Graeme Norgate

It's all happening tomorrow!

2011-09-10T20:11:00.002+01:00

Graeme Norgate is fundraising for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research

2011-08-25T11:21:00.001+01:00

C Word, let's drop it.

Graeme Norgate is fundraising for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research

Back to the Stone Age

2011-06-26T00:07:00.002+01:00

Cave paintings eh!

I wonder what they mean't... A Hunter bragging about his exploits in the forest... A bored cavewife taking up a recreational wall painting course.... cavekids doodling about what their Daddy did at work.

Who knows.

But... we have more chance of working out what they mean millions of years after they were painted than a million years time when - hopefully - a human finds a 5 1/4 inch disk, 3.5inch disk, cassette tape, hard drive, laser disc, Dat tape, CD, vinyl LP...shall I go on ?

How the hell do we archive our work for more than the next 5 years let alone a million?

I know this is a well trod path, but I'm going to go there one more time, just to trample down some freshly sprouted brambles.

last week, I had to write a couple of 1930 style jazz pieces. Now, when I was a pretentious - and talented it turns out damn me - 15 year old, I would write on manuscript paper my little piano doodles... mostly because I didn't have an Amiga and a tracker yet.

I still have a green folder full of these scribblings 25 years later... lucky, because, although a lot of the stuff was incomprehensible, a certain chord progression got me out of a hole.... when i was 15, I wanted to be George Gershwin...so 1930s Jazz was just the sort of thing.

Ok... so, imagine if the scenario was... I want you to write a tune in the style of James Bond.

Just say, my brain had closed down for the day... what about all those ideas I wrote in 1995 when working on Goldeneye for the N64.

Mmmm.. ok... they were on my hard drive at Rare.
Did you back them up ?
Well, incredibly, although they weren't backed up at the time, I did copy them to 3.5inch disks because I was OCD like that.
Great... do you still have them?
Somewhere maybe....Yep, here they are...
Oh hang on.. on mac or pc?
Pc
Cool, I use PCs..... wait.... floppy disk? but my PC doesn't have a floppy disk anymore.
go and buy a USB floppy disk drive
.....now skip the bit about whether a 14 year old disk would actually still work...
ok.. got them onto my new brand spanking killer PC... how do I load them ?
they're Cubase files.
it's a ".arr" file.. what the hell is that?
Oh yeah.. Cubase version 4 stopped support for .arr files in 2008

and so on...

You get the mesasge... when things were recorded on paper...or before than on stone and walls... it takes at the least, fire to wipe out stuff like that... that's why we luckily, still get the occasionally great composer's work discovered in an old basement somewhere in Europe.

What would happen in a 1,000 years time.. I found a box of 5 1/4 c64 disks... what are they? no idea... just bin them.

Say you find a hard drive... is it IDE? well forget it.. is it SATA2 ? is it.... insert whatever new and fancy connection we'll have in the next 10 years.

Then...say you can somehow read it.... say Charle's Dickens had password protected his word documents... then what do you do, you can see the files but can't open them.

Basically, my point is... it seems impossible to archive things at the present time for future generations.

I have songs written on the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, my Yamaha SY77, Cubase seqeuncer files from an Atari ST then a Falcoln, then PC. All are unreadable on an up to date version of PC Cubase and that's just my little world.

I'm sure we all have our similar stories.

Will the "cloud" save us ?

Personally, I find it hard to trust, but that trust is surely only a generation away... Google I'm pretty sure are more OCD dven than me at backing my stuff up... can't even remember the last time I did a proper back up and I've done some pretty important work recently.....must do it soon etc etc

Maybe it's not a worry for the younger people of the world... it'll all be taken care of by Google, but for now, I'm just trying to figure out how to get a tape recorder to back up my Alesis SR16 drum machine so I can save those songs I wrote 20 years ago compatible with the current generation of readable formats.

I might just scribble the rhythms on my wall at home.

Free Radical would have been 12 years old

2011-04-02T22:10:00.000+01:00

So I thought I'd upload a handful of videos I found lurking around on my drive.

Crysis 2 Be Strong Trailer

2011-02-03T08:52:00.000Z

Start spreading the news....

A new trailer with added Nine Inch Nails doing New York, New York.

Crysis 2 XBOX 360 Demo Announced - EA News

2011-01-21T17:55:00.000Z

What we've been doing.....

Crysis 2 XBOX 360 Demo Announced

How long is too long ?

2010-12-27T10:04:00.000Z

I've been really scant at posting to the blog recently.

I blame work of course, the hours each day are creeping up and I'm making an effort to spend less time in front of a screen at night having done so all day long.

Anyway, what did santa bring you for Christmas? Something nice I hope.

Here are a couple of remixes I made this year, you'll need spotify, if you don't have spotify then, pop over to Amazon or iTunes and grab them, they'll be less than a quid each I reckon.

Code 64 - Rebirth (Genome remix bt Virez)
http://open.spotify.com/track/1aSP95sQTnQIW8HH8F5z7G

Inertia - Repeat and Follow (Virez mix)

http://open.spotify.com/track/01kpbPGals5oyn5Hj2MAkl

Crysis 2 playable at Game City - Nottingham

2010-10-28T11:52:00.000+01:00

Here's a venn diagram for you and a link

Go and play it.

http://www.gamecity.org/gamecity5

Run and Remix Update

2010-10-15T13:10:00.000+01:00

The half marathon went really well, thank you to everyone who sponsered me, by about 10 miles, thinking of your generosity was what kept me moving. I want to do it again, the whole atmosphere of running along side thousands of people was a real feeling and emotion that will be with me for the rest of my life.

Let's Remix It !

I had a message waiting for me on my YouTube account from a rather talented chap Josh Koen, he's remixed the Bad Boss Boogie track from Donkey Kong Land, released way back in the mid 90s on the Game Boy.

I've put links of the original and his track for your enjoyment.

A bit of trivia regarding the piece.

Whilst I was writing a track for the industrial band I was in "Dydx" I came up with this hook I liked, but it was far too jolly for a serious Ministry sound a like band... I put it to one side, and when it came to writing Donkey Kong Land, I realised that this hook was just what I needed for this track.

Never throw any ideas away... save them off for a rainy day, you never know when they might be just what you are after!

Original track

Josh's remix

Doing the Running Man!

2010-07-28T12:33:00.000+01:00

I'm running the Robin Hood half marathon in about 8 weeks... in true Eddie Izzard style, I haven't done anything sensible like train for it, but I'm doing it for a very worthy cause which will motivate me to do it.

If you'd like to help me on my way for a couple of quid, please click on the link below.

When things go right.

2010-06-26T00:24:00.000+01:00

You know there's nothing more satisfying or life confirming than when things go right.

"but you make noises all day for your job, life must be sweet?!?"

You'd think that wouldn't you ?

However, there's high concept vrs reality

there's artistic intent vrs memory limitation

willing vrs broken tech

more often than you'd think, believe me.

So, less often than desired, sometimes things go right.

Changes made at our sound design level can make big impacts on the quality of the game.

These are life affirming days. the knock on effect is, working late, jumping out of bed early the next morning to get on with work, the desire to push things as far as they can.

That is our creativity being given the chance to excel !

Make the most of that my friends when the opportunity rises.

For ever time this occurs, there will be a dozen less exciting times where you are battling with technology, fighting with the "man", fighting with the constraints of your chosen platform.

Be thankful and happy for these creative occasions, for these are what motivates us to do good things.

It's the same when writing music. You can stare at an empty sequencer screen. Listen the the crapulous guff you composed the night before and wonder if it's time to down tools and sell your music equipment for a university course in "doing something useful that will feed the animals and children"

...but then.. the spark happens.... it will be sometime really awkward.. you'll be just falling to sleep....in the middle of a greatly satisfying bowel movement...or waiting for your change at your local sandwich bar.

The venue is not important...what's important is you've got it..... it's time to cancel the ebay listing of all your music gear, fire up your sequencer of choice and lay down the killer idea you had.

If you could only remember it.

Buy a digital recorder my friends, what the 70s would call a dictaphone.

Some of my best tracks have been due to the help of a dictaphone or my answerphone.

So, this is the end... stop reading this as a distraction... get on with the thing you were supposed to do before looking desperately for things to read. RSS is not your friend when you have deadlines.

Until the next time.

A quarter of a million people can't be wrong.

2010-06-18T00:37:00.000+01:00

Nice....best make the most of it, until the new version comes out ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZU5hIFT4-s&feature=youtu.be

Crysis 2 at the E3

2010-06-15T23:00:00.001+01:00

That is one hell of a large poster we've got there!

Can teach an old dog new tricks.

2010-05-05T22:04:00.000+01:00

Cubase.....

How I love to hate you.

I've used this program for...hmmm...18 years.... EIGHTEEN !

On the Atari ST, then the Falcoln, then various incarnations of PCs and various versions of Cubase.

A confession, to those who don't already know.... I used Cubase Score 3.0 for PC from 1996 to 2005.

No VSTs, no audio tracks, no effects, just midi. Midi controlling external hardware.

It never crashed on me, it was clean looking, I could see a whole mix on a 20" CRT monitor, and I loved it.

That said, I love using the newest version today, as I have done since moving to software in 2005, I'd like a monitor the length of my wall to see the mix, but having all that power at my finger tips, and total recall of a mix is fantastic, but with progress comes redundancy.

So, yesterday, I was trying to duplicate a part... a pretty basic function. you have a small event, say a bar long, and want to copy it so that it plays for 8 bars.

Pre this millenium, right click, choose pencel, hold down ALT and drag part along the arrangement window to make duplicates.

Do you think I could get it to work yesterday... sometimes maybe, but then, my sausage fingers had clearly changed the setting of the editing tool and I was changing the volume of the part and not duplicating at all.

2 hours of swearing at progress, pointlessly reading the freakin' manual, and searching the cubase forums, and I found a work around.

Went to tell my work mate, well show him....... and he says

"oh, I just press CTRL D"

yes...thank you, I reply... and so will I from now on.

20 years, and I still don't know the basics.... it's a miracle that I've written anything !

Cubase, I love to hate you.... I love you because you've enabled me to put the music in my head into reality, and in doing that, given me a living. I hate you because every 18 months, you move the goal posts, fix a few things, break a few more, add a few features, remove a few, but somehow convince us that if we don't upgrade, our music will be worthless, and our children will be born with small winkies.

......simpler times.......

Crytek UK named as Crysis 2 multiplayer dev | Game Development | News by Develop

2010-04-14T09:52:00.001+01:00

Crytek UK named as Crysis 2 multiplayer dev | Game Development | News by Develop

Posted using ShareThis

Goteki album preview

2010-04-13T08:06:00.002+01:00

Looking very promising.

A quick apology.

2010-04-11T14:12:00.002+01:00

Just a very quick post to say, sorry if you have written to me and had no response... I've quite a backlog at the moment, and not a lot of spare time to write back.

TS3 Spaceport remix

2010-04-07T21:10:00.000+01:00

Nice remix this kind chap has done.

http://www.youtube.com/user/LtSurge659#p/u/20/EFADpaxIcx8

Free Radical's 11th Birthday

2010-04-02T12:45:00.000+01:00

Free Radical would have been 11 years old today.

To celebrate this, here is an un-released track never before heard anywhere.

Written around the period of TS:FP.

Enjoy

Moving out.

2010-03-27T22:32:00.001Z

Thursday was the last day at the office I've spent the last 8 years.

In 2002, Free Radical had outgrown it's current office for the 2nd time, really, it was crazy by the end of each office, people were literally crow barred into the place.

Pictured is Unit 1, up until Crytek took over last year, we'd taken over another 4 units. Housing 250 plus staff needs a lot of space!

The location itself I feel had mixed reviews.... it was in the middle of nowhere, so there wasn't much you could do after work or for lunch.

But, for me, I liked it, because it was near some nice countryside for lunchtime walks, and most of the time, I had a window with a tree in view.

Monday sees a move to the city centre, no windows (for me at least), no countryside, but on the flip side... plenty to do outside of work, a beautifully designed work area, completely open plan so all the team can work together, plenty of breakout spaces for lunchtimes, purpose built audio visual and meeting rooms and a network speed that will make the old one feel like dial up.

Also, a first for me... a sound proofed recording booth, that I didn't have to build myself !

I think I built four whilst at FRD.

Getting my Jarre on....

2010-03-18T07:39:00.000Z

I had an idea for the piece I'm writing.... it didn't work, but it did mean I had an incredibly enjoyable trip down memory lane.... I tested out Superwave's Tiny Pops drum machine, which is an emulation of Korg's Mini Pops 7 drum machine.

It was used extensively on Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene.

Add an emulation of an Eminent 310U and a phaser and voila, instant Oxygene.

Shame it didn't fit, bit, I might just have to do a little tip to my mentor one day with these toys.

Slacky Slackington

2010-03-16T23:22:00.001Z

The purpose of this blog was meant to be a daily aide mémoire of my working day...more for me than anyone else...but if other people enjoy it, then that's a lovely plus point.

What I've realised is, a lot of days are spent doing things that really don't warrant writing about... at least not to my mind anyway.

Or I get lazy and forget... you choose which one is more likely.

Last week for instance, a very merry day was spent with a microphone, sledgehammer and old electrical items.

But, by the end of the day, I was so exhausted, the last thing on one's mind is to document what's happened... the first thing on the mind is BED BED BED

I bet Samuel Pepys didn't have this problem... he was either burying his cheese in his garden or making up cryptic markings to signify he'd had the pleasure of love single handed.

So, are Samuel no doubt did on those particular days, we finally reach the climax of this post... Today was day 2 into a new tune... Yesterday was the killer, hard work and uncertainty... today, I'm more sure about what I'm producing, but comes the running into the brick wall of ideas, and the endless fine tooth combing of polish... I can make that part last for weeks.... at least I had the luxury in the past of being able to spend that amount of time.

It's good to be writing music though.... it's one of the main things in life I enjoy the most and yet, it's the thing I spend the most time putting off doing.

Daft!

Goodnight!

As a post script... if you've got a facebook account... you may have heard of it...it's all the rage apparently.... well, I have an offer you won't be able to refuse..

go and give Gansta pets a try... and tell your friends to try it too... go on..... be a wise guy!

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=111680532847

Caved in.........

2010-02-21T23:17:00.001Z

Just when I didn't think there was any further ways for work avoidance, I've created a twitter account.

http://twitter.com/Norgans

I can see why Stephen Fry turned off all his technology to finish his book... it's so distracting...

Facebook | Gangsta Pets

2010-02-20T15:26:00.001Z

Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you.....

Facebook | Gangsta Pets

Progress Bars

2010-02-13T20:18:00.000Z

I wonder how much of my life has been spent watching progress bars ?

I mean, if I included loading games from tape when I owned my Spectrum and Commodore 64.

To loading from disk on the Atari ST and Amiga

Then Windows 3.1 right up to the present day, countless install, copying, rebooting

It must add up to a considerable figure.

I've just recently bought East West's Complete Composers Collection. Reading the gumph that comes with it, it looks like I'm in for 23 hours of installing.

That's a lot of progress bars!

Plus, I've got a copy for work and home, so that's 46 hours.

Best put the kettle on and grab a good book !

The Stercutus Touch

2010-02-12T22:53:00.000Z

Not every day is a winner.

I've had a case of the midas touch opposite, which I've been told is something to do about Stercutus.

Doing a load of work, which somehow goes wrong and takes a day to get back to where you started is very frustrating.

I feel like the time when Homer Simpson is left to look after Mr. Burns house.... Burns and Smithers leave, but forget something, they come back through the front door, and Homer has crashed arse first through a painting whilst the place is on fire.

On the plus side, our main boss dude visited the UK studio the last couple of days, and we very pleased with our progress with all our projects, exciting times!

Goodbye Hardware

2010-02-10T23:11:00.000Z

With our impending office move in about 6 weeks, it's finally time to say goodbye to a lot of old hardware... it's just not needed these days.

What's a sampler with 256 meg compared to something like the East West Complete Composers collection weighing in at 277 gigs.

Progress is a wonderful thing, but I'll still be sorry to see it go.

Worst of all will be my old analogue mixing desk, my Soundcrast Spirit Studio 32. My god, I loved that desk, it was so transparent, tracks would mix themselves and if you could really overload it to get nice crunchy percussion.

It's massive though, my penultimate room at the office I'm in now was actually too small to fit the thing in.... everything is mixed in software these days grandad, get with the 21st century!.

Not that this would ever happen - I'm not a famous recording artist with a library of albums available - but it's a strange feeling knowing that all those tracks written over the years are gone all but a stereo mix either as a computer file or cd recording.

Written on old versions of cubase, no longer compatible with the latest and greatest version.

Samples stored in obselete storage formats, in properirty file formats unreadable by todays PCs and Macs.

Synth parts from synths long gone, and patches long forgotten how they were ever made.

It's lucky that the whole remastering thing is such a con to get us to buy everything again in the believe we're getting to hear something new - when mostly it's just the old masters compressed and limited to within an inch of their life to bring their volume up to that of the current trend.

Some remastering is wonderful though of course, the work done on the Beatles back catalogue is nothing short of genius.

Maybe in 40 years from now, we'll be able to feed our wave files into a computer program like Melodyne, and it'll work out all the seperate parts and give us solo'd versions ready for remixing.

Now there's a thought......

Looks like I've just allayed my own fears of saying bye bye to my old hardware!

Electro Rooster ( Death Metal Rooster Goes Electro! )

2010-02-10T22:53:00.001Z

Death Metal Rooster goes electro! Look at him, lovin a bit of electro goodness! Music by me, so technically a Goteki song :)

Making things smaller

2010-01-28T22:59:00.000Z

When I first started in the video games industry I'd had little experience with cartridges. This was the era of the Super Nintendo, Jaguar, Sega Megadrive and soon to be the new kid on the block, the Sony Playstation.

It's safe to say, that when I went for my interview at Rare way back in 94, I thought, the days of chip music was over, and it would be red book cd tracks for ever more.

Wrong.

ish

My first project was Killer Instinct for the arcade. yes, we could use full blown music tracks, but they had to be mixed in mono (on an appalling tascam 16 track desk) and they had to be short with lots of loops.

Still good fun never the less.

Then, came the fateful day, I was asked to convert those tracks to the Super Nintendo.... yep... those full blown instrumental tracks that myself and Robin Beanland had thrown everything we had into, had to be converted to 8 sound channels and each track had to fit into 40kilobytes each.

Yep, that's right, 40k... what is 40k these days.... a notepad file maybe ? a tiny thumbnail perhaps... what about, all the instruments and music data for an arcade conversion ?

I panicked, Dave Wise, my audio boss at the time said, it would be like a suitcase when you go on holiday...we'd just jump on it until it shut.

That advice, and that experience is still proving handy today, 15 years later.... this week, i've been cutting down sounds to fit into something that they weren't originally built for... I'm really pleased with the results.... it's rewarding if not a bit mentally unstabling to listen over and over to a background ambience picking the closest loop point possible to keep the listeners interest, make the loop smooth, click free and small in memory.

In the days of gigs and terabytes and 100 meg net connections, this may seem un-necessary, but you'd be surprised.

From this:

to this

Tired but Happy

2010-01-26T20:11:00.000Z

It's taken a lot of adjustment having to get up at a regular time in the morning...yes, I can sense your hearts bleeding from here I know.

The result is that after a days work, a rather rubbish commute home north on the M1, I'm finished when I get home... I'm hoping this is a temporary state of affairs as I still have lots I want to achieve at home as well as at work.

Work has been good so far this week, our senior audio director was over for his monthly visit, good work was done, and new and exiting work is on the horizon.

The weekend was a belter too... work hard and play hard... may be a very 80s sentiment but it's proved true recently. Our creative director had a birthday / house warming party, known as the ultraparty...we've moved up a decade, but we're still living in the past here !

It was a night to behold, live boxing, a truth or dare room, a tarot reader, a lady giving out Indian head massages, a whole pig spit roast, tunes mixed and provided by my big headed self and the largest rum and coke you've ever seen...all drank by sucking a 100 foot straw... which I did manage.

He claims his next one will include a real ghost...somehow... but I feel he's still lightheaded from sucking on that straw!

A day of installing

2010-01-19T22:49:00.000Z

Day two back at Crytek and almost done installing everything, a lot quicker than in the old days of hardware samplers and synths..

I remember when Free Radical moved for the 2nd time in 2002, it took me nearly 2 weeks to rewire the whole studio.

These days, it's a PC, soundcard and audio software and bob is your uncle.

We're going to be moving to a new studio very soon, which means going through the old hardware I've accumalated over the years.... ready for a history lesson ?

I found a 2 speed external cdrom that I used with my Akai Sampler, then, a box of Jaz Drives, which had removable 2 gig cartridges, all linked up with a very unreliable scsi interface....scsi boys and girls was what we had along with serial and parallel ports before usb.

Then the finds got even sillier.... another removable drive...this time a 230 meg (yes megs) optical drive... it cost me 800 UK pounds in 1994 and I thought it was the business, as before then, I'd been loading my samples into the Akai using Floppy Disks.

Every morning I'd go into Rare and spend half an hour loading the samples in for the piece i was writing.

We soon forget how far technology has progressed.

Tomorrow, setting up done, it's time to make some noise.

Back in the land of the working....

2010-01-17T15:08:00.000Z

Very pleased to announce that I'm returning to Crytek UK tomorrow after a much need sabbatical.

It's going to feel strange having an alarm waking me up in the morning rather than the sunshine peeping through the bedroom window... welcome back to the real world!

Looking forward to making the best sounding games for 2010.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE for Christmas Number 1

2009-12-18T03:14:00.001Z

Timesplitters on Bits.

2009-11-19T00:20:00.001Z

Another old VHS find... here's Timesplitters 1 reviewed on Bits.

Enjoy!

Blast Corps - Celebrity Games Master Challenge - Paul Mckenna

2009-11-18T23:43:00.001Z

The title says it all really, this was shown early 97ish I'd guess, seeing as that was when the game was released in the UK.

My memory is quite fuzzy these days.

Goldeneye Severnaya Surface 1

2009-11-16T11:56:00.001Z

I had some footage of me walking back from the local duck pond in the snow, so put one of the Goldeneye surface tracks I wrote underneath.

Enjoy.

2009-10-28T16:10:00.000Z

Crysis Live.

http://gamecity.org/blog/crysisliveannounce

http://www.youtube.com/user/tregenza77

I'll be manning the sampler on Friday, should be quite an event.

There's also Resident Evil Live and Street Fighter Live.

If you are in the UK and near Nottingham, don't miss it!

Hello and Welcome

2009-10-04T22:24:00.000+01:00

As if there's not enough noise already on the net, I'm going to use this blog as a more upto date way of getting the word out of new music downloads from me and the usual random snippets of information about the world of video game music.

For a while, I'll keep the website www.graemenorgate.com and this blog running in tandem and see which works better.

Please bear with me whilst I get the hang of it.

Here's some October news.

Added Mantel 102 Radio Station as never heard in the video game Haze.

Get it while you can, this was an idea for Haze which got put on the ever increasing "to do" list. Instead, the radio station was relegated to one location, so unless you stood for an hour on the deck of the first level, it's unlikely you've heard this. More info lower down on this page.

Grab it here: here

It's 40 meg, an hour long, has some hip hop, chat, silly jingles and made up adverts

September 2009

Check out my remix of their track "Take me to your Lover" released under my Virez pseudonym

Grab it here: iTunes Play Amazon

August 2009

Big plug for the ZinkyZonk! app on Facebook