Friday, December 18, 2015

Your game Score, no not the points.

As miniature gamers we enjoy a cinematic experience on the tabletop. Heroes and villains beautifully painted models and terrain can leave us with some pretty neat visuals as we play. Heck if your not making dakka dakka and boom noises, even if it's just in your head, then you are playing wrong. The one thing we don't often add to our games that every movie has is music. Picking music to play isn't as simple as loading up iTunes and hitting shuffle and getting your game on. Nothing breaks the narrative of the moment like lining up your Carnifex to charge some pitiful Guardsmen who will cower before this beast, and then having I'm a Barbie girl! Come blasting over the speakers. At that point the Guard will point and laugh and poor old Fexie is going to go back to his hive in shame. On the other hand if the Imperial March comes on right as you start to unload with your Star Destroyer in a game of Star Wars Armada then all is right with the world.

You may be asking, What is the biggest key to getting the right music? For a simple start you want to look at musical Scores to movies. No not its Rotten Tomatoes rating, it's Score. The music actually played during the movie not the credits soundtrack so often sold instead. Now I know most of us don't have a library of ready to go Score music. Fear not Reader, Amazon Prime has what you need. If like me you are a Prime member for that sweet sweet free two day shipping, you may have noticed it comes with a number of other freebies as well. The one I want to point you at is Amazon Prime music. It's like Pandora except you can download songs and albums that are part of the free prime music library. Yup free, and guess what. There are a ton of albums compiling a number of epic movie scores and full on movie score albums as well.

Yay free mood music for all. Not all of it fits 40k but a simple listen thru and arrangement of the songs into playlists based on mood and you have a veritable gaming library of soundtracks to play with your every game. One of the better groups that you should start with to get a nice smattering of score music to form your playlist is Epic Score. You will find a ton of the albums from this group free with Amazon's Prime Music. Just grab them and put them on shuffle play for your first outing. Very few of the songs are not really 40k appropriate, and you can trim them from your playlist as you hit them. 

1 comment:

Ming said...

YouTube actually has a music video playlist for 40K....mostly heavy metal, but it includes songs that were actually written by bands with members who played 40K.