The Long and Winding Road, Part V

Sometime in 1992, I’m wandering through a labyrinth of offices, trying to find my way to a first meeting with one of my team members. I’ve already been at Dynamix a few months, but I’m still disoriented by the enormity of the game company for which I now work. By comparison, my job at New World Computing seemed like a never-ending game night in a dorm room with all thirty something of us crammed into a small suite in Woodland Hills, California. But here in Eugene, Oregon, in this newly acquired subsidiary of Sierra Online, I’ve got at least three hundred co-workers under one roof. The employee roster will become a veritable who’s who of some of the greatest designers and developers of the 1990s, and I’m a bit flabbergasted that I get to work alongside these amazingly talented folks. It’s an incredible place to learn.

After getting help from someone who can see that I am very lost, I am directed at last to my destination, a tiny closet of an office. Being the gear head that I am, the first thing I notice is an Atari 520 ST (like the one I have at home), a Roland MT-32 sound module, and a nice MIDI-equipped keyboard off to the side. But I am not here to ogle equipment, but to talk about the thing that’s unofficially become my secondary specialty: designer liaison to “the sound and music guys.”

I’m greeted immediately by Jan Paul Moorhead, a big friendly guy with a goatee who invites me to take a seat next to him while he finishes up something he’s been working on. After just a few minutes he spins around, slaps his hands on his knees and says “so…whatcha got in mind?”

He’s asking me about the score for Betrayal at Krondor, the computer role-playing game that will define my career, and that I’ve been recently hired to write and co-design alongside my friend and mentor, John Cutter. Jan will be the guy composing all the music, but even though he’s the pro between the two of us, he still wants my input. He tells me that he especially liked what I’d placed in the game design document about particular music cues, long before there were even scenes or gameplay for him to work against. I’d made it very clear in the design document at the start of the audio section that I was setting a very high bar for what I wanted him to squeeze out of that MT-32.

“The current thinking is to combine a contemporary movie-like score with classical, even medieval instrumentation.  The ideal:  a John Williams soundtrack with a "period" feel.”

— Introduction to the Audio section of the Betrayal at Krondor design document.

During our first talk about the soundtrack, it’s clear that, like with John, Jan and I are very much in sympatico in regard to how the game should sound. It should be as epic as its storyline, and serve not only to underscore the drama of the combats, but also provide emotional context where the player might otherwise not have visual cues about their environments or circumstances (e.g. this tavern feels dangerous, you feel as if you’re being watched in the woods, this NPC should feel untrustworthy, etc. etc. etc.) We both understood that in a game where we couldn’t see an actor’s non-verbals, or hear inflections in the voices of characters, we needed music to fill in those missing senses that couldn’t be otherwise communicated with the technology of the time.

“I really appreciate how you’ve thought about all this,” Jan says. “In the past, I haven’t always had the luxury of dealing with someone who understands the music. I was working for an ad agency one time, and their direction to me was simply: ‘Imagine there’s a commercial, and there’s a guy driving a car. He reaches over and switches on his car radio, and a song comes out that makes you want to buy a FAX machine.’”

As we continue our conversation, and it shifts inevitably to his Atari 520 ST and Steinberg (the music composition software he’s using,) I remark that I’m using the same thing at home because I’d read a really great review for it in Atari magazine back when I was in college.

“Oh really?” he asks. He’s got an ear-to-ear face splitting smile. “I think I know who wrote that review.”

Even though I knew what I’d find, I’d later go back and check the magazine which I still had in my stash of computer and music-related mags. I’d bought the Steinberg sequencing program because Jan Paul Moorhead had recommended it to me nearly three years before we ever met in person!

Sonofa….

My synchronicity tunnel wouldn’t end with Jan. During the course of production on Betrayal at Krondor, one of the producers was Bob Lindstrom who was writing articles for Electronic Musician and Compute magazine, both of which had played an important role in attracting me to the world of synthesizers and making music at home.

Unlike with what had happened at New World Computing, although I had greater and more direct contact with the composer involved on the project, I never contributed any music for Betrayal at Krondor…or at least not any melodies. There was a song, Northwarden Pigs, which plays a small role in a subplot of the game for which I wrote the lyrics and represents my first “recorded” song to be released to the public (as opposed to the MIDI-only theme which appears during the end credits of Planet’s Edge.)

If you bought the CD-ROM version of the game, you could even listen to ole Tamney the Minstrel belting Northwarden Pigs out for you.

JAN PAUL MOORHEAD - Among the diehard fans of Betrayal at Krondor who still play and stream the game 29 years after its release, Jan’s soundtrack is almost always cited along with the story and the gameplay as being one of the reasons that fans still love it so much. I will always appreciate how much he involved me in his process and will be grateful for the opportunities I got to watch him develop his compositions. I’ll always consider him one of my music “instructors.”

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THE ORIGINAL SYNTH STACK - ON THE ULTIMATE KEYBOARD STAND an Ensoniq Mirage & generic Radio Shack mixer (top), Roland Alpha Juno I (middle), Yamaha DX7 (bottom). STACKED ON THE FLOOR BELOW Kawai K1 desktop sound module, Alesis Midiverb reverb unit, a 1980s Sears tape deck & receiver, Yamaha TX81z sound module, and a Kurzweil 1000 HX Horn Expander sound module. ON THE TABLE a Macintosh SE30. FLOOR FOREGROUND Atari 520 ST.

At first, the switch from Los Angeles to Eugene is good for me on several levels, both personally and professionally. Between a higher salary and a dramatically lower cost of living, I actually have real, disposable income. I don’t have to eat macaroni and cheese every day in order to survive. I have a surplus of free time (at least until my design responsibilities on Krondor nearly kill me.) It’s only a ten-minute commute from Dynamix to my tiny little apartment, meaning I have nearly three more hours a day during the workweek to do whatever I want during that spare time. And what I want is to spend time writing and experimenting with music at home.

Of course, nobody wants to make music purely for themselves. Not forever. I have ambitions of writing songs and doing something with them…though I don’t entirely know what. I’m not going to go out in public and perform because, as we’ve previously established, my skills lie chiefly in composing rather than in performing. Though our lead programmer, Nels Bruckner, has a metal band that he plays with in his spare time, I don’t think I want to hassle with trying to find gigs and haul my gear around and mess with all the headaches that being a live performing musician entail.

There’s also the practical consideration of what my music is. It’s not the sort of thing that puts butts in seats at the local drinking hole. It’s in some weird nowhere between Pink Floyd, Vangelis, Erasure, and John Williams. Even if I only wanted to compose for games, I’d be restricted to writing for the still sonically limited capabilities of the Roland MT-32s or Yamaha FB-01 and given what I could do with my keyboards at home, these options are staggeringly uninspired to me. (It would still be a couple of years before the advance in sound card technologies and CD-ROM would allow game music to really shine in the way that it deserved.) All I really want is to be able to write songs, orchestrate it all on my synths, mix it, record it, and share it with other people. But that isn’t as easy as it sounds…at least not for me.

I’ve arrived in Eugene with what are essentially six different synthesizers (three keyboards, and three sound modules). While it’s entirely possible to control them all from my Atari 520 ST computer via MIDI, I lack the equipment I need to mix, compress, EQ, and capture their outputs in a way that I’ll be even remotely satisfied with. It’s not just enough to be able to share them, I want my stuff to sound professional…or at least as professional as a dude recording in the dining room of his apartment can sound.

By the start of 1993, I’m facing whether I want to go out and drop literally tens of thousands of dollars on quality recording equipment (And honestly, I’m tempted. I’ve been eying such things since seeing Matt Harris’ Tascam 388 years earlier) or I could go shopping instead for a new class of synthesizer which had been popping up in music stores and in my music mags for several years. Called workstations, this new class of synthesizers were designed specifically for one-man bands like myself, allowing someone to compose, mix, and even run each track through its own effects chain inside the synthesizer. Specifically, I was eying Ensoniq’s TS-10 which not only was a powerful synthesizer in its own right (and in my opinion, still one of the best keyboard values of the 1990s,) but it also could play samples from its sister keyboards the ASR-10 and the EPS. I’d been a fan of the Ensoniq line of instruments for years, and their first sampler, the Mirage, was already part of my stack of more traditional synths.

At the music store in Eugene (which I’ve been haunting on a regular basis since moving there), I’m able to lay my hands on the very first TS-10 to land in the city. I fiddle with it for what seems like hours, and realize that it’s everything that I’ve been wanting, and I brace myself for the reality that I’m going to have to take out a loan to buy it. I don’t care. I want to take it home with me right now, but unfortunately, it’s their floor demonstration model, and they aren’t ready to surrender it to the first schmuck who wants one. So instead, I fill out the loan forms, I go home, and I wait for an utterly excruciating two weeks for another TS-10 to arrive on a truck. When I get the phone call that it has come in, I break the sound barrier in getting down to the store to pick it up…and there’s a hole in the packaging. Something’s penetrated through all the packing and scored the face of it with a small dent that’s only about a 1/4 of an inch long and infinitesimally deep…not enough to break through the case, and there’s no real damage to it…but it’s not just something I can paint over either. It’s scarred for life. The store owner asks me if I want to ship it back to exchange for another one, but I’m sulky at the prospect of waiting another two weeks. Seeing my mood, he offers to knock $100 off the price if I just want it as is.

Dear reader, I took it home.

ENSONIQ TS-10 - The workhorse center of my musical compositions for many years, and still one of my favorite synths to come out of the 1990s.