Matt Uelmen

"The core of my production arsenal was three tools which I still use today, for better or worse. An Ensoniq ASR-10 keyboard/sampler with 16 megs of RAM was by far the most important tool, and its default library of 3 CDs of samples provided the backbone of my musical pieces as well as a surprising amount of sound effects."

"The core of my production arsenal was three tools which I still use today, for better or worse. An Ensoniq ASR-10 keyboard/sampler with 16 megs of RAM was by far the most important tool, and its default library of 3 CDs of samples provided the backbone of my musical pieces as well as a surprising amount of sound effects. I was familiar with the earlier generation of this keyboard, the EPS 16+, which I had spent a great deal of time with in my college days."

"This keyboard was then controlled by a Windows machine running an ancient version of Cakewalk. I have stubbornly continued to use this sequencer despite it being made for Windows 3.0 and have found it to be consistently reliable and containing every bell and whistle I could possibly want. With very few exceptions, the music for Diablo was made by packing up the eight tracks on the ASR-10 with as much as I could get into the 16 megs of memory and then controlling them using the Cakewalk sequencer."

"Most tracks in Diablo 2 were built around a blend of maracas and the human voice whispering or shouting. Favorite sources for this sound were live, using the 808/909 rack emulator, the Ensoniq percussion library, and Spectrasonics' Heart of Africa. My favorite choral voices were from the ASR-10 libraries and the ubiquitous Symphony of Voices. In the sound department, some Lucas source was also used, with the trademark fireball being found in the portal-generation sound. The Diablo 2 skill tree was a nicely sized task for everyone directly involved, and it meant significant thinking through almost one hundred miniature operas."

"Most tracks in Diablo 2 were built around a blend of maracas and the human voice whispering or shouting. Favorite sources for this sound were live, using the 808/909 rack emulator, the Ensoniq percussion library, and Spectrasonics' Heart of Africa. My favorite choral voices were from the ASR-10 libraries and the ubiquitous Symphony of Voices. In the sound department, some Lucas source was also used, with the trademark fireball being found in the portal-generation sound. The Diablo 2 skill tree was a nicely sized task for everyone directly involved, and it meant significant thinking through almost one hundred miniature operas."

"That was just from a stock CD, Heart of Asia, from Spectrosonics. That was just me chopping up a sample CD. I think people could have some kind of interesting image of a woman doing a session and wailing away, but it was just squeeky old me in front of my computer. An interesting story about that though, is she actually... the original track has quarter-tones in it, and I actually had to tune all those out. The reason it sounds a little more palatable to Western ears is that I had to go phrase by phrase and make some of the quarter-tones into semitones. It would seem horribly out of tone if you would hear the original because with our cultural conventions, we don't really know how to listen to quarter-tones."

"I keep things very caveman-simple. I just use Logic, Vienna samples and Omnisphere 2 on my main production rig. However, I have recently purchased Reaper and have an open mind about it, which is on my other rig." (Page 64).

"I keep things very caveman-simple. I just use Logic, Vienna samples and Omnisphere 2 on my main production rig. However, I have recently purchased Reaper and have an open mind about it, which is on my other rig." (Page 64).

"I keep things very caveman-simple. I just use Logic, Vienna samples and Omnisphere 2 on my main production rig. However, I have recently purchased Reaper and have an open mind about it, which is on my other rig." (Page 64).

"The live instrumentation used in the creation of Diablo also deserves a special mention, and I believe it made a great deal of difference in the quality and distinctiveness of the final game. The star of the show was a finger-picked 1994 Seagull acoustic twelve-string, which supplied the main theme for the Tristram shopping experience."

"My main goal was to try to create a hybrid lead instrument out of three different instruments that had common properties and all were a little outside the usual mid 2010’s soundtrack pallet: Moog guitar, fretless bass and pedal steel."

"I originally began this one thinking that it would be the tune for the showdown with Mephisto underneath Kurast, but realized midway through that I actually had the town music for Act IV. Almost everything in my more electronic bag-of-tricks makes an appearance here, with the starring role definitely going to the nasty old monophonic Korg micropreset. I had promised myself throughout the writing of these tunes that I would get some sweeping electronic stuff into the game once the player left behind the silly mortal realm."

"With very few exceptions, the music for Diablo was made by packing up the eight tracks on the ASR-10 with as much as I could get into the 16 megs of memory and then controlling them using the Cakewalk sequencer. Even when doing live material through my $150 AKG microphone, I would generally record it as a sample in the ASR-10 first, and often liberally apply the onboard effects, especially the delay. After making an archival pass through my Sony 59ES DAT machine, the tracks would then go to the third of these tools, also resident on my Windows machine - Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge, an editing program which I have spent a great deal of time staring at in my adult life. This piece of software has proved useful for almost every task I have faced in the editing process, and has frequently proven itself as a great tool for the most basic elements of sound effect and musical sample creation."