Soule didn't write Fallout 3 music... here's why

[wsmith123]

OK, Jeremy Soule's Oblivion style doesn't work for Fallout 3. Mark Morgan all the way!! But what many people mistook for Soule because of the horns and drums on Fallout 3's theme doesn't fool a professional ear.

As a musician myself, I know for a fact he wouldn't have been happy with the result heard on the site.

For those that are technical, the first thing I noticed was the track contained many low quality orchestral samples and a ton of polyphonic cutouts (a very amateurish mistake that sounds like notes popping to silence too quickly.) Polyphonic cutout occurs because the DSP runs out of channels and has to "steal" notes in a priority scheme to perform the composition. Often, this is the result of too few computers in a clearly underpowered studio trying to do too much--the composer wasn't writing within the capabilities of his hardware. A "weezing" sound results when this happens... like a broken accordion. Think of this as the audio equivalent to bad "LOD" graphics pop-ups in a game engine. Remember those trees that used to just appear out of nowhere two feet in front of you on your N64 racing game?

The playing was also very loose -- too loose for Soule. This was probably due to a MIDI system that was overloaded and/or bad note entry with no quantize. Soule runs a very advanced custom network. However, the one you are hearing here is like the Doom 2 engine trying to look like Oblivion--creaky old technology trying to do state-of-the-art stuff. Notice how the instruments seem to not be together very well. Some are playing faster than they should and some are playing slower--like soldiers out of step.

EQ and mix perspectives were also sloppy with no unification between the sample layers. In plain English, this is like when you take a bunch of source material in photoshop and try to make a new "fake" photo of someone but you don't match lighting and skin tones properly. Musical instrument samples are no different as they can come from many different sources but need to sound like a unified ensemble to be a convincing soundtrack score.

No trademark Soule instrument control (he has been interviewed on how he controls his computers with his lungs through a custom breath control device). Those dynamics on the Fallout 3 theme were obviously drawn in with a mouse (hence everything sounds very squared off) and were sloppy at that.

Acoustics were also cheap and non-existent--probably a hardware processor like a low-end Lexicon or TC Electronics. Combined with poor EQ and dynamics technique, you start to get a sound that is closer to the music store demo, not the film scoring stage. There are no pulse verbs anywhere that I can hear in this mix--again, probably due to a lack of available CPUs. The melody is also boring and the harmonies and orchestration are very poor.

This is a very low quality production put together by someone who is either inexperienced or just plain mediocre. Everyone can "see" poor CG animation, but everyone can also "feel" bad computer music.

I also know Soule wouldn't have approached this game in this way. Listen to Guild Wars Factions which doesn't sound remotely like Oblivion, and you'll see what I mean. Soule is very versatile and he knows Mark Morgan's work (the original Fallout composer) as both composers worked for Interplay. Soule scored three of Interplay's final games and was very close to the Fallout series. Morgan and Soule worked together seamlessly on Giants: Citizen Kabuto.
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