(dramatic music)
♪ They got magic and flair ♪
♪ They got falchions and cunning ♪
♪ They don't see over there ♪
♪ There's a monster incoming ♪
♪ Inspiration is waiting ♪
♪ Rise up, don't think twice ♪
♪ Put your fate in your hands ♪
♪ Take a chance, roll the dice ♪
♪ Roll the dice ♪
♪ Roll the dice ♪
- I'm Sam Riegel, I am a
cast member of Critical Role
and I wrote the theme song
for The Legend of Vox
Machina animated series.
- Actually, the way that
happened was me asking Sam,
"Hey, you made that jingle for D&D Beyond
"that was so incredible,
do you have any other
"stuff lying around in your brain?"
And he sent me back an
acapella version of the song
that he recorded one night at 11:30
after his kids went to
bed, and it blew my mind.
- [Sam] Okay, here's an idea, very basic.
The beat is like,
(imitating intense music)
There will be drums.
(imitating drums)
The vocals are something like,
♪ The adventure begins ♪
♪ They were always beside you ♪
Taking my initial demo and turning it into
a really cool song, which it is,
it took a while actually.
We needed real instruments,
'cause the first demo
was just me singing on an iPhone,
so we turned to our friend
Jason Charles Miller,
who did the original composition
of the original theme song.
- Well it's funny because
Sam called me and he said,
"Hey, I took your theme
and I wrote lyrics to it
"and I put a melody over the top of it."
I was like, okay, that's
interesting, let me hear this
and he sent me this tape of him just going
"roll, roll, critical, critical,"
like just him all acapella over top of it,
but when I heard it, I said, "Okay cool,
"then we can add this here
and we can do that there
"and we can put the original
melody back in here."
And then we had fun just
going back and forth with it.
- Then we had even more
players play on it,
so we got a violinist
named Colm McGuinness,
I'm sure I'm saying that
wrong, to do violin for it,
and we did some more drum work.
We got my brother-in-law, Peter Habib
of the producing duo Mr. Fantastic.
They put in some thumping drums,
and we just kept kind of
pinging the song around
to all of these creators.
- And then when it came time to do vocals,
we had a bunch of different passes
and we were like, you know what,
we really need the ladies on this.
It would sound incredible
if Ashley and Laura would sing on it.
- Travis was the one
that actually asked me
if I would be down to sing it,
and I of course was very, very nervous
but, you know, it was fun
and I only got a little awkward
when I was in the booth,
no big deal, because Travis
was sitting right there.
I can look like an idiot in front of Sam,
but for some reason I
get really uncomfortable
if Travis is there too.
- We sent a feeler out
to our fantastic friends
over at Outloud Audio.
The amazing Mark Condrache was kind enough
to give us some studio
time to let us record that,
one of the bigger spaces,
and I think Ronin was just
born, so Laura was in there
holding a little baby Ronin while she was
laying down those sick vocals
(laughing) on the song.
- I don't even remember how old he was,
I think he was only like...
I want to say two months old, maybe,
when we were recording
it, I think he was younger
and he started crying
while we were recording it.
- We only had the studio for like an hour,
and it just worked out that
Laura had to feed her baby
while she was singing the song.
- What's weird is I think
those were the takes
that we ended up using for the song,
because for some reason, focusing on that
made it way more comfortable
to actually do the singing.
- I don't know if any suckling sounds
made it onto the track.
That will be cut.
(laughing) Anyway.
- When we were recording
it, Sam kept going,
"More rock and roll, more rock and roll!
"Go as over the top as you can sing!"
Because I guess I'm used to singing
nicer sounding, sweeter sounding,
and Sam wanted it like,
"Ugh," like "I want grit!"
And any takes we did like that,
those are the ones they used, it was fun.
- And then when Ashley recorded,
she came over to my house actually,
which is a much smaller booth,
and she laid down her
vocals late at night,
after she had been doing a video game job
all day, I think.
She was, she must have been exhausted
but she didn't seem like it
'cause she just killed her
side of the vocals as well
and I recorded her, and
lickety split, we were done.
- Yeah, Sam, when we were
talking about the rolls
and the criticals, he was like, "Hey man,
"I pitched my voice down.
"You've got a deep voice,
you wanna go in and do it?"
And I was like, no, no,
I love it the way it is.
He was like, "Nah, come on,
let's really go in there."
So my contribution to
the piece was actually
going into the booth and
bouncing as I did it,
going "Roll, critical, critical, roll,"
and trying to sound as tough
and determined as I could
even though I could see
all of their laughing faces
as I bounced up and
down like a little baby.
- I was going for a little bit
of a retro vibe for the lyrics.
I knew that one of the motifs
we were gonna try to do
was just sort of like
the chance of it all,
taking a chance, putting
the fate in your own hands,
deciding your fate.
That's a cool element of
our game, and Critical Role,
you don't know what's gonna happen,
you don't know where
the story's gonna lead
so you just kinda have to go for it.
- I think the thing
that sticks out the most
is the roll the dice part of it.
Because Vex was always
one to take chances,
but I don't know.
Daggers and cunning is
pretty frickin' cool,
that we took it there.
Just that little change,
that made me pretty happy.
- I think the lyrics for Your Turn To Roll
embody, really, sort of the
spirit of our early home game,
which is like, a bunch of
friends gettin' together,
being nerdy as hell, rolling some dice,
not really caring what
comes out of your mouth
or who's watching or what
other people think of you.
You're gonna take on
brave, courageous personas,
try and right wrongs or maybe cause wrongs
depending on what your character is,
and just jumping into that adventure
and letting yourself go
and when the time comes,
roll the dice and see what happens.
It's an adventuring party
for a reason, right?
(dramatic music)
