Uncategorized | Ben Prunty's Blog

Hiking in the San Francisco Bay Area: Three of my Favorites

August 27, 2013 by Ben

My partner, Allison, and I love hiking. We have a tradition: every Monday, we pick a new place, pack up some Clif bars, lots of water, and my sweet camera, and go for a day hike. In the last three months we’ve explored nearly fifteen different parks. If you live in the Bay Area and are looking for a cool place to spend your day, I have three great suggestions, with pictures! Click on any photo to see its gigantic, […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: hiking, notmusic, photography

A guided tour through the FTL soundtrack: analysis of themes.

July 11, 2013 by Ben

As I mention in the text writeup included with every copy, the FTL soundtrack is very self-referential. Lots of sounds, melodies and chords show up multiple times throughout. Here I’m going to break down three of the major motifs, point out each time they pop up, and tell you a bit about them and how they fit in with everything else. You might want to pull up the soundtrack in bandcamp so you can follow along. The Space Cruise Chords This is […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: composition, FTL, game music

The Best Book on Music Theory

June 6, 2013 by Ben

I get asked about this all the time, so here’s the best book I know of for learning music theory: It’s fifteen dollars on Amazon.com. I’ve read a lot of books on theory, but Michael Miller is the only author with the balls to actually teach the reader the actual mechanics of music theory instead of just saying, “you should just memorize this stuff because I hate math.” Trust me, this is how a lot of theory books are. Buy […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: advice, books, composition, recommendations

I Love Novels: some book recommendations

June 1, 2013 by Ben

Even though I work in the games industry and I obviously love games, the novel is probably my favorite form of media. I’ve been reading a lot of books lately and I want to share some of my recent favorites. You’ll notice there’s a definite Stephen King trend; I’ve been trying to catch up on the ones I’ve missed. King is a master storyteller, and you should definitely check out anything from his enormous body of work. So anyway, here […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: books, notmusic, recommendations

Here’s what I used to make the FTL soundtrack

January 3, 2013 by Ben

I get a lot of people asking me what tools I used to make the FTL soundtrack. I started answering them individually, but I think a blog post would be more efficient and useful to everyone. So here goes! I have a Macbook Pro that’s the center of my setup. I record everything into Cubase, my DAW of choice. There are many quality DAWs out there. I hear Reason and FL Studio are good too. I originally purchased Cubase because ten years ago, when I knew nothing about […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: FTL, game music, hardware, music production

Giant, abandoned, derelict ship fiction

December 30, 2012 by Ben

I’m a huge fan of any work of fiction that involves exploring a giant, dark, ancient, empty, creepy ship or vessel of some kind. I have a mind to actually write a short story or novella involving such. These are some of my favorites in this sub-genre that exists in my head: The classic sci-fi horror film Alien Sphere by Michael Crichton The videogame Dead Space The not-amazing-but-pushed-all-the-right-buttons movie Pandorum Epic, mid-budget, occasionally goofy sci-fi horror movie Event Horizon Other, […]

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Song-A-Thon, a terrible name for a great music-writing exercise

October 12, 2012 by Ben

Not long after I decided to really dive into making music as a lifetime project, and in between learning music theory and piano, I somehow managed to start and finish Love Story (now on Chromatic T-Rex) in one week. I was so impressed with the quality of something I was able to make in so little time that I turned it into a challenge: could I keep making a good track every week? So I gave this idea the fairly […]

Categories: Uncategorized