So what instruments are you tooling around with these days?

MU: I bought a classical guitar for Torchlight, which I've gone back and forth with. That's pleasant to play because it's such a nice, quiet little instrument.

That's very much in the character of the game, too, the pastoral quality of the nylon strings.

MU: I really wanted to emphasize that. That color is not featured as prominently in the Diablo universe.

Yeah, the Diablo music is all about those resonant steel strings.

MU: Exactly. Other than that, it's really about what I can find time for. I'm actually looking forward to [our next] project, when I'm hopefully going to have a chance to do a lot of writing for live strings.

So, in my mind, what I'm doing is trying to visualize string writing. That will be the instrument in my head. I want to take advantage of the fact that I could hopefully get a lot of live textures in the soundtrack and maybe put on some of the synthesizer sauce, as the contrast to that.

You mean more of an overtly synthesized sounding thing, as opposed to synth mimicking live instruments?

MU: Right. Hopefully, the live strings will kind of free me up to do a little more of that.

You sort of earn the right to do that once you have a strong live element.

MU: Yeah, exactly. If you earn it with a nice, tactile, crunchy underscore from the lower strings especially, then you can get away with having a big spacey pad in the middle of it. Whereas if stuff is too sampled out and mechanical feeling, you really don't earn that movement.

It's always nice when you can afford to do that, because synthesizers have a reputation of being the cheap version of something else.

MU: Which is ironic, because they were actually extremely expensive when they came out in the '70s.

I possibly did a better job in the original Diablo than I did with subsequent stuff in terms of letting the synth [be itself]. I just let the resonance get cranked up, doing big sweeps with those textures. I like the sound of the old gear.

There's a very distinct sound when you think back to the '70s, when bands like The Who were first using synth. It was very front-and-center.

MU: Yeah, it's funny how distinct that sound is. That whole 16th-note thing that Pete Townshend did -- I guess it became the sound of the CSI empire these days. I think every CSI variant has its own Who song. It's "Who Are You?" on one, and...didn't they use "Don't Get Fooled Again"?

Yeah, where the guy always takes his sunglasses on and off, and then he tells a joke, and then Roger Daltry goes "Yeah!!"

MU: [laughs] Cheesy puns and Daltrey scream. Yeah, exactly. They never use "Eminence Front," though. That's my favorite Who jam.

I always found that song interesting because it doesn't sound like a lot of Who songs. It's more of a groove.

MU: It's driven by the 16-note sequencer note thing that they were using with "Baba O'Riley" and all those classic '80s ones. It's kind of disco-y. It builds up without ever getting there, which makes it fun. It's a great song for a fight or coming into a ring. And I love the lyrics. It's one of Pete Townshend's better examples of really putting you into a human emotional place.

Townshend is one of my favorite musical personalities of the 20th century; he's a great writer. As far as that synthesizer use goes, though, it was rarely used as a stand-in.

MU: There was a little bit of stand-in stuff.

Like the Mellotron [string section-emulating keyboard]?

MU: Yeah, which I love the sound of. Or the [Mellotron precursor] Chamberlin. I love the Chamberlin flutes, and that great sound in [The Beatles'] "Strawberry Fields Forever," and Zeppelin used it in "Stairway to Heaven." You'll hear samples of the Chamberlin flutes all over the place in Diablo.

It wasn't until samples got much better in the late '80s that you started to hear the horrible fake saxophone stuff.

That's the worst.

MU: Especially fake trumpet. John Chowning is the guy who really developed [frequency modulation] and was the mastermind behind successful FM-based synths. His original paper was all about modeling the partials and overtones from a trumpet, and it was very cool and effective, but the sound of an FM trumpet is one of the most unpleasant sounds ever created. It's right up there with Viper car alarms, which probably had more musicality than an FM trumpet.

They're more honest, at least.

MU: [laughs] They're more honest in terms of function dictating form.

I'm curious how much all this thinking is reflected in Runic's current project.

MU: Well, I'm curious, too. It seems like it should all come together. We have more or less the time and budget issues figured out. It's always a real treat to write for a big live ensemble.

I like the idea of making it really string-focused this time for a few different reasons. I think that'll be good for me. Hopefully, I can play to my strengths. I think I've always had a much better touch with strings than winds and brass, so I'm going to try to emphasize that.

I've always felt game soundtracks overemphasize the really smooth, homogenous nature of strings, without putting enough focus on the individual tenors of the various string instruments, like you'd get in a smaller chamber orchestra.

MU: The main piece I've been studying is one of the last things Richard Strauss did, called "Metamorphosis." It's somewhere in between a chamber group and a full orchestral string group, and he does a lot where it's just three strings at a time doing contrasting voices.

That's the nice thing with strings, though. You can either go for the big toothy thing where they're playing one gigantic line, or you can take a 48-string ensemble and give them all individual lines, and it functions reasonably well in both of those roles. That's what makes it fun.

Kirk Trevor, the conductor I've had a chance to work with and hopefully will be working with again soon, is particularly good at that stuff because his background is as a cellist, which gives him an exceptionally good sense of how to get good stuff out of strings.

Hopefully we can do it when it's not freezing. The last few times I went up to Bratislava, [Slovakia, to record with the local orchestra] was when it was in the teens, Fahrenheit, and I had forgotten my thermal underwear. It's a bad scene. But this time it will be a slightly warmer time of year, which will be nice.