Draft:Andrew Barnabas

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Andrew Barnabas
Credits
MediEvil (1998)	Original Soundtrack Speech Post-Production
MediEvil 2	Original Soundtrack Sound Effects Video Post-Production
MediEvil: Resurrection	Music Composition Sound Design
MediEvil (2019)	Music Composition

Andrew Barnabas is one half of Bob and Barn along with Paul Arnold. He was involved in composing all of the MediEvil soundtracks to date.

Interviews

1998

Wivern: When were you born, and where?

Andrew Barnabas: May 1973, in Croydon, South London. UK That makes me 24.

Wivern: When did you become active in the "Amiga scene" ?

Andrew Barnabas: Well unlike most, I was actually a late bloomer in the ways of the scene. was just starting to become quite active in the C64 scene as a programmer / graphics artist and a tiny bit of music, but programming was my forte (doing 3D vectors on the 64 was fun!). Just as that was coming ahead, we got an Amiga A500 in the Xmas of '89. Due to my contacts in the 64 scene, it wasn't too long before I got involved in the Amiga side of things, I'd actually composed music on the amiga before owning one so had a foot in the door as it were. My first group I joined was TSL UK (The Silents, UK division) on the recommendation of a 64 / amiga owner 'Guardian', and this was just over 1 month after Xmas '89, and having written approx. 2 tunes on Soundtracker! Nothing really amazing happened in TSL UK, so I left with Guardian as he started up his own group, and then moved on to a local Croydon group called Ecstasy. I stayed with them for approx 18 months, composing music for a few demos (most notably the Ecstasy Multi-Demo) and my own music disk (NightShade's Harmony) released in '91.In September '91 I was asked to join the Crusaders by Fleshbrain. I composed music to the penultimate Eurochart (November '91), and have stayed with them ever since... I now host The Gathering conference run by the Crusaders every Easter in Norway.During my tenure in the scene I met a *lot* of people, I took it upon myself to get to know as many famous amiga musicians as possible, and to a large degree actually succeeded. I was looking at a Eurochart one time and realised I knew *all* the muso's. I had a few run in's with a few of them (no names mentioned) went to The Party '91 with Jesper Kyd / Silents & Nightlight / Kefrens in Denmark and had my 1st taster of a *real* scene party, as opposed to the small affairs that were run in the UK. I had an absolutely wonderful time in the scene, apart from the fact that it took over my life (socially & financially) and ran up the phone bill incredibly but felt that I was always involved with something special, something where all the members felt passionately about the machine they were using.

Wivern: When did you start composing music for games?

Andrew Barnabas: My first official release was in 1990, that was SWIV on the amiga. In 1991 I got together with a friend in London (hi Bob) and started a games music label, and decided to get who I thought were the best guys around Europe involved. The company was called DENS Design. Members wise we had Bjorn Lynne from Norway, Rene Bidstrup in Denmark (Diablo / Budbrain), and Volker Tripp in Germany (Jester / Sanity). It was brilliant fun, and we all learnt a *lot* about the way the industry works. I personally got ripped off left right & centre, but when you're a student and don't rely on the work to live from you're not that bothered. I finished university in 1995 and joined Millennium immediately after finishing. Millennium got taken over by Sony in July '97. I hope one day to go back to DENS Design and run it as a proper company doing graphics / animation AND music. That WOULD be fun. It's just a shame that all of us are PC users now, the passion for the machine isn't at all what it was for the amiga, they're just more powerful and have got some great software...

Wivern: To what games have you composed music?

Andrew Barnabas: Here's a list of games that are *completely* credited to me. SWIV (Amiga), Double Dragon III (Amiga), Global Gladiators (Amiga), Cool Spot (Amiga), Aladdin (PC / Amiga), Pinball Dreams II (PC), Fifa '96 (SNES), Snowman (3DO, Saturn, PSX, PC, Mac), Father Xmas (3DO, Saturn, PSX, PC, Mac), Defcon V (PSX, 3DO, Saturn, PC), Silverload (PSX), Creatures (PC / Mac), Deadline (PC), Frogger (PC / PSX), Beastwars (PC / PSX), Medievil (PSX) - to be released mid '98. And I've worked on a load of others (unreleased stuff, the odd tune or sfx here or there etc.)

Wivern: Which of your own songs is your favourite?

Andrew Barnabas: Hard to say, changes depending on the mood I'm in. If we're sticking to mods, then probably Water II, the title track to Double Dragon III (in it's original form). I wrote that in 1991.

Wivern: How would you describe your album "Shades"?

Andrew Barnabas: Shades is the culmination of 3 years work by me. I started composing the music for it in late 1994 for my final year project at university (doing a degree in music at Leeds). The music is *completely* varied, and as such is difficult to put into any single category. The music ranges from acid-jazz (Jamiroquai) to funk-rock (Red Hot Chili Peppers) to soul (Sade) to ambient to brit-pop to fusion (Aphex Twin, Orbital). 4 of the tunes are from game music especially remixed for the album as Montages (music from Creatures, Defcon V, Silverload & Double Dragon III). 34 musicians were involved, from guitarists/bassists to a brass section to a shakuhachi player to a full male choir recorded in a cathedral. Variety being the spice of life and all that. Bjorn Lynne also donated a track for the album too (since I composed one for his 1995 album Dreamstate!). Shades is my debut CD, and was released under the TRSI RecordZ label. I hope to release a lot more, and game soundtracks too.

Wivern: What influenced you to write the tracks for it?

Andrew Barnabas: Well, since 4 of the tracks are for games, I think that's pretty self explanatory. My main goal with Shades was variety, for me to stretch myself musically and try something new all the time. I don't see any point in just repeating yourself as a musician and sticking to one style of music. This is the beauty of writing music to a brief, you get a spec and you have to think about what kind of music would suit that situation. That could be a full orchestra to one bloke playing a piano, whatever suits. I find these challenges very rewarding, I've been composing an instrumental hip-hop tune for the last couple of days, that's a *lot* harder than I thought it would be to get right. Another feather in the cap and all that. I think my aim is to be able to compose music proficiently in all styles, then you start to develop your own... Not in my life would I have thought I'd have recorded a full choir and a shakuhachi player for my own work a few years ago..... Also, it's great FUN. Taking a style of music you may be unaware of, analyse it and come up with something of your own in that style, very rewarding..

Wivern: Who are your favourite Amiga musicians?

Andrew Barnabas: I'll take that as meaning favourite scene musicians... Well, I couldn't narrow it to one muso but my top 3 would have to be :- Bruno / Anarchy, Heatbeat / Rebels, Uncle Tom / Scoopex. But I also highly rated Romeo Knight, Walkman, Nightlight, Firefox, Jugi and a few others who I can't remember right now (it's been a *long* time since I've been asked this!)

Wivern: Do you have any ongoing projects?

Andrew Barnabas: I'm still working on Medievil for Sony, and another project which I can't disclose at the moment for a 3rd party company. Suffice to say, both projects have gone extremely well. Medievil's music is basically Danny Elfmanesque sythesized orchestral work, and the other project is varied stylewise, anything from Jarre to Vangelis to Kraftwerk to X-Filesesque to classical to hip-hop!!! As to what the future holds, who knows?

Wivern: Anything else you would like to say?

Andrew Barnabas: Don't understimate game music, the quality of the stuff has come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years, people are starting to use full orchestra's for game music. The budgets of games are starting to approach that of small films as are the timescales taken to produce them. Most of the average games playing punters forget the sound & music, DON'T. Just think how much work must go in to what's essentially 50% of the overall product...

Platform Online

May 16, 2011

The two of you have been working together as composers for over 10 years. What’s your working relationship like?

Bob: As much as we’d hate to admit it, it is like a professional marriage with all the bickering and in-fighting, who farts the loudest, who shouts the loudest. We’ve worked together for over 15 years now. Fortunately, we now have two separate studios so we can go off in a huff that much more successfully. We both read scenes differently as to where the musical focal point should be and we are quite different people and our backgrounds bring different ideas to the table, some harmonious with what’s there already, some not. We have different skill sets. Barn will, say, initially focus upon theme writing and instrumentation, whereas I’ll be thinking about the whole musical picture, arrangement and orchestration. Then we’ll swap, argue, refer to the other’s work as having questionable parentage and go from there.

But somehow, we manage to pull it together and begrudgingly agree on a musical direction. If the client likes it, well that’s another story.

And how did you get involved with making music for games to begin with?

Barn: I began scoring games in 1990 as an offshoot of writing music for the underground ‘Amiga Demo Scene’. It was suggested by a guy I met at the Share and Enjoy copy party in July 1990 to think about writing music for games, he worked for Codemasters at the time. Never worked with them funnily enough.

So, summer holidays, 17 years old, I grabbed a copy of Zzap! 64 and rang up all the game developers who advertised. Managed to persuade three companies to let me demonstrate my work at the European Computer Trade Show in Earls Court that September. Trade shows are no place to demo music, fortunately my timing was good and I was invited to play tracks at the Sales Curve office in Battersea. October 15, 1990, I played them 10 Amiga modules, they all went quiet when one loaded up. I thought that was it, but much to my surprise they asked to license that track for the Amiga shooter SWIV. I was, as they say, on the map.

Bob: I responded to an advert for a sound engineer / junior sound designer at a games company in Cambridge that was posted on the student notice board at York University where I was studying an MSc in Music Technology in February 1996. Around a year later, Barn was away for a week, I had no sound design to do so volunteered my services and ending up writing my first track for MediEvil, which subsequently became ‘Gallowmere Waltz’. I was already very familiar with the studio and had watched music being written. The rest is history…

What are some of your musical influences and how have they affected your work?

Barn: Funk and film scores. Recently learning to play the electronic drums (bought a kit a few months ago) and am learning 80s Chaka Khan albums to play along with. Disco and jazz funk fusions from the Bob James, Earth Wind & Fire and Parliament era to more contemporary instrumental works by the likes of Spyro Gyra, David Benoit and Chick Corea. Film wise, James Horner’s Star Trek II, Jerry Goldsmith’s Total Recall and Basic Instinct, Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy and John William’s Superman.

Bob: 80s cheesy rock, such as Whitesnake, Dare and Dan Reed Network. These days more along the lines of film scores: Danny Elfman, John Powell, Trent Reznor and contemporary rock, like Evanessence and Nickelback.

How does creating music for games differ to that of film or television?

Both: Simple, interactivity. On TV or film you always know that at 28 minutes and 11 seconds she slaps him in the face. In the gaming world she may never slap him in the face or he may slap her. It’s impossible to score every possible eventuality so you cheat, try to come up with the most common scenarios and use clever implementation to smooth over the cracks of the rest.

We’ve just finished a couple of tracks for a very-well-know-racing-game but instead of one single high octane racing track, which has been the norm, we now have a six minute track that’s comprised of 25 segments of differing intensities that’ll be triggered and (mostly looped) over pertinent changes throughout the race creating – in theory – a much more coherent experience where the music more closely matches the energy level of the race.

Music evokes all kinds of emotion, helps strengthen themes and often gives the player vital non-visual clues. Do you find yourselves fulfilling atmospheric as well as design needs with your music?

Bob: Absolutely. In fact during our earlier days sound and music could help bridge the hardware visual limitations, since we audio folk have been using digital audio which can comprise of anything for 18 years. A low polygon gaming character can be brought to life through sound and music, so a great deal of our work was in providing atmosphere, and designers loved it.

There are projects, horror especially, where distinctions between music and sound design are rapidly becoming blurred. Jason Graves’ great work on the scores for Dead Space has more in common with music from 50s Noir than contemporary sci-fi. On its own, the string section of an orchestra performing a textural cluster but using the bows’ upside down on the strings is a stark and harsh sound, which is not something to be consumed musically but it works brilliantly in providing atmosphere in-game.

Following on from this, a big part of music and sound in games is giving identity to settings, people and objects. Can you explain how this has evolved, perhaps in reference to your C-12 score where you wrote songs for zones, instead of ‘one song per level’?

Barn: To create a cohesive experience for the player, it’s all about the implementation. From the limited requirement of title track and end credits music of the early 80s on 8-bit platforms to where we are now, the evolution of gaming hardware has allowed for greater expression and subtlety. For many years, music was simply aural icing on a visual cake, where the icing bore no resemblance to the action on screen. It was wallpaper music, written to set the mood and place. This isn’t how it works in ‘traditional’ sound to picture mediums of film and TV, where music serves the picture, ebbs and flows along an audio narrative, and music, dialogue or sound design take it in turns to take audio dominance.

​​​​So, 10 years ago we worked on our final PlayStation 1 title, C-12: Final Resistance. I was interested in pushing at least the musical variety throughout a single level. Long before middleware solutions (off the shelf software for plugging into games that now does this) were around, I worked with the audio programmer and we setup musical zones throughout the map of each level and tagged them with words such as ‘exploration’, ‘suspense’, ‘horror’, etc. I wrote numerous 30-60 second long looping musical cues that would fit those particular terms. Once the player entered or left a zone, a different set of musical cues would be triggered from the palette of cues entitled ‘exploration’ (or randomly it could wait up to a minute before triggering a cue), just to help imbue the player with the correct feeling and mood for the area. Once the fights kicked off, it triggered battle music which was again picked from a selection of battle cues.

It was the most ‘interactive’ score we’d done at that time. By today’s standards this is a crude approach but it helped us pave the way for the interactive scores we have written since.

How do you go about choosing the sounds and instruments to create a suitable atmosphere for a game? For instance, MediEvil’s atmosphere flows from the chilling (‘Hilltop Mausoleum’), to the comical (‘Comedy Corpses’), to the heroic (‘Zarok's Lair’).

Both: Put simply, as sound-to-picture composers, our inspiration comes from visuals. In the case of MediEvil, we would spend time with the team, looking at concept art and discussing what it should sound like – dark and horrific or light and comedic. We’d already formulated a MediEvil ‘sound’ from scoring the original FMV sequences which were used to sell the game. Chris Sorrell, the designer, had a very clear idea of what kind of music he would like to hear and gave us CDs from Danny Elfman, Elliott Goldenthal and Wojciech Kilar. We ‘assimilated’ as much as we could from these various sources and worked towards creating a sound palette and overarching theme that would unify everything.

Once that had been done, the majority of the hard work was over. It’s then down to cherry picking which parts of the unified sounds you use in which guise. We weren’t creating anything subtle in MediEvil, so using the organ and choir for ‘Hilltop Mausoleum’ was hardly original, but effective. ‘Comedy Corpses’ was a fairground attraction, so much fun with woodwinds and oom pah pah brass, and ‘Zarok’s Lair’ was the final showdown, so time for Dan (the hero) to step up, all to a rousing heroic version of the MediEvil theme. I’m sure we’re dispelling any myths behind composition there may have been, but in the case of a game like MediEvil, subtlety wasn’t really required.

In the early game projects you worked on, you created the music entirely on computer. What was it like producing a full score with those restraints?

Barn: A right royal pain. In many ways it focused you, you didn’t have to scroll through banks of sounds to find something appropriate, you had a couple of waveforms to choose from. So you focused on writing catchy melodies to help capture the mood, again it was hardly a time for subtlety. I started on the Commodore 64 (writing music in hexadecimal using Future Composer, fun!) and progressed to the Commodore Amiga (writing tracks on the musical equivalent of a piano roll triggering 8-bit mono samples across four channels).

I loved the Amiga and found it very hard to translate that compositional discipline to MIDI – what’s used in all production studios. It took me over a year to be won over by MIDI / conventional sequencing and there are still quirks that annoy, but overall the freedom of not running out of RAM or polyphony and the overall leap in quality of the final recordings means that writing ‘chip’ music isn’t something I look back at with anything other than rose tinted glasses.

And what does having the presence of an orchestra, like the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra on your scores for Primal and MediEvil: Resurrection, mean for the quality and scope of music in games?

Bob: It’s important that if you choose to have a large scale orchestral production in your game that you go the whole nine yards and produce it that way. Producing synth demos is OK to a point, but a synthesised orchestra is merely a snapshot in time of what a full orchestra can produce. In addition, having two separate processes, composition and then production, allows you to focus on the respective jobs at the respective time so that nothing gets missed.

Of all the video games scores you’ve worked on so far, what’s been your favourite and why?

Bob: It’s very hard to pick a favourite or a worst to be honest without upsetting someone along the way. I have to say, each and every project has its relative folly and foibles as well as its virtues. All you can do is produce the best work possible within the parameters set for you by your client. MediEvil was a great project to be involved with, a fantastic opportunity to write interesting music and really flex our musical muscles. Working on Brink was a different challenge – deciding where to place the music so that the soundscape made sense as a whole and also choosing a sound palette that made it stand out sonically from its peers.

Barn: For me, Brink kind of epitomises where we’re currently at. The combination of orchestral, electronic and ethnic with an unusual palette of instruments which we developed over the course of a number of months has been immensely satisfying. We love the Hang Drum, the Chinese Erhu, the Udu, Yamaha CS-80 sounds (Vangelis used it on Blade Runner), Taiko drums, Dharabuka’s and a whole manner of world percussion all mixed with an orchestra, Chinese Dulcimer and Soprano voice.

Thematically and musically, it’s one of the simplest scores’ we’ve ever written, a simple seven-note piano theme that ties everything together. As composers, I always like to think that we’re constantly evolving our process and honing our particular style. If Brink had lengthy narrative cutscenes where we could really amp up the emotions, it’d be as perfect as scoring Primal. But I’m niggling now, Brink is where I believe we are in terms of sound. Complexity of score and technical writing would go Primal or a German feature film we scored around the same time, but terms of who we are, I think Brink says it pretty well.

Can you tell us anything about your latest work?

Both: Alas not, we’ve just completed work on two projects, both of which will be announced towards the end of the year.

With the exception of BAFTA, do you feel video game music is respected outside the gaming community?

Bob: I do feel like it is now. BASCA have set up an Ivor Novello for best music score as well so the wider music community is also recognising it as a valid discipline. And rightly so, on many levels it’s actually more difficult to write interactively than it is to write a linear score and much more difficult to come from film to game than to do the opposite.

I think the days of game music being considered to be the poor cousin of film music have gone and we see lots of contemporary film composers getting in on the act now – but usually writing themes that are then expanded and implemented by industry specialists. We used to actually avoid mentioning our games background to prospective clients in TV and film, but we now realise that games are considered cool and many directors in both these industries are big games players.

Finally, can you imagine a time when radio stations, like Classic FM, would play video game scores like yours or Elder Scrolls, as they already do for films like Lord of the Rings?

Both: Absolutely! It’s all about respect for the craft. We’ve had music for games performed on Classic FM, but in a niche capacity. It’ll take a few years before more widespread recognition is garnered, but it was no different than that of film scores from the 1940s onwards.

Strangely we had a meeting with a DJ at Classic FM last year and mooted the idea that they could play more game scores in addition to their usual output. He was surprisingly receptive to the idea and talked a lot about the music itself rather than where it came from. They know their listeners very well and know what they like. If a game score were to fit the easy listening criteria, they’d be happy to add it to their playlists.

Message

January 4, 2012

Hi Ivan,

Alas whilst everyone at Sony Cambridge (including us!) wants to do it, the execs at Sony don't have any interest.

Mmmmm, you've got me thinking now since you're the 4th person to ask in a month. The main exec who veto'd it has since left so if I started a poll on our Facebook page I could get it looked at by the right people.

I very much doubt it'll make a difference but there should be no harm in trying.

Thanks!

Barn

External links

• Andrew Barnabas' homepage on the Crusaders Website.