Matt Uelmen Tristram Lyrics

"Tristram" - Liner Notes - July 19, 2000

Poor, poor, Tristram. What did such an innocent little village do to deserve such a dark fate? This track originally consisted of only the newer music - the last three minutes of the current selection - until Max here at Blizzard North suggested using the original Diablo town music. As it turned out, both are actually in the game, though the original Diablo track is what greets you first when you return to the hometown of that strange evil which swept through Khanduras.

I would like to consider the original track, presented here in the first 4:45 of the tune, as being a victory of inspiration over limited resources. All of the guitar, flute and ocarina in the original tune was recorded directly into a $150 AKG microphone attached to a Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler with exactly 16 megs of memory.

This tune is the grandfather of the Diablo musical world, first commited to paper in the spring of 1995. The main musical themes of Diablo, which can be heard in almost every tune in one way or another throughout both games, make their first appearance in this piece. Though I was originally attempting to capture a medieval sensibility with this tune, it is funny how stylistically far away from the music of that period this particular song is. I would hope that no one thinks I recorded this tune in a few straight takes and finds themselves frustrated when trying to reproduce it.

The track was recorded bar by bar, and originally consisted of at least two dozen chords and phrases which were stitched together in the sampler. Some retuning was done to make those harmonic runs possible, and some of those chords are impossible to perform in a manner which sounds as smooth as the final product. What strikes me when I listen to this track now is, believe it or not, the Peruvian influence. The selection of tunes on my favorite tape back in 1996 featured many gorgeous waltzes written by the legendary Chabuca Granda, and I spent a fair amount of time trying to emulate the finger-picking style used by the guitarist who accompanied the vocalist on this tape. The newer material was originally intended to be used as the Act 1 music in Diablo 2 way back in 1997, though I ended up finding the pacing a bit too tense and linear for the dreamy feel that makes for ideal shopping music.

- Matt Uelmen