darkSpyro

Hello All,

I've been posting this around some select Spyro-related Discord places lately, but thought I'd share it here more publically also so here goes

Recently, I reached out to Tom Miller, Composer for the Handheld TEN games (GBA and DS), to ask a few questions about his work. I've put all the questions and answers in a word document on OneDrive which can be accessed below!

Link to OneDrive Document: https://1drv.ms/w/s!AgOaT7nGGw...KJIVRK?e=ybIiYi

Hope yall enjoy!

wow!! thank you for sharing!

i don't know much about music, so it was interesting to learn that many of the songs were written in the baroque style.

yeah unknown track d is amazing

It's ultra validating to see the OST is inspired by FF12, not enough games take after its balance between movielike epic orchestra and catchier game soundtracks.

Also, with that question about the baroque inspiration, that kinda means that Dark Aether/Malefor only has a leitmotif in those versions, which is kind of interesting. All three of his themes in DOTD are either original or use the series main theme instead.

I'm really happy to see that people are really interested in this stuff for something that I thought was quite a niche topic

If I could do a Round 2, It'd be really cool if people had any more questions because I don't have to many left to ask off the top of my head

Still, some people have raised soem really interesting points...

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Is there any chance the preconsole versions could be released? If there is such a thing for these games…

I had to look-up what pre-console means D: I included a link to this in the document above, but a user named Bremmus uploaded a big video featuring A L L the music of the GBA game, including 'uncompressed' versions of most of the tracks that are of a much higher quality. Tom wrote a comment 2 years ago: "I wrote this soundtrack and I never thought it'd sound as good as these uncompressed tracks make it sound. Well done"! They're probably what you're looking for, if not the closest thing?

Unfortunately, his DS counterpart video does not feature uncompressed tracks, but that's actually a really interesting question to ask him as i would love to hear them!

As a side note, Bob Baffy (one of the OG-themed spyro GBA composers) recently uploaded a bunch of of his remastered Spyro tracks based directly from the original MIDI files! Here's an example!


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...it was interesting to learn that many of the songs were written in the baroque style.

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Also, with that question about the baroque inspiration...

It might be a bit unclear whether he was refering to the use of the 'baroque-like motif' or a general 'baroque style' in his answer, but based on the context of his reply it seems he was talking about the motif (he talks about an "overarching villain/evil theme") rather than the style here.

Without a doubt, though, there are some very strong baroque like tracks like Temple of Lightning and Gaul's Theme which seem to be 'pseudo-fugues' as he and I kind agreed on when I was sh*itposting in his Twitter replies one day

As a side-note to the meaning of the motifs, I kinda got a bit excited about him mentioning that the motif indeed represents evil and sent this in a reply email to him...



(yea, I got excited lol)

He also mentioned that he tried to incorporate a few other motifs but didn't specify what these were. It would be interesting to see if I could find those. Off the top of my head, these would likely be...

• a 'hero' fanfare/motif that appears in the World Map music and perhaps briefly in (or at least is stylistically to) Celestial Temple (Post-Boss)
  
• an unused stepwise-ascending motif that seems to only appear in the unused DS tracks
  

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All three of his themes in DOTD are either original or use the series main theme instead.

There might be a bit of confusion here if you don't mind me saying so? To my knowledge he only ever composed for TEN and not DotD. The DS DotD soundtrack appears to be a stripped down transcription of Kneubuhl and Mann's music (in order to fit it on the DS most likely?) - the credits for this game list the audio team as 'Music Adaption & SFX'.

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Again, really great to see other people enthusiastic about this, and do hmu with some more questions because I be thirsty!

Heck, this was an big post

Quote: WFLD

Quote:

All three of his themes in DOTD are either original or use the series main theme instead.

There might be a bit of confusion here if you don't mind me saying so? To my knowledge he only ever composed for TEN and not DotD. The DS DotD soundtrack appears to be a stripped down transcription of Kneubuhl and Mann's music (in order to fit it on the DS most likely?) - the credits for this game list the audio team as 'Music Adaption & SFX'.

Yeah, I don't mean his compositions, I mean Kneubuhl/Mann didn't use a new recurring leitmotif for him.

OHHH, by 'him' you mean Malefor? Got it

UPDATE TIME!!!!

So I made a part-2 interview just before Christmas and only just finished compiling all the answers into a neat format!

This time I've expanded a bit on some of the previous answers, but focused massively on examining a lot of the other musical motifs that appear (esp. in the DS game)!

I've also used Google Docs this time because I think it looks better on mobile compared to OneDrive!

Also, I got really nerdy this time

OneDrive ver: Part 2 Link
Google Doc ver: Part 2 Link

Enjoy!

Really nice, glad to see more of it!