “Daxter”
Whether working in live-action films, animation or video games, a composer must be able to create music in a wide variety of styles, yet each being original, and of the highest quality.
“Music for video games is sometimes more narrow in it’s emotional range,” Scott says. Currently working on a popular title for the new Sony PSP, the composers’ music for the video game “Daxter” is a big responsibility. “We’re talking multi-million dollar budgets,” he said. “The music has to be taken seriously, as seriously as any feature film with comparable budgets.” As such, a big part of his ob is to create a ‘musical identity’ for the characters and the entire game experience. While a lot of games which may have a combat or battle-theme feature music that may be a driven, Hard Rock sound, “Daxter” needed to be comical, yet suspenseful with mystery and an action-packed pose. “I had to come up with something unique,” Jamey said. “Because Daxter is kind of a comical character.”
Musical moments or motifs in a video game are ‘cycled’ and repeated during different parts of game-play, in comparison to a straight-forward score for a film or animated short. For every action the player may make, the music will respond, so in a way the guy with the control-pad playing this or other games is also tapping into components of the music, and participating in it, which theoretically would be different every time the game is played.
For Daxter, a ‘palette’ of 80 minutes of original music was recorded within the timeframe of six months, and was broken down into components, yet all thematically linked by things like the phrasing of a melody, or a certain string sound, etc. The key goal here is to create an experience that doesn’t get too monotonous.
A certain amount of programming skill on his part is also helpful, because you have to be able to take your musical creation and translate that into a real-time, interactive experience which can only be done through logic scripts and sometimes even new code creation.
“Games and animation are a very different world,” Scott explains. “There’s a lot of technology involved in games that you don’t have in a linear animation. Because of the interactivity factor, music for games is very complicated. Each game is different, because each developer has different resources and I have to work to the strengths of the technology of a game.”
For example, most developers have to deliver a game within a specific time frame and they have to make the best decisions for the game by allocating their programming resources to where they think they’ll get to that delivery with the most flair. „Usually, audio is a pretty straight forward proposition for a game, but the refinement of an audio and music engine takes an amazing amount of design and creation,“ Scott clarifies. “Usually, a developer opts for less refinement in the audio realm and chooses to allocate programming resources towards the visuals. The superior developers understand that the refinement of audio is a worthwhile investment and they allocate resources appropriately. Many others are ok with a more remedial effort in the audio because they believe that their investment in gameplay and graphics will have a higher payoff.
This is somewhat true, but as games evolve and become more experiential, more cinematic, more of a virtual reality in execution, we’re seeing a lot more effort being put into the refinement of the audio engine. Obviously, it’s making a big difference in the ultimate experience of the games so developers are beginning to bring more to the audio table.“
Short animation projects – a special thrill
One of the projects Jamey Scott is specially proud of is the 16-minute short “Eternal Gaze” by Sam Chen, which was nominated in the Best Animated Short Oscar Category 2004. “The film had a very unique style and was inspired by the life of post-modern Swedish sculptor Alberto Giacometti,” Scott remembers. “Sam just kind of got inspired by his art and wrote this wonderful story. Because there’s no dialogue, I had to tell the story in music. I think it’s a great piece of art.”
Finally “Eternal Gaze”, which took three years to complete, received the 2003 Siggraph Electronic Theatre Award.
A more current project for the composer is Brian Taylor’s “Rustboy”, a popular work-in-progress animation, that work will take at least another year to complete. “It’s really early in the game, but I’m very excited to be involved with it,” Scott says. “I’d really like to stay in animation. But if I got into live-action scoring, that would be really fun and fulfilling as well. A lot of projects I work on, because they’re independent, have a lot of creativity and heart in them and it’s a thrill to be involved on these projects. I hope that I continue to work on projects with this level of artistic integrity whatever form that may take.”
The inspiration and creative process for music does not always involve sitting at a computer, or even a keyboard, “I always start everything with a melody, and how I come up with that melody varies. Usually, I take a walk with my dog and work things out in my head. If you start it as something that you are singing to yourself, it’s much more likely to make sense,” he continues.
Composing for animation, games or live-action, is very competitive. Jamey Scott’s advice for the beginner who may wish to work in the video-game or animation music world sounds like a lot of other successful artists: “learn the craft, and love the craft instead of necessarily seeking only money. Pay scale for the games is great, but the starving-artist crowd who make independent animated shorts, though brilliant, are sometimes less financially endowed. There’s a huge amount of disappointment if you want to be a composer. Just do it for the art and not for the money, because the money is not that good. But it can be.”
And when it is, and the project is successful both as art, and commercially, that’s music to everyone’s ears.
Q&A with Jamey Scott
Interview by Tulay Tetiker
Even though they seem to be similar, they demand special skills of the composer.What are the differences between music for video games and a motion picture soundtrack?
The differences can be extreme. Many games are highly served by having music that is adaptive in nature and responds appropriately to the events which occur on-screen. To this extent, music must be composed linearly, but with a horizontal implementation in mind. Contrarily with films, a composer can sit down and write music that will serve the function of an individual scene or sequence of scenes and never concern him/ herself with whether what he/ she has written will work in a multitude of largely unpredictable possibilities.
In a game, you’ll never be able to predict a sequence of events to play out the same way twice, so you need to prepare the music to conform to all of the possibilities and implement it using tools that allow it to change over time based on what series of events occur on-screen. It¹s a difficult task to master and in this area, experience and technical knowledge are the only factors that allow a composer to achieve this with a reasonable amount of flair. A film composer who is asked to provide this type of user experience for a game frequently fails in his/ her attempts and usually opts for a less interactive solution, which compromises the potential a game can ultimately offer. While many game developers think that hiring a film composer is a great way to achieve a high-quality musical score to their game, they frequently underestimate the differences between composing linearly vs.
composing horizontally and end up with music that while may sound good, fails to serve the function of the game. On the flip side, scoring to film usually requires much more sensitivity and the ability to evoke emotion which requires a much more refined musical sensibility than the typical action based music required for the activity-oriented nature of games. Each approach is different and requires great aptitude.
How do you start working on a game score?
To me, the most important aspect of a good game score is to define “the sound”. When you think of successful examples of music and media, there’s always a definitive sound which you associate with that media. The sound of James Bond is very distinct and differs greatly from the sound of Star Wars, or Gladiator, to use examples that have an undeniable sound of their own.
For each game that I work on, I have to completely redefine myself as a composer and come to the game with a great deal of conceptual forethought in this area. I ultimately bring my style and flair to whatever kind of music I’m writing, so things usually sound like “me”, but I can do new things that have a completely different sound and define that sound appropriately for the task at hand. With Daxter, I had the luxury of a lot of forethought. I was working at Naughty Dog on Jak3 and I got 7 months to really delve into the world of Jak & Daxter. I got to see what was working musically and what wasn’t and I had a long period of intimate knowledge to determine what I would like to do with Daxter. When it came time to start writing the music, I pretty much hit the ground running with a very unique style of writing that will be the establishing (and hopefully) definitive “sound” of Daxter.
At what stage of the game are you starting your work? Are you looking at game sketches, reading the story to get inspiration…?
Yes, I typically get started very early on. I work from sketches and tech demos and then refine as the game becomes complete. I prefer to work throughout the development cycle and I’ve been fortunate to have opportunities where I can do that, but it’s not always the case. Frequently it’s a last minute throw-in kind of thing and the games sometimes suffer because of this, but I’ve never worked under those kinds of conditions. I try to associate the compositions with the themes of the levels, but a lot of times it doesn’t always have to be that specific. “The sound” is what is most important and coming up with an appropriate library of effective music is generally more important than catering to specific environments.
Do’s and Don’ts for a game composer
Do come to games with an open mind and don’t bring the typical film mentality to the process, which is almost entirely artistic. Game music requires a very technical approach in addition to the art and efforts frequently evolve through experimentation. Sometimes, you have to totally realign your sound and remake it appropriate as the game changes shape, which they always do. Making music interactive requires time and effort. You can’t just throw up your arms and let your ego get in the way of the effort.
No matter how good you are, life always brings new challenges and making games is a very fertile plane for new and creative ideas. Don’t think you can float by on artistic merits alone because you’ll ultimately get frustrated and disappointed.
With today’s smart technology it is possible to provide pre-arranged soundtracks with the ability to react to a game players actions and decisions in not time. Could you please explain the interactive approach to orchestra music for a video game?
Using an orchestra in the traditional sense is being done more and more frequently but we’re in an experimental phase in terms of how it should best be done to make it interactive and everyone is going with a different approach. For me, I record orchestral instruments, but not all set up in the same room at the same time. I multi-track the elements so that I can keep melodies separate from rhythms which gives more flexibility to chop things up and make them work within a script so that they evolve in real-time. The difficulty in using orchestral music is making it transition at any given time which is a lot more complex than “stop song here, play next song”. The seamless factor is were it gets involved and excruciatingly complex and you need to factor that in as you’re composing and record everything in layers and pieces so that you can make those transitions work programmatically.