Gaming Music

[Addled GM]

I integrated some music into my game simply by playing that awful Mortal Kombat techno song last week.  When I did I saw all my players perk up and after the game they said that that was one of the things they liked most out of the session.  I was hoping for some suggestions as to creepy music to use for CoC or some pulpy music for my pulp game when I have time to run again.
   

[Moondog]

I'd recommend any of the Silent Hill soundtracks, if you want creepy music. It's got this grating industrial edge to it that, if kept low in the background, gets very unsettling very quickly.

If doing it in the 20's/30's/40's America, don't forget some big band and swing. While not exactly creepy, it can be a very useful tool to help get players 'in the mood' of the game if they happen to visit say, a club or dance hall. Cab Calloway and the like would work wonderfully.

[malyss]

Sonic Legends has some cool tracks. Go to Paizo.com and you can find them there. A couple of bucks a song and they link end to end so they can repeat seamlessly.

[SageNytell]

OC Remix and similar sites offer free video game remixes in a bewildering variety of styles and genres, all of varying degrees of similarity to the source material. I've arranged various tracks into CDs for my parents for the last four Christmases, and they have yet to catch on that it's from video games. Best of all, the remixers can't claim the rights to the original music, so the songs are... more or less copyright free. Slightly more complicated than normal music in that regard, but still effectively copyright free.

MAKE SURE that you have a good long playlist. One single 3:40 song left on repeat 'because it sounds awesome' for the length of an entire combat (call it ~45 minutes) will lead to crazy/angry players veeeery quickly.

[clockworkjoe]

yeah sorry to burst your bubble but those are definitely not copyright free - remixing and sampling does not magically remove copyright. It's a huge gray area in the law, as remixing can be legal if you change the music enough so that it becomes an original pieces. Rappers found out this the hard way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_%28music%29#Legal_issues

That being said, I don't see video game companies actually enforcing their copyrights too hard because they make money selling games not music. They are obviously aware of OCremix and if they haven't taken legal by now, then I don't see them ever doing that.

[Dom]

For sci-fi games, Solar Fields has some pretty cool stuff.

I also own the Mirror's Edge OST, great background music for almost anything modern.

[SageNytell]

yeah sorry to burst your bubble but those are definitely not copyright free - remixing and sampling does not magically remove copyright. It's a huge gray area in the law, as remixing can be legal if you change the music enough so that it becomes an original pieces. Rappers found out this the hard way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_%28music%29#Legal_issues

That being said, I don't see video game companies actually enforcing their copyrights too hard because they make money selling games not music. They are obviously aware of OCremix and if they haven't taken legal by now, then I don't see them ever doing that.

I most certainly stand corrected. There is quite a bit more that I don't know about copyright law than I do know. Thanks for that information.

Adding to the thread! I found this in my continuing search for historical information on the 1930s so I can time travel and kill Hitler in style run a new campaign set in the late 1930s. I haven't looked too far into the material yet, but it certainly seems to have a lot of cool stuff on there, a lot of radio programs and dramas and some classic music.

[doctorscraps]

Music has never worked in my games. One of my players used to randomly fire up Blackmoors Night during a Star Wars campaign, and it used to annoy the piss out of me, but she tended to get real grumpy, and we gamed at her place, so I let it slide.

[Fizban]

I ran a Feng Shui con game a couple of years back, where I just collected a bunch of music that I thought would be good for the general background of each scene (so modern Chinatown with a bunch of classic Chinese pop hits, the netherworld with freaky electronica, and ancient China with lots of simple traditional Chinese music), and then I just had a big collection of upbeat classic fight music for the fight scenes (lots of movie stuff like Battle Without Honor or Responsibility, the one from the Matrix etc and with Kung Fu Fighting thrown in there for good measure).

It worked okay.  I got one comment from someone saying they thought it was distracting, and no other comments.

In the 4E D&D game we play, the DM has a running loop of one or two soundtracks which I honestly just tune out, as I don't feel they add anything to it.

For a game like CoC, or run in a pulp era, I can see the benefit of running music if people walk into a club or a speakeasy or something, and for setting mood for scary bits, but I think you have to choose wisely when to do it, and have an easy way of making it run - because nothing breaks the mood more than fiddling with technology.

[clockworkjoe]

- because nothing breaks the mood more than fiddling with technology.

that's why I don't use music when I run games more than anything else - before I recorded games for rppr I did some sessions with music. It distracted me and the players never really seemed to care. There are times I think music would help for a few games but the effort outweighs the benefit.