The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Hood Theme. It's a main theme for the soundtrack from the audio drama Hood: Noble Secrets and the whole series by Spiteful Puppet. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. My name is Samuel Pegg. I'm a composer from London, United Kingdom. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, Hood Theme from the audio drama Hood by me Samuel Pegg. Thanks for listening in. Hood is a historical audio drama with a sort of fresh twist on the Robin Hood stories that we all know. He's this kind of lone figure against his better instincts. Well, I grew up in Oxford, and I played cello and piano growing up. Played in orchestras. At the moment, I'm doing quite a lot of things for a historical theme park in Spain and France. Take a listen. It's just been really nice to record a couple of them in London and two of them in Vienna and one in Prague. Big orchestral stuff. Doing a few things at Abbey Road next week. All the musicians are so grateful for the work. 

2:39 IDEAS ON HOLIDAY 

I was holidaying in Cornwall right at the tip of Cornwall. It's a very kind of atmospheric place very windswept with craggy cliffs. So just walking around the coastline, exposed to the elements. And the writer of Hood sent me the script. A friend had introduced us. I basically spent the entire holiday kind of trying to form themes in my head as I walked around the Cornish coast. But it was a good place to have some headspace. Quite rare for me nowadays to have a chance to think about something like that.

3:47 INFLUENCES 

I suppose one of the influences at the time was the Game of Thrones main theme, with its kind of rustic sort of, I don't know very sort of war-like feel. Another influence would have been How To Train Your Dragon with the Celtic feel. That's what I was trying to do is try and find my own fantasy world for this story. 

4:48 BREAKDOWN 

For the Hood theme, I wanted to convey a sort of rustic seriousness with the adrenaline of running through the forest evading the law and I came across a sound palette that I thought was interesting with various masculine and muscular brass...strings...heroic. Then lots of guitar, mandolin, ukulele, and they were performed by my friend Andrew Simmons. With lots of percussive elements. Tuned metals to give you this sense of, I guess the countryside really. What you're listening to now is a waterphone. It might be surprising to hear it's a percussion instrument. Very spooky sound. I found it really conveyed a sense of being in the dark woods with the shadows closing in. 

6:22 CELLO 

My good friend Lily Thornton, who's a fantastic cellist now based in Melbourne, came over to my place and recorded the theme. Absolutely phenomenal player. And it gives it a real unique character and a sort of soul. 

7:20 AEOLIAN 

The Hood theme is rooted in Aeolian mode, which gives it a Celtic rustic sound. Rooted in D. The tune itself just keeps rising up until it gets dragged back down to its root key.

8:18 MARION 

I don't think any of these parts I've sent you will have Marion in them. Because she's actually like an anti-character really. As you learn more about her, she's actually not a good person.

8:46 STRANGE TIME 

Here is another piece from a different episode of the same series. This has a sort of lilting time signature in 5/8. Take a quick listen. This was my first audio drama that I'd worked on my background having been in feature film, I really just treated it much like that.

9:43 OUTRO 

That's about it for this week's episode. We'll listen to the full composition in just a moment. But before we do that, thank you for listening to How I Make Music. C

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