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@Riot Musicians, a Few Questions About Warwick's Login Theme

Umbral Regent·6/21/2017, 8:01:36 PM·9 votes·2,804 views

I know it's beyond excessively late to ask any of this in a timely fashion, but after reading the recent article "Team Composition: Play Along With Annotated Scores", I felt compelled to ask this.

So, one of my favorite reworks has been Warwick, who by all rights hit absolutely every note in his thematic and then some (which, also, a massive congrats and thank you to the gameplay, visual, and sound designers who worked on him!), but one thing that I absolutely love about his rework is his Login Theme.

I love the discordant noises all being pressed together into this semi-mechanical thriller piece, and it never fails to get my blood pumping. That being said, though, I wanted to ask the musicians at Riot who worked on the login screen a few questions!

  1. Did you set out with a specific goal in mind for the music? I'd imagine that, outside of encapsulating the theme of "chimeric blood-hunter with chemtech implants", you may have likely had a lot of room to work.
  2. What are all those sounds? Early on it sounds mostly like regular instruments (mostly string and percussion), though in no more than a minute's time, the sound of Warwick's pump flooding brings in more siren-like sounds and, what sounds oddly like some sort of breathing through a gas mask or something. I'm curious as to what all you used to get that (on top of the absolutely awesome music itself)
  3. How much iterating did you do on the theme before landing on what we have now?
  4. And, lastly; how does it feel getting to sell the image of a Champion (in this case, Warwick) before players even get to feel it themselves?

I'm hopeful to see some of those questions answered, but I can understand that you guys also have a lot of work on your plates (with Urgot, Evelynn, and whatever new stuff happens to be around the bend), so even if you can't answer, I want to let you guys know that you're doing awesome work, as with all the people at Riot!

Thank you so much again for the adrenaline-filled music that is Warwick's theme!

13 Comments

Ed the Conqueror6/22/2017, 5:39:03 PM5 votes

Hey there Umbral Regent!

I wrote the music for Warwick, glad you liked the rework, it's quite spectacular!

I'm a bit busy at the moment but will get back to your really good questions very, very soon!

Ed the Conqueror6/28/2017, 7:17:59 PM4 votes

Hey Umbral Regent,

There are some really cool questions in there!

First off, it’s never too late to ask :) I did write Warwick’s theme and I’d be happy to shed some light on my creative process for his music.

#1 - On most (if not all) League projects, we generally have “pillars” that we align around. This helps keeping our priorities straight and our IP cohesive across the many teams that work on a project. For Warwick, I think I remember some these pillars being “uncaged Zaun” and “savage killer” (fellow Rioters feel free to correct me on this!).

Now, while pillars are essential and an integral part of functioning in a somewhat large organization, they don’t tell the whole story.

What I do for every single project I work on is to go talk to the people who work on the champion/skin/event. For Warwick, I had meetings with the entire champ design team, as well as with the creative director of the accompanying cinematic (although said cinematic has no music), just to hear these fine folks talk about Warwick.

What became obvious is that Warwick isn’t good or bad. His predicament was imposed to him by Singed. The music became more about Warwick’s rage than about Warwick himself. A savage killer, yes, but one without the ability to control his urges.

The chase instinct was also something I wanted to portray. Rhythmically, the riff feels like it’s tumbling AT you, which helps.

#2 - Besides actual in-game sounds (some of which you have picked up already), there’s a great variety of sounds in Warwick’s theme.

Some are more on the traditional side (low strings, orchestral percussion, ethnic percussion). A lot of stuff, such as metallic percussion sounds (anvils, cymbals, etc.), are processed to the point of not being recognizable anymore.

There is also a lot of rock stuff on there. Layer upon layer of guitars (6 and 7 strings, including something fun I’ll speak about in my answer to question #3).

A great variety of synths (playing absolutely everything from ambient pads to super aggressive riffs). Depending on the project I typically go for a particular vibe/category of synths, but for this one I went for both digital and analog synths, and used them in a way that I believed worked well in depicting Zaun. These synths and the added processing accounts for a lot of the more exotic sounds you hear in the piece. Some were also re-recorded through a guitar amp.

#3 - You know, that really varies from project to project. For Warwick, things fell into place pretty easily. The riff came first. I was looking for a cool texture for the melody, and, upon listening to his in-game sounds, I had my work cut out for me. It struck me that his howls were super melodic, and happened to fit the riff I came up with almost without effort.

I doubled the line with a couple layers of electric fretless guitar, played with an e-bow. That’s a pretty fun combination :D

After the team heard the first iteration, most of the work was put into fine-tuning the overall production and sound of Zaun, as well as dealing with form concerns.

#4 - Working on a champ feels like a pretty big responsibility, At the end of the day, it’s just music, but we know from experience that players will get a pretty solid idea of what we intend the champion to be like/feel like before they log into the game.

The whole process is pretty exhilarating. We have a pretty big audience of dedicated players, and we know that whatever decisions we make will get heard!

Again, thanks for these great questions, and thanks for listening!

Ed the Conqueror

sakwoya6/21/2017, 8:46:48 PM3 votes

Preach brother. Preach!!!