Darktide 101: Creating the Sound of Darktide w/ Jesper Kyd
Hey Everyone,
This one has been a much requested dev blog. To celebrate the New Year and our latest update–Grim Protocols–we sat down with Jesper Kyd to discuss his work on creating the music we all love so much.
Grab your favourite drink, or snack and dive in for another Darktide 101 blog.
Straw Hat: What is your creative process like for Darktide? How is it that you normally approach a track? Do you often have somewhat of a complete idea once we give you a rundown of the level, like with Rolling Steel or Dark Communion?
Jesper Kyd: I would say it’s a bit of both. You know, the intuition is certainly there now that I’ve worked on Darktide for a bit. But these last few missions I’ve worked on, the train mission (Rolling Steel) and the cultist one (Dark Communion), certainly are going in a different direction. There’s a lot that still needs to be invented for that, and then added into the Darktide sound.
The usual approach is that I get a video of the level and a playthrough with the audio team and then we discuss ideas. I get to soak up the atmosphere and I start to hear in my head what would be really cool. Sometimes, it’s very instant. Like for Dark Communion. For that map, it was instant. I knew exactly what I wanted to do right away.
Make sure to check out Jesper's latest track on YouTube.The track for that mission came out really quickly. It was this eight minute track that just kept going. It was really fun to make. It was more of a grimdark orchestral style. I wouldn’t say that’s unusual for Darktide, but it does have a lot more orchestral elements than other tracks have had so far, which made it a lot of fun to work on.
The players are always so excited when they find out there is a new Jesper track on the way.
That’s really great to hear. It’s great to hear players are excited, too. I think you can hear my excitement in the music. You know? I’m just having so much fun working on this music, because it really is a good combination of what I like to do. I like to do something new, something fresh, and then mix it with all my electronics and orchestral elements and melodic things. And Darktide really is perfect for that.
How much time do you spend on a track for Darktide?
Well, it’s interesting. Because sometimes, I can get a majority of a track done in a day – if I’m just totally in a zone. I know exactly what I want to do. Other times, it can take me up to two weeks.
I think the more clear it is to me what the track should be, and the more clearly the map communicates what the intent is, the faster it goes.
With Dark Communion, I knew exactly what I wanted. So while it’s a longer track, I wrote it much, much quicker.
Something like Rolling Steel, you could go a lot of directions with that. It could’ve taken longer to figure it out. But I knew I wanted the pulses of the train moving, the strange grunting and breathing sounds, and all that kind of stuff in the music. That mission is a bit about stressing you out. But it can’t just be about stressing you out in a stressful way. It has to be in a cool way, too. I had to make sure it’s not going to drive you crazy, right?
Exactly, because it’s a shorter mission too, and players will be hearing it more often.
Yes, exactly. It’s not just an alarm going off. It has to be something more musical. It needs to still be cool on repeated listenings.
Subtlety is something I work a lot with, too. Even though Darktide’s music is pretty aggressive. It’s not shy music. However there are still a lot of layers. There are a lot of elements you might not pick up on the first few times you hear it, perhaps you only feel it. But after more repeated listens, you might start to notice it.
It is something really interesting about writing music for games. It has to be written in a way that rewards repeated listens. It’s kind of the opposite if you write a pop song. For a pop song, you want everyone right away to say, “Yes, this is it.” Because then the song can chart, right? For games, it’s like the opposite. You’re trying to make it layered, so that the music can grow on you and you can still listen to it time and again.
For Warhammer, it’s such a massive universe. There is so much lore that goes into it. For our game, it feels like you truly did create something to encapsulate the gothic, grim, dark nuances of Darktide. You couldn’t imagine this score in any other game.
It was definitely a part of the brief in the beginning that the team wanted a score that was not typical for the genre, which has more orchestral and choir and maybe guitars.
I think holding on to the choir though was really interesting, and we needed something to make it recognizable as Warhammer. The human voice is so powerful, and mixing that up with this industrial and these rhythms from the tracks creates something fascinating.
Also the organ. Whenever I use the organ, there always seems to be a positive player reaction.
I was going to say that is one of my favourite parts, where you’ve mixed those heavy, industrial sounds with the organic, human voices. When the choir and organ come in on some tracks, it’s really powerful.
There is something really God-like about those instruments, where the choir gives you this feeling like you’re now dealing with the Emperor. And the organ kind of goes in that same direction. It feels like it would be the Imperium’s kind of instrument.
For the latest track for Dark Communion, you said it came to you pretty quickly. Was there anything about this track that stood out to you?
The whole idea was based around creating something ritualistic. Something to sound like there is a seance of some sort going on somewhere in the level. No matter how subtle or big the music gets, it is meant to always give you that feeling. There are some subtle visual signs we approach from the distance, the way you see the smoke and colours. As you get closer, the music gets more and more epic. And then once we’re in the church, it’s full on.
It was so much fun to write. It’s not everyday you get asked to do a big ritualistic cue, inspired by the soul leaving the body, etc.
Through composing for Darktide, is there anything new you’ve felt like you’ve learned about music or your process while working on it?
Oh, absolutely. Darktide was one of those projects that I knew exactly what I wanted to create. And I knew I couldn’t do it. I had to figure out, how do I do it?
It very much had to do with the capacity of the studio. I had some things to solve because of what I wanted to do. I got a whole new Department of my studio running. It’s to do with step sequencing from the 70s. It required these old devices that can play back notes, but it plays it back in a very funky way. You know, it has a lot of swing to the actual notes, so everything sounds more alive. I wanted everything to sound like it was performed.
So all the synthesizers in that score, those 30-40 synthesizers I play, are mostly played live, or they run through these step sequencers. It gives this really organic feeling, like you’re part of a living world, instead of just having the computer perfectly synchronize everything. You know, everything on the beat is perfect, or you’re using software for the synthesizers. I wanted to stay away from all that.
We needed something really organic, that sounded lived in. And a lot of these synths are 40 years old. So, they sound 40 years old. And they sound used; they sound lived in. They sound very different from the day they were released in 1976. It’s a different sound, because the components and the keyboards, they age. I think it just sounds much cooler. I’m not a big fan of anything that sounded brand new. That’s kind of the perspective I took with everything.
I had to find a way to use my sequencer program, Cubase, with these step sequences so I could tempo synchronize everything. And that was really, really difficult. I had to get a custom box built for it, just to make it work, because there was no way you could do it without customizing something.
So, you were determined. You were thinking: I know the sound I want.
We got this box made, and now I’m able to run it so all my synthesizers are synchronized, and that was something I had to invent for Darktide. Because I knew I wanted that sound, like when you hear the Darktide theme, when that bass line that just comes in and you’re like, it’s supposed to make you pause and say what is this?
And it’s such a weird mixture of styles. And that is the technique on full display. It might just sound like a simple bass line, but to get that thing going, and to get it sounding that loose, and to get it sounding full of anarchy. Because you start underground in Darktide. It was very much designed to support that. Everything is chaos, anarchy, and dirty. You’re a reject.
Then, of course, we mix all that with the choirs and the organs, which is more the Imperium, and that’s the sound of Darktide. Those two opposing elements that really don’t belong together. I try to make them belong together, you know? Because that’s the world of Darktide.
And the last bit was, how do you make something that takes place 40,000 years in the future. We wanted to avoid being stuck with the idea that it had to be futuristic. No. It has to be real. It has to sound lived in. There’s been a war going on for 1000s of years. The Imperium knows war. That’s a sound that has been through the ringer. It’s been through hell and is still running.
The last thing I can say about that is I directly got a quote from the team that they wanted the music to sound like living machines that had been forgotten about. These machines have been running so long that people forgot how they actually work. They only know how to maintain them.
All of this I’ve been talking about, I think it all comes together to fit this organic sound that has become Darktide. And I think it fits the game so precisely. People just get it. You don’t have to explain it.
What is the strangest thing you’ve ever mixed into the soundtrack?
On the main title track of Darktide, it has “children.” I did a 15 layer children’s choir. But it’s all me. I was able to manipulate it live so that it ended up sounding like children. And I thought, there is this intense bass and industrial stuff mixed in, and then having these children, almost like children of the Emperor, coming in and chanting against all that underground industrial noise.
If you did the children’s choir, is it actually you anytime we hear a choir in Darktide?
No, we work with the Hungarian Scoring Choir and recorded them live for Darktide. And, man, that was an awesome session. It was just really cool to see them, you know, starting to groove out to the music. All those choirs are manipulated by me to sound a little bit more machine-like and perhaps people don’t even realize it’s live, but they’re all singing.
Alright, that’s all from our interview with Jesper! If you have any other questions for him, let us know in the comments. I’ll share some of them with him and make sure he sees them!
We hope you enjoyed this latest Darktide 101 dev blog. If you have other topics you’d like to see us discuss more, please drop a comment, too. I’ll try to set them up! (- Straw)
Until next time,
The Darktide Team
