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There can’t be many paying gigs for lutenists these days. Actually, there can’t be many lutenists. So when the developer of hit strategy game The lords of the manor decided he wanted authentic medieval music to accompany his medieval town planner, it was difficult to find the right musicians.

It was the work of composers Elben Schutte and Daniel Caleb of Pressure Cooker Studios, who were tasked with creating a soundtrack that sounds like it was born a thousand years ago, despite having no previous experience creating music from that era. They’ve created a medieval masterpiece, a soundtrack that perfectly matches the period details of the game. Here’s how they did it.

Going beyond Greensleeves

Elben Schutte openly admits that he didn’t know much about medieval music when he first took on this project. “When I started the game I thought Greensleeves was medieval, it was medieval music, that’s all I needed to know,” he said.

It turned out that there was a lot more to learn if the composers were to strike The lords of the manor creator Greg Styczeń’s desire for a soundtrack that is as precise as the game itself. “As a composer, I like to solve puzzles,” Schutte said. “And that was a really big puzzle to solve.”

“The biggest piece of the puzzle to solve was the fact that medieval music doesn’t work at all like modern music in terms of time signatures and all these rules that we have from Mozart and Beethoven.”

The music of this period was also not made with modern instruments, and although Schutte admits to taking some artistic liberties with the choice of instruments (“I know there were no string orchestras in the Middle Ages!”), they were looking for performers who could plays old instruments.

Instruments featured on the soundtrack include the lute (an early guitar-like instrument), the vielle (a bowed instrument that’s sort of a cross between a violin and a cello), the wonderfully named hurdy-gurdy (a hand-wound stringed instrument), and more .

But achieving that authentic medieval sound takes more than just finding the right instruments. “A lot of improvisation was needed, and that was also a prerequisite for choosing an instrumentalist,” Schutte said. “It wasn’t just about his instrument, it was about him playing his instrument in an authentic way, and that gave us the magic we were looking for.”

From building to battles

If you look down the song names of The lords of the manor soundtrack, you’ll see titles like “Humble Beginnings” and “Blood and Banner”. They symbolize the two main sides of the game – city-building and combat – and each requires audio clues from the soundtrack that things are going to plan… or not.

“You need a sound separation between the two [sides of the game] to inform you, well, now you are fighting, and also to give you that sense of battle, against the sense of your village coming cheerfully.’

Even outside of combat, there are moments in the game when things take a terrible turn, and part of the soundtrack’s job is to warn the player that things are about to get worse. “There’s a mechanic called ‘low loyalty’ where things aren’t going too well and your villagers are starving, their loyalty drops and there’s a point where it’s critically low,” Schutte said. “We actually created music for that, where as soon as you hit that critical threshold, all the jolly medieval music goes off and you have this looping tone that’s serious and fast-paced and gives you this sense of urgency.”

But as much as the soundtrack is used as an audio warning system for gamers, it can never reach a point where it becomes a distraction. “When we were recording at Air Studios with the orchestra and we wrote these big, beautiful haunting melodies and we’d come back with all this beautiful work and the engineer would say ‘look, this part of the music is so beautiful, but it feels like something’s going on.

“It was such a difficult challenge to navigate,” Schutte said. “A player should not be distracted, but this [the music’s] should stay interesting. And then we have to target a certain part of the game or a certain mechanic when the time is right.”

This kind of connection between gameplay and soundtrack requires a huge collaboration between developers and composers, the music can’t just be placed after the game is finished. Even before The lords of the manor had reached a playable pre-alpha stage several years ago, Schutte was sent footage of the developer playing the game so that the composers could get a feel for the game. “Although it changed quite a bit over time, a lot of our creative decisions were based on early game footage,” he said.

More than a game

The music created by Schutte and Caleb has a life beyond the game. In the same way that movie soundtracks are a huge business in their own right, so are game soundtracks. Almost two hours The lords of the manor the soundtrack has been released by Laced Records on all major streaming services and the soundtrack is sold separately on game stores such as Steam.

Schutte said he was partly inspired by Civilization VI soundtrack that won a Grammy among many other awards. Civilization VI re-recorded a number of traditional songs such as Waltzing Maltida and Scotland The Brave to represent different civilizations and The lords of the manor also uses old music. “Primarily, the reason we did this was for maximum authenticity, but it was always in the back of my mind that Civ VI did that and so I felt safe and in the idea of ​​that,” Schutte said.

Is there a big appetite for medieval music among gamers? Maybe not, but there is a wider audience. “During our journey on the project, we realized what a great community there is for people enthusiastic about the medieval world, and that there seems to be such a hunger for it,” Schutte said.

“We’re really proud to contribute to this community and give them something fresh to listen to, so I think it’s absolutely a stand-alone product that you can sit back and enjoy.”