OST: the great journey into making the game's soundtrack

[h3]In today's devlog our Sound Director "Janne Kariniemi" explains how he created the soundtrack for Great Houses of Calderia:[/h3]



"We started the music production with composer Seppo Kantonen researching the music of the era of the game’s location. Soon we discovered that authentic music would not be entertaining enough in the context of the game, but doing the proper study was very enlightening for us.

[h3]"Allowing ourselves to work with synthetic sounds and combining them with organic instruments was very liberating"[/h3]

We found many melodic components, especially instruments we wanted to use in the final production. It became clear that we wanted to move to more movie-like scoring and work within artistic freedom. So we decided to create a musical world that has some sounds, instruments, and melodic paths from the era, but use whatever sounded good and created the right kind of mood.

Allowing ourselves to work with synthetic sounds and combining them with organic instruments was very liberating and helped us to reach the goal we wanted. Also, we wanted to get some mystique and unknown to the soundscape and reached for that by seeking sounds from the neighboring areas and cultures where the actual game would take place."

The mandolin appeared during the Renaissance in Italy, www.pixabay.com


"In the second phase of the production, we created a Spotify playlist of any kind of music that could be somehow useful as a reference or just felt right. We shared the gigantic playlist with the game-developing team and asked how they felt about the music.

We started narrowing down the list using the answers we got from the team combined with our own ideas. In the end, something like over 200 reference songs were narrowed down to eleven. These songs had the overall mood, and feeling – the essence we decided to aim for."

Janne and Seppo created a musical moodboard on Spotify. Listen here

"Seppo started to compose demo versions for the main theme. Almost twenty different versions were made and one of those was chosen to become the main theme. After that, we did a breakdown of the game, just to make clear at what point and what kind of music was needed, and how we would fit the theme in different variations. When we had a shared vision of the musical entity, Seppo composed the rest of the pieces and we produced demos of these compositions."

[h3]"The actual production was very intense and we worked as a pair in the studio for long days."[/h3]

"We used the demos to make a breakdown of the instrumentation and arrangement ideas. When the instrumentation plan was done, we studied what could be the best way to produce the sounds we wanted to have in the scores. Several software and VST instruments were acquired to support the hardware instruments that were chosen for production.

We ended up using a lot of software like Spectrasonics Omnisphere, Arturia V Collection, and Native Instruments Komplete alongside hardware like ASM Hydrasynth, Nord Stage 3, Sequential Mopho X4, and some classics like Roland JV 2080 and TR808.

A "Nord Stage" keyboard used on the soundtrack. Picture by Daniel - originally posted to Flickr as Nord keyboardist, CC BY-SA 2.0, link

The actual production was very intense and we worked as a pair in the studio for long days. Executing well-made plans was the key to a successful result and actually gave us lots of time to try (and fail) new ideas during production. We had lots of fun and sometimes got carried away playing around, but being such serious professionals and not at all any silly babblers (yeah right!), we managed to get back on track whenever needed."

- Janne Kariniemi, Sound Director at Resistance Games


[h3]Which topic would you like to hear about in our next devlog?[/h3]


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- Great Houses of Calderia Team -