‘Manor Lords’ Music: The Making Of A Medieval Masterpiece

There can’t be many paying gigs for lute players these days. In fact, there can’t be many lute players period. So when the developer of hit strategy game Manor Lords decided he wanted authentic medieval music to accompany his Middle Ages city builder, it was a tough ask to hunt down the right musicians.

That was the job of composers Elben Schutte and Daniel Caleb from Pressure Cooker Studios, who were tasked with creating a soundtrack that sounds like it was born a thousand years ago, despite having no prior experience of creating music from that era. They’ve created a medieval masterpiece, a soundtrack that perfectly matches the period detail of the game. Here’s how they did it.

Going Beyond Greensleeves

Elben Schutte openly admits he didn’t know a great deal about music from the Middle Ages when he first embarked on this project. “When I started off with the game, I thought Greensleeves is medieval, that’s medieval music, that’s all I need to know,” he said.

It turned out there was an awful lot more to learn if the composers were to hit Manor Lords creator Greg Styczeń’s desire for a soundtrack that was as accurately detailed as the game itself. “As a composer, I love to solve puzzles,” said Schutte. “And this was a really big puzzle to solve.”

“The biggest piece of the puzzle to solve was the fact that medieval music doesn't work like modern music at all in terms of time signatures, and all these rules that we have came out of Mozart and Beethoven.”

Music of the period wasn’t made with modern instruments, either, and although Schutte admits to taking some artistic liberties with the choice of instruments (“I know that there were no string orchestras in medieval times!”), they did seek out performers who could play period instruments.

Instruments included in the soundtrack include the lute (an early guitar-like instrument), the vielle (a bowed instrument that’s something of a halfway house between a violin and a cello), the wonderfully named hurdy-gurdy (a hand-cranked stringed instrument) and more.

But to achieve that authentic medieval sound, it required more than simply finding the right instruments. “A lot of improvisation was required and that was also a prerequisite of choosing the instrumentalist,” said Schutte. “It wasn't just about his instrument, it was also about him performing his instrument in an authentic way, and that gave us the magic that we were looking for.”

From Building To Battles

If you look down the track names of the Manor Lords soundtrack, you’ll see titles such as “Humble Beginnings” and “Blood and Banner”. These typify the two major sides of the game—city building and battle—and each requires audio clues from the soundtrack that things are going to plan... or they’re not.

“You need a sonic separation between the two [sides of the game] to inform you, okay, you’re fighting now and also to give you that feeling of battle, versus the feeling that your village is coming along merrily.”

Even outside of battle, there are times in the game when things take a dire turn and part of the soundtrack’s job is to warn the player matters are taking a turn for the worse. “There’s a mechanic called ‘low loyalty’ where things aren't going very well and your peasants are dying of hunger, their loyalty drops and there's a point where it's critically low,” said Schutte. “We actually created some music for that, when as soon as you hit that critical threshold, all the merry medieval music will switch off, and you've got this looping tone that's serious and hectic and gives you this feeling of urgency.”

But as much as the soundtrack is used as an audio warning system for gamers, it can never reach a point where it becomes a distraction. “When we were recording at Air Studios with the orchestra and we wrote these big, beautiful sweeping melodies, and we would come back with all this lovely work and the developer would say ‘look, this particular part of the music is so beautiful, but it feels like something is happening’.”

“That was such a tough challenge to navigate,” said Schutte. “The player’s got to stay undistracted, but it [the music’s] got to stay interesting. And then we’ve got to cue a certain part of the game or a certain mechanic when the time is right.”

This kind of relationship between gameplay and soundtrack requires a huge amount of co-operation between the developers and composers, the music can’t just be tacked on after the game’s finished. Even before Manor Lords had reached a playable pre-alpha stage a couple of years ago, Schutte was sent footage of the developer playing the game himself so that the composers could get a feel for the game. “Even though it changed quite a lot over time, a lot of our creative decisions were based on early footage of the game,” he said.

More Than A Game

The music created by Schutte and Caleb has a life beyond the game. In much the same way movie soundtracks are a huge business in their own right, so too are the soundtracks from games. The near two-hour Manor Lords soundtrack has been released by Laced Records on all the major streaming services, and the soundtrack is sold separately on games stores such as Steam.

Schutte said he partly took inspiration from the Civilization VI soundtrack, which won a Grammy among many other awards. Civilization VI rerecorded a number of traditional songs such as Waltzing Maltida and Scotland The Brave to represent different civilizations and Manor Lords makes use of period music, too. “Primarily, the reason why we did that was for maximum authenticity, but it was always in the back of my mind that Civ VI did that and so I felt safe in the idea of it too,” said Schutte.

Is there much of an appetite for medieval music among gamers? Perhaps not, but there is a wider audience. “We came to realize through our journey on the project how big a community there is for people enthusiastic about the medieval world, and that there seems to be such a hunger for it,” said Schutte.

“We’re really proud to have contributed to that community and to give them something fresh to listen to, and so I think it’s absolutely a standalone product that you can sit and enjoy.”