If sound for video games is the new film sound, mixing games live takes FOH someplace it’s never been before
Part rock concert, part “Let’s Make A Deal” live, part religious experience, Video Games Live is a 135-minute-long amalgamation of the scores and songs from popular video games performed by an orchestra and a choir and set to both preprogrammed and random game playing on a massive video screen. Perhaps the best analogy would be Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show of the late 19th century, which sought to recreate the environment of the frontier west as a traveling circus.
What VGL and its cofounder, games music composer and sound developer Tommy Tallarico, have managed to do is take the immersive and often solitary act of playing a video game and make it a group grope. Monty Hall would have trouble picking out the best costumes as attendees — audiences routinely number in the thousands per show — vie to get picked to play a few minutes of a game on the jumbo screen as the huge musical ensemble beneath it (The Kennedy Center show in Washington, D.C. last year had a 66-piece orchestra and a 20-voice choir) labors to follow the unpredictable action of the game.
A game audio developer will tell you that what sets the sound of games apart from the movies they increasingly resemble is the fact that in films, the music and SFX are locked to the linear progression of the narrative; in games, however, the narrative is what the player creates in the course of play: If there are three doors to choose from, the music is going to be different behind each one.
“It’s not a rock concert, it’s not a classical music concert, it’s all of those things at one point or another every night,” says FOH Mixer Matt Yelton, who has mixed the show for most of its three seasons, starting in 2006 with what he called “a true baptism of fire” at the Civic Auditorium capping the annual Video Game Conference in San Jose, Calif., the Silicon Valley epicenter of gaming technology. Yelton thinks his long-time mixing of the Pixies and its lead singer Frank Black positioned him well for the VGL gig. “Clean and loud is what I did with the Pixies,” he explains. “Lots of dynamic shifts. I’m not a static mixer — I don’t just put up the faders and tweak them. I’m playing the console like a piano.”
That console will vary — VGL’s lighting and video take up an entire Theatrical Media Services semi-trailer, so Yelton works with the venues’ FOH desks, which also handle the monitor mixing. When he does get a digital console, like the Yamaha PM5D, he can load the shows’ moves from a flash drive; on analog boards, he gets a physical workout. “Digital is great for orchestral mixing because you don’t need analog outboard to warm up the sound — the nature of the instruments and the hall do that,” he explains.
In fact, many classical recording engineers would gasp at the notion of mixing an orchestra, an organic entity that is intended to balance itself under the guidance of a seasoned conductor. But VGL brings in the elements of rock music and sound effects and thickening pads used with smaller orchestras, stored on a hard drive and played through a DoReMi front end. “You try to treat a symphony orchestra like a drum kit, as one continuous instrument,” Yelton explains. “You want to let the orchestra balance itself — these are very good musicians up there. But the show has other elements in it that need to be balanced with the orchestra. Then there are other things to consider: The audience is made up of parents, grandparents and kids. The kids want a rock mix and the older people want it to sound like a classical concert. That has to be balanced. Then there’s the politics and peculiarities of an orchestra. There are choirmasters and soloists who are incredibly talented, but who can approach diva level — someone wants an extra microphone here or there, or the vocal soloist who is usually operatic and doesn’t know how to stay on the [Shure] 58 to stay bal-anced with everything else going on. There’s much more to manage here than a rock show.”
Yelton is confronted with a new landscape every night (VGL is up to about 60 performances globally this tour): orchestras range from a low of 27 to over 70 musicians, with as many as 60 choir singers. His approach to microphones is the same, though: a pair of large-diaphragm condensers in front of the choir with two small-diaphragm condensers to the side, two small-diaphragm condensers placed in the center of the violins, violas miked with a pair of large-diaphragm condensers placed on either side of the section, brass and woodwinds caught by four small-diaphragm con-densers, French horns use a single Shure 57, and so on.
Yelton’s mic chart lists simply the type of microphone he would like the venue to place, not restricting the brand or model, though the piano does get specific. He asks for Schoeps 414, Neumann KM 184 for top and bottom, and a Shure Beta 91 or Barcus Berry PZM as a pickup. For certain instruments like the cellos and bass, Yelton will use Audio-Technica ATM35 clip-on microphones that he carries himself on the bridge. Shure 87 wireless systems are used on the conductor, the MC and the featured vocalist.
Microphones are placed on stands as low as possible over the musicians’ heads so as not to interfere with sightlines to the projection screen for the first few rows of seats. “One thing that sets this apart from a classical concert is that there is a lot more low end,” he says. “We’ll add a couple of subs to the system and mic the basses — the bassists love it.” But overall, he says, fewer microphones means less potential for phasing or feedback issues. (A PA also gives the orchestras a fighting chance against the crowd noise in some of the more enthusiastic game cities: “In Brazil, it was almost impossible to get the PA loud enough to get over the ‘soccer’ crowd,” he recalls.)
The hard drive stores prerecorded string and specialized synthesizer parts — “You just can’s ask a synthesizer to be able to do Wendy Carlos-types of sounds live,” says Tallarico — as well as a click track. All of the above are sent to the conductor’s podium and to each musician, who wears a one-eared headset that are hardly hi-fi. Tallarico says they bought them in bulk for $2 each. But all they really have to do is communicate to the musicians where in an often interactive and unpredictable program they’re supposed to be. Conductor Jack Wall wears a Sennheiser EW100ENGG2 lavalier microphone and using a set of pedals and an eight-channel Mackie mixer at the podium can route his comments to various sections of the orchestra. “If the oboe is falling behind, Jack can zero in and coax him,” Tallarico explains. It also allows Wall to determine what each section hears in their mix.
The music moves in linear fashion, like any other concert, until it gets to a point in the show where Tallarico brings up a couple of audience members to play a game in real-time on the huge screen. Since game play is anything but linear, the score for the interactive sections of the show are four folded pages instead of the usual two, and contain numerous codas to loop a 16- or 32-bar phrase for as long as a player is in a certain scene or level. Changes from one section to another are color coded and led by Wall with hand signals. For example, when they’re playing the classic game Frogger, the intro music happens only once, as the game is booted, then the orchestra starts with Level One music. “Jack is watching the play, and if the player dies, he cuts the music off,” says Tallarico. “There’s a little pause for the death scenes. If they make it to the next level, Jack counts it off and the orchestra plays the Level Two music. Just like in the games, each level and goal has its own score. If Jack makes a fist, it means the player’s won and the orchestra goes to Game Over music.”
The game Space Invaders ratchets the play up, with a prize of a laptop to whoever kills the most spaceships in a 1.5-minute play window. The mu-sic is simpler — only four notes played repeatedly — but the tempo changes reflect how the actual game operated. “The guy who created Space Invaders started with the tempo of the human heart rate, and as enemies get closer on the screen, there are eight levels of faster tempo that kick in,” Tallarico explains. “When they were play-testing the game they told me that the tempo would actually affect the players’ heart rates. We do the same on stage, but without the click. Jack is free-conducting the orchestra.”
The sound effects are also live, created by the orchestra. “The woodwinds and violins will do 1950’s sci-fi effects, like Theremin-like eerie sounds and random pizzicato,” says Tallarico. SFX is augmented with synthesized low-frequency drones used on the Halo section of the show, stored on the hard drive and sent via an aux to the subs, along with electronic percussion. The orchestra will get some of the prerecorded music in their moni-tor mix and Yelton will send some of it through the PA when necessary to, for instance, get a double effect on a smaller orchestra. (Some union orchestras prohibit the use of music backing tracks on the grounds that it threatens musicians’ jobs.) He’ll send the backing tracks to the choir for pitch.
While the SFX for the games is done live, there is little in the way of effects processing on the audio for VGL. Yelton will use a touch of reverb — a plug-in on a digital desk or a Lexicon 480 L or PCM 70 when working analog — on strings and the choir. For the choir, he uses four microphones in a straight array across the front the choir. But while the two inside microphones are large-diaphragm condensers, as might be expected, the two outside microphones — the sides nearest the orchestra — are Sennheiser clamp-on dynamics, which he says offer better backside rejection.
VGL has a few other unique things for the FOH mixer to deal with, like riding the MC’s narrative over the music and SFX. “It’s really a thing unto itself,” says Yelton. “It’s a rock show, it’s an orchestral show, it’s a game show. It’s a lot of fun to mix.”
