Guild Chat - Episode 119

Guild Chat - Episode 119

Title

Composing the End of Dragons Soundtrack

Host

Rubi Bayer

Guests

Maclaine Diemer
Drew Cady

Date

February 18, 2022

Official video

YouTube

Previous

118

Next

120

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.

The 119th episode of Guild Chat aired on February 18, 2022.

"Don't miss this week's Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons™ livestream! Learn more about creating and recording the soundtrack with Maclaine Diemer and Drew Cady."

Transcription

Introduction [16:28]

Rubi Bayer: Hi Tyria, happy Friday and welcome to Guild Chat. I'm your host Rubi and I'm so glad you're all here with us today for the show. We are 10 days away from End of Dragons. Just a week and a half left until launch. You still have 10 days, if you haven't yet, to pre-purchase to get those account bonuses on your account and to be entered in the Dragon Legacy Sweepstakes. Prizes for that- there are so many prizes for that including- There's a DXRacer gaming chair with End of Dragons, gaming gear from HyperX, a gaming laptop, a trip for two to come visit us at ArenaNet and a whole lot more. You can go over to guildwars2.com after the show to read all about the Dragon Legacy Sweepstakes, what all the prizes are and how to make sure that you are entered to win some of those prizes. I also want to show you one more thing real quick for a preview of something that's going to help you celebrate launch week with us. Starting on March 2nd, on launch week up until March 29th, Hardee's and Carl's Jr.'s locations are going to be serving their large drinks in these cool End of Dragons collector's cups, while supplies last. So go get one for yourself and get something to drink while you're celebrating the launch of End of Dragons.

So, for today's show. We're gonna go behind the scenes of music and sound design. We've been watching all of your reactions to the music and seeing how much you love it, so we are going to talk all about it today with our two dev guests. So let me say hi to them and I'll have them tell a little bit about themselves, starting with Maclaine. Hi Maclaine, thank you so much for joining us.

Maclaine Diemer: (waves hi and begins talking)

Rubi: Oh, you're muted. That's ironic! (laugh)

Maclaine: It wouldn't be, you know, a video conference without one of us being muted.

Rubi: Well, I'm glad we got that out of the way right from the start and now we're good. So thank you for taking that hit for us.

Maclaine: Yeah, I swear I'm a professional. My name is Maclaine Diemer. I am the Lead Composer for Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons and the Music Director on this project, I suppose. I've been writing music for Guild Wars for a decade now and working on the game for 12 years, so yeah. Anyway, it's good to be back.

Rubi: Yeah, I am so glad you are. And our audio director, Drew Cady, is with us today too. Hi Drew.

Drew Cady: Hello! Yes, my name is Drew Cady. I'm the Audio Director at ArenaNet. I'm so happy this is audio week and we can dig in to End of Dragons's sound effects and music. I've been wanting to talk about this. I mean with Maclaine, I'm sure, we've been like, "I want to share this with the world." So, happy to be here with you all and to share in the details!

Rubi: Yeah, absolutely and we have a lot of details. Today, this is a longer show than usual today. I don't think, out of the three of us, any one of us are unhappy about it. So let's get started. End of Dragons is- There's a lot different than what you've done before, so why don't we start talking about the overall musical aesthetic and the new opportunities that that brought.

Maclaine: Sure. So, you know we're all familiar with what Guild Wars sounds like. You know, the core of it has always been beautiful, lush orchestral music and that's not any different on this score. But when Drew kind of initially reached out to me to start talking about this expansion, you know, we wanted to talk about what was going to be different, what was going to separate it from the last couple and, you know, the last decade of Guild Wars music. And the big thing obviously is the inspiration that we took from East Asia to represent Cantha, specifically Korea. You know the the original version of Cantha in Guild Wars Factions was kind of a pastiche of a lot of East Asian influences and and the studio wanted to kind of hone that into one specifically and this time decided on Korea. Which, from a musical standpoint, provided an amazing opportunity because, this was only something I learned after the fact, but traditional Korean music, which is called gugak or kugak, it's kind of a sort of in between a "g" or a "k" sound, is not very well known outside of Korea. You know I tried to find examples of it in games and movies and TV shows and they exist, but they're very, very sparse especially compared to, you know, more traditional kind of Japanese or Chinese music that is well represented, especially in the west. You know we've kind of been experiencing that kind of influence on our pop culture for 50 or 60 years now, but Korea has yet to kind of make that leap. And so I think we have a really unique opportunity with End of Dragons to present this stuff to a broader audience outside of Korea and I'm very excited about it. So, you saw a little bit of that in the video that we just showed with that piece of music, which I'm here to confirm, everybody: that is the main theme to End of Dragons. That is going to be the first thing you hear when you launch the game and I'm sure there are many people who are very excited about that, you know. I've read all your comments about the Path of Fire theme for the last five years and I hear you. So anyway let's- We'll get excited about that. There's little snippets in that video of some of the interesting Korean soloists that we incorporated into the soundtrack, but we have a slightly longer kind of montage of just some Korean soloists to give you a sense of the scope of some interesting and unique instruments that you'll hear on the soundtrack so let's take a listen.

Korean Gugak Soloists [22:10]

Musicians playing different Korean instruments: daegeum, gayageum, geomungo, piri, aejang, haegeum, danso, and taepyeongso.

Person 1: Okay, and you can learn how to say, for next time: Sugohasyeotseumnida!

Subtitle: ???

Person 1: Sugo. Like sugo... Okay. sugohasyeotseumnida.

Subtitle: It's 4:00 in the morning in Los Angeles where I am.

Maclaine: Sugo... hasyeotseumnida?

Person 1: That means "good work" or "you've worked hard" and you had a hard time and so, good job!

Subtitle: ...Not exactly the best time to try learning Korean.

Maclaine: Oh, great. Okay. Sugohas... How do you say it?

Subtitle: ???

Person 1: Sugohasyeotseumnida.

Maclaine: Sugohasyeotseumnida.

Person 1: Good!

Subtitle: 수고하셨습니다!

Everyone: Sugohasyeotseumnida!

Korean Instruments [24:09]

Rubi: Poor Maclaine

Maclaine: I love that clip. Yeah, yeah. I'm not exaggerating. It's about four in the morning for me in that clip and I'm just trying to stay awake and they're trying to teach me Korean so I'm very patient. Yeah, I hope I got close to the right pronunciation and I should say that I'm gonna pronounce some words here that I've done my best to learn how to pronounce, but please forgive me if I butcher any of them. So yeah! So that's, you know, there's a couple extra ones that I couldn't show in the video because we didn't have video of them, but those- that range of instruments is really the heart of this soundtrack and those musicians were just unbelievable. Such a joy to hear them playing and bringing that really distinct Korean sound to this score. So let's-

Rubi: Yeah, absolutely.

Maclaine: Oh. Yes, go ahead.

Rubi: I think we're going to say the same thing. Let's look at more of them because like you said there's more that we could show.

Maclaine: Okay, yeah, let's talk about them. Yeah, so there's kind of three broad groups that they can kind of be broken down into. There are winds, you know, which are powered by the human breath, there are the strings and then there's percussion, right?

So let's take a look at some of the wind instruments first. Okay, so I'm gonna do this clockwise and I'm doing my best to pronounce them. So in the upper left-hand corner we have the daegeum, which is a large bamboo flute. Then to the right of that we have the taepyeongso. Below that is a combo picture, very difficult to find pictures of some of these instruments by the way, so below that is the danso and the saenghwang, which I'm sure I'm not pronouncing that properly but that's my best attempt. And then the final one in the bottom left is the piri. And so all of these appear in some form or another on the score. I'll just talk about a couple of them really quickly.

So the first one that is kind of, you know, the star of the show I would say is the daegeum, right? This is a very distinctly unique flute to Korean music. It might look similar to some other, you know, Chinese and Japanese bamboo flutes that you've seen, but the kind of distinguishing characteristic, if you can sort of see on this slide, between his hand and mouth there's a little gold kind of plate that's wrapped around the flute and that's covering up a small hole that is covered by a membrane, which I don't know if it's paper or synthetic or like a cured kind of animal skin or something like that, but there's a little membrane that covers this hole. It operates on the same principle that a kazoo operates on, with the wax paper covering that hole, so when the player plays and they sort of, you know, breathe into it a little harder or maybe hit a certain note that resonates a certain way, that membrane will buzz very rapidly and it creates this very distinct almost like a natural distortion sound or a buzzing sound. And, you know, once you kind of hear it, like I said, it's unmistakable and it's very specific to the sound of Korean music with this particular flute and it was important to kind of capture that and and, you know, allow it to be as expressive as it naturally is across this whole score. The person that we got playing that flute is just unbelievable and he would take these- my crappy demos and, you know, my notes on the page and he would just elevate them. And there were so many times where we would do a take and he would play what was written and then I would say, "Okay, good. We got that as a safety. Why don't we do a take where you just, you know, put the natural expression into it that you normally would if you were playing this kind of music?" And those obviously are the takes that we used in the game because they're way better than what I wrote. But, you know, it's just such a cool and interesting and beautiful instrument and because it's a little bit bigger than, you know, some bamboo flutes you're used to hearing, it has almost like a tenor quality to it. It's hard to describe, but I love the sound of it.

Okay, let's look at the strings. Look at all these beautiful pictures. I love the outfits that they're wearing in the background.

Rubi: They're so gorgeous.

Maclaine: I stole these off of YouTube, but anyway. You should google these instruments and these videos will come up. You can hear them in all their glory. Okay, so these are kind of the four core stringed instruments, I think, for gugak music. So we've got the gayageum in the upper left which is like a plucked zither. Looks very similar to a koto or a guzheng which are the Japanese and Chinese equivalents of this instrument. There's some differences which I'll come back to. To the right of that is the geomungo which is also a zither except that is played with a stick instead of your fingers. So it's hard to see in the slide, but she's holding a stick that's about the size of a pencil and uses it to strike the strings and kind of pluck them and it has this amazing kind of throaty snap, you know, kind of attack to it that I love. The clip of the woman playing it in the montage we just showed, she was like a wizard on that thing! It was so cool to watch her operate. Below that is the ajaeng which is also a type of zither except this one is played with a bow. And then to the bottom left is the haegeum. And the haegeum you might, you know, recognize it or be familiar with its cousin the erhu, which is the Chinese version of it. But this one has evolved into its own kind of unique instrument that's different tonality, different styles of playing it, but a very beautiful and expressive instrument.

So I want to talk about the gayageum a little bit. So the gayageum is kind of the count- you know, the other side of the coin to the End of Dragons score and to Korean music in general. It's really one of the key sort of distinct Korean instruments. It's... Like I said, it's a plucked zither, right? You know, shares some kind of characteristics with a harp, I guess? I made the mistake early on of writing parts that you would write for a harp that you would play on this thing that, you know, it doesn't really work that way. So I had to kind of adjust my writing technique halfway through the score. But it's- That instrument and the daegeum are on more than half of the tracks in the soundtrack. They're just so beautiful and so versatile.

What I find amazing about all of those plucked sort of stringed instruments, and in particular the gayageum, is the strings are slightly different than their Chinese or Japanese equivalents. Those, the koto and the guzheng, have kind of modernized a little bit in the industrial age and have strings that are made out of steel generally, kind of like a guitar basically. They are louder, they resonate a little bit more, they sustain a little bit more. But for the gayageum, you know, the strings have kind of maintained this traditional tightly wound silk and it means that they don't sustain quite as much as their steel string equivalent, but what they can do is they're unbelievably flexible. And you saw that, I think, in some of the video of the gayageum, of the ajaeng as well, and even the haegeum. The strings are all kind of the same on all of them and they're so flexible and it allows the player to bend them very aggressively and get this extreme vibrato that, you know, that we're not even used to hearing here in the west or maybe even in other East Asian kind of traditional music. Heavy, heavy-duty vibrato and it's because of the nature of those strings. You know, to me it's just an interesting and beautiful sound that I wanted to make sure we captured and I'll come back to that vibrato thing in a bit.

So, but let's look at the final slide of of the percussion. Okay, this is only some of the percussion. There's some other stuff, but this is kind of the core Korean percussion. Those first four instruments we have the janggu, the buk, the, and I'm gonna mess this one up and I apologize, kwaenggwari, and the jing. Those four are usually kind of heard together in an ensemble called pungmul ensemble which is sort of traditionally played by farmers in the rural areas of of Korea. It was important to kind of capture that the sound of them together because they sort of all do, the janggu is sort of the the star of the show and often times will be seen on its own or with an instrumental soloist or a singer but when there's a percussion ensemble it's generally those four instruments. And they create this amazing exciting music that worked really well not just for ambient tracks in the game but also for the combat music. You know, combat music ends up being so percussion heavy just the nature of it is is to kind of you know keep the energy up and keep the tension and excitement happening. So it just seemed like such a natural fit because what those four instruments do together is just inherently exciting. It doesn't take much on top of that to kind of make it feel like guild wars combat music. Then let's look at the other two, these are really cool. Ok so, the first four are sort of more for the folk. These last two are traditional kind of royal court instruments, that you typically only use for big holidays and ceremonies. The first one is the pyeongyeong and those- What that person is striking are these tuned stone plates. They're sort of shaped like a boomerang. But each one of them are very carefully refined and tuned to a pitch. There's, I don't how many, there's like, whatever, 20 maybe. And then you strike it with a hammer and there's a very sharp tack and not much sustain surprisingly but a very clear tone. And then to the right of that is the pyeongjong and that is a similar looking instrument in terms of the beautiful ornate wooden frame but instead of these tuned plates, it has bronze bells. It's also struck with a hammer and they're typically played together. There's videos out there of you know, kind of court ceremonies, recreations of court ceremonies with massive group of instrumentalists playing all of these instruments. And there is usually only one of those, kind of giant percussion instruments and they are generally used as like a marker of a down beat of a measure as we would think of it in the west. So it'll be like Bang!, they'll sort of hit one clear note and then everybody else would start playing.

They're huge, they're heavy, they're very special. So you know, we had to go to them. I didn't unfortunately physically go there, we only did it over Zoom. But our kind of street team in Korea went to a high school that specializes in teaching kids about traditional Korean music and they happen to have one of each of those. So we got access to it for a few hours on afternoon which was just amazing you know. I hope someday to get there in person, see it in person, I would love to. But we incorporated it, not just into the music but also into some of the sound design that maybe Drew can a little bit about.

Drew: Yeah, yeah it was nice to have the solo instrumentalists, you know, do a little bit after their sessions and give us a little more, you know, plucking or blowing through the flutes and give us more texture for sound design. So interesting when we're talking about, you know, two different music and sound effects and we want to blend those together and to make a really immersive soundscape. And so this gives us the opportunity to get the textures back into the sound design. We did another full session at the high school and got even more instruments that we didn't have with the solo instruments that we were recording for the soundtrack and that was so, so great. Yeah, I can't thank them enough for taking the time to give us more opportunities to have that you know, sound design textures. It's like a toolbox. We're making a toolbox and at ArenaNet, when we do each expansion, we're looking for those opportunities to make a specific theme and really dive in deep and I think we really did it this time.

Rubi: Oh wow. You did so much with this. A whole new suite of instruments and having all of these available gives— This creates the opportunity for a whole new distinctive sound to build for End of Dragons. So can you go into the background of that a little bit?

Maclaine: Sure, so, you know, Cantha is not Korea, right? We're not making a game about Korea, but we want to honor that culture, so it took a lot of studying to kind of find the balance, I would say, of what makes this type of music played on these instruments Korean, and then how do we adapt it for Guild Wars. In addition to just the instruments, which is kind of, you know, having access to them is sort of the the first part of the battle because you just have them play something and it will automatically sound Korean. But we also wanted to honor, you know, the traditional Korean approach to melody and harmony and rhythm and these are all very distinctive to me to other East Asian cultures. It took a while to kind of wrap my brain around it. A lot of googling and a lot of google translate copy and pasting, you know, characters that I can't read into youtube. But yeah, you know. There's certain— there's three things— there's three aspects of music, you know, across the world— across every culture. It's melody, harmony, rhythm, right? Those are kind of how everything can be broken down into. So for things like melody, you know, let me come back to that, actually.

Rubi: [laughs] Okay!

Maclaine: So for things like harmony, yeah. Yeah, because it's more interesting and I'll ramble a little bit about it. For harmony, you know, in the west we're used to like an orchestra for instance playing, you know, the violins might have a beautiful melody and then the woodwinds or the brass or something might have the accompaniment playing the chords in the background, and then you might have another section playing a counter melody or a harmonized line with the melody. We're very familiar with that sound.

Korean music, it doesn't really approach it like that. Even though there's all these beautiful instruments, they tend to play melodic figures all in unison, and so, you know, incorporating that into something like the main theme that we heard at the top, you'll notice that when those instruments are playing the melody, there's not a ton of harmonic support and there's almost no— I don't think the main melody is harmonized, it's literally just, like, "Everybody get on this, play the melody in whatever range works for you." And it's great because, you know, for something like a main theme you want it to be catchy. You want it to stick in your head, and if everybody's playing it then you're going to notice it, right? The kind of more traditional western orchestral approach doesn't really kick in until the B section of it when there's kind of a secondary melody and the violins sort of take it up and there's counter lines and the horns and things like that, but then in the back half it truly is like, "Bam! Everybody just play the melody." Except for the brass, which— they sound awesome playing these low chords. You know, that's what they like to do.

So then, in terms of rhythm. This also— You hear it a little bit in the main melody. You know, in the west our sort of default rhythmic structure is based around even numbers, right? Two and four, right? So you've got, like, you know, if you're gonna count it off you'd have "one two three four," right? And it would be just, you know, increments of two or four or eight or whatever. And it's not completely uncommon to hear things that are in what they call sort of a triplet feel or a triple meter, or three-quarter time is kind of an old-timey way to refer to it, where things will be subdivided in groups of three. A lot of traditional Celtic music, you know, our sort of evolution of folk music, has this sort of triplet feel. But in Korean music, so much of their rhythmic structure is based around triplets, so things that are divided into three or six or nine or twelve. There's interesting other, much more complex, rhythms that I still have a hard time grasping, but the sort of foundation is this lilting triplet feel that has this kind of like "one two three, one two three, one two three." And so the main theme, when it finally kind of kicks in, has this sort of 12/8 feel for the music nerds out there. That was very intentional to try to give it that, you know, distinctly Korean feel. And then in terms of melody, this is where it gets exciting, right?

Rubi: Yeah!

Maclaine: There are multiple kind of different approaches to a scale, called the pentatonic scale, which is, you know, foundational to a lot of folk music around the world, for reasons that are too sort of lengthy to get into here, but a pentatonic scale, if you're a music nerd, you know what that is, and you might be very familiar with the way it sounds. But the way that different, you know, kind of traditional cultures in Korea approach that, it varied by region, right? The country could sort of be divided up along sort of the topography of it, right? The mountains and riverways separating different regions, and each one of those distinct regions developed a unique approach to scales.

Yukjabaegitori

But there's one in particular, which we have a slide of, which we can show, that is very, very distinctly Korean. And I really apologize. I'm gonna butcher this one. Okay, so this is pronounced yukjabaegitori. And even though it's all written as one word, that suffix "tori", it just means "scale" or "mode". And "yukjabaegi" is kind of the name for this particular type of mode. And if you look at it, it's very simple, right? It's essentially just three notes, or kind of like three and a half notes, and this sound- Once somebody pointed this out to me, I heard it all over Korean music that everything I was listening to, I had this like light bulb moment like, "Aha!" You know, "There it is!" And it kind of was my access point to incorporating this music into Guild Wars and how we would kind of adapt it. So I have a piano sound up here which I hope you can hear. I'm gonna turn my mic around a little bit and turn this up. So I'm gonna play it. So if we can get that on screen again. Yeah. So, in the western approach to music, this would be in the key of A and A is the middle note where it says plain tone, right? So that's this note. [plays an A] And the way they approach this from a sort of melodic figure standpoint is they would play that A, and they would jump up to the C which is the black note there in parentheses, and then quickly jump down to the B below. That that's why there's the little loopy arrow pointing to it, right? And then from there would drop down to the E below, which is the note that says "heavy vibrato". And so let me play without talking through it. This type of melodic figure- It can be embellished, you know, in many different ways, but you'll hear this in a lot of Korean music. You'll even hear a little bit of it in the main theme. And then, as it says on that slide, when it gets to the E below the A, heavy vibrato. And so heavy vibrato was the first thing that I noticed about, you know, Korean music. It was the first thing that jumped out to my ears across every one of those instruments we showed in those slides, even across the different types of vocal styles that they have in Korean music. It is a defining characteristic, I think, of Korean gugak music, you know. And it was interesting- It was a learning experience for me because in the west, we're used to heavy vibrato being used for comedic effect and maybe we can illustrate that now.

Drew: Oh wait and there's another one. There's this slide whistle.

Rubi: I appreciate this so much.

Drew: Cartoon, yeah.

Maclaine: Yeah and and you know just because I'm you know, I'm I've spent 40 years growing up in the West watching cartoons and and hearing that trope of of, you know, vibrato being used as something silly for somebody slipping on a banana peel or whatever. Uh when i first heard it listening to Korean music i was like, "Whoa, this is, you know, i have i have to kind of brief reframe this and retrain my brain to hear this in a different way." Because i don't want to, it's not silly right they're not using it for comedic effects.

Rubi: right

Maclaine: And and i really had to retrain my musical uh barometer i guess uh recalibrate it um to to understand why they're doing it, understand when they were doing it, and to appreciate it so that we could incorporate it, you know, respectfully into into the music. Um yeah so those are that's kind of the foundation i would say of uh of at least what we tried to adapt for the end of dragon score from korean music.

Rubi: yeah

Drew: Yeah, we also had an internal uh team member Sung Ha Hong check spelling, who is Korean, which she dug in early in the process and made a pdf of a lot of instrumentation, melodies, rhythms, had traditional examples as well as new pop culture examples uh and gave that to Maclaine and he continued to kind of give that to other composers as we work with them. So yeah, it was such a, it was such a help and support in this process and I and I want to thank her for that.

Rubi: Absolutely! Sung Ha is somehow awesome. I'm so glad that she's part of the team. Alright, so here's my question, you had all of like you had to retrain your ear, you had to learn all of these new things, a whole new suite of instruments, a whole new type of sound, this obviously went completely perfectly right from the beginning with no issues correct? Don't make a liar of me!

Maclaine Well, Ruby, you have you have a great deal of faith in me. Um you think very highly of me and I maybe thought a little bit too highly of myself going into this process. I thought, you know, oh a third expansion well I've already done it twice, you know, I've been writing Guild Wars music for so long and I've been making music for so long, surely I can, yeah surely I can, uh you know, teach myself about Korean music quickly and uh, you know, incorporate it and everything will work out great, um.

Ruby There's like klaxons in my head.

Maclaine Yeah and there should be and there should have been there should have been in mine as well. There's certainly enough space for them up there so the, what ended up happening was, you know, I did a very, very cursory research on Korean music, um, this was almost two years ago, you know, this time of year, uh, I did some very light research and to uh I ended up putting together three kind of concept pieces of music to pitch to the studio to get some feedback on and say, "Is this the right direction, you know, how do we feel about this?" Um knowing that we would have to balance the elements of orchestra, Korean stuff, and uh synthesizer sounds, which we'll get to eventually. So I I wrote a few things um and some of them were okay, uh, some of them I stole from later on, once I was kind of, once I hit uh got on a roll uh and incorporated them into a couple tracks. But i wrote a track that was ostensibly the main theme right? It was, it had the vibe of a main theme and it didn't end up being the main theme, but there are some similarities. Um and uh yeah I I thought I thought I did a good job, um and uh I played it for the studio. We had a meeting about it and they very politely told me that it was time to go back to the drawing board. So let's, we have a clip of it. Let's take a listen. I'll talk a little bit more afterwards.

[Music, Main Theme: Early Sketch]

Maclaine It's painful for me to hear that.

Ruby I can hear what you're talking about. It's not it, it shouldn't be painful. It was a, it was a learning process.

Maclaine Sure but, you know, you started airing your dirty laundry uh but yeah it was a learning process and and and it was important you know when when I when I go back and listen to that now I, there's nothing Korean about it. You know uh and I'm not even an expert I feel like I've said this to you know pretty much anyone who will listen that even though the game is coming out and the soundtrack is done, to me, it's just the start of my journey with this music because I truly fell in love with it and i feel like I've only just started to scratch the surface of my understanding of it. But when I wrote that I, it was like I knew less than zero and you know the studio the folks we had in the meeting,they basically said you know you kind of did what we were hoping you wouldn't do and and what i was hoping i wouldn't do, which was just sort of sprinkle this like fairy dust of generic Hollywood, you know, exotic East Asian sound over this and and it sort of is the intro and it does that thing and then it kind of shuffles it off to the side and then ends up just being a Guild Wars thing without anything you know Korea or even Asian inspired at all in it. And, um, you know, it was important to kind of have, you know, someone point out to me like, "hey this isn't what you think it is and and maybe you can try again." Um and there's no shame in failure uh it was it was a humbling moment and it was a moment that stuck with me throughout the entirety of the writing process um and i think it was really important to go through that.

Rubi: And it sounds like it was super worth it in the end because what we came up with and what was created out of that has turned out so incredibly well. And it's absolutely gorgeous. So let's take that and move forward with how you took that foundation and that learning experience and how you made it work for end of Dragons. So you turned it into this expansions music.

Maclaine: Yeah, so so up until now, we've. Kind of just talked about two of. The three pillars of the score right. There's the Guild Wars orchestra sound that you're used to hearing. There's the Korean kudak sound that you, you know, will hear, hopefully for the first time, or recognize if you're familiar with it. And then there's this third element, which is really the wild card, and it made things even trickier to find a balance. War, which was, you know, we're going back to cantha, but we haven't seen cantha in 250 years. In that time, they have found this amazing source of energy in the Jade Sea that powers this, you know, very high tech JJ tech. Makes you know this kind of has reshaped the city into something much more futuristic looking, and so the studio to to kind of musically represent that they said they really wanted to hear a lot more synthesizers and electronic textures being sort of pushed to the forefront, which is not something we've traditionally done with Guild Wars. There's been a little bit of it with. The Asura, because they are also kind of an advanced technological society but still very light touch and that's sort of the nature of the fantasy genre is, you know, you wanna sort of that there's an established sort of sound palette both for fantasy and for Guild Wars that we, you know, stick with. But this is like we've we're seeing. We're gonna see things we've never seen before. And it'll look very futuristic, so it has to sound a little. Bit futuristic as well. And of course, you know, there's there's no shortage of just pure synthesizer sounds on the on the score, but you. Know the the. When you just use synth sounds, I think you run the risk of it sounding like a sci-fi game. And even though there's it's sci-fi adjacent, it's still a fantasy game, so we had to kind of round it in reality and. Our approach to that was to take acoustic instruments and heavily process them with, you know, electronic plugins. And you know, all sorts of interesting mangling to turn them into something unfamiliar. So traditionally with an acoustic instrument like, for instance, A cello, you might record it, you know, you put a good microphone in front of this beautiful instrument, you have somebody playing it who you know has spent their life trying to master it. And you just want to kind of get out of the way you want the recording. You sound like you're you're in the room with them and and capture the natural acoustic sound of that instrument. Well, we didn't do that. The the sort of baseline orchestras I guess treated naturally, but not not always. There are times where we did some stuff you're not usually supposed to do with with an orchestra. And then especially with some of the soloists. We would do things wrong. You know, we would put delay and we would put flangers and phasers and distortion and and you know, pitch shifting and. All sorts of. Anything to make it sound interesting and otherworldly? You know, as if it was emerging from Cantha, right? Like, what would their version of this music sound like if they applied that technology to their musical instruments? Have a clip of. Of one of the tracks that will play in new Kinning city. Yeah, that I think demonstrates this pretty well.

Rubi: I love this track so much.

Drew: I got chills. I got chills. I mean it kind. Of ties the. The music and and you know. It's like sound designing the music you know, and it's so interesting, so nice working playing. On on really having fun and being playful and and trying to fit the aesthetic of these maps with the.

Maclaine: Yeah, well, you know, I I thank you for the opportunity to to try some new stuff. You know, there's there's been a couple instances over the years where I've been, like, writing something and thinking is this too much? You know it it are are. Is the studio going to? Accept this or the players going to accept this. And and you and every time we've kind of rolled the dice and and the feedback has been great. So I hope I hope it's great. For this whoever's monitoring chat, maybe it can give you some instant feedback on whether or not. You like it?

Rubi: That would be me. And they love it.

Maclaine: Oh, great. All right, excellent.

Rubi: Super, super good reaction. But yeah, this was this one I love because it's such a good example of exactly what you were talking about, doing things you're not supposed to like. It's dreary and kind of ugly, but in a good way.

Maclaine: So you know the the the snippet of it that we heard, it's a much longer track obviously, but the snippet of it that we heard, there's really only three things happening there, even though it sounds. Very dense, right? There's this droning synth pad at the very bottom. Then there's this kind of synth pulse that sort of keeps the motion. Going and then this cello solo, and that's that's all that's happening there. But there's so many effects and distortion and reverb and stuff just swirling around you, but I wanted to highlight what the cello was doing, you know, outside of it because it might be hard to kind of, you know, I know what I know what it sounds like. I wrote it. But it might be hard to pick those elements out without hearing it on its own. And you know, we had this unbelievable cello player named Row Rowan and and they are just incredible at playing both beautiful things but also coaxing interesting sounds out of, you know, this gorgeous instrument. That are slightly eerie and unfamiliar, you know, maybe can sound a little distorted, can it can almost sound like guitar feedback sometimes where it's hitting, you know, some of these kind of overtones that that you typically would shy away from if you're trying to make it sound beautiful. And then also that heavy vibrato. I had a discussion with them about, you know, kind of what. Makes Korean music Korean and and we honed in on that vibrato thing, and they just went nuts with it at a couple of spots. But then after we got this amazing recording, which already sounded incredible, that's when it was time to kind of muck things up a little bit. And so we put on the delay and the. Portion and the idea was if you're in, if you're in the slums, you know that's where the refuse of kinding is kind of coming down to. So I was like, what? What would this sound like if you were, if if, like Drew said, if there was some busker that had a cello and was propped up in a giant sewer pipe, you know, where just trash was streaming out of it, what would their music sound like? Is it echoes around through that? So you hear the playing of this beautiful instrument then. When it stops. This nasty kind of low rumbly pitch shifted, distorted delay kind of bubbles up from the bottom. And you know, I wanted to. I wanted it to feel like you were in the underbelly of this city. So anyway, that's one of my favorite tracks.

Rubi: Yeah, it is for good reason. So we talked talking about this being in the slums of new kinding, and you'll hear that down in there gives me a good point. I want to talk a little bit more about the different maps and end of Dragons. I know we've been super focused on the music and just how it was built, but let's go through the maps and just talk about how the music. And the actual audio work throughout the map work together, so we can start with Shine Jay.

Drew: I mean, so we have all these interesting textures and techniques from the Western Orchestra and the Korean gogok instruments and and the way that they play. And then we, you know, bring in the synthesizers, and then we have to bring them into the world of cantha and. That's already a. Whole lot of options already and then we have such diverse maps in camp though, which is just it's so fun. You know we. Yeah, we had the Shinji cunning city equivalent and and JC, so Shin Jay, as you were talking about very traditional lush natural dream like we had sung Hogan since she's. Knows this kind of aesthetic, she. Did all the sound effects she implemented she implemented while learning the tool and she actually just owned the whole map at the end just like you? You got this. Go with it. So, yeah, she she kind of stitched it all together and and made this believable. McClain comes in and writes tons of just amazing pieces for this, and maybe you can talk a little bit about Xinjiang.

Maclaine: So as Drew mentioned, it's it's supposed to be kind of natural feeling, right? It still has elements of jade Tech to it, but it's our introduction to cantha and it's, it's, it's it hasn't been sort of fully subsumed by or taken over by by this jade tech. So you know for me. There's there's an example of this for every map, but I like to have some kind of high level notion. I call it my egghead ideas because I have a giant egghead, my egghead ideas to to. Sort of trigger some sort of inspiration to to start the process of of writing for a map and capture the aesthetic. So with Shin Jay, it's all very natural feeling even with the J tech elements and and I thought, well, what if I was, you know, sitting on a beautiful rolling hill underneath the cherry blossom tree with my taigam or my kayagum and all of a sudden the breeze kicks up and blows some petals. Often I see. And just kind. Of drifting off into the distance. What kind of music would I make? And and you know the first piece of music I wrote for the map was sort of with that in mind. And and it helped me kind of feel what I what I wanted the map to feel preserves some of that natural element to it. It still has orchestra and some some electronic and synth textures, but. It's very much focused on the sort of natural acoustic aspects of some of these instruments and then maybe drew can talk a little bit more about new kanang.

Drew: Yeah, kind of. Lots of levels. As you previously mentioned. High, mid slums. That's kind of contrast each other. And so you know, with that score you're talking about. It's it's, it's. It's a little nicer up here. It gets pretty heavy and murky down there, so yes, sounds Chris Burgess worked on this. He's an internal member of the team sound design team. Love synthesizers has a lot of them. He knows that aesthetic and so having him do the map was was really a treat. He spent a lot of time building up these samples and this this. Kind of, you know. Toolbox of sounds to fill out the kanang. And these can be very abstract or they can be something. OK, I could. I could hear these footsteps and and people, you know, talking and the the WALA. And I believe that, but what's this other thing and and what's that effect on it? And it just kind of blurs the line and it it makes things really interesting, we also took. Snippets of the solo instruments, so this was really interesting. We taking taking solo instruments and and adding an effect to them so they are rooted into the world and. They're buskers, so we have buskers in the map and it. It's very subtle, but it it it draws you in more, it's the it's the soundscape.

Maclaine: I love this.

Drew: So that's the the whole thing we want to do is music is up here. Sound design is here. We want to blur those lines and that's part of that way we're we're blurring the lines. And yeah, I think I think that map really turned out. Well, it's such a. It's such a contrast from from of the other maps we've done in Tyria and yeah. So, fun, so fun.

Rubi: So how about Echo vault? At that one now.

Drew: Yeah, echo old petrified forest.

Rubi: No, I was like, nobody's going. I'm going.

Maclaine: Or yeah, you wanna. Go back. What? Sure, sure.

Rubi: To call on. What time do you want?

Drew: To talk about Counting city a little bit.

Maclaine: Ohh sure yeah. OK. So we heard a. Little bit about the slums, right. It's it, you know, has the really heavy duty synth kind of stuff. The rest of that map has it. It's not all it's. Not all dark. And gloomy like that. But you know, because it's this. Incredibly futuristic looking. That's the one that leans hardest into the kind of synth and processed electronic you know or electronically processed. Acoustic sounds much more heavy than any other map, and then within that has, you know, kind of interesting gradations with the different tiers of the city. So there's the high level which, you know is very kind of noble and stately feeling. A little aloof, I would say. The middle tier of the city is is kind of the heart of the beating heart of it, right? It's where the the working class people live and and it has much more energy to it, you know, kind of a a bustle to sort of capture the vibe of the city. And then the lower district, you know, like you heard in the slums piece and some other stuff, it's just dark and grimy and and, you know, it's we don't wanna think about that down there. It's we we we send all our trash to them and and hope that it just goes away but it doesn't go away. It turns into very nasty sounding music. So that was a fun map to play around.

Drew: Then it takes us back to equivalent. Another it's we've done jungles and things like that before. We've never done a petrified forest so petrified for it's murky they got. It's kind of like a cathedral. There's lots of verticality to it. Lush, dark reverbs. It's it's very padded and muted in in contrasting something like Shinji, which is. Which kept kept more natural. Todd Davies is a sound designer for that. His game profession is a necro, so it's kind of fun. It's like let's let's give him equalt and he's. Then such an amazing job. It's taking taking a long time. There's there's a lot of detail in there. There's a lot of state changes and even when you're crafting, you know, making sure everything is turning on and off, he's done a an amazing job and and some of the sound design is, is can be something you're kind of used to giant. Trees creaking and groaning and almost subsonic because they're so massive. And then you take it to, you know, down to the insects and and creatures that are in the background that are, you know, what is that, you know that that's a little different. So we had we had an opportunity to try some. Think different and he he took the baton and ran with it. And I'm happy to see where where we got.

Maclaine: And for the for the music, you know, here's my eggheaded idea for this map. We have these giant, beautiful, petrified trees, you know, and to me, that just immediately conjures images of the woodwind section of the orchestra. Right. So there's there's a little bit of, you know, some of the Korean instruments in this, but. It's the least sort of Asian inspired map I would say of the four. So I leaned a little bit more into the orchestra, but because it's it's dark and murky, you know, it's it's a lot of low woodwinds and and low strings to kind of thicken things up. But you know, if you look at a, an oboe and maybe not an oboe so much, but a a bassoon or contrabassoon or base. Clarinets or an English horn. These are instruments you know. They made out of wood, and they literally look like giant petrified trees. And so there's a lot of that kind of, you know, murkiness to and they just sort of naturally have a a warm sort of woolly sound to them. And I don't know, it just seemed like a perfect fit for for echo Vault.

Rubi: Yeah, sounds like it worked out super well. So the 4th map, do we want to talk about the sound and the music and the Jade C?

Drew: Jade see anybody?

Maclaine: She was like, yes, give it to me.

Drew: So, so there's and. This really contrasts echo ball because echo ball is. So padded and muted. In longer delays and things like. That JC right? Shimmery. It's a petrified. Ocean. Wow, that's. It's undercurrent of magic reflections and things. So we did have a delay on there. That's that's kind of skipping. Like if you skipped a rock on an ocean, same thing we did that with the with the sound. Effects and some music techniques we can talk about the music a little later as far as mixing, but Jasmine Serrano stood up. This map did, did implementation and and the events and and. It's really really fun. Yeah, it was just. Like as you get closer to these blocks of jade, they have a little shimmery musicality to them. They they have an energy, but it it moves. We kept it moving through their samples, so we're kind of evolving the samples as you get closer and it just it makes things a little more interesting than. Than a static world. It's not just a petrified ocean, it's a living kind of energetic world, right? And maybe McLean can talk about. Some of the music for that.

Maclaine: So for this map, uh, it has the least amount of ambient music because the nature of the content in the map is. Very, very combat focused. There's a lot of fighting that happens so that you'll hear a lot of combat music, tons, but when there were opportunities for ambient music, you know, again, I just I wanted. It to feel like. You know the music that would naturally kind of emerge from this sort of setting. And so it is very bright. It's very reflective, both reverbs and delays, you know, bouncing around the very first track I wrote for it, the kind of heart, the motor, that sort of keeps it. Moving is an instrument called the Glass marimba. I don't have a glass marine, but it's a sample of a real one. I wish I had the real thing, but I don't yet. Maybe I'll get one someday, but, you know, a marimba is a giant instrument that looks like if you're not familiar, it looks like a huge xylophone. And the times that you hit are made out of wood, where you strike them with mallets and it has they, they resonate, but it has a very sort of warm. Wooden sound to it. It's a beautiful instrument and hearing people that can play it. Well, is is a treat, but somewhere in the last few decades, somebody got the bright idea. Speaking of eggheads to to make one out of, to make out of glass, so you know the the resonating times that you hit are are made of of, you know, plates of glass. And what's interesting is when you look at it, it looks like an instrument that might be made. From the JDC because you know, glass sort of naturally has a little bit of a greenish teal kind of tint to it. And when you put it all together in this beautiful instrument, it has this, like, very light, you know, greenish blue hue, almost like my. Yeah, I like back here. It's kind of like that. And so I thought, well, this is the perfect instrument for the JC. And then he just slaps some delay on it, as if it's bouncing around all these kind of, you know, polished surfaces of of frozen jade are not frozen. But you know what I mean? Petrified jade frozen in place, let's say. So that that. You know, you'll hear that sort of glassy, reflective kind of texture across all of the music for for the Jade C?

Rubi: Well, so my take away here is that the people with the eggheaded music ideas are the ones that come up with the. Really cool stuff. So I'm I'm comfortable with you. Just keep rolling with that.

Maclaine: I mean, everybody has, you know, everybody has their own way of getting inspired. But for me it it has to start with some kind of idea and it doesn't always have to be. I'm physically in the place, but there's just gotta be some hook that is, you know, kind of or a key, something that unlocks the creativity of that particular area. You want to try to make some you want to try to make it new sounding. You want to try to make it specific to that area and unique from all the other areas. And I'm just grateful to have the opportunity to play around in these four areas because they're so different for me. Be out even outside of Guild Wars, right? And certainly within Guild Wars. You know, even if you've been working on something for a decade. You're looking for opportunities to to get inspired by something new. So you know this. This was this is the most fun I've had writing music for the game in in a very long time.

Rubi: I'm so glad to hear that. So one thing that I want to touch on before we keep moving forward, there was so much work and effort that went into this and there's there's so much music. This couldn't possibly have been a solo effort. I mean, you're amazing, but a lot of people contributed to this. So I wanna give you the chance to talk about those people as well.

Maclaine: Yeah, Drew kind of sprinkled in the additional sound design team into the maps. And so, you know, it's not, it wasn't just the two of us doing all of this. I hope we don't give off that impression. It was really important for me to get help, you know, knowing the scope of the game, I wanted to make sure that we. Incorporated other people, which we've done, you know it hasn't just been me the entire time I've been. I've been writing music for the game. There always been at least one or two other people, but this is the biggest team we've worked with yet. So the first person I reached out to was a friend of mine named Mike. And Michael is an unbelievable composer from Korea. I met him here in Los Angeles a few years ago and we sit in touch. He lives back in Korea now. But I thought, you know. You can tell by looking at me. I'm not Korean. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, I I don't have any sort of inherent knowledge about this culture or music. So it, you know, took a lot of work for me to catch. And I wanted to bring in people with a, you know, a more authentic sort of Korean voice. And what was interesting about that, again, Speaking of humbling and sort of teachable moments, I had a conversation with Michael very early about, you know, what he could bring to the table. I knew I was mostly familiar with his orchestral writing, which was gorgeous. He writes beautiful melodies and. And I knew that would be a perfect fit for Guild Wars, and I thought, you know, as a sort of added bonus of of being Korean and and maybe he has a a better understanding of this traditional music than I do. And he's he told me, you know, very politely, he said. You know, I'm not an expert in this. He he was more familiar with it just because through osmosis and growing up there, you you just hear it, but he's not an expert. And and it just kind of again just sort of flipped the switch in my head and and was very humbling about my assumptions, you know about this situation. You know, if he was coming to me and said, hey, I'm working on a game that's set in colonial America, so you probably are an expert. On all colonial folk songs of the, you know, whatever 17th century, because you're American, right? You must know about all that stuff. And of course the answer is no. I have no idea about any of that stuff. And so, you know, I think it was important to kind of not treat bringing in other people as sort of tokenism, right? I want to bring them in. Or their their creativity and their expertise. Anyway, Michael amazing composer did a bunch of stuff for the Shing Jay map. The next person I brought in was a composer named Sojin Rieu, who I met through Michael, who's also an unbelievable composer of, you know, traditional orchestra stuff. And she did a lot of the music for Echo Vault and and a couple of other pieces here and there. But writes beautiful melodies just you. Know I I think. I'm not sort of out of place here saying that, you know, Guild Wars music is beautiful and and it should always be beautiful. Even the ugly stuff. And so that was kind of my #1 criteria was, will they get that even if they have a unique voice, will they be able to sort of bring that beauty to the, to the music music? And so yeah, so Jen is just write some gorgeous stuff. Stuff I really love. And then we brought back a couple returning favorites. So we have Brian Atkinson as part of the team. Brian's been kind of involved in the game. For I don't know, last three years maybe, maybe a little bit more doing trailer music for some of the marketing trailers in game, cinematic music. And for this one he did some combat music. He did the cinematics for the game and helped flesh out the combat music and did an unbelievable job. He's just very complex writing that was challenging for the orchestra play, but it sounds amazing. And then we have my friend Steve Pardo, who Steve is somebody I've known for a long time. Since we both sort of started our career in games at the same time, many moons ago at harmonics music systems in Boston, Steve wrote a special track that I don't want to give anything away about, but. You look up a little bit about Steve. You might get a sense of what that track would sound like. You'll know when you hear it. Let's put it that way. And then and then of course, the sort of marquee returning guest is, is Lana Rain, who, you know Lana has been writing music for Guild Wars almost as long as I have. You know, she she contributed her. I think her first piece was for Winter's day in in 2012. The first winter's day festival and. You know, kind of increased the amount of music we could get from her. Over the years, but she's been. Sadly missed and absent, at least for the last expansion. And so I knew it was really important to get her back. Lena is, you know, such an important voice in the in the Guild Wars, two sort of pantheon of of music. Rick and is so good at writing big, memorable boss encounter music that we brought her back for the for the final confrontation of the game. And she wrote a really. Special piece of music that. I'm I'm excited for people to hear. And then there's one other person that I want to mention who is the MVP of this soundtrack. He's the most important person on this entire thing. The soundtrack would not have been possible without him. His name is Andy Roseland, and Andy is a composer that I met through asking around about. About, you know, is there anyone out there who knows about traditional Korean music or knows anyone who plays these instruments? Can you put me in touch with someone and eventually through kind of extended game of telephone, I was introduced to Andy. Andy is an American, ironically grew up here in Los Angeles, but he's lived in Korea now for the last 30 years. He has a background studying traditional Western composition as well as traditional Korean music. And so I initially brought him on to write combat music. Because I knew. He would, like I said, understand those kind of intrinsic rhythms, rhythmic structure and melodic structure that I wanted to capture the combat music. But he grew into so much more than that, right. He ended up being my guru to teach me about this. He was an unbelievable teacher for this. Kind of music. He was my weathervane to tell me, am I, you know, in the right going in the right direction? Is this even physically playable on some of these instruments? And sometimes you'd be like, yeah, if it was in this key and like, oh, right. That's that's important. They can't if you know, they might. Not be able to. Play in whatever E flat, but they can play it in D perfectly. So and also he was a translator, you know. He he speaks. Fluent Korean and was able to communicate. To some of these soloists. Every one of those soloists that we that we showed in that montage video at the top were all recorded in Andy Studio in Seoul and many of them were actually old classmates of his from when he was studying. Music at school. And and he was saying, you know, I'm grateful for this project, for reconnecting me with some of these people who I haven't talked to in years, which I thought was that was pretty cool. So yeah, you know his his fingerprints are on every single track in one whether he wrote it or whether he was the person who, you know, recorded the soloist on it. He touched every single piece of music on this score and we would have fallen well short of the mark. I think if he hadn't been involved. So my thanks to Andy for all of his help.

Rubi: And my everybody's thanks to all of the people on this team, like you said, this is a huge team working on this. And one thing that you've mentioned is all of the different places we recorded this because these were recorded live all over the world. Do you all want to talk about that?

Maclaine: So you know, we talked a little bit about Korea. Obviously that's where the soloists were and and Andy recorded his parts as well. There are a lot of percussion and some other interesting instruments, and I'm here in Los Angeles. I did what I could here between some live stuff and all my, you know, synth gear and all that kind of garbage around here. Lena is in Seattle. So Jin is in Chicago or Illinois outside of Chicago. And Michael and Andy, of course, are in Korea. The orchestra we recorded in Nashville with, you know, they were just, I don't know, they were just, I already talked about them. But they're amazing. My buddy Steve Pardo, also in Nashville, we recorded some other soloist, A soloist named Kristin Nagas, who is an incredible multi instrumentalist. Recorded a couple things for us in in Florida where she lives. And then even down to the mixing which which also happened not in the United States, maybe drew can talk a little bit about the mixing. In the technical side of the score.

Drew: I mean we've we have a high quality lineage in our soundtracks, and I wanted to respect that as much as we could. And and there's new opportunities now and I wanted to explore an immersive experience using Dolby Amos. So the entire soundtrack. In Dolby Atmos, which is just so fun and amazing, I want you, you know, as a listener, as you're as you're listening to it outside of the game to still be immersed in, you know, Tyria and Kantha and that that's important. And I think I think we got there and I'm, I'm so happy, you know. The sounds will be from the side of you and to the rear and even in the ceiling they can be very dramatic. As we talked before with this cello. As it bows and stops and the delay catches it and it distorts, you know, does that just stay in right where that cello was? Maybe it ripples into the room a little bit as the wind instruments are playing to not be shadowed by the strings and the cellos. You know this? Is kind of like first wall. In the stage they're behind. So what if we just pulled them up in space a little bit kind of pull them up into the ceiling speakers? It gives them a little lift, broadens that scope of that sound stage and so we're just we're bringing that listener in. It's kind of like if if the normal speakers were in. Front of you as they. We want you to just. Two or three steps forward, and so everything just kind of wraps around you. And like I said, sometimes it's it's it's subtle. Sometimes it's very dramatic. I think there's a there's an echo of all piece that just it starts off. We intentionally started off centered in the mono speaker and then it just ripples all the way down and it take. I think four or five seconds each time this delay happens, so you're really just are drawn into this world. It was so fun. It took us two at 3 months. McLean and I and and Simon and and the people at sound and motion down in Cape Town, Africa. So yes, another world experience. Clicking on chat calls and and you know dialing in. He's later in his night where earlier in the morning, so we had to kind of coordinate our times. We would do these. Reviews at 8-9 in the morning and we go for a couple hours. We actually listened to everything and surround. Like as we were. Exploring this new opportunity of immerse audio, we would we would kind of stand up this template and we started with the main theme because that had literally the kitchen sink, right, everything all the instruments, the synthesizers, the gogok instruments, the big heavy orchestra. So that was that was so fun to stand it up. And then make sure that it wasn't too much like it's it's it's focused the the listener is not going to get too overwhelmed and then. We started listening to it in stereo, so how does that translate to normal speakers? We wanted to make sure it translates everywhere. Big array stereo speakers and then binaural. So even if you don't have a big theater, put on some headphones. A lot of people. Have headphones now I hear so you can play it on your phone and and. Stream it in Dolby Atmos and and listen to the whole the whole soundtrack. So that was that was a lot of fun. I think some of those opportunities. In the different maps is, you know, Shinji is more natural. We did have some delays, you know, like like we said before, it delays with some of the solo instruments, but we kept it kind of natural and and traditional kinango, more delays, distortions. Souped it up, ripples down the side equivalent we actually. We actually ECHO was interesting. We used we had a frozen lake in in Washington and we skipped rocks on it. And it goes Doo poo poo.

Maclaine: Poo poo poo.

Drew: Sounds really cool. We actually took that and made. A delay out of it. In surround sound and added that into the music which is just just me and Simon kind of riffing and having a fun time. Seeing like how, how can we make this even more interesting? So we we we padded. We kind of generated our own reverbs and and use cinematic rooms to to shape all of these different maps aesthetically, so they all kind of fit, which was really cool. As I said, we collaborated with with the team Simon, Carl and Jade at Sound and Motion, and I have a video of Simon playing. With his sweet rig in and yeah, let's.

Maclaine: Check it out. Hey, fuzz. Hello.

Simon: More traditional orchestra. Come to here. So you can see like certain elements coming in at different times. So it's not just a front plane, you've it's it's you know it's panned out and pulled back into Atmos. And then on top of that, you've got the UM so little things like, you know, having having wind instruments kind of like slightly elevated in space, that kind of thing. And then and then you've got the. Gugat orchestra the the Korean Orchestra which? It is outrageous and awesome, and then that has to kind of that that slots in with the with the, the more traditional Western orchestra, if you. Like so it's. Essentially almost like. I'd be that almost like having two orchestras at the same time. Let's open this all up. OK? This is all made neat. Thanks to Carl, but we've obviously. We've got, we've got all our effects up here and a combination of stereo effects and atmos effects, so using cinematic reverbs. For example, you can see there's longer and shorter holes automated from different, slower and faster sections. Then live orchestra, which is then split out into your winds and brass and various passes, that kind of thing. But ultimately everything then basically goes down to this matrix down here, so you've got subgroup stems. So these are objects, multi channel objects. You just take violin as an example. So I was just catching up. So you can see that that's kind of like in in the Atmos space is actually not not panned so high, but. But these are. Just the spots of the strings of string, one or violent one, just as an example. So there's high. That's flute, for example. That's an object. So you get a sense of height based on the fact that it's an atmos. And then go into final stems and then the stems come up here as beds include. So you've got percussion stems and stem, etcetera. These are all objects we're using multi channel objects for the main orchestra and then for the for the main the. Reverbs and it took a really. Long time to figure that. Out. So we've kind of. You know, kind of withdrew, we're just kind of drew at the rennet, just trying to figure out, you know, how all the planning. Just kind of like how the my career would work and then I started experimenting with like with my terrible handwriting, just various ways of packing it out. So it took, you know, quite a bit of time to to just kind of build the matrix that we have here, which is now. In ads about 500 and when it's when it's fully specked out with all the the samples and things that comes in at about 500, between 450 and 550 tracks more or less. That's the story.

Drew: Yeah, fine. So. Lots of lots of tracks, lots of effects, and we pulled it all together and I think, yeah, made a beautiful soundtrack. It's 58 tracks in total at 2.5 hours long, which is, which is so so great. Gives us more variety. Really stitches into each one of those maps and and make sure that they have coverage for for all of them. And we went a step further. In this last few years, Chris Burgess has been working on alternative variations where we're asking the the composers to deliver stems so we can actually kind of stretch out the music. And we did the same approach. With end of Dragons and so Simon would finish a mix, he would send me the project file. I would open it up into my workstation. I would you know, mute and solo and kind of figure out what I wanted as an alternate option. So I do like, you know, 345 alts per queue, per, per track. And send that back to him and then he would render everything. So it was it was really. Really a great way to to imagine more without composing. More so we already had 2 1/2 hours which is a lot. So we actually ended up with 8 1/2 hours of alternate assets and it's so nice. I mean just having that just for the combat alone, just to have the, the that original just the lower drive, the, the percussion. A few instruments and then it kind of builds, adds in the strings or adds in the brass or or maybe it's just the percussions and the and the gogok instruments. We have a interesting little video I can I can kind of breakdown the alternative arrangements for you. We why don't we watch that? Yeah, I mean I I think you you can hear how it's, it's complex and then it breaks down. I think the really nice thing about the alternate mixes as well as they stitch into the soundscape more so as we're just kind of coming up to this event or or. Another encounter, if things are are simple and a few layers, then you get the sound effects and the music kind of blending and then as the event kind of blooms and and gets more intense. More instrumentation comes on more drive, you know, more intense sound effects, your skill palette of your profession kind of kicks in. And so it's it's a lot more dense. So they all kind of bloom at the same. Time this is really. I think that it turned out really well and there's one more member of our team that that after all of that, after we mixed everything we have to master it. And so Nathan Moody was our mastering engineer. Where is he? He's in LA as well and.

Maclaine: I know he's in. He's. In the Bay. Area he's in the Bay Area.

Drew: He's in San Francisco. Yeah, he he took everything, listened intently to to all the details, made sure that they were balanced over all the tracks. And so nothing, just kind of really pokes out. He also went through all the alternative mixes and made sure that those were leveled as well. So we did all this mastering before we shipped the game, so all of the in game assets are are top notch. Sometimes we we would make we would ship. Living World episode or or an expansion and then master it and then do the streaming. So this was all done beforehand and that was it's such a treat to to have it all done and we just kind of drop it in and and let it go. So yeah it's. Quite a quite an experience going through that whole process and but well, I I'm so thankful for for this entire team and and what we have accomplished, that's for sure.

Rubi: I love that the whole theme of all of this music and sound design conversation today has been. But wait, there's more, and there's there's right so much music, and everyone involved has had so much fun with. But The thing is, there's there's still more to talk about as we wrap up. And McLean, I'm actually going to turn to you to talk about the pre-order on the final soundtrack and what's coming with that because it's amazing.

Maclaine: So we're lucky enough to have a third installment of the Guild Wars music on vinyl. The the incredible people at IM 8 bit. So they did. A vinyl release for the heart of Thorn soundtrack and for the path of Fire soundtrack which drew I think, has hopefully, is he happy?

Drew: Ohh here it comes. Oh my God it's. They they they go out of their. Way to to really. They keep it in. It's green for heart of thorns. It's kind of like that, that purple hue for path of fire. It's so cool and you know, open it up. We got the. Oh, this one doesn't open. Just kidding, Khan said it. More on a revolving stage, but yeah. It's pretty cool. They they go out of their way and. We're bringing it to you this time as well.

Maclaine: Yeah, so so it'll it'll, you know, you can sort of see, I guess if you go to inhabit.com they they'll there it is, they'll have it for period. This is just a mock up, but it's aesthetically in line with the previous two soundtracks with the unique logo and color scheme for end of Dragons. You know, I'm so it's just so cool to have. I do have copies. They're at home that I should have some in the studio here, but. I have them at. Home so I can listen to them. But if you. So if you if the pre-orders are open now they open this. Week if you pre-order it you will get a code that on February 28th when the game launches, you'll be able to download the entire soundtrack, so there's physical restrictions to how much music you can put onto vinyl albums. So it's kind of it's it's kind of the highlights that represents every map, every composer. But there's only 20. Let's see 20. It's 425 tracks or something like that. 26. Yeah, there's mid the mid 20s on on. The vinyl, but there's 58 in total. So you know, if you get the vinyl, you'll get the code that will essentially double the amount of music you. That and I can't wait to get my hands on one that they just there's they're so cool looking and to have all. Three of them together will be special.

Rubi: Yeah, they are absolutely gorgeous. We're also, I'm going to give you a little preview of next week, starting late next week. We're also going to preview a few end of Dragons music tracks for you that you haven't heard yet that starts next Thursday, but they are going to be coming to you in a way that you in kind of an unexpected way I'm going to. Leave it at that. Streaming stereo on February 28th and drew do you want to talk a little bit about that and the Dolby Atmos mixes?

Drew: Yeah, all all 58 tracks will be stereo. The stereo version on February 28th with Dolby Atmos to follow. So yeah, we'll be streaming on lots of different platforms. I'm sure you can find one to best suit you and the ones. That you have, I'm. Very, very eager to ship this out to you.

Rubi: Ohh my gosh, we're so close. It's almost there. As we wrap up one more thing, I do want to touch on Drew, you're here representing the audio team because physical restrictions, we can't fit everybody and they're super busy. But you have called out a few of them, so I do want to thank the rest of the audio team who's been working so hard on this expansion.

Drew: I we're still head down. We're in the final days. I appreciate this team so much. They are doing everything they can, everything they can. It's it's like there's music is a tip of the iceberg. It takes probably 85% more stuff to do sound effects VOD implementation. And I've mentioned a few of them already. I would say the other MVP of this team is Joseph Clark. He is the lead sound designer on end of Dragons. Ah, I can't thank him enough. He is an amazing sound designer. He's an amazing lead. He does not stop at anything. He will not stop until this expansion has the right sound on everything. He is touched almost every part of this expansion, supporting others been just a a wonderful collaborator and. And yeah, he he's just and and just a super friendly person overall so. I've talked about Chris Burgess and he's done even large scale meta events helping Jasmine out. And yeah, his work is all over lots of MTX items. What else I mean? Tons of stuff Todd Davies like. I said we're going echo Wald. He did a a lot of other a lot of other things, sporting events as well. I mentioned Keenan Sig strong implementer. We gave him a lot of the story instances and strike missions. Is a very. Well-rounded sound designer, he we could just throw anything at. Him, like fishing. Go fishing, go fishing. Rob, you know how about this large scale event? You know, like we need something to, you know, blow up in this huge way or something. He's got it. So he's he's came in swinging. And learn the tools very quickly. So thank you, Rob and Jasmine Serrano. One of our younger members and she's taken to game design really well and is so friendly to work with. She she knows her stuff and continues to not only do her own tasks, but support others too as they need it. So yeah, there's so much to talk about in sound effects. I I really want to have another segment. To give everyone on on our audio team, just some some time to to shine in this light and so looking forward to that, I can't thank them enough for all they've accomplished. I'm I'm so proud of them all. Yeah, I I just. I'm I'm speechless and if I get to the end McLean, I'm such an honor to work with you in this last two years on end of Dragons. Thank you for all of your effort and this collaboration has just been unreal. I I so thankful.

Maclaine: Well, thank you, drew. And and of course. To arena net. For the continued opportunity to make music for this special game and push boundaries of what we think you know belongs in it. And and of course. Thank you to the players for keeping the game alive. You know we wouldn't be here talking about it if. It wasn't for for you all. So I I just can't wait to get this out there. And you know I've been itching for years to to finally be able to talk about this stuff and celebrate all the work that all these amazing people have done. And yeah, I'm, I'm. I'm very proud of it. So I I hope that. I hope that fans love it.

Rubi: You absolutely should be super proud of it. So yeah, we are we are very close to everybody hearing it and that's our show for today. Thank you, McClain and Drew for joining today. Thanks to everybody on both of the teams that you work with. And thanks to all of you for watching. We are 10 days away from end of Dragons. We have lots more to share in these last 10 days too. So before end of Dragons launches, just keep your eyes open, watch our social media channels, watch our website so you don't miss anything because you're not going to want to. We will see you in Kantha on Monday, February, February 28th. See you then.