hi all im new to the forums and starting my first shadowrun game soon, and i am looking to see if any of you have any suggestions for music for shadowrun games? ive been looking at alot of yoko kano lately but beyond that ive been coming up dry...

Yep that's a FAQ on here We really should make it a sticky...

If you go to the Search page, type in music, pick a date range such as "Any", tick the "Search titles only" radio button and you'll get lots of good suggestions and views on music and SR games.

Welcome to Dumpshock, whitezero.

For my own games, I prefer stuff like the Fight Club soundtrack, Chemical Brothers (not all songs, but some of it works), Prodigy, and mostly a bunch of random house and trance stuff. Some industrial for fight scenes.

To me, it's not the specific song that's important, so much as the feel of the music overall. I generally keep it pretty low key in the background also.

I'm not familiar with Yoko Kano. What kind of stuff is it?

hi,

i suggest you to design sound track for your game. Ok example:

I'm writing a whole campaign for the aztlan/Tenochtitlan scene. So basicaly i need music with a strong aztlan flavour.
I then decided to dive deep inside undergroung rap/hip-hop aztlan bands (it does exist indeed, just make a net search with the "aztlan" keyword and brace yourself for a culture shock....a yes BTW i'm french)

So i downloaded (legal-free) music, hip/hop/rap/techno from the mexican scene, mixed it with traditional music tracks and added some sound tracks ( wave or mp3 files coming from a sound libraries downloaded from the net for..free) like chopper passing by, airport noise, crowd walking ,police screaming, far gun shot, industrial, gunshot and so on.

pump it into your media player and you can choose what ever sound you want while you'r gammasterizing. This method gives you total control on the soundtrack underlaying your scene in the same way a film soundtrack tamper with the audience. You can even underlay your sound track with a heartbeat sound pulsing around 75 bpm, deep bass almost inaudible.

Better to secretly pumpup the volume on your PC and play a fierce lion growl sound LOUD, than : "ok perception test, TN 2....any success ? everybody hear a strange loud growl.....

overwhelming effect, check for heart weakness befor doind them this trick.
a little work with the computer and....technomagic in action

Yoko Kanno is the greatest composer alive. No, seriously, she composes all the best anime soundtracks, including Cowboy Bebop, Escaflowne, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Macross Plus. As far as cyberpunk stuff, I'd recommend Information High from Macross Plus for when you mobilize the Black IC.

As for what kind of stuff she makes, she's the queen of eclecticism. She makes everything.

Does she make stuff outside of anime soundtracks? What CD's should I buy/pirate?

One trick that seems to work well for me: As the intensity of the moment goes up, the mood music should become quieter and more melodic.

Thanks in large part to Platoon, a gunfight with Barber's "Quartet for Strings" playing in the background is a lot more evocative than any heavy metal I can throw at it. Brutal torture and beatings usually call for Gilbert and Sullivan. if only because the absurd contrast typically causes people to stop and feel a bit more uncomfortable about the situation.

80's music. Any other type of music is a betrayal to cyber punk, and will ruin your game if you play it.

get the soundtracks for Hack Sign, and Heat Guy J. They both have a good mix of techno, low key instrumental, choiral, and ren-fair-fantasyesque tracks.
Heat Guy J is a little better in my opinion. Very Shadowrunny, and good for action.

I would also recommend the three GITS:SAC soundtracks, and the soundtracks for Sneakers, Conspiracy Theory, Fargo, and Blade Runner. Especially Blade Runner. If you can cherry pick through the Bebop stuff you could get a couple of good albums worth of music, but honestly I think a lot of it isn't a good match for SR - good though it may be.

Portishead's Portishead CD is good (kind of a droning bluesy sound), and Vangelis did a CD called City Music (I think) that was ambient city sounds over very soft music, which I also recommend.

I once played in a CP2020 game where the hostess set the dmx music channel to Salsa, and kept it there. It worked, it really really worked. A couple of years later, when I saw the movie Mean Guns, I couldn't stop laughing that someone else thought to mix Salsa with megaviolence.

As an aside, I just recently found the soundtrack for Silent Hill (the computer game). A lot of it is better for horror, but much has an off-beat industrial background sound to it (industrial as in the sound of factories and chains, not industrial the style of music). In general I try to avoid music with lyrics as background music because it's distracting, so computer game soundtracks really are the place to go.

Any of the Silent Hill soundtracks are good, but as they go on there are more tracks you'll want to skip (more vocals, etc.).

Decoded Feedback has some good tracks for SR.

~J

Merzbow!!!

Thievery Corporation
Funker Vogt
Pitchshifter
Crystal Method

thanks to everyone so far but lets keep the ideas coming...has anyone ever heard goblin? they did the soundtrack to suspiria and might have done the original dawn of the dead anyway i likd the comment about 80s music and how it will ruin my game if i dont stick to it...know any other good 80s synth, melodic epic soundtracky stuff?

Underworld - Rez, Cowgirl

Those are two must have tracks for matrix work. All your hacking dice will come up 1's if you don't play one of these two tracks. I swear to god, black ic will pop up and kill you next time youre surfing for porn if you don't get these tracks.

ps. im serious.

Also, 80s synth without the 80s is called Electro nowadays. go to your digital music download store of choice and check out some samples, find an artist you like.

*shudder* Eighties music. The game is set seventy years in the future and you want a soundtrack from twenty years ago!

But more usefully, there's a site called www.magnatune.com that has very cheap and little known music. A lot of it's crap, but there is some very good music tucked away in there (usually under World / Ethnic ), some particularly good for any Middle Eastern or Indian runs. The main advantage though, is that a lot of it is instrumental only. Words often detract from the mood.

Soundtracks, you can keep an eye out for anything Eric Senna was involved with. He did the soundtrack to the film Wasabi which has some very good j-pop on it. Just great for the Renraku mall.

I'm loathe to start another thread on this, so I'll put my request in here:

I'm looking for something a little more appropriate to a Cyberpirates campaign, myself. Anybody refer me to a little techno-afro-indies? futuristic-mystic-calypso? steel smart-drums? latino-industrial sun-drenched cyber tunes?

Dub/dubtronica.

~J

I live next to Kage. "80's" music is only called that because 80 is an emoticon for a guy with sunglasses singing. See? Because it's all awesome. My two year old has begun singing along to Anarchy in the UK. Talking Heads rock my world. Go 80's all the way. You truly feel the spirit of Shadowrun.

Go to www.pandora.com and tell it "Dust Brothers". I have yet to thumbs-down a track that it plays on that station, and most of it would fit my games pretty well.

besides all the tech and anime already kcicked around, we use lots of Celtic and Celtic rock stuff. Clannad, Corrs, etc

The Crow Soundtrack

The site is good. In general, though, I'd advise feeding it individual tracks rather than artists—I've gotten better results that way.

They need to index more of the songs they've got, but as a paying member for over a year now, I'd definitely recommend the site to others.

~J

Hah. For you guys that loves the 80s music during your games, I recommend the plugging of the following into Pandora:

- Jan Hammer
- Miami Vice Theme (by Jan Hammer, but still...do it)

Best song for SR that has come up so far: Big Money by Front Line Assembly

i fit my music to the situation, for example, Fight till you die firefight, the kind where your surounded or have surrounded the appartment and its all or nothing/your probably not coming out alive, i put on "March of Cambreadth"

otherwise i stick to a lot of 80's stuff, or 80's styled music from the 90's and now

oh, i wanted to add something, just ran across it recently thanks to John Ringo's "Kildar" series, "Winterborn" by Cruxshadows, very kickass

omg, so, in the shower this morning I kicked myself for not saying Front 242 is so completely cyberpunk through and through. and through.

Heroin, Wasteland, and especially Neuromancer off of Billy Idol's 'Cyberpunk'. The rest of the album alternated between "meh" and "sucks", but these three tracks fit.

And if there are ANY SR players that do not know what Neuromancer is, burn your SR books and jump off of a bridge into a sea of broken glass. You are not cyberpunk enough for this game and deserve to suffer for being a poser.

Has he stated one? I believe he only stated an opinion of Shadowrun (and one that's pretty understandable if you don't bother getting past knee-jerk on some subjects—see the visceral reaction to things like YotC's almost-furries. Not that that was handled well, but if you don't look closely, you can't tell how well something was handled.).

I hope that all parses, I'm writing this while still more asleep than not.

~J

King Diamond and Dream Evil.

No sweat. I'm a fan of Gibson's work too. I just wouldn't hold it against anyone who chose to enjoy SR without reading his stuff. Neuromancer was good, but I just said it was ironic to call it a prerequisite to SR when Gibson doesn't endorse the game.

And I wasn't thinking so much about his "gag me with a spoon" blog entry on SR as inferring from his comment in Pattern Recognition about sad or lonely people or something like that.

Yes, ironic if he had been serious. I agree on it not being an out and out prereq, though. It is on my "recommend to new players" list though.

thanks alot guys for all of your suggestions and im pretty psyched that my thread has turned into a gibson/nueromancer dsscussion, but i decided to put toghether e soundtrack from music by GOBLIN, they do alot of synth stuff for italian films and horror movies, they did suspiria and dawn of the dead most notably but alot of there earlier stuff is perfect for a wierd-almost-cheesy-but-too-awsome-to-be-labled-as-such sort of feel everyone should check them out!

I never said you had to READ all of Gibson's work. However playing SR without at least knowing what Neuromancer is or who William Gibson is... well, that's just wrong.

Neuromancer? Wasn't that that computer game from the '80s?

~J