Stewart Copeland went from The Police to prolific composer, but perhaps no score was as beloved as Spyro the Dragon for PlayStation. Those sounds have now been revived in community-led, free libraries that run on all sampling platforms, along with some theory and composition lessons. It can instantly improve your mood–and it all began with Stewart playing, dying, and respawning in the game.
This will be instant nostalgia for Spyro fans but even if you’ve never played this, you may quickly be seeking out the game and soundtrack. Yes, yes, The Police. But also Wall Street and Sunset Strip. And a lot of games.
Behind the scenes
“Step one is to beat the level.”
Not all composers work this way, but I think this might be the first key to Spyro’s appeal. Copeland would play through each level and then go to the score.
PlayStation Underground visited his studio to check out his work for Insomniac Games in 1998. Trainspotting the gear: well, real percussion, of course, plus a Kurzweil K2500x sampling keyboard and a copy of MOTU Digital Performer (v2.11, I think, see this Sound on Sound review – I definitely used this very version).
A year ago, he came back to talk about the process and answer questions:
The soundtrack
And wow, the music. It has a strange appeal now, too, in that we tend not to use these smaller, crispier samples, and they have a certain 90s character, especially in Copeland’s hands. His playing is improvised, but also ultra-quantized (as demonstrated with input quantize in the video), a funny combination of spontaneity and precision. It’s real drums and an eccentric assortment of exotic samples.
Spyro 2 kept up the high-energy, optimistic groove:
Copeland has riffed on these themes, too, cantus firmus / leitmotif style, with appearances in the theme to The Amanda Show, Look Up, and Louis Hansa – see the Spyro Wiki because of course there’s a Spyro Wiki.
From a story in Far Out last year:
Speaking to Screen Rant last year in celebration of the game’s 25th anniversary, Copeland recognised the useful discipline of video games musical peripheries: “I just had to churn and burn. There was so much music required; it was like doing a quadruple album of backing tracks every summer for four years. It was deeply engrossing, but I had to just move so quickly that I discovered something interesting about composition and probably other artistic endeavours as well, which is that pressure increases the quality. I had to produce such quantity that I could not stop for a minute, I couldn’t evaluate, couldn’t judge just had to churn and burn.”
SoundFont phenomenon
Here’s where the story takes a twist. The sound of those sample libraries was so distinctive that fans of the game have done a copious amount of work to build a collection of SoundFonts to recreate them, driven by a passionate Spyro community. That can produce even higher-quality renditions of the original score in the game, or can become the basis of all-new music. Wanted to compose in Spyro as a genre? This is for you. Imagining weird ways of warping the Spyro instrumentation into something entirely new? (Dunno, Spyro black MIDI, Spyrostep, Spyrocore, something?) Go!
This is accompanied by a massive Google Spreadsheet listing the sample libraries. That means apart from Spyro history, this project has accidentally produced the best archival reference to soundware from the time than I think exists anywhere else.
It’s of dubious legality here so I’ll leave you to look around for the link, but historically, it’s fascinating.
And you can create unholy hybrids like this–forgive me, Sonic!
There are a ton of ways to load the files, including the free Plogue Sforzando and free and open source LinuxSampler and … someone help me remember everything that’s compatible, please. (Your sampler/host should be able to, ideally.)
Spyrobibliography
I am far from the first to write about this, so if you want to just keep obsessing–and why not?– here you go:
Yes, this can be your entire entry into music theory:
All music shall become Spyro. We will add your musical and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to serve Spyro.
And for more reading:
The Legacy of Spyro the Dragon’s Music Game Grooves
‘Spyro the Dragon’, PlayStation, and The Police: The unlikely story behind a PlayStation classic [NME]
I don’t know that it’s that unlikely, especially if you followed Stewart’s other scores. (And remember Danny Elfman was in Oingo Boingo before he scored Batman.) Maybe what’s surprising is how it has stood the test of time, even as other PS1 games were forgotten.
Chasing the dragon: Stewart Copeland’s ‘Spyro’ score [Far Out]
Deep dive into the game [hardcore gaming]
Oh and if you want to go down just a complete PlayStation linkhole and not get any more work done for days, here you go. It was like Nintendo Power, but published by Sony, and with a CD and videos, and generally more cool/made for adults. (Sorry, NP.) And it lives on online:
Plus it wasn’t just Spyro using sample CDs. That’s a big part of the sound of PlayStation games of the era as composers were unleashed on the expanded capabilities of the platform. A detailed Reddit thread on the topic:
The sounds from these 90’s Sample CDs were used 195+ times in retro games!
Here, for everyone who misses it or just was too young / wasn’t born: