Hi everyone!
There are good days, and great days, and then some days you know you’ll remember forever as one of the best experiences of your life. We had one of those days yesterday.
We had the amazing good fortune to get to spend the day in the recording studio as our composer and her team recorded the score to Homesick.
Working with Composer and Pianist Heather Schmidt as she has been writing an original score for our game over the past several years has been on its own a really cool experience. It has been so rad to talk with her about the vibe, feeling, tone we are going for – and then she turns those concepts into beautiful and moving music. She nailed it, and we are in total awe of her.
For each song, she sends us a synth version of it, of her playing the music on a keyboard. We have been inserting these into the game as place holders, so if you have watched the trailer, or played the alpha as a tester, you have heard these synth-version tracks. Yesterday we recorded the real deal: the original score played live in the studio.
A few weeks ago our jaws dropped when Heather told us where we would be recording. The Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage at Sony Pictures Studios. Which is known as the best scoring stage in the world. The Wizard of Oz, Lawrence of Arabia, Toy Story, and countless other epic scores were recorded there. And now Homesick! How we got to be so lucky, we will never know.
And, in addition to Heather playing the piano, Heather’s long-time friend, and wonderfully talented musician and music professor, Shauna Rolston played the cello. She flew down from Canada just for the recording session, and brought her beloved cello from the 1800s.
This was the first time we got to hear the score played with actual instruments, live. Not only that, Heather and Shauna are amazingly talented. It was beautiful. Heather and Shauna were in the sound stage, while we were sitting in the booth (which is actually more like a large room) with the extremely impressive and great to work with Sound Engineer, Adam Michalak. When Heather and Shauna started playing the first track, our hearts just stopped. It was incredible.
Homesick has been a huge part of our lives. We eat, breathe, and sleep this game. Our hopes, our dreams, our hearts are poured into it. Getting to hear the score come to life, in such a special place, played by such amazing musicians, mixed by such a skilled engineer … it was just magical. I wish you all got to be there with us to share in the experience, and we can’t wait until you get to hear it in the game.
We are forever grateful to Heather, Shauna, and Adam. We cannot thank you enough.
Although this won’t do it justice, we put together a quick little video to capture the day:
And here is a pic of the whole team:
(From left to right: Awesome Sound Technician Guy, Sound Engineer Adam Michalak, Composer and Pianist Heather Schmidt, Cellist Shauna Rolston, Barrett, Morgan)
Thank you all for being on this adventure with us!
– Barrett & Morgan
