Being engaged in the gaming process, you may not even realize how important the music and sound effects are for creating an overall atmosphere to the slot game.
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If you have ever wondered what it takes to create quality music for casino games, take a look at these five essential steps.
Songwriting
You won’t have anything to work with and improve if there is no good core. Keep in mind that songwriting is a creative process. You cannot do it using only the predefined patterns if we are talking about a unique track, of course.
Imagine yourself as a sculptor. You have to work with some material and tools. Material for such work as songwriting is rhymed lines, fragments of melodies, and ideas. They arise spontaneously and may go just as quickly. Therefore, the majority of songwriters use tools like recorders or a sheet with a pen to make notes of the results of their inspiration.
The music should match the theme and spirit of the game. However, there is a golden rule – music must not distract attention but rather help players immerse themselves in the game even more.
Arrangement
Now you need to correlate a piece with style. You decide on a rhythmic pattern, determine the tempo, think over dynamic development, choose the instruments and write the right parts for them. If the sounds of music turn into a mess, which even mixing cannot fix, it would be better to review them again.
Even if you are working on a track for an online casino game, knowing at least the basics of music theory will certainly not hurt. The more you know about music, the easier it will be to detect unnecessary things and cut them out of your arrangement.
As a rule, you do not need vocals in the background tracks of casino games. If you do plan to implement them, you need to pay extra attention to their quality. When composing an arrangement, each element added should be harmoniously combined in the final track. Otherwise, it will be annoying rather than complimentary.
Tracking
It is no secret that any complete musical product consists of many separately recorded and formed parts called tracks. Tracking means laying out the song before you can record it. In other words, it is creating tracks for all the instruments used in the song. Now you have an idea of where everything in the song is.
The first thing you want to do when tracking a song is to create a new session. It means you should have it ready.
Then, you create all the instrument tracks for that session. It can be a bass, drums, guitar, piano, etc. When using multiple mics for one instrument, you want to create a separate track for every input that you do on the song. You can always add more later, but it is nice to have them all in front of your eyes.
And finally, you should play through the song once, do a live version of how you want to record it. You can use that track as a reference. Later on, go back and put all the parts in the right places. Do not give up if it is not yet as you want. Or if you made some mistakes.
Digital Editing
You cannot even imagine how lucky you are living in the 21st century with all the technologies that simplify both your day-to-day life, as well as everything to do with creating music. Back in the day, if you wanted to make any changes to the track, you had to physically cut the parts of the tape you needed, which means there was no way to do it without changing the way it sounded originally.
Nowadays, thanks to digital editing, anybody can make corrections an endless number of times. There are lots of digital editors on the market. Choose the one that will work the best for your needs and preferences.
Mix and Master
Mixing and mastering are the cherries on top of your song. The main goal of mixing is to create overall high-quality audio, where everything is perfectly balanced. Thus, a mixing engineer mixes all the elements, eliminating any conflicts and adding what is lacking to create an organic composition.
Overall, mixing is all about building the volume balance between individual instruments, eliminating unnecessary side-tones, noises, recording defects, etc. Mastering, on the other hand, implies working on the already mixed song, with no possibility of making changes to its elements.
The goal of mastering is to correct possible errors occurring while mixing, make the sound better and prepare the song for being published or used for different purposes, including casino games. Any changes made during the mastering stage must not be drastic. If any are required, you’d have to take a step back to the mixing stage to work everything through once again.