Wing Commander Album Orchestral Pieces Released! (December 22, 2014)

KrisV

KrisV

Administrator
Check your e-mail inbox if you backed George Oldziey's live orchestra Wing Commander album on Kickstarter or FundRazr, because the orchestral pieces are now available for download! There are ten high quality tracks (48kHz 24 bit masters!) for a total run time of about 32 minutes. The remaining (digitally sampled) tracks and the physical album are due out early next year. We also have a behind-the-scenes documentary to look forward to, and you can check out several preview videos here, here and here. If you're in need of album art for your music organizer software, you can use the one that LeHah put together with Klav's Hornet.






A couple of thoughts on the process. These musicians were wonderful, and very motivated to do the best they could. They particularly had to rise to the occasion on the gameplay music from Wing Commander 3, which turned out to be MUCH more demanding than WC4 or Prophecy music. You probably recall that the technology used back then to generate the gameplay music was very limited in terms of polyphony (in this case, how many notes could be played at once). Chris Roberts wanted that orchestral sound of course, so I had certain patches playing a lot more notes than I'd otherwise make live musicians play, as well as play in ranges that were challenging. I tried to keep as accurate to the original compositions as possible, which of course put a lot of strain on the french horns and strings, but I think they did a magnificent job.

Here is a list of the tracks... There are two tracks from the movie portions of the games. There is of course the 9 minute Suite, which features music from the intros to both WC 3 and 4. There is also the winning endgame from WC4 where Tolwyn has his meltdown in the senate chamber and culminating in Col. Blair flying off into the "sunset".

WC 3 gameplay music features three mission pieces; "Strike", "Behemoth" and "Defend". WC 4 gameplay music features two mission pieces "Borderworlds" and "Mission 4" (not sure what the final title of that was, but I found it in my files as mission 4!). There is also a WC4 battle medley. Music from Prophecy features "Mission to Alien Space" and "Intense combat".

You'll notice that for some of the shorter gameplay pieces they loop at least once before fading. I'm sure all you clever gamers out there can figure out good loop points if you want to try to hack them into a game!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the digitally sampled pieces and CD will be available early 2015. This process took a bit longer than I anticipated, but I'll complete my mission before too long!

Once again, a TRULY heartfelt thanks to all of you for your support. Being in that recording booth and hearing all this music played by an orchestra for the first time was one of the biggest highlights of my career! Maybe we can do "Volume 2" in the not too distant future!

I hope all of you have a blessed and happy holiday season!

Musically yours,

George
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Original update published on December 22, 2014
 
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That was an unfortunate gaffe, publishing the link to everyone. I find it interesting that the new, private link redirects to wcnews.com though!

Yet to download, will have a good listen when it's done.

Edit: I got confused about the link - the text in the e-mail says wcnews.com anyway, but the actual link goes through kickstarter.com.
 
FYI, for the sake of history, I did not make the album cover that George posted. My good friend (and fellow WC fan) Mike Joffe made it on the fly, after I told him I didn't know what the album art would look like. I just passed it on to the proper parties.

That said, the album is truly terrific and everything I ever wanted for almost 20 years!

(Did George say something about a second volume? I'm game!)
 
Pedro said:
I backed via fundrazr rather than kickstarter, no e-mail about available downloads :(
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Hey,

An e-mail should have gone out to Fundrazr backers as well. Have you checked your spam folder in case it was falsely flagged? Or maybe you told Fundrazr never to e-mail you? Have you tried logging in on the Fundrazr website and checking for messages there? I know that works for Kickstarter.
 
KrisV said:
Hey,

An e-mail should have gone out to Fundrazr backers as well. Have you checked your spam folder in case it was falsely flagged? Or maybe you told Fundrazr never to e-mail you? Have you tried logging in on the Fundrazr website and checking for messages there? I know that works for Kickstarter.
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Just logged in, I can see the contribution and the claim of the digital download perk - but nothing in my messages folder, and my preferences allow fundrazr to contact me.
I did recieve the initial thank you for your contribution message back in May, but nothing since, not even in my spam folder.
 
No Fundrazr email. Patiently awaiting my autographed CD. Will see if I can access the digital versions.

Nice Christmas present. :D
 
Salk said:
Would it be possible to use the new tracks in the game?
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What game are you referring to? If you mean putting back into WC3, 4 and Prophecy, there is not a way to do this. As cool as that would be, it sounds like quite a tough proposition - the movie cutscenes each have their own type of audio/video encoding which is different again from the in-game music. And then there's only about 30 minutes of live reorchestration out of the hours of music across the games, so it would take quite extensive modification to swap out a fraction of each game's music.
 
Thank you for your input, ChrisReid.

I just meant WC3 and WC4 tracks. I was hoping it was possible to swap them with the one shipping with the game.
 
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