Paul Anthony Romero/GOG Classic Vault and Heroes Orchestra interview
My name is Paul Anthony Romero, and I'm from Los Angeles, and I'm a composer, and I'm very happy to work on projects like Heroes of Might and Magic.
How did your musical journey begin? What led you from classical concert hall into the world of video games?
Very good question. Um, I was very lucky as a child. I had a sort of a child prodigy career. People found that I could compose at a very young age, like eight, nine, and I was getting opportunities to play in different parts of the world, Japan, New York, Washington D.C. So I thought "Oh, everybody thinks I'm a composer at a very young age."
And then when I was 15 years old, I went to a very serious music school and they said, "No more, no more concerts. No more being like a trained monkey," is what they said. "You need to stay here at the school and study, study, study. Forget concerts. Forget the outside world," basically.
So I did that, and I finished my studies, and I developed a good education, but now I'm in my 20s and there's no work, like, there was zero. So I started cooking, I started doing construction work. Anything just to make money, but I couldn't find any work in music.
So 10 years went by and I was, probably in my late 20s, and I just was at a party in Los Angeles, and I met this producer Rob King. And he goes, "So, tell me about your life." And I said, "Well, when I was young I used to be a musician, and I used to do concerts." And he goes, "Oh, we need a musician for our new project. We're a small company called New World Computing, and we have a new game called Heroes of Might and Magic, and there's castles in it, and then there's wizards, and then there's knights, and there's, dragons and spells." He goes, "But we only have rock and roll musicians who are doing the music for it, and it doesn't seem right." So he goes, "Do you think you can do music that sounds like it's from a long time ago?" I said, "Well, how long ago?" "Like, well, long ago, where there's castles." So I said, "Sure. I'll come in" So I went to the little studio that he had, and I started playing, classical music, like, Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and and he goes, "Well, I think the Baroque era is going to be the right era for this soundtrack." So, I go, "Okay. I can compose music that sounds like it's written, like, three, four hundred years ago." He goes, "Great," he goes, "We're gonna pay you $400. You start tomorrow, and you have one week to do all the music." So I was like, "Okay. I can do that."
So that was how it was. It was at a party, and I just happened to randomly meet this, audio producer from New World.
If you weren't a composer, who would you be? Have you ever considered any other career paths?
I dreamt when I was a little kid of being a composer, writing music, performing my music on stage with orchestras and singers. Actually, I even have a book of drawings when I was probably 8, 9, a lot of drawings of me playing the piano with an orchestra on stage, and singers, and it's kind of like what I, what I do now, but I dreamt of that when I was very young. However, when I finished music school and I realized, well, that's probably not gonna happen, so I just, I kinda went with life, and that was, um, I'd loved cooking, so I got to cook for 2 years, and doing construction work, and I loved that, and one day magically, meeting this producer, he invited me back into the world of music. But I never even played a video game before, so it wasn't, it wasn't a career path that I was searching for because I didn't even know. If I knew that computer games would have been a good fit for me, I would have already pursued it when I was 20, but now I was almost 30, so it kinda came to me by an accident at a party.
Which classical and contemporary composers have influenced you the most?
Contemporary composers is, they're, they're 20th century, not maybe real contemporary, but, definitely Prokofiev and Ravel and Stravinsky in the 20th century, Aram Khachaturian, an Armenian Soviet composer, Babajanian, another Armenian jazz composer. I love those sounds because they use the full symphonic orchestra, as we know it today, however, because of their culture, they can create sounds of the past within this modern orchestra, so I love using that, but then on the other side, I really love music from 400 years ago. I love the music of Lully and Bach, and early Scarlatti, and Handel and Vivaldi, and all the Baroque composers, you know, from the 17th and 18th century who had very limited, orchestrations, I like to compose within that framework as well.
It's almost like if you're a jeweler and you're doing jewelry in the 17th century, you have no electricity, you have no lasers to cut your diamonds, so you actually really have to chisel your diamonds, and your stones, or your cabochons, and do your gold work by hand. And, uh, but then you also get to make jewelry using 21st century technology as well. So it's like a beautiful combination of being able to do ancient kind of music and modern music.
Can you highlight your favorite themes from composed soundtracks? And what are your favorite castles?
So, unfortunately, even though I've been writing music for 30 years for games, I've never played a single game. So I don't really know how they intermesh. I hope they, I hope they work, but, as far as my favorite tunes, my favorite tunes are simply based on what I feel the quality of the music is, just for me. So when I'm working on a piece of music, I don't, I don't judge the music on how it fits into the game. I'm judging it just on a piece of music. So if I take this piece of music, how do my colleagues from classical music school, how would they think it was just as a piece of music? So that's to me, that's very important that it's actually very good.
My favorite pieces of music are from Heroes I. The Barbarian theme because it's in the style of, like, Vivaldi or Bach, but it was the very first piece of music I ever did for a soundtrack for a computer game. And that's one of my favorite pieces to play today 'cause it feels as if, like, Bach or Vivaldi wrote it. It doesn't even feel like I wrote it. It feels like somebody else wrote it, so I love, I love to play it just as a classical piece of music.
On the other hand, I love the music from Heroes V, Heroes of Might Magic V. It goes completely different from Heroes I because now it's epic and more like early 20th century music of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev and, even like Szymanowski and some other composers that are hundreds of years apart from the original style of the first Heroes of Might and Magic. what I'm happy about in this journey of the games is that the companies have allowed me to progress my music along with the game as well.
So nobody made me stuck in one genre and [were like] "Okay, you gotta do that same music for 30 years" because I don't think I could have done it, it's allowed me to grow as, just even as a musician, because I was in my 20s when I started with the first Heroes and now, like, I'm almost 60 doing the new version of Heroes. So it's kind of it's nice just for me as a person to see how my own music has progressed.
How does your creative process looks like when it comes to composing music for games?
Sometimes it's, it's financially based if the, if my audio producer has, created a contract where we're, we're created by minute. I don't tend to like that. That was sort of, maybe in the middle of the Heroes franchises. Maybe Heroes IV and V were music by the minute. I prefer, like, let me just do a piece of music and if it works for the section, I'll try to make it between 2 to 3 minutes, or 3 to 4 minutes, because as a composer, you need the extra space. But some producers really want it to be exactly 3 minutes, which means if the music really finished at 2 minutes and 49 seconds and there's a note at the end, like a oboe, that note has to go. 3 minutes and we cut it off right there. That's exactly what they want. So that's a little more difficult. That's, sort of like selling fabric, or your, your shirt or your dress by how much fabric they use.
I prefer a little more creativity because music needs to have a little space between. Sometimes the music needs to be shorter or longer and it's like, it's like having a child. You have a child, you don't know how tall that person's gonna be. They might need clothes that are bigger when they turn 7 or they might need clothes smaller when they're 7. You just, you have to go by the actual, um, melody, you know? And these melodies are very organic and they, they kind of dictate what they really need. So it's a different process. So sometimes it is by the time. Sometimes it is by, we need it by next week, and sometimes, you have 3 months to write this piece of music. And if I have that much time, then I can go crazy with choirs, languages, soloists. It's, uh, every game is a different creative process. Just depends on who you're working with.
So, I'm working with a producer who's letting me take, like, 2 years to write the music, which is really nice. In other games, like, "Oh, we need that by, like, we needed it by the 2024." And they're still waiting. So, and I say in this regard, composers have to be very flexible. You it just ha- uh, ha- you have to be very fluid with who and what you're working with, budgets, personalities, or aesthetics, uh, timeframes, in your own personal ability to create something very quickly or very, or very, uh, over a long period of time.
Do you recall any track that was particularly hard to compose?
Say, I was just looking at it over there, Neverwinter Nights 2 The Storm of Zehir. It’s the musical language, and what they needed, they were only hiring me for the main theme. And so you'll only get one opportunity that's, like, 3 minutes long. And so, that was very hard. Like, how do you say a lot within a 3 minute piece of music? So, the nice thing is that, I tried to use a very complex musical language. And I used 2 different languages for the soloist and for the choir. So I kind of wanted to give my all within that track. It was difficult because I was trying to use an ancient language of Farsi and then also Old French. So we had, we had worked with, we worked with a soprano and we worked with a choir and to put the 2 languages so that, that it made sense of what the storyline was. And then I recorded the music at our studio on keyboards and computers. And I thought it sounded really great.
Then the company said, "Well, we want the London Symphony to perform it. We want to use their recording." So then, the process of taking this recording and now re-orchestrating it for live musicians within one week was a very difficult process. And then the orchestra recorded it in London, but they only did 2 rehearsals. So when you only have 2 rehearsals it doesn't necessarily have the expression. It doesn't come. It's just like, "Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna play this twice, and hopefully it's gonna sound good." So I had a difficult time when the recording came out because I thought my recording in the studio was actually more beautiful than the London Symphony, but marketing, they wanted to use the London Symphony recording. So it was difficult, just in, in an artistic ways. But I'm very happy when I hear that music, when I hear the actual symphonic recording and I hear my studio recording. I like both versions, and I'm proud of both. But, well, it was, it was difficult. To do that three minute piece of music, it was unusually difficult.
Do you like how the modding team of Horn of the Abyss approached music continuity?
It's very interesting on the theme for The Cove At the time, I was working on a song with the drummer from Nine Inch Nails, Chris Vrenna. Chris Vrenna asked me if I could help orchestrate a pop song called “Stupid Girl” for a band called Cold. There was a band called Cold. They had this song called “Stupid Girl” and they wanted to make the song longer without drums and just with classical orchestrations. So I did the classical orchestrations. Picolan heard the music for the “Stupid Girl” orchestration and then he liked it, and he turned it into The Cove. So if you hear The Cove: And then if you go find a recording of Cold singing “Stupid Girl” with the classical it's called the Longplay, you're gonna hear: ...stupid girl. [Wiki note: "Stupid Girl" (My Life is Long remix)]
In hindsight, I love it, because he used it like kinda, like a tribute, you know? And he liked it. I mean, he really did like it and he actually was able to turn that into a song. And for me, I just used that as a motif. But he really took it to a whole new level. So when I, when I played The Cove with you last night [with Heroes Orchestra] I really remember him and it's very beautiful 'cause I thought, "Wow." I thought, "One day, he's going to be doing what I'm doing," because he was super talented. And then to also remember the melody with Cold, because that was a very good experience to work with.
Chris was wonderful because then he gave me a real insight into his work with Nine Inch Nails and, and I understood how their creative process was and how even rock and roll bands, how it's a very specific creative process. It's not just a bunch of guys going like this. There really, there really is a lot of mentality behind all that. So kinda the those worlds come together of Heroes of Might and Magic, Picolan and then Cold, and now with the Heroes Orchestra, to kinda relive that, that it's weird. Sometimes your worlds collide from the past and the future and the present, and so it's one of those, it's one of those experiences.
In the 30 years since the first Heroes of Might and Magic, technological advancements have without a doubt influenced the process of music composition across all entertainment industries. How was your process of adapting to each new tech innovation or revolution during your career, and has there been any pressure to stay on top and work with the state of the art at any point in time?
The culture that I came out of with classical music was just working always with live classical musicians. So, at music school, I always played, like, Brahms, I played Beethoven with all my student colleagues. And then to start doing soundtracks using artificial sounds, I'd never done it before. Like, our first Heroes 1-2-3 primarily are digital and synthetic sounds, where basically anything you hear in the orchestra, it's actually me playing. And then as we had more budgets, we were able to start using real musicians. And so, my, I mean, technology gives us the ability to have more natural-sounding instruments with the libraries. And actually, sometimes when you use a library, it sounds more natural than if you're actually using real natural musicians. So I, there's conflict, obviously, if I I'm using synthetic or sampled sounds, and then I have friends who are live musicians, they go "Why aren't you using us?" And the only reason why I would say is because it's, uh, it takes more time to have the live musicians perform than it does just to have me do in the studio. So there's a conflict, and it kinda depends on the budgets and timeframes and how much, uh, companies are willing to let you use live musicians. And so, you know, I love to use live musicians. If I can't use live musicians, then my ability for technology has to go higher, so that it really sounds like live musicians. But in the genre that I compose, I try to keep it really in a classical, symphonic realm, and not too much, um, outside of that in terms of sound effect or sound design. I'm still trying to keep the core of what I grew up with and what my natural training is. So I would never do a real weird synthetic score, because I, I really wouldn't know how.
That's why I love Hans Zimmer, because that guy can go from classical to Gladiator to, like, heavy metal and rock or sorta environmental sounds. I'm not able to do that. I'm kinda like John Williams where I stay within my core of orchestrations, and then that's where most of my music comes from.