Making music for your game

Hi all, I have another issue.

I'm at the point where my game is nearly finished for a beta release, but I would like to at least get a theme song and a boss theme done.

Thing is, as a primary artist and getting the hang of the quirks of Construct 2, I do not know how to compose music.

Last time I tried to compose music was when I had Mario Paint... when I was 11. It had a block format that worked by adding symbols representing sounds on the music sheet lines.

I'd prefer like a 8-16 bit chipset style, but at this point I'll settle for anything to try out.

Any recommendations?

I am in the same boat too. I need music for my game too. I have done some, but they are not as good.

Sony Acid studio is pretty good for creating stuff quickly

you can also purchase cheap music from jewelbeat.com for each about 1$.

You can also use free music, check this thread for good links: answers.unity3d.com/questions/7743/where-can-i-find-music-or-sound-effects-for-my-gam.html

There is some quality stuff available for free, pay attention to the license as it may have conditions like crediting the original author.

I've been playing with Nanostudio lately

It's basically a mobile app, but I use it on desktop for now (free download for windows!)

And because it's compact and "simplified" you don't have to mess with a lot of options, so it's a neat thing to play around, even for complex stuff

Wow thanks for the speedy replies, I'm going to try some of these. The dollar music ones sound like a good idea, I'll definitely remember to credit the author.

There are tons and tons of composers willing to work for free on noncommercial projects (not sure if that's what this is). Try newgrounds as a start.

My favorite music making program is Linux Multimedia Studio, or LMMS. It is free and open source and is for windows, not just linux. You can make a good beat pretty quickly with it and make melodies with a piano roll kinda like a graph where you place notes. http://lmms.sourceforge.net/

I'm very interested in this as well. What would be a good program to specifically create digital music within the program, rather than recording instruments?

Personally I'm most interested in ease of use, and it doesn't have to be free.

If you want to create music without recording instruments you'll need software to sequence it with (generally a digital audio workstation or DAW) and some software synthesizers. There are a number of free DAWs for windows and mac and also some reasonably priced ones such as Reaper, which I would recommend as it's very powerful and cheap. You can load virtual studio instruments (vstis) into this (basically software synthesizers, but sample based instruments are also available) and compose away. There are lots of free ones out there, but a good one to check out initially is the excellent and free Synth1. It should be noted however that this stuff has a pretty high learning curve and getting good results won't happen quickly.

newgrounds.com audio section is good. Both for game loops and music. Usually you just contact the artist and ask permission then put them in credits or whatever.

Here are my tracks:

silkng.newgrounds.com/audio

I'm happy for them to be used, so long as you give me credit. :)

I'm back, I'm a little concerned with using Jewelbeat as this part of the user agreement can pose a problem:

6a. The Licensee is permitted under the Standard License to distribute up to 50,000 copies of a physical or downloadable product, including but not limited to DVDs, software, downloadable games and downloadable videos that incorporate The Music.

6b. The Licensee is permitted under the Extended License to distribute up to 1,000,000 copies of a physical or downloadable product, including but not limited to DVDs, software, downloadable games and downloadable videos that incorporate The Music.

Figured there had to be a catch... if I read this right you can't sell more than that amount. Like if you used a song for an app, you're limited selling 50k (downloads in this case?) of that app for standard.

Can anyone clarify?

6a specifies that you cannot sell more than 50k copies if you use music from Jewelbeat.

— It looks like that applies to the standard license, but if you purchase the extended license ($49) there aren't any limits. So essentially, just buy the $1 and if you're lucky enough that you're getting close to selling 50,000 copies, then just buy the extended license.