The Music of Regions of Ruin: Runegate

We've been getting a lot of wonderful comments on and interest in the soundtrack for Regions of Ruin: Runegate, so we thought the music would be a good topic for this week's dev blog!

You haven't heard from me yet in the dev blogs, but I'm Mike- the other half of the Gameclaw team as well as the composer of the score for RoR:R! Prior to being a game developer, I've pursued music in one form or another since my teen years, but I'd spent around 15 years in the audio profession as a composer in the entertainment industry and in general audio work such as foley, sound design, etc. and as an audio engineer. For those interested, I am a lifelong Steinberg Cubase enjoyer as my DAW, or digital audio workstation of choice.

Steam post image(Snap of me home turf. Gotta' flex the clean minimal setup and RF swag desk mat, no? r/battlestations?)

THE MUSIC OF OTAM

We knew early on that we'd first be visiting the world of Otam, a place filled with norse and celt inspired cultures. In the beginning of the project I made it a point to immerse myself in a lot of norse music in the background of developing to get a good feel of the instrumentation and stylings of traditional/folk music from these cultures. Some of my personal favorites were groups the likes of Wardruna or Heilung and I quickly fell in love with the beautiful, haunting sounds of some of these traditions.

Traditional norse music has an interesting suite of instruments that are relatively uncommon outside of that part of the world, such as as the wonderfully coarse Scandinavian Tagelharpa (a kind of bowed lyre) and the Swedish Nyckelharpa. (pictured below, it's almost like a hurdy gurdy with a bow instead of a crank wheel) Drums range from thunderous large skin frame drums, mouth harps, to common practical things they just had lying around like a camp cooking pot, or a deer's jawbone leftover from a hunt.

What struck me with norse music (or at least my assuredly narrow, modern experience of it) is that much of what I was listening to felt largely bardic in tradition, or that the main point was the telling of a tale, or famous deed, set to music. [See: Skald, or Skaldic Poetry] The music itself wasn't the real centerpiece, the tale was- and with it the speaker/singer. That lies a little at odds with some common wisdom of soundtracks. Lyrical music tends to take the spotlight in your mind when you hear it. As humans we're all wired instinctively to pay attention when we hear speech, so it doesn't often make for great background music that's there to support something else that you're meant to be paying attention to, unless the whole point is to be the focus purposefully.

Steam post image("A Minstrel Sings of Famous Deeds," by J.R. Skelton, c. 1910)

It was really quite a challenge to find a way to distill the sound and feel of this style of music without being able to make use of its main attraction. In the end, I settled on a nice spread of Scandinavian instruments from Eduardo Tarilonte's wonderful Scandinavian instrument collection, ERA: Dark Ages, studied the stylings and cadences of the music that was played with them and incorporated that back into a place I have a lot more experience with- backing it with an orchestra. (largely Spitfire Audio's incredible BBC Symphonic Orchestra) I endeavored to write the orchestral arrangements in such a way that it supported the feel and movements of the norse elements, though careful not to overwhelm them, while nicely filling in the hole left by the absence of a voice singing their tale.

Most of the way there, but wanting to still capture some part of the vocal aspects of the music, I sought out a good instrument library for non-lyrical voices and came across a company called Zero-G out of the UK who had two incredible libraries I was pretty blown away by- Ethera Gold Prometheus and Ethera Gold Atlantis. (male & female libraries respectively) These proved to be the missing ingredient, keeping the vocal flavor while remaining light on actual lyrics.

Prometheus in particular lent everything I used it on that axe-swinging dwarven testosterone with its booming deep voices and soaring bardic highs, such as used in the Main Theme or the Fjukamann theme, "Riders of the Wind." Atlantis also features prominently on several pieces, filled with character and bathed in reverb, creating some beautiful vocal passages such as in the back half of the Sveitland theme, "The Northlands."

Overall, I had a blast writing the music for RoR:R. I've written a lot of music in my life, but professionally so much of it was contracted work for other companies' projects, other people's visions, or even just the commercial work that makes up the bulk of so many composers jobs, day-to-day. I always gave everyone who contracted me my best of course, but it's vanishingly rare that's you're ever left feeling much of it was truly your own with so many hands guiding it along the way.

I will say that I had a particular proud dad moment at the end of it all when exporting out the final masters for the soundtrack and going through and setting up all the ID3 tags for the mp3s and such that can honestly only be summed up with a proper Jeremiah Johnson nod.

I hope you've all enjoyed this meander with me through some of the process behind the music of Otam. The response so many of you have had to the soundtrack has been really lovely to hear of my work, truly. If you guys found the topic interesting, perhaps we can do a part two sometime about the very different music of Ealam! Cheers! - Mike