The Gothic Horror Music of 'Bloodborne'

[Music] good morning everyone so nice to see you thanks so much for coming so uh we're going to talk about the music for bloodborne and uh my name is Peter and I was one of the music producers on this project and uh to my right this is Panka and this is Jim and uh both Panka and Jim did the orchestration for both the main game and uh the DLC so they will talk about the specifics of the music but I thought what I might be able to do for you and I I hope it's uh interesting for you to do a little bit of a behind the scenes uh uh discussion to let you know how this this project wound up coming to be and I'll let you know about you know the team that was assembled to realize uh hi Tako miyazaki's vision for the score so ultimately this was a team of six composers writing 130 minutes some music

span three continents uh was two and a half years in the making and involved collaborations between five separate Sony campuses uh I just thought those were impressive statistics because you know it's this became a big production but it didn't start out that way so initially this project started out uh as discussions between from software and the Japan studio and at this point our colleagues in Japan sat down with me as aisan and the from software staff composers to discuss their thoughts about the score so this is my uh colleague in uh Japan I'm very fond of him this is Kay and he's the audio director for Japan studio so he initially sat down with the folks from from software Miyazaki and asked if they had any goals for the score so unfortunately Kay couldn't be here uh he had to take a flight back to Japan but he had this to say since from software had their own in-house

composers naturally we could have just used them but since this was a new challenge for us with a new game for the new PS4 Hardware their composers thought that they needed something new and different to work with especially when it came to music that would match the game's atmosphere and the type of musical Expressions they wanted to aim for and a quality that could be accepted worldwide which was an important point so K continues says Mia zakian gathered some video material to give us an idea of what the kind of music he wanted and the music that uh he he brought to them was from this album uh this is uh city of of the fallen and this was composed by an American composer that you might know Ryan Ammon and uh Ryan had uh done the music for the Sony film alium of which he collaborated with with PKA on that so when Mia aisan had presented this material to uh Kay and our folks our our

colleagues in Japan uh they reached out to the director of our music studio here in America and that's Chuck Dow and they were wondering if we could get in touch with with Ryan now it's funny how things work out because as as luck would have it Ryan uh we were in La at the time it was myself and Chuck and Ryan happened to be in La as well and literally just swung by our Sony campus in Los Angeles and we started to talk and discuss the project and Ryan was fantastic he's a brilliant composer and he was really excited uh to get involved in the project so initially our task was to create uh the music for a trailer that was going to be the debut trailer for bloodborne at E3 and what we did as the American team is that we provided creative direction to Ryan and the Japan Studio facilitated communication between their music team and from software

now I bring this story up today because to me I I feel like there is uh for those of you who may not have a window into this process that it's a really uh compelling story because what's happened with Ryan is that he's done a self-published trailer record that he distributed on iTunes and I'm sure you know other methods of distribution and this wound up weaving its way all the way back to I'm and I'm going to uh get into more details about the story as it's told to me uh some fans of the Dark Soul series which paired this music up with some footage from Dark Souls and then that's what was presented to meia aisan and that's uh what really grabbed him so the point here folks is that you know the world is listening and if any of you have felt as I have felt in the past as a former composer and now producer thinking hm how do I meet the the right people how do I get the projects that I

would really like to be working on I would give you this advice having had a window now into this process best thing to do is focus on the music just do some great work as I'm sure you all do put it out there because uh folks really are listening and I think now in the world that we have with the types of communication tools now more than ever so um I felt uh you know some despair in the past thinking hm how do I move forward here that really is the way to do it and I encourage you all just focus on your art for the composers that are here in the room uh it it will get heard I promise you all right moving on uh back to bloodborne and ultimately what wound up happening with the score is that it was written by three in-house uh Japanese composers from from software and they absolutely brilliant and we had three American composers that we wound up recommending and contributing

so the challenge for us at this point was with six composers how do we achieve a consistent sound so uh and before that is sorry I'm jumping ahead a little bit what we had to do first was we had to define the sound you know what was going to be something that was going to be uh it was going to be the elements that really captured what bloodborne was about so we had some further discussions with the our colleagues in Japan Studio and from software and we talked to them of course of what they wanted to achieve with the score then we did a little bit of research and what we wound up doing was to create something that we call a style guide and what this is uh is a research project that we do we find other scores that have been produced that we think have elements that help to define the sound that the creative team is looking to achieve and then we present that and then we talk about it and figure out

well what are the elements that we feel are going to work for bloodborne and maybe what elements are not applicable to that um we wound up uh presenting in the end uh maybe about 20 scores that um you know we found tracks from sort of various scores that we thought uh really helped Define the sound we had a lot of help with that uh particularly from uh Daniel uh schweer from the fosa group who's in La happens to be pka's husband uh but he's absolutely brilliant guy and of course our own in-house Sony team uh we do this kind of work as well so the gothic Victorian sound uh this was something that was very interesting to me because what we found is that people generally yeah and by by people I think us you know sort of collectively associate this Victorian sound as being featured solo strings and string quartet Prim primarily and what's what was

interesting to me is that if you do the research the historical research that actually has nothing to do with what the music that was popular in that era in Europe in the Victorian time so it's interesting how our perceptions change over time for the gothic part we asked the composers to integrate a quasi classical approach to the compositions and I just listed here just you know some of the the main elements of uh the uh Orchestra and other um you know musical elements that we use that eventually made up what the Victorian sound is excuse I'm getting dry okay next was how are we going to achieve a consistent sound with six composers so this was uh an idea that we brought uh to our colleagues and brought to from software and I I'm very proud to

say that in the end uh we felt that this was really successful and what we did was we defined what the primary orchestral lineup was going to be uh for the musicians you can see it up up here and what we asked the composers to do is just compose the music with this template in mind now initially I have to say this was met with a little bit of resistance because you know the the conventional wisdom at least amongst uh some of the composers was well you know I want to have all the colors that are available to me in the orchestra and what we pointed out is that well it doesn't necessarily work the same with artwork right what you do or colors for a game sometimes you reduce that to a pallet that really applies to the game and we can do that with the music as well so uh as as that point was presented I have to say it was it was very it was embraced by all of the composers and the net result of that is that when you listen to the bloodborne score it doesn't sound wildly different from track to track all although we have a lot of different

composers there so this this worked for us here's a couple of pictures uh of the recording we did uh quite a lot of the recording at air studios in London and you can see there's the the string and Brass line up there and we did choir separately uh here's something similar at Abbey Road we wound up recording there as well uh excellent uh facilities to record okay I'm going to bring up Panka right now she's going to talk give an analysis of some of the music so is Jim and then I'll come back at the end and talk a little bit about how uh the production [Applause] continued good morning again so I will discuss the style form Harmony and orchestration of the score so we know bloodborne follows the hunter through the fictitional decrepit Gothic City of yarum its inhabitants have been afflicted with a bloodborne disease like

a plague that turns them into hideous Monsters the overall Aesthetics as Pete pointed out is Victorian Gothic horror music for mutant monsters in the scoring traditions of Dracula all of us are familiar with the the Dracula vernacular and that was our style guide um how is the music used in gameplay so music plays during the downloading of the game the track is called on the soundtrack the night and furls and if you stay on the title screen a little bit longer also the E3 trailer will play it's titled Omen um I'll take a close look just in a moment music also plays during the boss battles it is always fast intense very dramatic and Relentless music is also heard in the hub where the player rests and stocks up on weapons it's titled the Hunter's dream composed by Ryan Ammon the Hunter's dream is a dark and contemplative piece featuring the solo

Viola the viola was selected to express the subdued feelings in the hub many online score reviewers said solo cello but actually it's Viola not cello Viola has a different tone it's not as expressive it's more nasal and it's also the vi is more subdued it's not as rich and beefy as the cello um and again that was a very purposeful choice and The Haunting soloists add a special quality to the score and make it a distinctive character istic of the music I would like to play um an exerpt from the track called Hunter's dream which we hear when we're in the [Music] [Applause] [Music] hub

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] he that was that the music for The Hub

um I wanted to mention that many level campaigns are mostly without background music but with creepy and evocative sound design Instead This contrast between the sound design for walkthroughs and intense music for the boss battles creates an atmosphere of dread and fear when the silence breaks with an ominous chant or pounding Rhythm you know you're in the boss battle this was a very specific creative and aesthetical choice made by the game makers this was not random or not this was a aesthetical choice um the music the orchestral music employs a variety of of what we call Extended orchestral techniques also known as orchestral sound effects which are inspired by 20th century modernism I'm going to mention a number of names of modernist composers for instance liy the composer of a variet fantastic variety of music but he's mostly known um as the composer of the coral music used in the 2001 Space

Odyssey if you remember the monolith on the moon queue that's what liity sounds like also expressionism expressionism is early 20th century music Alban Berg was the composer of 20th century operas vukin Lulu and that very intense musical style is an inspiration for horror the horror convention so of course the modern horror soundtracks the entire vernacular of horror with clusters aloric techniques tremolos layered dissonant textures essentially kind of a wall of sound approach where you have layered dissonances and I'll go into detail later rhythmic cados and soaring melodic lines these are all the tropes of horror scoring that were employed in the gothic score for bloodborne one nice image to kind of inspire you and one more um I would like to go into greater detail and talk about the main title Omen which was used in the E3 trailer uh

it's also the opening track on the soundtrack uh it's composed by Ryan Ammon it features a dark low cello Solo in c minor with a three note Motif the three not Motif sounds Melancholy and desolate this is the cello Motif and you'll hear it after this cello theme we hear a signature pounding stab it's played by a South American instrument called baring bow uh it plays a repeated low SE pounded and that's a fresh color that Ryan Ammon brought because he also has researched the South American Music very extensively and has traveled so it um that's the picture of this instrument baring bow and you strike it and it's doubled with contra bases um and timony after that stab another signature color comes in it's a cluster in the women's choir very very specific cluster

very dissonant um later on the same cello Motif is sung by the soprano soloist first softly and then an active Lou higher more loudly um I would like to play this music now so listen to it [Music] enjoy [Music] [Music] d

oh [Music] um we recorded the strings in two separate passes also known as striping uh all the melodic lines were recorded in one separate pass and then all the rhythmic ofad will recorded as a second pass this approach gives us more Precision in the mixing and also gives us much more flexibility in implementation um also because it's a horror game with heavy sound design very

elaborate sound design weapons and Folly the low breast is reinforced with contra based trombone and chimbas in order to balance the heavy low end in the Sonic Spectrum uh this approach of beefing up the low strings and low breasts is actually a very typical approach in orchestrating fantasy horror and science fiction games and Hollywood movies um for the purpose of maximizing our time at the scoring sessions at air Studios which is obviously very expensive we had to we made a strategic choice to keep all the orchestral effects on samples and by orchestral effects I mean clusters aloric textures stabs um usually there's a there's a sample Library called symphobia raise your hand if you're using symphobia in any of your music it's it's the kind of library that you use for sound effects for genre films so we made a choice to keep these elements on samples not to recreate them again because they already mixed and treated and uh but I just want

to tell you you could also make a choice to re-record them for instance you can re-record the risers again that's a choice you make as a creative Artist as a composer as a music producer um it can go either way one more nice image that we saw before um I wanted to talk about the characteristics of the choir because the choir is obviously a very big part of this sound it's extremely important the coral writing some of the most technically and dramatically challenging writing that I've laid my eyes in recent scores the the choir is unrelentingly dissonant has a very broad emotional pallet it's somber soaring nightmarish tormented very often very loud the choir becomes the signature of the battles with the Monstrous bosses yet each boss has its own musical personality uh the singers are asked to sing in extreme ranges highest notes for the women lowest and highest notes notes for men they also sing effects clusters

slides monastic chants murmurs the 32 person choir sings not only conventional four note chords one note for soprano Alto tenor and Basse but is also divided in up to eight voices so I wanted to take a close look at two level um level play um and what the music that goes for it so I'm going to look at um IAS one of my favorite pieces um it's composed by a Yuka kitamura and um I is a hard to beat boss Pete has beaten her twice but she beats me every time so uh she can be found in the upper Cathedral Ward she's a giant monstrous creature with squid-like tentacles in her back she's a Celestial child has a SK of skeletal has a set of skeletal wings and is the conduit between the church and the great bosses she resembles culu and is inspired by

The Cosmic mythology of HP Lovecraft so the piece that the companies that level has very distinctive features um through composed form through composed form means that unlike for instance in a pop song where you have Verse Chorus Verse Chorus bridge in a through composed form you have different sections that flow into each other and nothing is reprised nothing returns like don't have a motif that keeps coming back but everything is kind of kind of new that's true composed form um and the reason why most of the music is in through composed form throughout the game is because different sections are looped so you'll get to hear them again and again um the choir is very prominent it's the kind of choir you'll hear in requim or oratorial kind of very loud dramatic the harmonies are very dissonant throughout um and I'll discuss in detail um the the harmonic language starts from tonal then goes through

model incorporating model cords modality as in lydian or frian or mixian they're also poly cords now poly chords are harmonies stacked together like you would stack Legos so you're stacking cords and the sound becomes rich and dissonant and U very intense um there's also even impressionist Harmony it's the impressionistic harmony is what WC would use in his music WC of of course he the composer of uh clar Deon and three nocturns great impressionist composer expressionist Harmony that's the early 20th century Harmony that um shamberg alberg used in their music and uh what is interesting about that expressionist Harmony is these interlocking um sevens which I'm going to look in just one second and finally um the piece has many climaxes throughout I mean it kind of goes to a climax and sustains the level goes to even higher climax that's also typical I wanted to take a close look at the

Harmony and I want to encourage all composers in this room to do similar exercises because I have found this to be exceptionally U useful and uh powerful so what I wanted to point out here this is an exerpt from one of the climaxes in the piece at 2 minutes and 14 seconds and what you have here is you have these interlocking sevens like if you for a moment focus on the Metro soprano that's the second line line the second bar you have that D against D sharp diminish doct of minor 7th and um if you um just keep looking at [Music] [Applause] [Music] um [Music]

that's the harmony with inter interlocking sevens I'm only showing you the choir but the orchestal texture also has a lot of sevant embedded in it and you see how um in this particular case you have e against F natural and again e against F natural and the D against dsharp so that's how the harmony was conceived to be dissonant as my friend Jim says it's not like you know you're mashing the keys with your elbow that's this is more more elevated approach to dissonance um I also enjoy so um this is one thing I enjoy doing as a composer and orchestrator um I'm always very aware of the form and what I did here is I took the sound the the piece as it is in the soundtrack not in gameplay because in gameplay is implemented with looping different sections and I kind of made this flowchart it's one continuous line but I had to fit it I had to fit it in two split lines so um what I did here is indicate the different sections

different thematic sections um each one has uh tonal Center so the music is never totally a tonal it's never quite a tonel it's very dissonant very kind of wall of sound with stackis but there is a clear tonal Center and uh this is the kind of chart I enjoy doing it teaches me about the form I would encourage you to do that it really is very informative when you want to learn the form of a musical piece so um I'd like to play the game playay and again keep in mind the music has been looped obviously the game play play is much longer than 3 minutes um and um enjoy

[Music] oh [Music] oh

[Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh

and game gam playay continues um my next um example is um a piece called um Watchdog of the old lords that's the name of the gameplay and in the soundtrack it's called Terror by Chris Velasco oh the warm and fuzzy cutie so um in the soundtrack this this theme is used for the Chalice dungeon bosses um now what what's interesting how this piece was implemented so for instance the track as it was composed and as it's in the soundtrack opens with um composed by Chris Fasco it opens with a four note violin gesture um and then there's this rhythmic riff which becomes the Thematic riff for for the rest of the music um later the choir comes in and the brass picks up on that rhythmic idea tagam um and from

that figure the whole riff the whole memorable riff is derived um and but the way the music was implemented is actually the gaml begins with that memorable Rift which actually going to see here that's the brass and then the choir has sustains just something to listen that's how the gameplay begins but in the music as you can see it's bar 43 um here is another great example of the choire and strings playing a memorable two note Motif with highest intensity in the most extreme High ranges look how high The Sopranos are in classical Opera since 18th century a falling Motif like this was called The Motif of the Sigh and here it's falling and rising and falling again but that's again the operadic Trope where this idea comes from um throughout the track these thematic sections are interspersed with clusters orchestral risers and choir effects to create an overall feeling of desperation

and life and death Stakes which this queue is now the orchestration is not thick at all it's not thick and busy it's not like a wall of sound what we just saw before instead each Motif is doubled at two octaves and sometimes these motifs are doubled at three octaves so you have that layer of three octaves playing the same Motif they're doubled in choir violence and Brass while the rhythmic propulsion the propulsive pattern is in low strings and then we also have impact hits like low percussive hits and occasional clusters High clusters in the violence which is an orchestal effect so in this piece we have such Clarity in each layer each thematic layer and the clarity in the spectrum of frequencies just for a moment thinking you're going to hear sound effects you hear music you have the spectrum of frequencies but what we have is Clarity and that Clarity gives enormous energy and dramatic impact to each layer and that approach is opposite to what we

just heard which is the wall of sound um in stack dissonances in abetes so both these two approaches are wonderful examples of horror scoring genre scoring and um let's now listen to the music [Applause] a

um in closing I wanted to say bloodborne was one of the happiest collaborations and most challenging musically jobs for

me teamwork between Freelancers such as myself and the wonderful Sony campuses was fantastic listening closely to feedback I had to listen very closely forget everything I know and listen closely um asking questions when in doubt and extreme attention to the workflow were vital I was getting feedback on the scores from my fantastic supervisor pet skuro and Kei liry and from all six composers the Sony producer mon was in charge of reviewing the scores and providing feedback as well attention to detail meticulous file archiving and communication were crucial as fly as files finale files were flying across the globe and across time zones so working on bloodborne was one of my proudest accomplishments and now I'll will let Jim thetion hello so uh I want to talk to you a little bit

about the music for the DLC the old hunters and in particular I'm have a look at sucasa sito's queue the orphan of cost um I'm going to touch briefly on the differences between the recording sessions for the main game and for the DLC and on maintaining the established orchestral sound before getting into some detail about the way that cyto San's Q was orchestrated now P has already covered the harmonic language of bloodborne and the way the orchestra is used so I'm going to look Instead at the way the queue appeared in the original midi and the way that it was and wasn't changed to create the orchestration for live performance and then we'll try and squeeze in a summary why not um so although the choir and the orchestra were the same size uh the number of sessions weren't so originally we had eight sessions that was uh 27 hours of recording for the DLC we just

had two sessions one for the orchestra and one for the choir and overdubbing rules mean that we weren't able to replicate that uh reinforced Orchestra sound that pener had created to use uh to use to create bloodborne's dense orchestrations but the music still had to have the same sound as the original score it had to be a continuation of bloodborne story in the same way that the DLC is so that was the first problem to solve and the way we decided to go about that was to think about each Q's orchestration foreground its middle ground and its background so for each Q there's generally those three elements there's the foreground which will be uh melodic thematic material or as is often the case in bloodborne it's that kind of driving riffy ostat things the middle ground is going to be counter Melodies other elements that are of secondary loic or thematic importance uh for instance accompaniments and finally the

background which is harmonic support uh effects that fill out the orchestral sound so to help with the sense of scale it was important in the old Hunters music to give each orchestrational element its own space this allowed it to be played as forcefully as possible without overpowering the other sections uh to achieve this made sure each element was represented by a distinct section of the orch ra playing in its most effective range while ensuring that the original orchestral Sound envisaged by the composer was retained so if a foreground element was in the strings it remained in the strings rather than be moved into the brass into the choir so let's have a listen to some of those elements in the orphan of course we're going to jump in about halfway through the queue where the large 54 tinat uh really kicks [Music] [Applause] in

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so here the main Port of interest is the ostinato uh that driving riffy thing it's given in the strings which means that it can be played without breaking for breath giving the whole music a Relentless drive forward which is further given an uncomfortable off-kilter feel by the 54 time signature so that the whole queue begins to feel quite anxiety-provoking and and uh it's fairly straightforward you got that nice big chunky string thing from an

orchestrational standpoint but if we look at the midi provided by cyto San we begin to see some uh problems some difficulties in directly representing what was written so this is just a quick snapshot of the piano role uh and you can see there's quite a nice balance spread from high to low every little bit's got its own space there if we just sort of zoom out and look at the track you see it's actually kind of unbalanced there's a lot of deisy uh some sections aren't really being used at all uh bases and the first Vin for instance to just sort of show you that in its midi form uh to make it vaguely more musical here it is pulled into a score obviously this is pretty cluttered I just want you to get a sense of the shape of what's going on there uh you can see that the atin appear appears in the Chell and the violas in octave deisy with accents in the bases

and as the phrase progresses more High strings are added expanding the octave toty and growing the sound it's obviously uh kind of clustered so we'll zoom in a bit on a smaller section just so it's a bit more obvious what's going on cello and violas are covering a four octave pattern the bases have octave Unison accents everyone's div buy and they're all sitting in somewhat uncomfortable ranges the top base and Viola voices very high uh low cellos are really about as far as low as they're going to be able to go this is a common site when you're orchestrating from midi mockups the composers used their sample libraries in the most effective way to create the sounds they want to hear here it's the use of Viola and Chell samples to create a low full bodied sound but if we were to take this as gospel then the Austin Aro is going to be very unbalanced the low Chell and high violas in particular won't blend together and rather than sounding as a solid Mass the sound will

be somewhat disjointed and uh rather than sounding as solid accents the base is going to sound quite strained all the way up there and I should stress that this isn't a fault in the composition or in the programming it's just a symptom of making the midi mockup sound as effective as possible and another thing to bear in mind is that with sampled with sampled instrumental sections when we add another to the string section were essentially adding another 10 14 16 players that's really beefing up the sound with real Orchestra of course when you ask them to divide you're Haring the number of people on each note uh although it can sometimes see counterintuitive coming from midi divis can actually make a string section more delicate and Airy especially at low Dynamics not that that was a thing that happened that much in BL um so in this situation the orchestrator needs to rely on their ears as much as on the provided midi the composer's demo is going to be essential in deciding

what sound thereafter and in helping you decide how to orchestrate for Live players so let's have a listen to a similar section um but this time from the original demo that to cancer cyto [Music] provided [Music] so that aato is in there and you get the sense that that needs to be aggressive and large and the the dominant foreground element of the queue uh the lower line may be a bit more prevalent than the upper Viola line at least to begin with and to get that kind of thick sound we're going to need the bases chell's violas violins all in stack octave Unison on the separate lines with undivided sections rather than theis and

that's going to allow the full force of the players really digging their bows in to add punch and body to the sound so here's how that final orchestration looked you see that the second violin stabs have been moved up into the uh firsts allowing the seconds to take over the upper Viola line when that comes in once the idea of the high stabs is established the firsts are free to move to their original sustained line and join the tinat at the climax so that kind of expanding uh range of of the Riff is retained as it was originally composed but of course by having the bases play the lower voice of the repeated pattern we've lost the base stabs but all is not lost because uh we had a big brass section to play with so listening to the brass's role at this point point in the queue uh you see they're punctuating that aato really

forceful kind of percussive stabs and that's the middle ground of the orchestration it's an accompanying figure it helps to shape the aato and it needs to be perceived by the listener but it shouldn't dominate the foreground material um the brasses that appeared in the original midi looked like this not super exciting sounds good though uh or in score form say and you can see that actually only three of the trombones have been given anything here and that's leaving us eight players with nothing to do well you know we could bolster that trombone cord uh we could put two base trombones on the low E flat put two teners on the air for all the horns on the high E flat have the tub play player switch to chimbo add an E flat an octave below the Bas on Bones that's going to give us a really big aggressive in your face cord um when it's played at Tri f it's going to be pretty uh overpowering but it's going to be too big right uh

it'll completely overpower the strings whenever we hear it and it leaves nowhere for the brass to go as the music builds towards the end of the queue not to mention our leftover double base stabs and there's that horn effect to consider as well and we could uh stick with the samples as PKA suggested but here where that sample is repeated several times through the queue much nicer if we can to get it live with some very iations so the solution here was to treat those two stab motifs the original trombone part and the original Contra base part as the middle ground material and give both to the low brass so keeping the areas of orchestration in the same section this connected the two patterns together as a single orchestrational idea and kept them both powerful but still balanced with the strings it also meant that the horns could play their effect to life adding variety each time time you hear it so there's how that ended up

looking the horn effects makes up part of the background along with the percussion the temps and symbols and the sustained first violins when they appear and the background fills out the orchestration harmonically and although part of it is performed by the brass instruments the Horn's different tomra and their different spatialization really delineates it from the low brass accompaniment and uh he should be able to make out on that big old screen uh the accents that have been added to uh just slightly give a a different shape to the two lines there's a tanos on the tuber and second basom bone they're taking the original contrabas line and there's a mark Stato on the other guys so to achieve the large sound that pank had established in the original soundtrack it was necessary to decode the composer intentions converting their MIDI mockups into live orchestrations that effectively used the resources

available the aim was always to keep the orchestra sounding vast and this was generally achieved by making sure instruments were always playing in Strong full sounding ranges uh that balanced well with the rest of their section and the orchestra in general in this way it was possible for the musicians to play forcefully without fear of becoming unbalanced the key here when orchestrating is to listen as well as to look that way you can best represent the composer's intentions even if that composer is you uh and then arrange within reason to achieve the desired sound there may be some areas where you thin the midi out but you should always be seeking to represent every pitch that the composer wrote even if some instances of those pictures are dropped for balance for voice leading although in bloodborne this generally meant keeping orchestrational ideas within instrumental families it was still important to think about the orchestra and orchestration as a whole a change made in the strings may leave some musical material that needs to be

covered by the brass but that may leave the existing brass passages under staffed the choir could add body to a high string line but is that going to diminish their impact when they enter later in the queue by having a view of the whole Quee at all times both horizontally and vertically you can be aware of how Arrangements in one family or passage are affecting another I guess what I'm getting at is uh that although it's helpful to think by family and in terms of foreground middle ground and background ultimately the orchestra is a single sound making entity uh it's a single instrument and you get the most out of it if you think of it as a whole rather than as a selection of ensembles that come together to perform a queue so taking a midi orchestration that sounds great and converting it into a score playable by an orchestra which matches that sound is a common task for orchestrators hopefully by looking briefly at a section of the or of how the orphan of cast was orchestrated how

it originally arrived as midi and what the thought processes were and going from one to the other you have some ideas for the next time you're orchestrating your own or Another composer's music so thank you very much and I'm going to hand you back to P so folks just a few final words um as I mentioned earlier you know we we started this project with the ition of U just providing some music for an E3 trailer but it really wound up growing um organically as we continued our our discussions and our work with our colleagues in Japan um eventually uh as as I said in the beginning the the production was really spread out over the three continents and this had um a very uh interesting effect when it came to the crunch because we had a couple of crunches one with the game score and also with the DLC and that is that Jim could be working in the UK and we could take advantage of the time difference so he could work uh all

day send us some stuff uh J Studio folks of course were ahead I think 17 hours 16 17 hours from us in the US so you know sort of you think about it as far as you know managing the workflow from uh region to region it was actually something that worked quite well and made the the crunch much more manageable than it sometimes is as I'm sure many of you know um when you do a project like this communication is really the key and um it really helps there there was a really uh there's an unsung hero I think in this whole um collaboration and that was in this case uh June Mickey who is our uh business development manager for Sony Japan studio and June was tasked with not only doing the translation with us but she really helped us with um it's of her uh her her role in this was was much more um nuanced and subtle because it

it's not about just translating what you're saying but it's also the cultural nuances and really trying to express particularly with music where you know language sometimes is very difficult for us uh to use we don't have the the the words in our language to really Express what we want emotionally out of music so she was uh really crucial to making this uh collaboration happen and uh be smooth um also I have to say um well here I'm end with this picture so this just shows some of our our our team when we were recording the um DLC and recording the main game score and that's uh some of us out of uh at Abby Road um of course there were a lot more people involved than just what you see on the screen there and um really want to thank uh there was Mia zakian and uh the from composers they were absolutely brilliant there was all

of our colleagues at J Studio particularly uh K uh isamu from the audio department at J Studios Alan Becker who is the the uh director of uh Japan studio is very supportive of of course the producers for uh bloodborne uh in particular uh Tori yasan and um masaaki and uh just really appreciate uh you know their help and support with this so I'm going to end with just one final thought and that is that something happened in this uh uh production that um was really profound and it's we're we're working on the music but there was and forgive me if I bust a feeling here but there was something bigger that happened and you really start to see the effect of music you know what are we doing here it's not about the notes after a certain point it's about the communication it's about the relationships that we're able to forge

and you you particularly notice this when there is a language barrier between uh you know yourselves and the other members of your production team and this is the thing that winds up binding us and really uh make this a fulfilling thing to do so I just want to leave you with that thought uh we have some time for uh a few uh questions so I guess we'll open it up to the floor if anyone wants to ask us a question please raise your hand or if there's a mic oh uh there is a mic hi there thank you so much for this talk it was really informative um I have a quick question for PKA I noticed on one of the um formal examples that you gave that you noted that lydian mode was used and were there other modes besides lydian that found their place in the music in particular the only queue that used modes extensively was aetas um every all the other cues used frin and minor like typical genre scoring great thank

you hi guys and gal uh first of all I want to say thanks to pinka and Jim for really getting into some nuts and bolts stuff with the music it's you know it can be a little rare sometimes that people are uh you know willing to talk about things like DVC and fortisimo for fear of alienating people so it's nice to hear uh you know the real musical language um so this but this question is actually more for Pete I think so this was a this was a really big project obviously um M multiple continents multiple Studios and and highly anticipated so there's sort of a guarantee that it'll sell really well right hopefully fingers crossed but I'm I'm guessing that at some point during the production you maybe hit that ceiling of what you thought the original budget would be and had to go to somebody and say hey we're short or or we need more money and I'm curious when or if that conversation has happened on

this game or another game how do you convince somebody that is going to write the check that look it's it's really really important that we do this to the best of our abilities and not compromise you know with uh the full scope that we originally set out to you know complete you know that that's a uh that s that's a really good question um so let let me give you some insight to that one I I should say that when it comes to managing a production budget for music um that act that is something that is quite manageable and we found that it's easy I shouldn't say easy but it's it's very possible to stick within the scope that you originally set out uh the the money that you have available what you want to accomplish with that um what is and this is a little bit of a tangent was a little bit more difficult to manage in terms of budget sometimes has to do when your work your we're

we're doing implementation work for example and it's dependent on the performance of other aspects of the development team uh that's that's when the labor there can sometimes be an unknown but managing the external budget is what we call uh it's it's fairly straightforward now that's not to say that the scenario that you're describing doesn't happen because it does however it's usually not something that we get blindsided by so uh we are of course in um communication all the time with the other producers that are on the game so when it comes to decisions that might be made in terms of quality or expanding the number of minutes of music that we're going to produce for the game that's something that usually has some lead up to uh a major decision that major decision decision maybe being hey we want to spend some more money because we know we're going to get this benefit great

thank you hi um I actually had two questions for PKA uh the first of which was um for brius I found it super interesting that you put in lyan in the middle because it's a horror soundtrack it's supposed to be so dark and for boing but lydian I personally I feel it's one of like the most kind of happier beautiful kind of scales so I was wondering uh what was your thought process when you decided okay this section is going to have the lydian modal scale in it we have to remember my job was to translate the composer's vision so I kept all the notes but also remember who is this boss so she's like a Celestial child so it's okay to have that very Cosmic um sound so I haven't changed any notes um I did have to do some refinement of the arrangement but my job was to translate the vision so um I totally it totally worked for me because I thought of her well this is like the cosmic you know the HP Lovecraft ideas and um I lyan but you also have the low base so it's lyan plus something else going on that's very

dissonant okay um also sorry just one more question um for maybe perhaps for all three of you do you have any um composers that you would suggest to study for this kind of grand scale of orchestration with the horror like dissonant um feel Bram Stoker's Dracula M the soundtrack um expression right k um 20th Century Music um Strauss rard Strauss um shanberg alberg horror soundtracks there's a fantastic vernacular of sci-fi horror music out there of 21st century 20th century I would encourage you strongly to to study soundtracks and if you can playay your hands on scores and dissect the scores the way we did Jim and I did today it will be tremendously beneficial I strongly encourage that and they not horror but as you say rard stri and Vagner you can't go wrong studying them for for orchestration thank you so

much what are some of the challenges um that maybe you face working uh doing orchestration for six different composers because I I do a little orchestration and every everyone I've worked with has a totally different approach and it kind of it uh changes my workflow so maybe you two could talk a little about that um I was brought in very early we had a number of conversations with Pete and Keith and um I understood my job was to unify the vision that was my primary job and um it took certain questions and and addressing things and refining but um I I had to unify and through the orchestration through um translating the ideas of the composers trying to understand the intent as Jim spoke about understanding the composer's intent but it was that choice of instruments and that choice choice of beefing up the low strings or low brass that is part of the horror scoring that added that unified sound the composers um I was prevy to

the um design sheets the design documents that were given to the composers and and the notes the feedback that was given so actually I saw the notes that Mia zakian gave to the composers and was able to incorporate that do process in my orchestration uh yeah I to be honest it was relatively easy for me because panker had already done all that work thank you hi what were the compositional and other musical elements in the cleric Beast theme is that the cl sorry could you just repeat the question sure what were the compositional and other musical elements that defined the sound of the the cleric Beast theme which Beast cleric Beast oh cleric Beast oh it's um it's double strings so low uh short strings and long strings brass choir and um and orchestral effects that came from from the samples yeah yeah it's the same orchestration what you saw here and uh

the strings were in two passes you have the melodic strings and you have you have the low strings going on oato thanks was there a particular rhythmic device or something it's very intense and I was just wondering what uh led to that the whole Orchestra and strings two passes and and samples and percussion thank you okay hi guys great talk uh thanks a lot have a quick question for workflow U Pena basically did you start working uh straight under the sequencer uh software and start maybe removing key switches and doing some cleanups how how did that go about um normally as a matter of routine I receive MIDI files both Jim and I receive MIDI files which have all the midi instruments and we also receive a full mix and Stems string bass string brass effect stems everything separated so we can hear distinctly and uh then we go through our protocol you know we have to clean up the midi the first our first job is to understand the composer's intention that's the most important job

so we listen um we recreate the sequence and we listen very closely many times uh mute and solo different stems and once that musical picture is clear in my mind um then I begin orchestrating begin crafting the score and then there's like levels of refining but it's always the the midi and as Jim explained brilliantly the composer gives you the midi but it's our job to translate and refine and polish that Med and most importantly translated to this orchestral Ensemble and um once you play it on the stage that same power that same impact same orchestral Mass has to translate from how the midi sounds and of course has to sound 100 times better but it's our job to take that composer's vision and translate it for the live performance for the recording session to be performed thanks for um for reminding everybody the importance of the orchestration uh and the orchestrator job but it's the composer Vision we we just translated for the orchestra our job is to be beautiful and yeah and

honor the the notes yeah uh hi there great talk and uh from designer perspective I have to uh ask a question um how many not I mean uh composers how many uh what's the stuff they get before like they start to work it's like design documents or the concept Arts how many information they get about the boss before they like start working with question the question is what did the composers receive before they compos correct oh yeah okay um yeah concept art generally um we discussed it uh of course uh a lot of that I think was covered at the beginning of the talk in terms of just uh what the template's going to be uh sometimes you know where is this going to appear in the game um yeah but they didn't have much to be honest with you I I have to say the composers did uh particularly on the the American

compos that