The Banner Saga Franchise: Making Indie Sound AAA

[Music] I'm Austan I'm just gonna dive right in here and as usual my favorite part of this kind of thing is in the discussion afterward and I kind of see my job as as hopefully posing provocative or interesting questions or ideas that we can hash out in QA so I'm gonna kind of blitz through things and at some point I'll probably play a few seconds of something and say okay moving on so if for some reason I cut off something that is of use to you or valuable please just scream at me and tell me to pause there because the whole point of doing any of this is to share something that is hopefully meaningful and worth hearing and if I am circumventing that then I'm literally defeating my entire purpose I'm standing up here so with that said last summer we shipped the third of a franchise that I had worked on for over

six years called the Banner Saga that is a wonderful kind of case study for the success of an indie a little fledgling indie that could they're they're one of the sort of flagship Kickstarter games that I can't overstate the the privilege and joy of having worked on out of curiosity who here's played those game Oh awesome well now I know it's like where the intersection of turn-based strategy and willing to wake up the via the 9 a.m. talk exists probably the entirety of that demographic is in this room but so okay good well I I there's I I didn't want to spend too much time on the basics of the game since we're here to talk about the music and especially I want to get into kind of the the meta story or the peripheral story around the score itself and make it about how we were able to do the things that we were able as opposed to purely just kind of

having a musical nerdiness about themes and that sort of thing but we will do a taste of that so yes it all started as Kickstarter it was three guys from bat from Bioware who had basically gotten fed up with ten years of work on the old republic and said we we want to make our own thing and they quit their job and put this game on Kickstarter and had the very lucky timing of putting it on Kickstarter right when that sort of 2012 magical gold rush happened they had already prepared the campaign to hit the green light when Double Fine announced their Kickstarter and sort of triggered an explosion of interest and so they were already queued up ready to go and just hit the button and then you know within 24 hours there were three hundred percent funding or something like that and they were one of those kinds of stories and this was back in those you know naive wonderful innocent days of 2012 when no one realized that there's like a 50/50 chance that you'll give them all this money and they'll actually make the game and so there was a lot of love and excitement going into

it and I was brought in in the middle of their campaign they called me and said should we show you our game and are you interested in and I was blown away immediately for those of you who aren't familiar you know this art style of the game is one of the things that immediately kind of announces itself to people and I just thought this is this is just too fantastic so so off we went so an actual post mortem and I'm just going to quickly give you some some rundown of the of the score and the creative choices that were made and then but I really want to focus on this kind of second point here of the logistical analysis and how we were able to pragmatically achieve what we were you know the title of this talk is how to make indie sound triple-a and it was really it was it was it was not easy but at the same time it sort of was easy and that's why I'm excited to talk about it and the big takeaway that I'm just going to repeat over and over and over is about embracing your constraints is about finding those things that appear to be a limiting factor and turning them into an enabler of ideas and of

creativity and in letting the the specifics of that situation dictate your creative vocabulary so that it becomes itself it becomes the thing that it could have only been made under these circumstances because ultimately that's I think the the thing we're all chasing especially you know as composers at least as artists in general trying to make something that sort of is this magical distillation of truth in that moment and so that's only achieved I think by embracing these constraints so I'm also going to kind of skip around a little bit amongst the three games and not do kind of a chronological retailing of the retelling of the trilogy so to start the most obvious thing about this is that it's music written for Wind Ensemble this is a photo from our recording session of the first game and so the first thing that's obvious is this is not a recording studio that we did this in this was the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas Texas and that ensemble is the

Dallas winds at the time they were called the Dallas Wind Symphony and then they decided they were sick of getting confused with the Dallas Symphony and so now they're the Dallas winds and and just for my fellow nerds I thought I'd throw in there what the instrumentation was on those first sessions and so a quick story on how we got to this choice is I had you know good solid two years I mean of course like all games it was supposed to be you know we're gonna make it nine months then six months in it was like well okay maybe a year and then as a year starts to approach okay well it's for sure gonna be at least eighteen months and then at eighteen months it's like okay we're all about to be broke and homeless so two years it's gonna be regardless of what state of the game and so had a lot of time to think about it mold over and something that happened that was very fortunate was as a way to play test their turn-based strategy mechanics they created a free online multiplayer called factions that was basically just simple 1v1 playing of the

game and had no story or anything like that it was just kind of a tournament mode and so I played that like a hundred fifty hours or something like that because I would I would be able to write music and then we'd bake it into the build and I could go on and play someone and see how that music reacts in an actual kind of live fire situation you know within an hour and a lot of interesting things seemed to emerge and one of them early on was the the actual palette you know we they had greenlit a really because their Kickstarter was so successful but the team was really small they had said you know we're willing to carve out a pretty substantial amount of money for the score but that's all kind of abstract and pathetic until you know what kind of score you're gonna write so I just kind of said well you know it's Viking lore and it's about the end of the world and and so you know just let's start toying around with something orchestral but it's kind of generic to just assume it's gonna be orchestra but you know I'm a believer that writing is in the rewriting so let's just start somewhere and if it's garbage which it inevitably

will be we will start to modify it and so I started writing music and then at some point I just kind of took a step back and listened to it and realized you know I'm not really using the strings they're sort of texturally like violins holding some high notes there's all kind of brass Corral's and things like that and I then had this flash too when I was in college at NYU there was a world premiere at Carnegie Hall of John Corley Ana's third symphony called the Circus Maximus which was commissioned it was at the time as the largest I think it still might be the largest Wind Ensemble commissioned ever it's like a 45-minute symphony all you know unbroken continuous music for just the most unbelievably huge group you know I love that it's like a 70 piece group but they don't have the 40 quiet ones in the form of the strings so you know it's like 25 trumpets and 12 trombones and 10,000 tubas or whatever I don't know it's it's and it's all it's very it's very surround sound if any of you familiar with the piece you know the musicians

are scattered all throughout the hall and there's you know whole drum corps behind you and it's a it's a very immersive and crazy theatrical experience and I was like 19 or something like that and and as a composition student we were we were comped tickets to go see this and it rewrote my DNA was the equivalent of Bruce Banner sitting there and getting the gamma radiation burst or just afterward I emerged I came smashing my way out of Carnegie Hall at fundamentally different composer after this experience of hearing that piece and cuz I was you know I was an orchestra kid and the general sort of like gamer nerd I wasn't one of those band nerds who thought through this this lens so I had this flash of the power of a wind ensemble remembering that experience and so I thought you know well I could try to just do a session orchestra of Wind Ensemble but I thought I called that conductor of that piece that I was at Carney huh why not just see where that conversation goes and

he's like the foremost conductor for wind ensemble music named Jerry Junkin who teaches at University of Texas Austin and he also conducts one of the foremost if not the premier Wind Ensemble that's professional in the US because that's kind of a niche market right like I say the premier Wind Ensemble and it's like on a list of one but still give him to him and he's a phenomenal conductor and he's as normal in the way don't sell him a world he's always commissioning composers and things like that because that world craves new music in stark contrast to the orchestra which is like we like to cut things off around Mahler and so I just reached out to him and I said you know I'm working on a game and you kind of changed my life with your Circus Maximus commission and performance at Carnegie Hall a number of years ago and I am curious if there's an opportunity to work together I didn't know if he would even write back to my email and he writes back like five minutes later and says let's jump on the phone this sounds super interesting and so it turned out that it was one of these pipe dreams of the ensemble

they've released multiple albums including Grammy nominated or winning albums in the kind of classical categories and but the idea of recording a score was one of those sort of pipe dreams that they never anticipated could possibly be reality but just they thought would be so cool and so I very quickly led to a conversation of well let's make this reality so obviously there's not an abundance of scoring stages in Dallas turns out and they all their albums they've done have been in this this Hall the meyerson's Center and so it was like well what would it take to record there well turns out it's so not easy because this is a concert hall and this is a classic example where I'm just kind of letting one conversation lead to the next to the next to the next and creating all kinds of challenges but saying something will novel and interesting it's going to emerge out of this or at least that's the hope as I kind of it's like dr. Strangelove writing the nuke down just going I'm sure this is going to be fine and and so

one thing I'm going to get to that it's going to come up a lot was that and 'red practice in a recording session situation obviously is everyone's wearing headphones and playing to a click and they were like click what is this concept and it was like well you know to be able to you know have a real strong consistency of duration especially if there's pre lays involved you know if I have any kind of electronics or otherwise or multi layering or if we need to stripe it because we're breaking it apart into until layered you know brass separate from percussion for implementation purposes or anything like that and they were like mm let me get back to you and I start getting these emails about oh we found this really cool you know wireless low wattage radio transmitter system and we can get a bunch of wireless headphones for the orchestra and I was immediately like yeah this is a this is this is I'm watching two trains and slow motion heading towards each other so I said tell you what I'm gonna do this

entire score that and not require a click that's the only way we're gonna get to the finish line here and so that that single decision ended up being the foundation for a lot of unusual things that came out of it because the constraint was how can I record an ensemble and do an effective game score where there's no exact precise consistency between even subsequent takes of a given Q and that that that as much as that close certain doors that opened up whole doors I'd never even considered because it's always the default position to just assume you're going to record certain ways so here's just a little taste of how that sounded [Music] so another thing I decided to really go is that it's very opposite of studio recording I'm a big fan of making recordings immersive where you're deliberately kind of placing the listener hyperreal perspective that's not

actually physically reproducible acoustically where you're getting all the detail [Music] she was like one so it's very much about that solid sense which is the opposite but it led to certain aesthetic inspirations that's anyway that's a little taste from the very first game another thing I'll just mention is aesthetically about the game itself there's a mournfulness to it that I said I really want this to be very heavy emotionally but not loud I'm not really expecting a loud score I'll it should be about warriors who are begrudging the fact that they have to go into battle and they're weary and they're tired you know one of the story points is that the Sun one of the kind of symbols that the apocalypse has begun

is that the Sun has to come to a complete stop in the sky and they're just eternally in this kind of noon daylight and everyone's just getting worn totally ragged by the fact that there's never night there's never rest and so the notion that these are powerful warriors Viking inspired kind of Norse but they're not blood lusting there every time they pick up their sword it's with this massive sigh and resignation and I thought you know 50 musicians playing loud instruments you know like we had multiple timpani you can kind of see in the back corner you know we had a timpani section where I'd write a note and they would - 10 penis would play that note that kind of thing you get a big body of sound even if it's playing a pianist omona it just made everything feel really heavy I'm discovering a flaw on how I said this up where it's gonna try to replay my audio skipping to the second and third games we stuck with this formula the second one we migrated to Colorado there's there's whole stories about how we chose where and all that kind of

thing I'm not going to get into that because it's you know it's not really what I'm after here today very similar but not quite identical instrumentation and you'll notice also just for what it's worth for those who are band nerds we we eschewed some of the normal Wind Ensemble traditions for example the clarinets tend to be the violins of the Wind Ensemble so a typical standard concert band would have like 20 clarinets and so everything just sounds like Sousa marches to me and I hate that and so I was like we can have a normal number of clarinets and I'm sorry to your 20 clarinets that aren't gonna get the call and have to stay home but it needs to sound more orchestral and less let's Sousa II but kept the saxophones because I thought you know everyone under eights how nasty a sax can get we you know it doesn't have to play jazz and it doesn't have to be you know an oompah it doesn't have to be a lot of the things that it has sort of a stereotypical reputation for and and especially for the second game where the

overall aesthetic got way darker bombast kind of notched up a little bit as well and they can really play Polly rhythms which is super fun orchestras tend to revolt the third score was done in London at err this was the only one that was done in a more traditional scoring sort of

way but but the reason I chose air over Abbey Road was because air is kind of like a big hall it's basically a converted Church and if you raise the ceiling all the way up and you kind of make it as live as possible it has very similar acoustics and and also the third one we had a shorter schedule and a tighter budget and so I actually had to record the entirety of the orchestral orchestral parts of the score which was about an hour and 10 minutes of music in a single very fast-moving day and they can do that in London because they're not human and so use a taste of that [Music] is that loud enough you like like uber laughs yeah can we are you

able to raise it [Music] third one is also weirder so anyway it gives you a sense so one of the things that ended up being unexpected and unintended is that there's a kind of slight difference in the sound of each one because they were all recorded in different cities different musicians there was not a hell

of a lot of continuity musician wise with the exception of there's also a bunch of soloists and the three that formed the kind of heart and soul of it are these these YouTube stars and part of the reason for that was that having come from Kickstarter I thought this is a game birthed by the Internet this is a game that would never have existed without the kind of communal love of 20,000 initial Kickstarter backers who gave it close to a million dollars and so how to kind of place at the heart and soul of it surrounded by the bombast and the heaviness of the Wind Ensemble is you know some singers and a single viola and the one exception to the no strings policy would be people whose career is also born of the Internet you know the whole notion of a youtube star is so beautifully 21st century that like Peter Hollens as an example who lives in Eugene Oregon and has approaching four hundred million views on his content 90%

of which he makes in his living room and he's just this spectacular singer and around the time of this he had done a cover of the dwarf song the misty mountains from The Hobbit film that I saw and was like I need this guy in my life this is beautiful and and they're all in their videos like this you know where he's doing the classic multitrack self camera thing and he's just an amazing vocal producer and then like I said Taylor for the for the one non string exception and I told her I said you're gonna probably feel uncomfortable but I want this to be very rustic and raw and live - especially given the nature of how we're doing the wind ensemble so do you have like a practice violin from when you were a kid that's just objectively not a good violin that can we use that and can you like tune it and get it perfect and then just sort of loosely just kind of randomly twiddle your tuning pegs then we'll do it it was kind of like the you're gonna be the reason my career ends isn't it that's good that's the look I got she did it it's awesome and then maluca who exploded

onto YouTube around that same time she had done a cover of one of the bard songs from Skyrim and it's hilarious because she's she's generally pretty shy and very and very sweet and she didn't want to share this recording and her her now-husband which I guess shows that there's a happy end of this story spoiler she was at work one day and he put this video of her she had made on line and then went on reddit was like everyone check out this awesome cover I found or something like that totally so she came home from work discovering she was like a viral phenomenon and didn't have a chance to veto him and because it's just astoundingly beautiful I was gonna play you excerpts from all these but I know I'm gonna run out of time if I do so go look up all of them if you're not already familiar they're brilliant I also had it quite a few additional other solos and one of them that's cool is you can see this little instrument here that's called a the the this the non-christian image on my mouse pointer

does it show up over there but the horn there is is a it's called a bucha horn and it's a it's one of the only kind of known viking instruments because there's not a lot known about viking music it's just one of those things that archaeologists have found instruments but there's no record of exactly what it sounded like obviously there was no musical notation or anything like that and obviously also this is not explicitly a viking game and even if it were what's the point of trying to do Viking music we want to make something that's a little bit more emotionally Universal but I am a fan of kind of coloring it and sprinkling it in so it turns out the Buckhorn there's basically one guy in the world that makes them and it's effectively a lamb's horn and it's like if you want one you have to order it a year in advance cuz he has to like raise the lamb and then do unspeakable things so my friend Noah who Collette he's a trombone player who collects instruments and and he was like I've always wanted to order one from this guy and so I said he said how much time you have on this game and I said I've got at least a year and so okay I'll check back in with you later and then one day he shows up with with that thing and it's

hilarious because it's it's horrible it's basically just it's just a horn that's got holes drilled in it and that mouthpiece jammed on it and it can play like six notes and I love it and it's on all three scores and and so obviously we tracked some percussion Johan sigurðsson was the voice actor from the game who he just sounds like a Viking and so he's just got this amazing like I have his original audition he's this Icelandic guy who's like my name is Johan I'm reading my mother's song and it was like yeah I don't read the lines just just when can we see your Monday and so I said I really want to write vocals for this guy I hope to god he can't sing because it's just gonna be so gritty and awesome and delicious and of course he show up and he picks up the party site reading sheet music and I was like what the hell that's such and but he was amazing and just to compliment my my my youtube people and especially because peter hollens it's like the ultimate

sort of like pure acapella glee club kind of very pure specific the idea of it being even one cent sharp is horrible to him so I had to kind of pour salt all over that in the form of Johan and then ever in search of interesting x-factors of a friend who's a composer and and an de jure doest and so I just had him come over to studio and I said I really want to make kind of all sorts of interesting weird sounds there I played a little bit of accordion on the second game specifically you can see there's a there was an Icelandic and by the time we finished the first game and it went really well in the meantime this video had gone viral of these skies in Iceland singing five-part acapella in a train station a hymn in in Icelandic and there a band called our stiva that does music that to my ear almost sounds like the band Kansas it's sort of like this beautiful lyrical 60s baladi sort of thing but mostly in Icelandic and and they all play strings and things and they produce insanely well and and so I

just cold called them and I said I saw your video and you want to record on a game and they're all just like all right they so would insanely chill and I was glad you're excited then anyway I'll see you in a few months and so wrote a bunch of stuff for them in fact that weird vocals that you heard that were all processed and strange in the last clip that was from them and then on the third game added my friend Anthony in Los Angeles who had just bought he's a bassoonist and he he bought a bass serosa phone and sent me a photo of it because he knew that if he sent me a photo I would say I need to write for that I don't know what it sounds like but it looks like a steampunk bassoon I mean it's the weirdest thing it's all these pipes and key switches and and it kind of sounds like a baritone saxophone it's about a really aggressive it's just ugly as sin and perfect and and then I also worked with a wonderful singer from the Faroe Islands named Ivor and then another

christen egg is Kristin hiding in here somewhere I'm a little embarrass her extensively she knew to avoid this talk Kristen plays all the woodwinds she I had worked with her on Abzu she's the featured oboist on that score and and but she plays so we we created a cocktail I sent her a line and I said will you record this melody on basically every instrument you have and send me all the stems and then I want to kind of create a composite instrument from some subset of that and then that will be our template for the score because I wanted some new sound for the third game that has had no precedent in the prior ones so we ended up with was this blend where the it would be the melody on English horn and then an octave higher that unlike an Irish pennywhistle and I usually would put a huge amount of reverb and delay so the penny whistle sounded more like overtones of the English horn you couldn't really hear it on its own and then and then she had this thing called as a foon which just looks like a garden hose that someone

put a mouthpiece on and it's just the weirdest sound ever I'm pretty sure she made that up and but there was this nasally thing that would show up in the stems that was just fantastic a good good partner for the bass sousaphone and and I'm blanking on what the fourth one was but we had this kind of little quartet that everything I sent her would get recorded and then I had my certified crafted a default setting for all four of them to live in and then though last thing that is just always way too fun to not make a point of is our friend Viking Jesus who it's it's actually coincidence that he would be Viking Jesus but he is a like a metal musician who I met through the world of video games live and Tommy Tallarico and he had done a journey cover of a metal cover of journey burning sand and it was awesome and so I was like I want to I want to work with hey I need him in my life and so I wasn't quite sure how to

do that and I thought what about prepared electric guitar so I'm just gonna if you'll indulge I'm gonna just show you we did a little kind of behind-the-scenes thing for you too and it's better to just so in spring of 2012 I forgive he went to town I said bring me a giant toolkit of things that I could use then we decided what if we went totally over-the-top and you literally sawed this thing in half as a sound the sound of you literally cutting through this thing and he did and I love how he left all of his on the desk so part of the recording is all the crap vibrating [Music] so that all that crunk crinkling that's all the guitar I mean he sent me a huge

amount of stuff and I created a whole kind of effects library out of it there's belukha there's the sewing [Music] so that given or saga one came out so that gives you a kind of a sense and and the reason I'm spending a fair bit of time talking about that is a point that I'm going to get to later and sort of spoiler now is the idea of embracing constraint our budget really was quite narrow and so I knew I couldn't write like two hours of orchestral music there wasn't enough in the budget to record the orchestra for two hours so you have all these variables that you could start sliding up and down and so one of the choices as well I could do like a small orchestra for the full length of the score or I can save that for the sort of most crucial moments and figure out ways to bridge the gaps within other sounds

and the idea is always to make sure that the score doesn't feel like it's got this schizophrenic sort of square wave of productionvalue where from one moment it sounds great and it's big live ensemble and then the next moment it's like we it's like sampled trombones or something and so by crafting an aesthetic built around things like soloists and and prepared electric guitar being sawed in half the the score could have ways of distributing itself over a large amount of time where it just sounds like itself at any given moment you know it has intimate moments which are marked by just hearing this guitar of craziness and a single voice and you don't listen to that and think wow but where's the orchestra suddenly it just is organically the next cue it just makes sense and you have to build it that way from the from the beginning but it's a it's a great way to make the resources just go all the way to the finish line and so I wanted to get a little bit unkind of the nerdy subject because it was this was a really lucky

situation where they were planning to make a trilogy of course it was all contingent on the first game doing well because the Kickstarter was sort of genuinely that it was a kickstart of this franchise but we didn't know if it would if it was going to come off but the thing that was so exciting was that they knew what they wanted this story to be from the beginning so I had my very first meeting with them in the days after the Kickstarter ended where they said okay here's how game 1 is going to end here's what's going to happen in game number 2 and here's what's gonna happen in game number 3 and I was able to kind of plant seeds melodically and thematically from the beginning that I knew weren't going to be paying off five years or something like that if you know sort of God willing as it were so just to give you a little sense of of that here's how the main theme was treated at the beginning of the first game purely the horns and then the rest of the brass I don't know how readable that has been good he senses like I said I was very drawn to this kind of brass chorale

liberabit kind of regal Noble slightly mournful quality so then moving along by the time the second game comes along same theme but you know shit's worse [Music] Taylor is part of the main title you [Music]

at the end of the first game but the good news is it gets even worse so third game we I started I took me a while to figure out what to do here so I start off with the recording of the first game and then I kind of send it down the drain right now you're hearing clearly [Music] and then here's my little quartet of kristin layers [Music] or a weird hybrid composite wind instrument

this one of course just [Music] so what's so cool is I was able to think about this stuff for like five or six years which which is very lucky but that's but that's you know not that uncommon for the for the indie world which is which is useful because it lets me have think about how to optimize it to just be as grand and lush and and itself as possible and then so it's jumping off of that it's big spoiler the thing that was so interesting to me was that this story that was purporting itself or representing itself as kind of like a Viking apocalypse you know Ragnarok kind of thing it's by the time you get to be of the third game you realize it's actually kind of like this Romeo and Juliet condemned love

story and there and you had almost no indication of that in the first game and then little teases of it in the second and then finally that sort of an operating factor in the third game and so I thought what if the main theme this sort of statement of brawn enos and regal nobility in all of that what if that's actually the foundation of the systemic evolution that by the end has to become this other thing and so I knew I would have almost no use for this within the context of the first game but but thought all I will I have to write a theme that I know can go there eventually so you obviously just heard the main theme you know very simple little bomb so the first time you really in earnest here what I'm going to do with it is in a second in the Indus here's a variation on the ability of Lucas's a little different though [Music]

[Music] so it gives you say so then by the time the second game comes along there's two characters that are you know essentially pretending to not really know each other that well in a way and later it turns out like they're kind of secret love is what's centrally causing the apocalypse typical and so so here's the like there's a scene where they're fighting I was like let's use that [Music]

and then so by the time of the third game you have you know that's just all the cards end up on the table and you end up with this this you know this this thing that began very regal and Noble and then has become very kind of full of love and then corrupted to all hell [Music] and then by the time we reach the end credits of the third game it all has to kind of come full circle [Applause] [Music]

this common ingredient that's going from one way and there's this is happening in other places but I'm skipping a lot of stuff another thing to talk about is that again the intersection of where logistical and pragmatic constraints meet creativity and creative decision-making is is how we end up making things just become what they are and that optimize the situation so again embracing the constraints I'm going to say it many more times and the fact that the score became so broadly aleatory is is part of this because I mentioned before I couldn't record with clicks which meant that every time there was a kind of layering system where energy level is getting more crazy in the middle of combat I didn't have a good way to pivot amongst these layers because I knew they wouldn't actually be

able to loop in sync and crossfade and do the traditional things that we would do and so it became like well what if I just created I just did after we recorded the main queues I took 20 minutes and recorded a whole library of custom sort of aleatory clouds and effects that I could use to smear these very imprecise transitions from one performance and one take to another and then it just became like well I think just aleatory can be kind of a an aesthetic mainstay of the score itself in fact I remember someone in Twitter wrote something like it says if how they phrase it it was like it was as if the Lord of the Rings had a baby with the matrix or something like that which was awesome and so to give you an example of an extreme in this queue you can hear how it all ties together [Music] this here's what you're not like the trumpet's for example this gesture

wins [Music] there's that melody again so yeah you can also see that by the end of the third game I'd also kind of abandon the idea of its quiet and somber and it's heavy without being loud so I got that fortissimo and so just a quick notion of how we implemented I already just kind of touched on that but because we couldn't do traditional sort of stacked stems and layerings and the kind of things that we would typically do in a game like this I had to come up with another system but then also the gameplay itself really informed what to do here because I played tested the game as I mentioned earlier quite extensively and one of the things that I realized is

that especially the combat where most of this discussion is taking place happens in a very slow way it's not it's not a real time thing it's turn-based strategy and it very much moves it's unlike say XCOM which is turn in my opinion XCOM is basically turn-based strategy the new one the new reboot recently last few years it's essentially turn based strategy trying to convince you that it's real time because you know that's like the score is super turbocharged and the animations have really quick cycles and and it's trying to be as you know sort of StarCraft II or whatever as possible in my estimation and banner saga said now let's go for something more methodical so this is sort of what it looks like to play combat in the game okay click that like it's not an exciting thing to watch probably not good for twitch streaming and and so I realized that if the music is overly

agitated and overly crazy it's really going against the sort of inward and introspective thing that you're experiencing and then also it's all very algorithmic and and very specifically its arithmetic there's very simple you know five plus four sort of math underneath the hood driving the in-game stats which is what we hooked all the music to not going to get crazy into that right now but the bottom line is that we were able to track using very simple metrics if the player is effectively winning or losing at any given moment and wrap the implementation around that well the thing is if someone spends five minutes trying to make a decision about their next move and they click it and the system instantly knows even before the animation fully plays itself out if they are now Lou winning and if that was sort of a good decision so if the music immediately gives feedback on that it's actually extremely distracting because you spend all this time and then decide okay you know what I'm gonna rotate this here and if the system immediately is like ah you're done up you're sitting there like well I I you need you need it to unfold more gradually so that it's an emergent sort of gut feeling and so I

realized we should very rarely ever pivot in the middle of this sort of cycle of the loop it so think of it more like a train turnstile where you make a decision and downstream the track clicks to the left or to the right depending on on where it's going to go next but the loop had to play itself entirely out and so the reason I brought up the lack of click track so many times does it led to a thing like this so I would create multi-layered cues but we would have to record different performances I'm not just snack so here's a combat cue from the end of the first game where it's built very much around bassoons what am I ever gonna get to do that again so that you hurt Mike I kind of was talking over but you get this it's kind of understated okay so then layer two I had the charts marked you can kind of see it says layer two on the conductor score so I would

tell the musicians if it says layer two don't play this next take we're doing layer one and so they would just sit there and then come do layer two and now you know trumpets trumpets become the dominant chattering voice but you'll notice the machines are still there it's not [Music] and then of course that's by the time you get to third layer the idea so it led to it led to a lot of that whole concept led to all kinds of

choices that would never in a million years have made and so I'm gonna I'm gonna skip some some things cuz I really don't want to run out of time and I really don't to run out of time for questions and I'm already flirting with both of those things rather dramatically so I want to I want to pivot to the to the logistics side and do a real crash course so I will I will open up the the the hood here fairly transparently of course they leave off specific numbers but this is the budget on the first game that I had to work with this my music budget and you'll see I sent I spent solidly half the money on hiring the orchestra and I pulled all kinds of favors on this I parlayed all kinds of favors to make this happen because we were like this said this is an indie game financed on Kickstarter you know there are triple-a games whose music budget dwarfs the entire budget of what this game had to offer but they did give me a kind of disproportionate amount of their I mean I had a six-figure number to work with which was very outsized relative to the proportion one would typically have but here was the the

thing is I realized as much as they were offering there wasn't enough to do a big grandiose score unless I was willing to not get paid and so I basically said here's the gamble I'm gonna make I'm gonna make an exclusively back-end deal with these guys and we'll put everything that they had to offer into the production of the score so that I'm taking the exact same risk that they are as developers because these guys put all of their savings for two years into making this project they received into zero money they used none of the Kickstarter money to pay for their life expenses and all three of these guys were you know married had families children in school all that kind of stuff and they said now we're all-in and I have this philosophical idea of not wanting to be living a different life from the people I'm collaborating with and so I thought well if they pay me and I'm very comfortable in luxuriously off of their Kickstarter money and they're all meanwhile saying if this game fails we have to like go flip burgers or something because they burned their they burn their bridges in their previous job and that this was they put all their

eggs in this basket so I said I think the score should live in that same headspace so it was like okay give me a profit participation a revenue share on the game itself and total control over the soundtrack album and in exchange every single dime and as it turns out more than that because I just get overexcited and start putting my own money into the score is going to go into making this thing sound as great as it possibly can so but the first one was still very tight situation so I'm pulling all kinds of favors which is why the orchestra so heavily dominates by the time we get to the second one I had a little bit more to work with and also the first game did really really well and so it emboldened to this strategy so I said guys same proposition and so but this time things were a little bit more balanced you see the soloists are you know a sizable punch something I always been telling people never ever ever under budget this big yellow one at the bottom music prep the sheer amount of copying and part at prep and librarian work never never under budget that that's exactly how things go to hell on the scoring stage especially on a thing like this where you're recording with non-traditional ensembles you know in

London they have an infrastructure but Colorado Symphony and the Dallas Wind Symphony you have to show up with your together really really really solidly or it will go to hell cuz no one there can help you they are clueless and it's like just sit down and play the notes and I have to handle everything else and the third game in London obviously we were able to do things this is a little bit more of a traditional makeup but it was a similar kind of proportion and so it gives you sense the entire thing was predicated on taking this risk with these guys now I'm fully aware that not everyone is going to necessarily be in the same position to be able to do that but so you know you do you know know no coercion meant or suggested and no I'm not trying to say this is how it ought to be done in fact I'm sure there are composer colleagues of mine that would say what I did was sort of professionally irresponsible because it creates the precedent that I would effectively work for free except that I would challenge that and say I was not working for free at all I damn well expected to get that profit participation especially cuz I believed

in the game I thought they were making something really brilliant and I said I'm willing to take this ride with you in an exchange let's put the you know however many many tens of thousands that you're willing to spend on the score I want all of that to be heard through the speakers because that's going to be how this game is what you're doing the equivalent of in your art direction and in your mechanics and all that's how to make it come to life and you know three four three games it was a it was a wise decision in fact the first one did so well that if I had pocketed 100% of the money and done it all with samples I would have made less and so not the case with the other two but you never you never know you never know what's gonna happen with these things and so they were razor thin margins I had to pull a lot of favours on all three games but but I think it was worth it because at the end of the day I care more about having a final product that I'm really really proud of and so to give you an example of the kind of deal that was made is the the orchestra in Dallas they had a recording engineer they had a long history with a record label that they had written that they had done albums with and so I went to them and I said look I can't really afford to pay your engineer I have no extra budget for your

engineering crew so how about this if you front those costs your label gets to release the soundtrack album and you will make a hundred percent of the initial however much whatever it takes to recoup your engineering costs plus interest then from that point it's stair steps until eventually we're 50/50 partners so that I'm incentivizing them to sell the hell out of this album and they're giving their a you know joining the risk with me and they said absolutely let's let's do it and the really cool thing with that was that they do these super high fidelity surround sound albums and 192k ridiculous ultra detailed classical recordings and so as part of their normal marketing they sent it out to all these audiophile sites and so to this day I get Google Alerts of the Banner Saga being reviewed on on websites that know nothing about games but they're like really they're saying this album just sounds really great and we're reviewing and others there's one reviewer in particular that reviews speaker systems and he always uses this album as his test so it keeps showing up in reviews years and years later because of the nature of that deal

that I made and that's when it comes to this notion of how to make indie sound Triple A I'm always looking if I'm on a project like this always looking for what's every opportunity who are the people involved what talents do they bring and how do we mutually incentivize each other to bring something to the table where we can all do really well this is all based on the philosophical precept that everyone is willing to take on risk and for some people that's not possible for some people that's not interesting they would rather just get paid and so if you if that person has to be involved then you carve out you know more money for them than they the rest and then everybody else gets to join and potentially a greater windfall later that kind of thing and the results of course let you create something that you couldn't just write checks and make it happen it wouldn't there's just not enough money the resources you know on banner saga three for example had to write close to two hours of score and like I said I had one day in the studio a tear so I said okay I'm gonna be able to get about an hour and ten music which is an insane pace to do in a single day but like I said after mention London

musicians are not human and that time I was like yeah we're gonna use a click we're gonna speed this process up a bit but I but I told them you know we're gonna make this very ensemble II but we got to move and so then it's like how do I get another almost hour of music out of this and that's how you bring all those other strategies of well if I just hear a singer alone acapella for a minute you can create a really evocative and interesting piece of music and the note player says where is the orchestra this is so cheap like that's that you don't have that problem and so I was able to parse things out which is a lesson I had I had first learned on journey really was so built around these cello solos with a very limited orchestral budget but didn't really internalize till here and so anyway now I'm moving right quickly and haphazardly but I just wanted to share some of these things because I really I was changed as a composer in person by working on this franchise I five think that these guys who made it are really really really amazing people and really amazing game developers it was really privileged

experience to work with them and so that's why for me the big takeaway of diving in and meeting them at the same level of their risk and just saying okay screw it no one here's getting paid unless it does well let's all just try to make something beautiful together I know being one of the best experiences I've ever had may may may never be topped frankly it was so creatively free and and and wonderful and predicated on doing this and but as a result was able to make indie sound at least quasi triple a with that said I have a few minutes to take any questions I have less time than I would like so if there is anything I know we have a mic here and I'm happy to dive straight into it and if you ask no questions it means I have utterly failed to be provocative and say anything interesting and I expect your reviews to reflect that fact so alright kicking it off I thinks this was this was great so for Banner Saga 3 did you say 4 that

you did use it a click yeah yeah and just for sake of efficiency and just random detail I noticed that you had I was a fewer clarinets and more bassoons for that I think it was curious like if that's a creative decision or I had well every penny counted so I had to make I had to make a few decisions where I limited very specific things just to kind of shrink where I could you know I had only one timpanist for example that kind of thing but it was that was just like where can I make a cut that's you know in aggregate will show up and help but won't really affect the overall sound especially if I write conscientiously to avoid duplicating gestures and so yeah it was a couple it's generally the same but a couple little differences yeah cool thanks yeah of course hi thanks for the amazing talk um I really like this a bit about where you got all these weird instruments in so I just wanted to ask do you have ideas and then the instruments come in or do these

instruments and dictate your ideas and if that can never be negative just because you have this crazy horn do you have to then use it yeah right you know it's a good question like it because the the corollary question that comes up a lot is do you write to the strengths of your sample libraries or do you write you know trying to make the samples transcend themselves knowing that the mock-up may suffer as a result and I'm a big fan of of not limiting the tools are there truly as tools let your imagination because unbridled as possible but there's no question that if it's super esoteric instrument it will it will do things better than other things so if I just write for it in some abstract way absent what it does best I may not be using it to its most effective capacity of course I may also be missing the opportunity I mean think of think of Stravinsky had regarded the bassoon and only its stereotypical way we would never have had the opening of the Rite of Spring which no one had ever heard of bassoon really play that high and and gently and weirdly lyrically like that and so it's it's it's sort of a tug of war

between these two poles and the specific case for example of the bucha horn the weird lamb's horn the thinkin literally it only plays a kind of quasi modal f-sharp minor that is not at all based around like an a 440 derived it's just kind of like yeah this is the closest note to f-sharp that I would call that sound and so yes I very quickly realized I have to write to what this thing can do because I can it one note wrong if I write a G natural he'll go I can't do it you know so that very much did dictate a lot of what I was doing in certain areas and then in others you know I did every once in a while say I'm gonna cheat and Melodyne this thing to be what it needs to be and record it I'd write it you know half step off from where I wanted it and then just nudge it that kind of thing move it in its entirety so it's still all weird and out of tune but it's just weird and out of tune and like G minor instead of F sharp minor so yeah it's that kind of answer you're good

thank you thank you did the conductor also not have a click so it varied on the first game basically I split the conducting in half with with Jerry and I did all the rest of it myself on the second and third on the second one I did have a click but the musicians did not and on the third one everybody did so it was kind of like every possible scenario of none conductor only everybody ok and and the first one to know click yeah not really I mean we we did run a cable out to the booth but half the time I would just say screw it it's just too I would rather be more present with the musicians and and just do this that way own this environment own this situation instead of trying to be half in one world and half in another cool thank you yeah sure this is a question about budgets in general how much do you feel like the audio budget should be out of a total production budget for indie up to triple-a and does that percentage change in D up to Tripp good lord like it's

like the start of our to of my toilet like what's the range like would you go from 10% for Indy up to like their eyes they're people I my answer to that is always I'll take what you got because frankly I'm not making their game I don't consider it my place to tell them how to spend their money because they have a thousand mouths to feed and so you know in a game like this for example the art direction is extremely tedious to make and so they're gonna need you know a few support artists around the main guy working around the clock it's just in it's a game that the art style is why people end up noticing it and so should you know theoretically the art budget should dwarf the music budget because it's it's why anyone's gonna care and so those kinds of decisions are the things that they are grappling with and I always say to them you know you you know I I will I will work within what you've got I mean that's kind of the main mo of the talk right like if you tell me only have a hundred dollars to produce the score and it's something that I feel like I have to be part of this then it's like okay a hundred dollars there's a

lot you can do with a hundred dollars just got to figure out what it is you know immediately first thought is grab the zoom recorder and start making weird sounds and do things that don't cost that much you know they'll require a big Orchestra that kind of thing so yeah to me it's there's no one-size-fits-all every single production it can even be literally like you know Far Cry 3 versus far cry 4 don't even have to be beholden to the same idea of how much the music budget should be you know so it's it's even within you know large scale production Triple A and one sequel to the next things can change dramatically and I'm okay I don't I don't prescribe to them like you need to spend more money the one thing that was unusual about this situation is on the first game because of the Kickstarter they they brought me on halfway through so I said to them if we make music specific rewards for the Kickstarter can we funnel that money specifically to the score so they had a baseline amount that they were basically willing to guarantee me and then I offered things like during the recording session you can get a signed part by a member of the orchestra who played I didn't think anyone would

care about that it's like a hundred bucks for you know the third clarinetists for em 25 page four and people we've made like thousands of dollars worth of selling though it was actually it took like a lot of the musicians had to stay quite a bit after the session sitting there like god damn actually I thought it was really cool and and so that we were able to funnel more money into score based on that kind of arrangement because it was like okay well you know they basically said we'll do it now it's on you go sell that so like on Twitter begging please support this and it helped that journey had come out like a month later and so there was a bit of a fervor going on and so yeah anyway that I don't know if that fully answers your question but I don't I don't believe in prescriptive budgeting Thanks my name is Jasmine I want to say thank you for this talk I really enjoyed it I found what you said about putting all the money

into production very commendable because I'm kind of in a similar position now and I wanted to ask you were you in a position that allowed you to do that or did you have other projects going on at the time that enabled you to be able to funnel all of that music all that funding into the music aspect of banner saga yeah absolutely yes I mean that it's a two-year period I I definitely had other projects that I was doing that were an essential part of the ecosystem of why you end up kind of in a Ponzi scheme with yourself of sort of taking from here and giving it there but but you know I don't think any of us got into this career with the idea being that it's all gonna be very straightforward and easy and 9:00 to 5:00 Monday to Friday like I made it further rough-and-tumble and so the idea was yeah this is a super high risk I'm turning down a lot of potential money up front in exchange for something that hopefully is vastly more beautiful and far more fitting to the game it's something that it's like I feel professionally obligated to do this in a way because I my goal is to make

something that that is as perfect as I can make it for that game in this context and this path is the only way I can see to get there so it's not even that I want to it's I feel a certain obligation that I have to and but yes that completely and totally is predicated on having been gainfully employed in parallel to that and that can be a balancing act because you obviously don't want to shortchange the amount of time you're spending on this huge risk because then it's like you're you're cutting your own idea off at the knees if you're so busy with other stuff that this project that you're taking this huge gamble on you don't have the time to actually really flesh out so I was very lucky that I was able to survive and I was okay but able to spend enormous amounts of time I mean my steam build of the game says I have like 300 hours of playing the game or something like that because I would just every single day try to figure out how to break break it and and make the music better and and just learn more the lore and I'm like a huge fan boy for the game now I'm like one of those Tolkien weirdos about their thing where I'm like oh you know that

part of the map where this what is that all about they're like just just let go man and so or they're probably at a point where like we don't even know just go start a wiki yourself and and put your own theories so yeah anyway I I yes the answer is for sure I would and that's why I say I'm not trying to prescribe this as this is how it must be done because I know I was in a very fortunate position to be able to do that but that's that's how I was able to make indie sound triple-a you know it was like I used everything on the table in my life in general to make that happen including letting this project over here finance that project over there that kind of like my lifestyle during that project that sort of thing okay alright thank you I appreciate my pleasure I think I'm out of time so that was our grand finale question thank you all