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Interview With Alexander Brandon

I have a sort of new video for you. Several months back, Tom White (from Weird Videogames) met composer Alexander Brandon at a convention and set up an interview with him to which I was invited to. We proceeded to ask him a bunch of questions, Tom was in possession of the footage and has finally edited it all together and put it up on his channel. The interview ended up being more technical than I anticipated, so it may not be for everyone, but some may find it interesting. For those that find it too dry, Tom also put together his own special edit here that you might like more.

For those that don’t know, Alexander Brandon is one of my favorite composers and has done fantastic work for games like Tyrian, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, along with lots of other music. He was a lot of fun to talk to and exudes this personality like there’s no stopping him. Also since he was the audio director on Deus Ex: Invisible War, I got to ask him what happened with the music direction for that game (that part is towards the end). Also, when we interviewed him, he was currently available for composing music for game creators. I don’t know his rates, but if you’re working on a game, it’s possible you could hire him to compose music for it. I think he mentioned his contact information in the video (also towards the end), but it’s been several months since I did this, so I don’t remember for certain.

All in all, he was a cool guy, his music is still great, and I think I would enjoy his unrestrained vision of the original Unreal.

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BenMcLean   

BenMcLean
Posted
Alexander Brandon is working on this Kickstarter game with The 8-Bit Guy. Everybody support them cause the game looks really awesome mkay?

 

I'd agree the main thing the 8-Bit guy needs help with is sound design.

What do you mean? Did his previous games have bad sound? I think his 8-Bit Keys videos sound good.

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Presence   

Presence
Posted
What do you mean? Did his previous games have bad sound? I think his 8-Bit Keys videos sound good.

 

I'm speaking more to his videos. He does plenty of fantastic content, but his sound environment is terrible and his editing does him no favors. He'll cut from clear as a bell digitized effects, then to echo laden shots of himself talking to the camera, then to decent quality dubbing, then to echo laden pov shots.

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ScumCoder   

ScumCoder
Posted

Oh my God I love Brandon so much.

 

Twenty years ago when UT came out I was so addicted to its soundtrack that I actually soldered a special cable with 3,5 mm jacks on both sides, connected the audio output of my PC to a tape recorder with it, started recording, then launched UT and started a practice match on each of the maps that had my favourite tracks. And then put this cassette into my cheap Chinese tape player and listened to it everywhere.

 

Because how else are you going to rip music from a game when you are a stupid 3rd grader and the Internet is not yet even a thing.

 

Since then I've learned pretty much every sample of every track by heart, but they stubbornly refuse to get old. Even now Brandon's music is among the most played tracks on my smartphone.

Come the full moon, the bat flies whose boiling blood shall stem the tide.

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