Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to be about the new music added in Utopia, so I'll start by giving the word to the very man who created it: Andreas Waldetoft, our resident composer.

My name is Andreas Waldetoft and I am fortunate enough to be the senior music composer here at Paradox.

From the get go when we started discussing Utopia music and what it should be, we talked about having large scale music. What better way to get that kind of music then with a full live orchestra with synths added on top!.
But why stop there, we extended the brass section with more horns and more low brass. What we ended up with was a rather loud sounding ensemble to say the least.
In fact, we had to record the brass by themselves on a few tunes just because it was hard to hear all the other instruments as the brass leaked way to much in the other sections mics.

We had decided to go for the Budapest Film Orchestra as we had heard they had done a good job on quite a few games already and knew the drill.
This first piece I want to share is a song called “Towards Utopia”, this excerpt section is in the middle of this long tune.

(Music sample: Excerpt från “Towards Utopia”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_lw-xgG62w

I always get impressed when going on these recording sessions, the musicians were really top class. They had to endure gut wrenching long breaths, really weird time signatures and really fast runs for extended periods of time. I was actually surprised at some difficult passages how they nailed it after just a few runthroughs. Thanks to this we actually had time to record some extra stuff which I had written in half a day or so before going to Budapest. This next tune I want to share is one of those bonus songs. I am extra pleased that we got to record this one because it is a lament to one of the greatest scientist Stellaris has ever produced!
The song is called “In Memory of M.R” and it was recorded in one take, 5 minutes before we had to pack up and end the recording session. The musicians had never seen the music sheets before and this is what happened.

(Music Sample: Youtube video of “In Memory of Mercedes Romero”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhBNQdANHOo

I hope you guys will like the new music for Utopia and I can’t wait to do more music for Stellaris when I get time off from all the other games we are doing.

This is a list of the songs included in Utopia with a running time of 24 minutes and 30 seconds:
“A New Dawn”
“Towards Utopia”
“The Imperial Fleet”
“Cradle of the Galaxy”
“In Memory of M.R”

/Andreas


The Music Player
Thank you Andreas! I also wanted to touch briefly on the Music Player. The Music Player is an in-game tool that allows you to browse the music tracks available in the game and pick specific tracks you want to listen to. It also allows you to set which tracks should be on your playlist, whether they should play sequentially or use random shuffle, and also lets you go back to previously played tracks and skip forward to the next track. In other words... it's a music player, exactly as it says on the tin. :)
H

Finally, I'll leave you with a cryptic little note: There's something special that's been added to the audio for Banks by none other than our Audio Director, Björn Iversen, himself. Keep your eyes peeled for it in the patch notes...

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