The Story of Vi's music

"The whole idea actually started a few weeks ago, when our artists were working on Vi, and after seeing some of her concept art and hearing about her pretty punky character. The further Vi's concept and idea was developed, the more everyone got excited about her as a champion since it became obvious very quickly that she would be a superawesome champion.

So after tossing around some ideas, I slowly began to think “Hmm, why not go nuts with this and have an actual rock song for Vi that leans towards the punkier side of things?” As people at Riot have already gotten used to me coming up with some crazy ideas for our game’s music, I told a few of our producers and artists about this idea. One would think this could get shut down as too crazy of an idea, but, alas, turns out the other Rioters are as much of a nutcase as myself. They loved it, thought that it’s a great fit for Vi and trusted me that I could actually pull this off.

On the paper, it’s a bold move, you know, putting a high energy music piece into a login screen, but I think a very important part of the League of Legends realm is that it is so versatile, and that it has so many characteristics and aspects... Vi is a total punk chick, and of course, I could have somehow added some some electronic or industrial, grainy elements to an orchestral piece, but that wouldn’t really have been Vi. It wouldn’t have delivered what she ACTUALLY is like. So eventually, I just knew that I had to give her something special and something more raw than the usual music piece.

I then started laying down some song ideas and melodies, and when I came to a point where I had the song pretty much figured out and the guitar parts recorded, I asked some people in our company if they would be interested in helping me. Eugene, a sound designer on our audio team, is a super talented bassist, while Danny, our Director of IT, is an awesome drummer, and they were willing to spend some of their free time on this so that I could get a proper band sound together for this song. There I was, all of a sudden having the chance to record some kind of a Riot All-Star band.

Then, the all deciding question appeared: Who should be the singer? After thinking about this for a little while though, the answer was pretty obvious; Nicki( http://www.facebook.com/NickiTaylormusic ), a young singer here from LA and a friend of mine simply had the perfect voice for this song, and since she’s also a huge video game nerd and a cool chick, she was down to help me out with this and record the vocals for this song. So I brought her in last saturday and recorded the final musical element.

Sunday and Monday, I spent my time mixing and mastering the song, trying to find a good balance between the instrumental and the vocals and making sure it sounds good on all the different sound systems... and the rest is history.

The coolest thing to me about this project was really the creation itself. Here at Riot, we care a lot about never losing the creative spirit of simply wanting to make ‘cool stuff’. It was really just a bunch of us music nerds, sitting down and putting together a music piece, doing what we think captures Vi's character well and is cool for our players to check out.

Combined with the visuals, the awesome motion graphic animation that our guys Greg, Tonny and Anthony (LiquidStripes) created, I think it’s an awesome first experience and glance of our new champion Vi.

We hope you guys like it.

Cheers,

Praeco"