Today’s DreamsPS4 Music Production Livestream on Twitch was a Hit
Today’s DreamsPS4 music production Twitch stream was a hit focusing on tools for you musicians out there. This stream was more based on a glimpse of music production with the DreamsPS4 built-in DAW than exploring all of the audio tools in-game. After taking a listen to some well crafted tunes at the beginning, audio fans get surprised at the end of the stream from Bogdan!
Tom, audio lead at Media Molecule, starts off by going into the Dreamiverse for music to place in the level. Some grade A quality chill music is heard from Tom titled “Plimps and plunes: whole piece”. Various instruments and sounds seen in the timeline are named “Keyboard crazy piano, Tongue Drum, 2 shakers, Simple Sub Bass, GermanViolaGermanCello_Harmonics..” and more. It took Tom about a day or less to create the track.
Ed jumps in to show off his music track titled “Sugar Creature”, a really playful production. You can find instruments and sounds used in this piece such as the “Clarinet Staccato”, and an “Odd Drummer Kit”. Yes, crafting your own collections with audio in Dreams will be done so just like any other object.
Bogdan brings out the chiptunes with his music track “FluffBucket” which also blends in some hard bass techno grooves near the beginning. The imp is thoroughly enjoying the tune as well. Imps for the most part are a representation of you after all. If you are dancing in your chair then your imp will be moving about dancing as well. Part way into Bogdan’s music, we can hear some familiar chords and notation similar to a Castlevania track called “Vampire Killer”. “FluffBucket” was only made in 45min so you can make really nice sounding music in DreamsPS4 in a good amount of time.
If you haven’t realized it by now, when it comes to crafting audio in DreamsPS4, pretty much everything is tweakable. You’ve got the BPM and time signature on the timeline which you can change. Slowing down the tempo like Bogdan demonstrated can not only give a different sound for different situations but can help with cue points in-game. If you want a song to last longer there is also another trick you can use with area cue points. Simply loop certain sections or instruments in one area location and cue the next part during an event such as a boss battle!
Customization helps with both creativity and workflow. You can color-code elements such as your timeline, instruments, fx, and more. This would also visually help people during online multiplayer in addition to in-game notes. There is additional organization when it comes to finding audio as things can be filtered by type of sound, style, etc.
In the stream Media Molecule picked a piano sample from their studio to use. When compared to playing the actual piano in their studio at the same time, they indeed sounded the same with near perfect quality. You could even plug in an audio interface and record your own instruments to the PS4 that way if you don’t used the PS4 camera or USB mic. Not only that but with importing, you’ll be able to upload browser supported sound files such as mp3, wav, and aiff. Using the 2D performance surface you can play samples vanilla style or put a gadget in the field for real-time effects like reverb and flanger. The notes recorded from the 2D view get translated to the piano roll view in which you can do fine detail editing.
To help tighten up and perfect your editing, there is a quantizing tool to help correct any off-time errors. However, a quick tip from us here at ImpSpace, you don’t want to always quantize everything. Sometimes you need those happy little human accidents in your rifts #BogRoss. There is no time to explorer every single tweak you can do in Dreams because there are so much. You can expect your traditional tools found in DAW’s with ASDR, arpeggiator, granular waveform editing, and a whole lot more.
Going back to logic and how it can affect everything, Mm did a quick example of connecting the timeline play-head and tempo to the character walking speed. There was also a demo with a green apple making it flash to the tempo similar to the PSX “Maintain Eye Contact” level.
To end the Dreams livestream with a surprise, Bogdan showed off the ‘Beetbox’ IDM based drum machine instrument. The instrument in made in Dreams so…VST’s in DreamsPS4 CONFIRMED! Made from scratch, Bogdan put a lot of logic behind the Beetbox VST even decorating it with actual beets. Going into a brief look at the logic, the lights, the LED displays, everything is connected in a tailored instrument for Dreams. There are switches connected to the timeline to effect the effects, of custom made effects…into other timelines..randomizing it…then randomizing the randomizers…still with us here? The beetbox is pretty much an inceptionized creation in a case.
Dreams tends to get pulling out the surprises left and right and there is still much to see and for much to be revealed when it comes down to the little details. If you haven’t checked out how DreamsPS4 has a 10 year plan, head over to the article to get a sneak peak. Sony PlayStation and MediaMolecule are supporting Dreams in a fantastic way. You can find out more on DreamsPS4 at ImpSpace soon and we’ll be having some nifty surprises to share. Follow us on YouTube, Twitter, and don’t forget to join the DreamsPS4 Discord Server! if you haven’t already. E3’s coming up soon!