Corrigan's Wail

One of the most unique aspects of sound coming to Vanguard is that of its music. The concept of a layered piece for background music is something that is just now coming into fruition in the rest of the game world. With that concept entering the world of Telon, the MMO genre only benefits from how dynamic things can sound as a result.

The concept is this: Every area in the game has your basic ambient music track. It may loop, or die out after a while and come back. It then has other layers that can trigger based on several events. If the sun sets and night begins, the music shifts to a new layer, altering the ambiance due to its change in time. If a player enters into battle, one of several other layers is transitioned to for the duration of combat. Crafting the music in this way allows for a great quantity of audio that doesn’t necessarily get old through over-use.

Using this concept of layered music, I created this piece called Corrigan’s Wail. While the content might be somewhat more dramatic than what would be featured in an MMO soundtrack, the origins are still there. What I did was essentially write the same piece twice using the melody and synths as a basis for growth and progression. This is a bit of a simplistic use of layers in BGM (background music), as all the engine would be doing is cross-fading back and forth between two pieces playing simultaneously. What a more complex system would be doing is triggering even individual instruments to come in or out, “mixing” the piece in realtime.

About the piece in specific, I wrote it as a potential dungeon theme. What I pictured while coming up with the textures and melody was something along the lines of a subterranean cave with large expanses of water and an abundance of undead banshees wandering the hallways. In the ambient layer, harp and marimba make up most of the melody and harmonies with a brief English horn solo in the more melodic section, while several thai gongs repeat the bass notes. In the combat layer, the gongs get upgraded to timpani hits and low drones on the basses. A percussive hand-drum line is introduced, and parts are assigned to the strings and brass with a much more aggressive sound. Replacing the English horn for the middle section’s melody is a huge pipe organ, harkening to my love for Castlevania’s music and atmosphere. Throughout both sections though is a lovely “wailing” synth morph I discovered while gathering inspiration for the piece. It just tied everything together well with a certain ambiance that served itself well to the undead.

And without further ado,

Corrigan’s Wail