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Utah has developed expert re-sources in these spaces, so it’s no surprise that top video game titles like World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, Infinity Blade, Dun-geons and Dragons and many others are coming to Utah for their music.

“We’ve seen an exponentialincrease in the amount of video game music done in Utah over the past 5 years,” says Marshall Moore, Director of the Utah Film Commission. “Our talent and technical expertise are second to none. And with facilities like War-ner/Chappell’s LA East recording studio in town, we’re starting to attract a lot of attention.”

One of the most recent games to score in Utah was Heroes of Might and Magic: The Forgotten Wars, developed and published

by global gaming giant Ubisoft Entertainment ($1.5B annual rev-enue).

“We chose Salt Lake City be-cause of the beautiful music re-corded here over the years,” says Ubisoft’s Director of Audio Ser-vices, Aurelien Baguerre. “Lis-tening to the exquisite Riders of Rohan score recorded in Utah last summer really solidified the decision.”

Ubisoft asked Chance Thomas, who composed the Riders of Rohan score and has a track re-cord of producing award-winning music in Utah, to manage their recording process. “I’ve been re-cording in Salt Lake City for many years,” he said. “I also record in Los Angeles and Seattle, but some projects are just a better fit for the musical ecosystem here.”

MUSIC FOR VIDEO GAMES IS A HIGHLY SPECIALIZED FIELD, DEMANDING CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY, EXPERIENCED TALENT AND SUBSTANTIAL CAPITAL INFRASTRUCTURE.

WARNER/CHAPPELL PRODUCTION MUSIC IS OWNED BY LEGENDARY MUSIC PUB-LISHER WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC. The company unites successful independents Non-Stop Music, 615 Music, Groove Addicts, CPM, V–The Production Library and many more. With offices across the globe including Lon-don,Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Salt Lake City, Nashville, Hamburg and Stockholm in addition to world-class recording facilities in Nashville and Salt Lake City, Warner/Chap-pell Production Music’s brands have com-posed works for countless well-known TV shows, films, and companies, including the “Today” Show, ESPN, Disney, Capital One, DirecTV, British Open Royal & Ancient, World Cup South Africa, Motorola, Subway, Major League Baseball, Cox Communications, SPEED Channel and Volkswagen. Warner/Chappell Production Music brands are the recipients of many industry awards including multi-ple EMMY Awards, Telly, Addy and Promax

Awards.

More @ www.WarnerChappellpm.com

THE SECRET IS OUT. UTAH HAS THE EXPERT TALENT, FACILITIES AND EXPERIENCE FOR WORLD-CLASS MUSIC SCORING. THE GROWING TRACK RECORD IS EVIDENCE OF SUCCESS. YOU CAN SAMPLE THE RESULTS FOR YOURSELF BY LISTENING HERE: WWW.SOUNDCLOUD.COM/UTAHMUSICSCORING

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The symphonic nature of music in Might & Magic required finding an orchestra with deep experience in studio record-ing. There is a fundamental difference between an orchestra that gives an exhilarating live performance versus an orchestra that can deliver in the studio. Many orchestral musicians who sound wonderful onstage are totally lost in a recording session.

In the recording studio, musicians wear headphones carrying a metronome-like click and critical accompanying tracks. The musicians’ performance must match those tracks in intensity, timing and in-tonation. The Utah Film Orchestra has done thousands of such recording ses-

sions over the years. This depth of ex-perience ranks them among the most recorded orchestras in the world.

A spacious recording studio was needed with a beautiful resonant sound, vintage microphones and the latest recording equipment. Warner/Chappell recently set up shop near downtown Salt Lake. Their studio, known as LA East, has a large sound stage with a rich wooden resonance and all the top gear.

Ubisoft provided a music budget that was sufficient for live recording, but in a disciplined way without extravagance. This also played into the decision. Musi-cian, engineer and studio rates in Utah are among the lowest in America but still

provide a living wage because of the low cost of living.

With the composer, orchestra, recording studio and engineering team selected, it was time to move into production. The schedule allowed only five weeks from first written note to final mix. There was no room for error.

Thomas started by producing sophisti-cated mock-ups of each composition in his digital studio. “Think of a mock-up as the musical equivalent of an animatic,” he explains. “My writing studio has thou-sands of orchestral, contemporary and futuristic sounds for this – all accessi-ble at the click of a mouse and playable from a piano keyboard.”

The mock-ups take shape using a specialized scoring program from MOTU, a Cambridge Massachusetts technology company specializing in digital compo-sition tools. As musical ideas flow from the composer’s inspiration, digital sam-ples of violins, horns, timpani and bou-zouki fill the screen. Soon it sounds as if an entire symphony orchestra is playing alongside a Middle-eastern ensemble, with a chorus of baritones chanting in the background. Even this early in the process, the flavor and power of the score are becoming clear.

Ubisoft checks in with the composer on a regular basis to monitor progress. When the composition of each track is

MIGHT & MAGIC DUEL OF CHAMPIONS

Release date — March 23, 2013Developer — Ubisoft Quebec

Might & Magic Duel of Champions is an on-line strategy card game set in the fantastic Might & Magic universe. Choose a hero and build his army with Creatures, Spells and For-tune cards to defeat your opponents in epic battles. The unique Battleground of Duel of Champions creates an action-filled game-play that fits any style of players. Enter tour-naments, measure your strength against top players, earn gold and get new boosters for your deck!

MOTU

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts motu.com

MOTU is a leading developer of computer -based audio and video production hardware and soft-ware. MOTU was founded in 1980 and has been developing audio, video and music technology products since 1984.

Inspired by the Macintosh when it first appeared, engineers at MOTU developed one of the Mac-intosh's first music programs ever. Performer®, the music industry standard for MIDI sequencing, be-gan shipping in 1985.

MOTU products serve a wide range of users, from consumers to enterprise-level installations in mu-sic, broadcast, film, gaming and other entertain-ment industries.

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finished, Chance uploads it to the devel-opment team in Quebec for review, then starts on the next piece. Any requested changes are discussed by phone and In-ternet with revisions uploaded within the next day or two. In just under three weeks, the entire score is written and approved.

With composition complete, key digital data from each piece of music is trans-ferred into Pro Tools, an industry standard platform for recording, editing and mixing music. This transferal must be frame-ac-curate, as each piece of music may con-tain dozens of perfectly aligned virtual music tracks. Any imperfections in orien-tation will throw off the rhythmic balance and impact of the score. To keep things synchronized, the studio employs a pair of Apple’s MacPro towers slaved to an AVID SyncHD.

Sheet music preparation is also underway using another widely used software pack-age, Finale. Chance imports data from the MOTU program into each Finale file, transforming digital bits into staves and notes formatted like a conductor’s score. Articulations for each musician have to be input by hand, a long and tedious process. Louder, softer, smooth, abrupt, bowing type, bow position, bow direction, muted or unmuted, sectional divisions, etc. And that’s just for the strings. Woodwinds, brass, choir and soloists all require similar attention. Inputting the proper articula-tions insures that the musicians and sing-ers will accurately reproduce the compos-er’s creative ideas.

Behind the scenes, studio contractor Jenn Sprague has been steadily working the phones to bring together each of the

sixty-five talented musicians and singers requested for the upcoming sessions. The studio is booked for two full days of recording, with a few hours of overflow on a third day for overdubbing. Ubisoft Audio Director Aurelien Baguerre secures his flight so he can attend the sessions. Everything is set.

On the day of recording, Chance arrives at the studio early. Bass player Ben Hen-derson is already there, warming up with long, steady strokes. A film crew wan-ders onto the stage, checking the light-ing and staking out vantage points for a documentary about the making of this music score. Three stereo pairs of ex-pensive microphones are perched precar-iously high overhead, their cables joining dozens of others from sectional mics and headphones snaking across the floor. An assistant walks out and begins placing sheet music on stands while members of the orchestra start to file in.

Recording an orchestra and choir is an invigorating and pressure-packed situa-tion. With musicians, engineers and stu-dio time billable by the hour, every tick of the clock represents a sizable dollar amount. Time and money must be man-aged shrewdly. Likewise, the energy lev-el of the performers must also be closely monitored. Brass players and singers only have so many takes in them over a 3 hour stretch before their vitality starts to ebb. Having a veteran at the helm is critical.

The first session begins with a few words of introduction from the composer and an explanation about the nature and feel of the game. Keep in mind, none of the musicians or singers have seen or heard

a note of the music until that very day. Every musician in the studio must be an expert at sight reading. They run through the first piece twice and are ready to re-cord.

Contemporary recording processes allow any mistake in a musician’s performance to be fixed by performing only that part again. This procedure, called punching-in, keeps the previous performance until the engineer punches-in record mode. The new performance is recorded until the engineer punches-out of record, and the previous performance continues unin-terrupted. The process of recording and punching as necessary continues until the entire piece of music sounds flawless.

With recording complete, Chance takes all of the audio tracks back to his studio HUGEsound, and begins to edit each part of the score, track-by-track. By now there are hundreds of tracks to sort through, including playlists of multiple takes. The goal of editing is to find the best possi-ble take of all the various components and weave them together into the most cohesive and emotionally powerful per-formance. HUGEsound’s editing suite includes a pair of digital mixers, high-end studio monitors and a MacPro tower run-ning Pro Tools.

Even after all the tracks are edited, the music still needs to be mixed. Might & Magic was mixed at The Pod, a top mix-ing studio near downtown Salt Lake City known for chart-toppers like Kaskade, Late Night Alumni and Neon Trees. The studio is dominated by its large ATC mon-itors and racks of analog EQ’s, compres-sors and high-end pre-amps.

Lexicon’s flagship 960L controller sits prominently atop one of the racks. Yet, there is no mixing console in the studio. Only a comfortable padded chair and a track ball facing a large flat screen fas-tened to the wall. All mixing is done using Avid’s PT10 virtual mixing console dis-played on the screen.

The sound of the strings is sharpened with precision equalization and filtering. They’re sweetened with digital delays and reverbs. The brass section is split wide left and right across the stereo spectrum, with a doubling effect added to the French horns. Percussion tracks are run through compression algorithms in virtual plug-ins to pack more of a punch. The fretted instruments, woodwinds and choir all get their own similar special treatment in the mix. Pitch shifting, detuning, chorusing and a host of other effects and process-es shape and mold the nuances of ev-ery sound, striving to balance ear-candy impact with emotional resonance. Com-poser, mixer and audio director are all in-volved.

It’s a long process, but the final product is worth every effort. The music score is carefully encoded and uploaded to Might & Magic’s producer Stephane Jankows-ki. After listening to the entire score he writes back and gushes, “I just heard the mixed recordings, few seconds ago. Damn, it’s epic!”

The secret is out. Utah has the expert talent, facilities and experience for world-class music scoring. The growing track record is evidence of success. You can sample the results for yourself by listening here: www.SoundCloud.com/UtahMusicScoring

C H A N C E T H O M A SChance is a multiple award-winning composer, creative director and music producer. His music has underscored both professional honors and commer-cial success, including an OSCAR, an EMMY, several GANG Awards, and bil-lions of dollars in video game and film sales worldwide.

He is a passionate advocate for game music, having led the movement which first brought game music into the Gram-my Awards. He helped found the Game Audio Network Guild and the Music and Sound Peer Committees for the Acad-emy of Interactive Arts and Science. He speaks regularly at Universities, music schools and industry events on game music production and business topics. He serves on the Board of Di-rectors for G.A.N.G. and on the Audio Advisory Board for GDC.

FINALEFinale is the world-wide industry standard in music notation software. Anywhere music appears on the printed page, Finale likely created those pages. Finale helps the choir to sing, the band to march, the students to learn, and the orchestra to raise the excitement level in the latest blockbuster movie.