Gabriel Plourde’s introduction to the music world came when he was nine, and a character in a Legend of Zelda game played a type of flute called an ocarina.
His parents found him an ocarina of his own, and the rest is history.
Now, the Edmundston composer combines his love for music and video games for a living.
And most recently, he was asked to compose an original score for a new world in Fortnite, one of the most popular video games of all time.
“It feels very rewarding, because … I do music all the time, and all I hear is the music and the final product on YouTube or in other people’s projects,” Plourde said.
“But to see it, like, in gameplay, with the sound effects going on and everything, it’s really rewarding.”
Fortnite, an online video game, is often considered a cultural phenomenon and has amassed over 650 million registered users worldwide.
Plourde, 29, records covers of video game music and composes his own scores for video games on his YouTube channel, Gabocarina96, where he has more than 37,000 subscribers.
But when a friend from the industry saw a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, looking for someone to compose orchestral-rock music for a new Fortnite world, she tagged Plourde.
While many people are familiar with the popular Battle Royale mode in Fortnite, Plourde said there’s also a section where people can download other worlds.
Plourde said the world builder who commissioned him is known as CooliSushi and is quite popular on the platform
“The guy I composed the music for … has, I believe, 25 million downloads on his maps,” Plourde said. “So it’s a big deal for me [and] my name is credited right when you begin playing the game.
“It’s quite good exposure for me.”
Plourde is commissioned to create original music and he will usually talk to the client about what they envision.
For the Fortnite world, called Anime RPG Tycoon, Plourde said it already had temporary music that is used during production, so he was able to listen to this, talk to the creator and start drafting ideas.
The piece is an “orchestral rock sound,” which Plourde said is a mix of typical rock or metal music with orchestra playing in the back. The idea was to have the music be in the style of the Xenoblade Chronicles, one of Plourde’s favourite video games.
After creating the arrangement, Plourde sits down and records all the parts, usually beginning with the drums, before mixing it all together.
For the Fortnite music, he used virtual instruments on a keyboard to create the synthetic orchestra and then real instruments, such as the guitar and bass, for the rock portion.
A song usually takes a week or a little longer, depending on the complexity of the arrangement, said Plourde. The Fortnite composition took about a week, he said, but then he had to do several variations of the same theme for different parts of the game in order to create a more “dynamic experience.”
“It is a lot of work … but it’s work that I enjoy doing,” Plourde said.
And while Plourde does this work full time and has been commissioned in the past to create music for “mods” — where players can take their game and modify the files within it — and for YouTube channels, this was his first time having his original music in a video game.
Plourde said the ultimate dream is to continue down the path of video game music composition. Someday, he’d love to compose for a Japanese role-playing-style game.
As a lifelong New Brunswicker, he said it’s a great feeling to be able to do this work from his home province.
“With the internet today, anything’s possible,” Plourde said.
“Sure, sometimes there [are] bigger opportunities and stuff like that in bigger cities, but you can really put yourself out there from anywhere in the world these days, which is amazing.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.cbc.ca ’
