Team Composition: Play along with annotated scores!
At Riot, we’re very lucky people—we get to write music for awesome projects, inspiring champions, and exciting esports events. We set out to write music that stirs emotion and becomes a soundtrack worthy of the love players have for League.
And sometimes, League players want to take a bit of our music and give life to those notes through their own fingers. (As composers, there’s nothing quite as fulfilling as hearing how musicians around the world re-imagine the music we’ve created.) But we’ve also been so busy writing new music that we haven’t really taken the time to help you access the music already out there. Some of you have gone through extraordinary lengths to figure out our (sometimes complex) work, and while we appreciate the effort, we’d like to make things easier on you by sharing more of our stuff.
We think releasing sheet music is long overdue. So instead of waiting until we can clean up the scores, we’ve decided to release some of the raw sheet music we used during our recording sessions.
These are the same scores that musicians, conductors, engineers, and our teams have used. Some of them look OK, some of them look like they were made in a rush (they were). Some have mistakes in them, some are nearly flawless. Some were modified during the recording session (“Should we take the trumpets an octave below? Let’s extend that A for another two beats. Cellos, make that a mezzo forte “plus”, not a forte.”), but these verbal changes are not caught on paper. If something looks weird, we challenge you to see if you can figure out what happened during the session by listening to the recording!
We’ll be working towards providing more sheet music to you, either in this format or another. We can’t quite promise how or when just yet, but we will do our best to deliver as much as we can.
Enjoy!
Kled, the Cantankerous Cavalier (click to download the whole score)
Kled is one of those projects where musical execution was crystal clear from day one. I decided to play with the big guns (a big, heavy brass and woodwind section with a cello ensemble) pitted against an assortment of bluegrass instruments (guitars, dobro, mandolin, banjo, etc.).
Despite Kled being a very straightforward character, I *did* attempt to bring some musical finesse to the music, especially in how the density of the voicings change throughout the various musical phrases. We recorded the brass and woodwinds separately from the celli, which did help bring out the intricacies of the string writing.
Also, I’d like to take a moment to express how grateful I am to be working on a game that allows me to write a tuba solo! What a rarity these days!
- Ed the Conqueror
