The main title
A hundred and one beats a minute, brass, clavinet, a wah-wah guitar and a tune you can hum while committing a tort. The first finished piece of music for Rally Mortis, with forty seconds of it to hear.
The first finished piece of music for the game arrived this week, and we have been playing it in the studio so often that we now hum it in the queue at the bakery.
The brief
We wrote the brief on one page. It asked for a theme that sounds like the opening of a television drama from 1975 about very rich people behaving badly: big brass, a clavinet, a wah-wah guitar and a bass line in a good suit. Under no circumstances should it sound like a racing game.
Racing games tend to sound like engines with drums. We wanted the music to sound like the family: grand, a bit pompous, absolutely sure of itself, and heading for a fall.
The crackle
Cornelius Vane recorded his will at 78 rpm, and the sketch of the gramophone has a note on it: crackle on every line, Vane insisted. The music took that to heart. The whole score is mixed as if it might be coming off a very good record player in a very large house, with somebody important lying in state in the next room.
A hundred and one
The tempo is a hundred and one beats a minute. That sounds slow for a game about driving very fast. It is slow, and that is the point: it is the speed of a procession, of a funeral march that has been told there is money at the end. The races have their own faster cues, but the main title walks. It walks like someone who owns the road.
It also turned out to be the perfect tempo to cut pictures to, which is a story for the day we show you the trailer.
The rest of the record
The main title is one track of several now in progress. The Reading, for the scene at the gramophone, is a harpsichord and a walking bass, very polite and very ominous. Port Saffron Promenade has steel drums and bongos, because it is a seaside town and it is summer. Halfmast, After Hours is the slow one, brushes and an electric piano, for the garage between races. The final viewings, where you meet a rival head on, share one theme, and it is the fastest thing we have written.
Sound, in general
Alongside the music we have started on the sound of the world. Each car has its own voice: the Black Tie burbles like a large dog dreaming, the hearse has a deep, patient hum, and the lorries on the Coast Road sound like furniture being moved upstairs. The best sound in the game so far is the one the gramophone makes when the needle drops. We recorded it more times than we would like to admit.
