Original music · Work for hire
A track is not
a deliverable yet.
What a game needs is the piece and the versions of it that survive being played: a loop that comes back round without a seam, a second loop so a long fight does not wear thin. Two commissions, shown the way they were handed over.
One cue, three versions.
Switch between them. The full versions play end to end. The loops are excerpts of the delivered loop files: for the battle cue, two genuinely different ones cut from the passage where they diverge most; for the main cue, the looping section that runs under exploration.
Battle cue
Main game cue
Why a fight gets two loops
A single loop is fine for thirty seconds. A fight that runs five minutes turns the same eight bars into a metronome the player starts fighting against. So the battle cue was delivered twice: 3:22 and 2:52, same material, different arrangement, so the game can alternate without ever announcing a new piece of music. The main cue does not need that. It plays under exploration, where one loop is enough. What it does need is an ending that disappears. Measured against the full version, that ending is the only thing its loop changes.
The loops are also cut differently from the full version. A piece written to be listened to ends; a piece written to be played has to hand back to its own opening without a bump at the join: different last bar, different reverb tail, sometimes a different arrangement in the final phrase.
Unreleased, and shown anyway
Neither game is out, and neither client is named here. What is on this page is the audio work: finished, mixed and delivered. The music does not become better or worse because a project found its way to a storefront.
And one cue, five ways.
An earlier commission. Same theme, same tempo, five instrumentations, written so the client could hear which one actually fitted the game instead of describing it. Click through them.
And one you can go and buy.
Crime Cakes is a published card game, so this one comes with a name. The bakery theme was written once and then tried in different keys. The pitch changes what the same tune means.
What does your game need besides the track?
Loops, stems, states, shorter cuts for menus and trailers. Tell me how the music is played back and the delivery is shaped around it from the first sketch.