Interviews:SG1-Radio Talks to Nick LaMartina

From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)

Interview mp3 Transcript – by Khabarach

DJT: I would like to introduce you all to Nick.

NLM: Hi.

DJT: Ok, first question. What is your role at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment?

NLM: My role is to be sound designer. That basically means that I make music, sound effects and audio design features for Stargate Worlds.

DJT: That's quite in-depth, how's your workload when it comes to that?

NLM: It's pretty good. There's a lot of work to do on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. The thing that makes it a little easier for me is that I have the ability to switch on the fly, so that if I'm sick of doing music, I'll go to sound effects and if I'm sick of doing sound effects I'll do some more design documentation and back and forth like that.

DJT: It must actually be really good doing something that you really enjoy doing.

NLM: It is yes. I've done things for jobs in the past that I really didn't like, and that wasn't a lot of fun.

DJT: Ok, question 2. Could you walk us through an average day at CME?

NLM: Well, I usually come in at around 8 o'clock, because it's more empty and I like the peace and quiet of course. I'll spend anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour catching up on email, Mondays are usually worse because there's a lot of catching up to do. After getting that stuff out of the way, I'll go straight to documentation and review if there are any changes are necessary, checking my schedule to make sure that I have detailed enough for the week or the month or whatever milestone is coming up. It's then a matter really of either creating sound effects, writing music and taking ear breaks so that my ears can breath a bit in between.

DJT: hmm, I know how that is.

NLM: Yeah, I'm always in critical listening mode throughout the day and it can get fatiguing sometimes, so I take breaks to listen to music, to sort of settle down, then I'll have meetings and emails to respond to throughout the day. It's pretty much the same stuff each week, but the amounts that I do each day in each category changes frequently.

DJT: Personal question for me, I normally get through the day through a nice interesting lunch, food is important to me. What do you normally eat during the day?

NLM: Normally I eat some type of sandwich with meat and cheese. I was using some sort of sandwich sauce called 'good time' and I enjoyed that, but then I switched to some sandwich spread that had relish in it and it was horrible, I thought that the meat was going bad. So I'm no on mayonnaise. In most cases it's a meat sandwich with cheese, some Cheetos, white cheddar, naturals, and some type of goody and water.

DJT: How did you come by your job at CME?

NLM: Well previous to this, I was running my own recording studio with my wife, and we were doing a lot of recording and we loved that, but I wanted to do more commissions for writing. I did a couple and it was fun, it was great getting paid to do that sort of stuff, but we wanted to look at more options for outsourcing our work to video game studios. I was doing a lot of mods, and I was enjoying doing that, but I wanted to get paid to do it also. So we looked around to various companies, sent out a bunch of demos, then we found out that there was this new company somewhere in Arizona making a Stargate game, so we thought "Oh maybe we should check them out, we don't see any listings for needing that type of service, but it wouldn't hurt to contact them", it turned out they were looking for a full time sound person. It was sort of a hard decision leaving our business in Idaho and having to transition, but writing music is something that is almost a religious experience for me. It's something that I have to be doing all of the time, and to find the kind of fulfillment that required me to be writing music on a full time basis made that decision a lot easier.

DJT: It probably also helps that you enjoy Stargate as well.

NLM: Yes, I love sci-fi, and I've been waiting a long time for a really good science fiction MMO that goes beyond the "here's a fantasy MMO and we are going to slap some metal and weird shaders on it and call it good". I'm excited because it's something that will go in a new direction and have some genuine development as far as changing the game and making it something better than it was previously, so that's why it was such an easy decision.

DJT: What hardware do you use in your work, and are there any specific tools that you enjoy the most?

NLM: Well I use a workstation just like anyone else, except it's got a lot of fancy stuff in it, so 2 fast processors with dual core and 2 threads each, and that helps as well as my audio apps are multi-threaded. I also have a couple of sound cards, I've a sound blaster x-fi for certain types of applications, I've a Presonus Firepod for my monitoring, some Fostex speakers as my audio monitors, a Logitech DHX system for my surround monitoring, some headphones, so nothing really fancy. I don't personally require fancy stuff, because I'm a real believer in the virtual studio. Software wise I use the Sony Creative Suite, Acid Pro., Vegas, Soundforge, CD Architect, DVD Architect and a couple of mastering tools, as well as Sibelius for writing my manuscripts.

AJZ: <unintelligable>

NLM: Yeah and that's what I've grown up with, I've been using some of those applications for years and years, and it's just something that I can work very very quickly with, and with the kind of business and workload that I have, anything that can make me work faster is something that I want. Another great thing is that software sampling and virtual studio have come so far in the past few years that it's really reducing the need to do anything outside. The amount of realism that one can get with software alone is getting to the point where it really fools people. That's great as it narrows the gap between the really really expensive method where you go out and get your studios and full time orchestra players and record all of that business and then go and do the editing. Most people can't afford that kind of thing, but being able to leverage the support of sampling software is just amazing.

DJT: Out of all the different software packages that you currently use, which one would you say that you enjoy the most? It doesn't have to be sound related.

NLM: From a purely enjoyment point of view I would have to say Firefox. I enjoy reading forums of all different types and catching up on news and shopping online, so it's sort of a non-answer but that's the application that gets the most work out on my machine.

DJT: I can understand completely, I use Firefox myself.

<musical interlude>

DJT: How often do you browse the official Stargate Worlds forums?

NLM: Throughout the day. I don't want to call myself a forum junkie, but I kind of am. So anytime I'm taking a music break or any time I want to refresh I'll just poke around the forums. People don't usually mention audio too much, but I keep an eye on it, and having a finger on the pulse of what people are excited about and there are a number of issues, like if someone says "well what if the game does this thing?" or whatever. Sometimes I come up with audio solutions to their question.

DJT: Do the forums scare you at all?

NLM: Do they scare me? No, the forum I frequent the most is very very strict and you can be banned at a moments notice, so I'm used to the pressure I guess you could say.

DJT: Some people wanted to know the meaning behind your forum name AnimusSonitus.

NLM: Sure, it's a very sloppy Latin conjugation that basically means sound mind, or mind sound or brain sound, so Animus meaning mind or brain. I looked it up one time and though "oh this is cool" so basically the reason I named myself that is I always approach sound and music together from the perspective of neurobiology and neuropsychology, so that instead of just understanding "here's a cause and here's an effect", it's looking a little deeper and trying to understand why do these sort of things happen while listening to sound and how do we react to them on a very very small intimate scale. I feel that really helps me design certain features and it helps me write music to stimulate people in certain ways. It's just been an emphasis of mine for a very very long time so that's why I call myself that. Actually the avatar itself is a cutaway section of a brain and the little purple piece in the middle is an auditory cortex so it's just a goofy little thing.

DJT: So how many songs would you say you have done then, basically designed to pull on the heart strings?

NLM: Basically everything I write is that way. A lot of music composition is from the heart anyway, but I find that adding a little bit here or there like bumping this frequency or adding a delay or compressing a certain part, to add another layer of interest or intimacy to the music. Sometimes it's just an involuntary reaction of the listener and they know that this is interesting to me and compelling, but I don't necessarily know why and that's an area of success that I aim for.

DJT: What do you think of Dance Dance Revolution?

NLM: I will confess to owning a Dance Dance Revolution pad at home. Back a few years ago when I was still living in Idaho, I would go to the arcade with my friends with big huge bottles of water and bushels of bananas and stay there for hours. Yeah, I went through that phase.

DJT: Must have lost a lot of weight too.

NLM: I didn't have that much to lose in the first place, but my legs got a lot stronger I'll tell you that much.

DJT: Will there be sound in space?

NLM: I'm not at a point where I'm able to decide that sort of thing, but if I wanted to be totally realistic about it I would say that no there won't be sound in space, but at the same time that's something that is very foreign and some people will plague me like "what the hell is wrong with the sound on this thing, who designed this?". It's kind of tough, a lot of people are used to hearing sound in space, and actually I think Firefly for a while did not have sound in space I thought that was very interesting, but they had the music behind it. So it's a difficult question but I intend on fully exploring it at the proper time, which is not just yet.

DJT: What sort of sound recording instruments do you generally use?

NLM: I don't record any instruments into the machine other than my voice usually. I use the piano sometimes to do little reductive sketches, but as far as what instruments I use it's hard to be specific, just about anything I have in my library.

When I'm writing a piece of music, I'll turn to my left, my trusty Yamaha PSR and start dinking some stuff out and if it needs to be more complicated I'll be writing down chicken scratch on a piece of paper. When that's all ready to go, i'll turn to my right and start fleshing it out and orchestrating it in Sibelius where I can see the whole manuscript, and after there it's out to Acid and the other instrument programs that are plugged into there. It's a long process but it's enjoyable and it's second nature.

DJT: You used a very technical term there in your answer, dinking, would you like to go on and express the intricacies of what it means to be dinking along?

NLM: Well dinking along can mean many things of course. Primarily with my composition it will mean tapping the notes and waiting to hear something I like. I sort of have the approach that the music is already floating around and I just have to wait to listen to it at the right moment before I find what is actually interesting. The actual process is actually me pressing the keys and waiting until something jumps out at me, and then that's the direction to go, and then eventually a song comes out and if I don't like a certain section I'll go back and dink around a little bit more and I know that's wonderfully technical, but that's basically how it works.

DJT: What is it like to work with the rest of the team at CME?

NLM: It's great. Like I said I've had jobs in the past that I've not liked at all and mostly it's because the people that I was working with had different standards than I did in terms of the amount of effort they put in, or their thirst for new knowledge or different ways of doing things...there was a lot of complacency and that's the sort of thing I have a really hard time flourishing in. The thing that I love most here is that it's a building filled with intellectuals. Sometimes it can be quite intimidating working with people who are in this business longer than I've been alive but everyone is such a wonderful resource and they treat me with such an incredible amount of respect. It's great as a sound guy because in some situations you have to struggle to be yourself and to play it loud and not be bothered by that sort of stuff and as an audio guy I have to go to everybody for many different things and ask them "what do you require of me", "what are we going to be doing this week that you need from me" or "this is what I need from you" so there's a lot of communication that always has to be occurring. I find that the people here are always willing to have conversations, always to listen to more information and always willing to take care of things quickly. That's something that I think is essential to have in a good work group, that being willing to work quickly and address issues rather than ignore them and hope that the problem will go away so everyone is very proactive.

DJT: Do you have pleasant conversations around the water cooler?

NLM: We do actually, there are several of them distributed around the office, so on more than one occasion we will group around and chat about things if it's later in the day and we've got our stuff done, but yeah I'm holed up in my office so I don't have a lot of personal contact throughout the day unless I make the effort to initiate it. The people here are very open in conversation anyway, I find that most of us get more out of face to face conversation rather than just shooting IMs and email back and forth. Having that positive social dynamic is very powerful as a workplace.

DJT: Can you give us a feel for the direction you are taking for the dynamic mood setting music in game?

NLM: Well I'll certainly give you a feel for it, there are things that I have done and things that I am planning, and I'll talk about neither of them in detail but basically my goal for the music and audio in general for SGW is to be emotive, emotionally accurate and important to the gameplay. I don't believe in fluff, that goes for both the music and sound effects. You can draw your own conclusions from that, for me it's pretty clear as I'm seeing it from my perspective but it's sort of a different direction where audio is "well, we've got to have sound effects because somethings moving on the screen". That's how it's typically done, I sometimes think the only reason people add sound effects to the game is that the players might maybe miss them if they were gone. I want to change that so that audio is essential and not just some radio background chatter drivel.

DJT: How often do you look to David Arnold and Joel Goldsmith for inspiration?

NLM: Not as much anymore as I did early on. That's mostly because when I was first starting to write the music, I listened to all the available soundtracks and also listened to the shows in certain scenes to internalize the sound and the feel, and some of those motifs. That's sort of what I do, I have 50 different CDs and anthologies as well as my own personal music that I like listening to and I listen to stuff all the time so that I can familiarize myself with that musical, emotional and aural palette. Listening to the Arnold and Goldsmith stuff early on was basically me training myself to internalize it. Music in general was described to me by "you take all of the stuff you were influenced by, a little bit of Reznor, a little bit of Goldsmith, a little bit of Bach and a little bit of Cano, and you are what comes out of the bottom". So listening to that stuff earlier on was me throwing it in the funnel so that now I don't have to rely on it as directly, I just turn up the Goldsmith or Arnold knob and the feel of that comes out without necessarily imitating it note for note.

DJT: What are you planning on doing to keep music from getting old after listening to it over and over in a zone?

NLM: Plenty of things. I'm not going to talk about them in too much detail, but basically music gets old and stale for a number of different reasons, because there's not enough of it, because it isn't good in the first place, because it plays too often, or because there's not enough background audio to fill in the holes of the music or vice versa. All of those problems I plan on addressing.

DJT: Will a soundtrack CD be released for SGW?

NLM: I certainly hope so, that would at least indicate that people like what I was writing, but it's not something that's been discussed in anything more than casual terms here but it's something that you do typically see for games of this nature with a type of franchise and brand power attached to it, so it wouldn't surprise me if that's what I ended up doing.

DJT: What kinds of themes do you most enjoy writing?

NLM: I enjoy writing themes that are most appropriate for the material. It's hard for me to say that I like one more than the other as it's all a part of the musical palate, it's like saying to people "what note do you like best". I actually do have a very strong preference for an A flat 9 chord, but other than that I sort of look at it as trying to get a feel for what this area is, what is the story trying to communicate, what is the first impression that I get after looking at this image and how is the music going to act as a vehicle to push the player and to suggest that he or she move in a certain direction emotionally, so that acts as a vehicle for exploring different areas basically. Sometimes that's major, sometimes that's minor, sometimes it's fast or slow or broad and stately or very quick and paced, so it's hard to narrow it down to my favourite as i've written so many different kinds. I wouldn't say that I enjoy one more than the other, the enjoyment I get out of it is seeing how close I hit that mark and then when someone listens to it and seeing their eyes light up and saying "yes that's it". That's the sort of enjoyment I get out of those sort of things rather than the content itself.

DJT: Do you ever get artwork to draw inspiration from?

NLM: Yes, that's actually how we've set it up. There are a bunch of paradigms that you can use of when does the music start to take shape in the development process. One can say early or late, and I prefer late because the more information I have, the better I can craft it. Music has such a very very powerful momentum behind it, you can draw the art and be really specific about it and write the music in a certain way, but the music can then really help that or destroy it or change ones mind about it, because it exhibits so much power, it has to have as much information about it as possible in order to direct it responsibly. In most cases I will wait until I have some artwork. On the forums I have talked about oralisations which is basically looking at concept artwork, reading the story and then working with the other departments and saying "ok, this is what we expect", then writing basically an oral concept piece, we call them oralisations that goes along with the concept art and the story. There's this little unit then that says, "this is what this place is" and then draw from that font then while writing the rest of it.

DJT: Would you like your music to be critical in one or two game quests?

NLM: I would like it to be. We've talked about the possibility of that sort of thing and how it would be fun. I don't know if that sort of thing will happen in the game, it's certainly a possibility that we are exploring. If you are asking is it something that I would like then absolutely certainly, it would be fun.

DJT: What games do you think have hit a home run with sound?

NLM: Three that I can think of immediately would be Res, Beyond Good and Evil and Halo 2, all for very different reasons. Res it's very hard to describe to someone who hasn't played it, you're basically this wireframe and you are hitting the buttons and the music goes along with it, it's like "who wants to play that?" but it was just such an amazing experience. The idea that you could play this game and get an idea of what synesthesia is like. One sense is stimulated and two respond, and that's something that I deal with sometimes, and so that was just a really neat experience for me and I loved the amount of work they put into that. Beyond Good and Evil, the voicework was just spectacular with great acting in it.People didn't act like they were bored when they were delivering their lines. A lot of times people will try to fill the games with music and expect that that's going to be good, but Beyond Good and Evil made the point of having music in very key spots to evoke certain emotions at specific times and I thought that was really really great of them. Halo 2 had a lot of technological things that they achieved in terms of their interactive music system and having certain loop points that would wait for you to move to a certain area and then move onto the next piece. The voice acting in that was also great. That's the kind of things I look at when I say "oh that's a good game with sound".

DJT: I recently went to the Video Games Live concert. They needed someone to do a skit during their Metal Gear Solid section, so there I was dressed as a mercenary walking across the stage being followed by a man in a box. It was a good experience.

NLM: Yeah, my wife and I wanted to see them, but we were actually out of town when they were around. It's interesting that you brought that up, because there was a comment that I was reading, saying that games are all starting to sound the same. You've got this big epic huge orchestral sound, and that's the bar that everyone reaches for, but it really doesn't go in any horizontal direction from there. I think that's a very puzzling development, where we had this upward momentum toward having a more and more sophisticated type of sound, but now we all sort of sound the same.

DJT: I guess if you wanted to look at it logically that's probably due to the influx of Japanese games like Final Fantasy and such. Those games have been really big hits, and they've mostly used orchestra style music, so it could just be people following the bandwagon so to speak.

NLM: Yeah, I mean I'm not saying "Oh my gosh, it's the death of our industry", but it's an interesting sort of development. Sometimes with audio it feels like we take a few steps, and then we sit down and wait for everything else to blow past us, and then take a few more steps and see where it goes.

DJT: When SGW comes out, would you be interested in performing music for SGW at a live event?

NLM: Absolutely. I've had my works performed live before when I was in college. It was just the most amazing experience that I've ever had as an artist. It was fulfilling for a lot of different reasons, mostly because it was so much work. They were all essentially volunteers, so arranging the rehearsals and getting the most out of the thirty minutes that I would have them, volunteers from the choir and orchestra, and also at the same time, finish writing it and then conduct it too. It was a lot of hard work, but to be on stage and then turn around and hear everyone applause, it was just the most amazing thing. So yeah, I would love to do that sort of thing again.

DJT: The game is still a long way off. What are you dreading, and what are you looking forward to?

NLM: If I'm dreading anything I would say it would be working with software. It's something that I'm used to at this point, but software just drives me nuts frequently, but it's something that I have to rely on, not just for my job but in my free time at home. There are a lot of things I can do at home to cut down the amount of crap that happens, but we're developing software, and that's just like trying to build a car while driving it at the same time. It's just astonishing that this stuff runs at all. The thing that I would dread would be some kind of show stopping bug that I'm going to have to wait around, and will ruin my schedule. I'm mentally preparing for it, I know it's going to happen, it's already happened in little chunks, but that's just the nature of it.

The thing I look forward to is just probably finishing this. It's a tremendous amount of work. Right now I look off into the future and it's like "man, how am I going to do all of that?". It's difficult to do that to, because I come into work, and I'll have my schedule charted out for a month maybe, and I shouldn't be bothering myself by looking too much forward as it's going to change, that's a guarantee. Just to keep things in perspective though, I try to look at it on a week to week or day to day. I really look forward to getting it done so I can say "here's this big huge thing that I've accomplished and I'm happy because of that". Everyone likes finishing things.

<interlude>

DJT: Are you personally going to be doing any voice acting for the game?

NLM: Maybe. It depends on a number of different things, but lets say that we get voice talent that is covered under union rules, then we would have to get a waiver or not credit me if I wanted it, so it's a complicated thing. The likelihood is that I will want to, but we'll see.

DJT: Last question, how has SGW allowed you to grow as a musician?

NLM: Oh boy, an awful lot. My college education took me to a certain point. I graduated with my BA in music with an emphasis on vocal performance and composition theory. After graduating I started studying orchestration and writing in a bunch of different genres. Here I have to write on an almost daily basis, so it's pretty much inevitable that I'm going to develop and grow as a musician, I would be very troubled if I wasn't. Basically the way it's made me change is the sounds that come out of my manuscripts mature much faster. Music is always hard, for me anyways, it's always been a difficult process. The patience that I have for dealing with that is getting better, so the speed that I can think of something and get it down to paper is shrinking. So I guess I've improved from a speed standpoint, but that then translates into a greater complexity with music because I don't have to fiddle around with it. I guess to try and be brief about it I'd say that I'm writing better.

DJT: Thank you ever so much for agreeing to do this. It means a lot to us and the rest of the community.

NLM: I'm glad to do it.

DJT: Is there anything that you would like to say before you go?

NLM: Be ready to have your ears open because SGW is going to have some of the best audio you've heard in a game. You would think that I would be approaching it that "I want some of the best audio of any MMO ever made", but I want the best audio of any game, be it single player, multi player, online or offline. I'm really setting the bar high for everybody. That's my intent and that's what I look forward to, and you should to.

DJT: Thank you ever so much, it's been great having you with us.

NLM: Thank you.