Sara Garrard: Game music Demos

• Soundtrack music in a variety of styles, from retro sounds to full orchestral score (listen )
• I can produce from start to finish if desired – my setup is Logic with Kontakt and other plugins; also have experience of Ableton, ProTools and happy to learn new software.
• I can work to a brief and with others (working with directors on film and game projects, and working intensely collaboratively on theatre pieces, including as part of improvised productions.)
• I also do sound design / SFX creation.

I enjoy writing tunes, themes, melodies. While not every piece of score wants to be melodic, in many cases it’s the melody more than the production that makes for memorable.

So I have this “classical” background and experience of composing for live performance as well as recorded media. I have a PhD in music composition and have taught composition and orchestration at university level, have played oboe in orchestras and chamber ensembles, and conduct vocal ensembles. Why do I think this is useful to you?

• I can write for live musicians, including preparing scores and parts for up to full orchestra if that is on the cards, but also: 

• It’s useful in writing for virtual ensemble, particularly anything referencing orchestral styles.  Even if we then bend the rules, familiarity with orchestration from the point of view of composer and performer lets me write more interesting and better sounding music. Same goes for understanding of harmony etc, as well as instrumentation.

• I also have the practice in getting to grips with specific styles and genres – medieval chant of the Iberian peninsula before 1080 anyone? – and, probably more to the point, can apply this to new ones.

Of course it kind of begins—or begins again—with Final Fantasy VII. I wrote music all through my childhood, but got into composing in a serious way in my teens basically thanks to that Nobuo Uematsu score, and I studied music at university because of this trajectory.

I wrote music for student films and theatre projects and won a university prize for my third year work. I continued after graduation, including writing the score to a cinematic documentary that aired on Channel 4. There were also a number of indie games with online contacts from those early days onwards: visual novels and RPGmaker projects, not all of which came to completion, but it was a good time and I have some nice tunes.

And of course I had a number of made up RPGs in mind for which I wrote various score pieces… (I revisited a lot of these this year and rearranged my old music into Shadows/Infinity: Battle Zone, imagining the RPG characters in some kind of Dissidia-esque crossover.)

I started teaching, piano, oboe and singing, and directing choirs. I caught the improv bug and with Degrees of Error have been part of multiple sold-out runs of Murder She Didn’t Write at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I went back to university to do a PhD in composition, with a focus on medieval-inspired music.

2020 happened (—I had an online viva) and a lot of my real-world music-making was disrupted, but I had some solid time for my own projects, and time to realise again game music was where I still wanted to be. I worked on some more individual commissions, indie games and music packs on itch.io and released albums: Infinity Crystal and beyond.

I also picked up a ukulele and started setting loads of poems to music and singing a lot more. I’ve now done 7 years of writing a piano piece every day in November. FFVII Remake happened and everything came flooding back and now I have a youtube channel full of Remake music arranged in the style of the original game.