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Greg Turner is an American composer for games. He worked as an audio composer for Realtime Associates. For some games, he would work with Eric Swanson on the music.
When Greg was 9, he began taking lessons on the piano and later started learning the trombone at 11. As a skilled trombonist in high school, it got him into some bands and orchestras. His piano skills got him into bands of all genres and even was an accompanist for choirs. While he was in high school, he had a passion for electronic-sounding music which he still composes to this day. When Turner attended the Berklee College in Boston, he was composing for films. After he graduated there, he was commissioned in the Battle Creek Symphony and was also a keyboardist in some other bands. After that, he was composing for television which got him into composing films. In 1994, he started working for Realtime Associates Seattle Division and worked on all of their games.
Music Composition
Greg had this to say about his BreakThru! (GB) music and GameBoy music:
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Let's see.... I think that was original music I wrote and arranged for the 3 voices that were available on the Game Boy (and Game Gear). For these handheld game platforms here was the setup:
- PC running DOS (yeah..... :) )
- Cakewalk midi sequencer
- Proprietary hardware interface connecting the gameboy (and gamegear) to a serial port on the PC. There was a hand-made interface card that plugged into the cartridge slot on the hand held unit with about a 2" computer cable coming off that went to the PC.
- Custom coded audio system by Dave Warhol (Realtime Associates, Inc.)
- MIDI interface on computer and MIDI keyboard
Dave's setup allowed you to treat the gameboy like a MIDI instrument. You could play the 3 voices (that's all it had - and a drum channel with white noise 'drums') from the midi sequencer just like any other midi instrument. In this case though, you had to make sure that no midi notes overlapped the next note on a track. Each voice had its own midi channel/track. There was something like 16 patches available for each musical voice, and seems like there were a couple different versions of white noise patches for the drums/perc. (... calling those sounds 'drums' is a bit of a stretch.... lol)
After you wrote a piece, you took the midi file and ran it through a conversion process for the audio system, then compiled a 'build' and played it on the handheld. There was a little audition program of Dave's so you could play the music directly on the system as it would be when the final ROM was made. Like I said, it was very picky. If you had ANY overlapping notes it would hang. If (when) this happened, you had to go back into the MIDI sequence and find the problem. After a while, you got pretty adept at quantizing the note lengths. Of yeah, it seems like we had to quantize everything as well, or that would cause problems too.
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Gameography
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