Creating a Cinematic Audio Pack in a Week

The Goal

I'm a massive nerd. I love playing Dungeons and Dragons, and for me - the musical experience accompanying the game is a big element. During my first game, I found various film/game soundtracks on Spotify and played them during appropriate times. For my second game, I decided (rather ambitiously) to write all my own music for a fully original score. Last week, I decided to try and make a complete cinematic audio pack of short tracks to accompany specific moments in tabletop games.

This kind of project is the right scope for a write-up for me (much longer and I'd become uninterested and abandon ship). So, with that in mind, I wanted to create:

A selection of tracks (around the 5-30 seconds each mark)
The tracks should be distinctive, working for particular scenarios
All original material
Fully mixed and mastered
Artwork to accompany
Something that can be released for free

The DAW

Firstly, a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is required. My choice is Reaper. It has a famously generous free trial (think WinRAR...), exceptional flexibility, subprojects (we'll get to that later), and for my purposes, does everything the other contenders (Logic/Cubase) do.

To begin with, I create a project in Reaper. This will be the Main project. Each track that I create will live inside this project - the reason being is that the tracks can all be mastered together, using a consistent reference track, and it's easy to open up tracks one at a time. This is because I used subprojects. In Reaper, subprojects allow you to have a "project within a project".

Open up the project, and make a selection for the length of time of the first track. Then go to Insert > New Subproject. This will likely ask you to immediately render the subproject. Once you let it render, you'll see a blank media item in the Main project. This contains the rendered output of the subproject. Once we get writing in the subproject, every time the subproject is saved, it will automatically render and update the Main project.

Regions

Hop back to the Main project and make a selection the same length as your subproject. Then Insert > Create Region (or shift + r). This is important for our final rendering. To keep organised, give your region the same name as the subproject (these can be edited at any time, so don't be precious).

Writing Music

Once we have this setup complete, we can think about writing music. You might want to record instruments yourself, in which case, you'll need to make sure you have a microphone and an Audio Interface. For more variety, you may want to work with virtual instruments.

Virtual Instruments

This becomes a bit of a rabbit hole, as you can spend literally thousands on orchestral strings alone - but thankfully there are some very good affordable alternatives. The best in my opinions, are made by Spitfire. They have the LABS range, a free library of high quality virtual instruments, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover pack - a free orchestral library (this requires filling in a questionnaire to get it for free). There are other resources like Pianobook for more free VST's, and endless places to purchase them - but not enough time to explore in this post!

Template

Once you have your instruments installed, it's time to think about a sound palette. This is what defines the feel of the pack. This is about creating some limitations on what you'll use in order to create a consistent set of tracks. Its not essential, and in some cases might be actively avoided, but largely, it's a good idea to create cohesive sounds, and a template is the fastest way to do that.

My preferred method is to simply write my first track, then base my palette on that track. Once you're happy with the palette, select all tracks, right click on them and select Save tracks as template. Give them a name, and this will allow you to quickly import that set of instruments into each subsequent file. Now it's time to write your piece.

Mixing

Once the piece is written, I like to freeze all of my tracks (render them in place). This helps speed up project load times, and allows you to unfreeze any track to continue working on it. Then you can mix the rendered tracks until your hearts content. Once mixed, save the project and let it automatically render (this will be a lot faster if you've frozen the tracks).

Now repeat this process for all of your tracks for the album, until they are all mixed and rendered in the Main project.

Mastering

Head on back to the Main project and see your mixed tracks now sat ready for mastering. Use any tool you like to master, I like to do one pass on each individual tracks to get the levels correct, and then one pass over the entire project to make sure each track feels like it belongs in the set. My choice is to use Ozone, but anything that can measure LUFS (which Reaper can do) is fine, along with any EQ and Compressor (again, both of which Reaper comes with by default).

I would highly recommend using a reference track for mastering. Find a track, similar in style to yours, and import it into the project. Then listen to yours and then the reference track in succession to see if you are getting the volume, EQ and compression roughly correct.

Exporting

Once the files are mastered, it's time to export it all. Go to File > render. This will open the rendering config. There's two important steps here. First is to set the source to Region render matrix. This allows us to export an individual file for each region (track). Then go to the Region Matrix, and tick on the track mix for each track on that you would like to render.

You can do this either by just ticking the master mix for each, or selecting each individual track (however if you are applying FX on the master track, make sure you tick master mix, otherwise those FX won't be applied in the render).

Now set the output directory (so that your files aren't just dumped in the root of the project. I like to use a renders folder. Then using the wildcards button, you can give the file names based on the region. I used $regionnumber - $region. Make sure you render the files as WAV, in 44.1 or 48kHz. Then render.

Polish

To make the project feel a little more professional, we'll add some album artwork. You can do this by finding either images/paintings that you have the rights to use (either through a service or asking the creator). Look at Pexels, Pixabay or Unsplash. Alternatively, create the artwork yourself. Take a picture, or paint a scene. I used Krita to paint a scene of a wizard and a gnome, walking along a snowy path towards some mountains.

And to give you some confidence - this is what I started with.

A lot of hours (and many Krita tutorials on YouTube later), I had a final piece I was pleased with.

Then I used Figma to create a proper cover for the project.

Release

Finally, it's time to release the project. I decided to release my tracks on Soundcloud. That makes it easy to send links to people, and allow them to download the tracks for their own usage.

And there we have it. A full audio pack, released on a popular platform for free. All in all, I'd estimate this took about 15 hours in total to create.