How closely did you collaborate with the developers?

We worked fairly close with Fabrice Cambounet, Sylvain and Thomas at Ubisoft. They had some good ideas for the direction of this game and came up with the idea of having a “Theme” based score similar to film. On the previous games, we pretty much just wrote songs from the heart for everything. On HOMM V, we came up with a Main melodic theme and two sub themes and wrote the score around those.


Which are the tracks with which you are the most satisfied with?

For me it is the Academy, the Haven, Sylvan ,and the main title theme. Our good friend Karin Mushegan returned to do a solo vocal on Haven. She has been on all the Heroes games since HOMM II. Back then she was only 17, I believe. Now she is a professional singer working in Philadelphia and New York. The choir we recorded for the Main theme was great, as well as Fang Fang XU who played the Solo Cello through the score. I really enjoy the new battle and siege themes as well. Another favorite is the grass adventure theme. The melody is just so sweet, and we like sweet. 


Will HOMMV offer more music than the previous ones?

Yes, a full two hours!

How does your collaboration with Paul Romero go? What other musicians did you collaborate with?

We usually just sit around reading gossip magazines like US weekly and Enquirer discussing music direction while reading the misfortunes of celebrities. Seriously… In some cases Paul comes to the table with some brilliant ideas and we work out the arrangements, or I might have an arrangement of drums completely laid out with melodic ideas that we work from. We have two workstations here at the studio and usually we are both doing something on the song then go back and forth on both rigs. There really isn’t any certain way of doing anything, just get it done fast, you know? When we use other musicians, the arrangement is usually done and tracked in advance, and we replace the sampled parts with the appropriate musician. On the main theme, we actually just did a choral arrangement to a click/piano track, recorded it at a studio and brought it back to our studio and wrote the music around the vocals. Pretty tricky but I actually enjoyed the results. It lets you think a bit differently about the musical parts.


Are the songs performed by real lyric singers? If yes, how did you select them?

Yes, they are all people Paul and myself work with on a regular basis. Top-notch players, every one of them.


What is your favorite instrument while composing HOMM music ?

Always the Cello.

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