Scarlet Moon recently partnered with composer Eric Benaim on the incredible Elsie Original Game Soundtrack. It features a blend of genres drawing on everything from Japanese fusion to Latin influences from Benaim’s native Venezuela. We were able to ask Eric questions about his direction, the tools used, and some of his favorite moments to share with listeners as they jam out to this amazing score.
Read the full interview below.
On the Collaboration with Knight Shift Games
Meeting the folks at Knight Shift was a bit of a chance meeting! It first happened when I found a random game composer job opening in the Unity3D forums. I reached out and submitted some demos, which the team liked. They then reached out to talk and hear more portfolio pieces. During our chat, we discovered we all lived in the city of Miami, about 20 minutes away from each other! Elsie is actually Knight Shift’s second large game. Our journey began by working on a first game that we soon realized was too large in scope to complete as a small team. After a few years of development, we decided to take a break and create a short game that we could complete in a month or so before returning to our first game. Over time, our excitement led to us adding more features and ideas into this game… almost a decade later we managed to release the game!
On the Distinct-Yet-Diverse Selection of Musical Styles
There’s a large group of genres and influences that eventually made their way into the soundtrack. I tried my best to feature progressive rock, metal, jazz/fusion, and latin music! Initially, the conversations with the dev team led to the desire to blend traditional contemporary sounds with retro elements. This felt like the right decision after checking out Elsie’s low resolution pixel art with high fidelity shader work. As a result, most tracks featured a core band comprised of guitars, bass, drums, keys, and synthesizers. A doubling layer of percussive white noise was also added under the percussion to add a different texture to the drum parts. Additional “chiptune” parts and layers were added in to blend in elements from a retro soundworld.
Each group of tracks belonging to given biomes include unique instruments and sounds to help add distinctive qualities. For instance, the icy Trishula’s Tundra levels contained more bell-like synthesizer sounds, manipulated bell samples, and a bit more spacial reverb on the clean guitars and synthesizer parts. The city-like electric Circuit City levels featured a doubling of contrabass under the main bass part, big band brass and winds instrumentation and writing, and fuzzier synth parts doubling some of the piano parts. This, in addition to changes in thematic, motivic, harmonic, and rhythmic material, helped provide a bit of cohesion between tracks belonging to the same biome. Where the core band and recurring compositional material functioned as the glue to the entire soundtrack!
On the Tools Used to Create the Soundtrack
Most of the soundtrack was sketched on the piano and then built in Cubase. It was primarily written using romplers, samplers, and several synthesizers for variety. I used a heavy amount of KORG instruments (M1, Wavestation, Legacy Cell, Triton, Mono/Poly), Omnisphere, Trillian, Keyscape, Serum, Retrologue, and Chipsounds for most melodic, rhythmic, and bass content. Superior Drummer 3’s Metal Machinery, Roots, and Custom & Vintage sets were using for most of the acoustic drum sounds. I recorded most lead guitar parts, solos, and rhythm parts using my Frankenstein stratocaster. It’s an old american strat that had its pickups swapped out for DiMarzio Super Distortion (bridge), YJM (center), and a PAF Pro (neck). An Ibanez 7-string was used for the lower tuned tracks such as the Forgemaster’s Caldero boss music. Some of the early takes were amped live using a Peavey cab and an SM57, but over time I ended up using the DI parts and reamping using Neural DSP’s Gojira, Cory Wong, and a bit of Parallax. Elsie Lovelock joined us to play the main character in the game, so the team and I thought it’d be a cool idea to write a song and have her sing as Elsie! She’s an incredible singer and did a killer job on the game’s opening song.
On Benaim’s Favorite Track
One of my favorite tracks is “Warlus & Big Omega,” the boss theme from Trishula’s Tundra. It features a condensed and developed version of the themes that were exposed in the level themes. Toward the end of the track, I had the opportunity to include a synth solo over a Venezuelan joropo bed. I used some of chiptune elements to mimic the parts you would commonly hear in the genre, such as the “arpa llanera” and the “furro” bass parts. Don’t always get the chance to bring music from my home country, so being able to do so made this an extra special track for me!