Legend of Grimrock Theme Music MP3 and Diary

For this week’s update to the official Legend of Grimrock website, the team at Almost Human has brought in the game’s composer, Stakula, to pen a quick blog entry detailing the creation process he went thorugh on the game’s main theme music. He even treats us to a downloadable MP3 of the main theme song, which sounds pretty damn good to my ears:

When I started working on the song I realised I needed a good instrument for the main melody. I can play several instruments myself, like saxophones, clarinets, guitars, keys and so on, but this one was definitely a cello thing, no question about it. Luckily, my band mate Tuukka Helminen, a cello virtuoso extraordinaire, agreed to torture the old wood for me! I mean his cello, of course.

I went on making a demo version using solo cello samples at first. I also played bass clarinet for the middle part and orchestrated the song more towards film score proportions. After a few adjustments the game team was happy about the demo and it was time to record the cello. Tuukka, aided by few beers, tracked multiple cellos in several octaves within one hour and it sounded great! It’s always quite a leap when going from samples to real instrument and it’s always for the better, nothing replaces the human touch!

For the final version I played a rare instrument I bought from Okinawa, Japan, called Sanshin. This snake skin banjo with three strings is quite an ethnic sounding little fellow and I really liked how it emphasized the oriental epic movie feeling of the pentatonic main melody. It’s intentionally not very up front in the arrangement it’s more like a subliminal color slightly outside the typical Celtic fantasy realm without being too exotic.