// PC GAMER — GAMING
Mass Effect composer Sam Hulick releases his 're-scored' trailer for N7 Day, 'my way of saying goodbye… at least for now'
Hulick also revealed that he was asked by BioWare to score an internal demo for Mass Effect: Universe—but work was cut short by the studio's closure.
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Mass Effect composer Sam Hulick revealed in October that he was 're-scoring' the leaked trailer for Mass Effect: Universe to reflect his own "musical vision" for the game. The original, with an edit of "Quartz" by French 79, is pretty groovy, but now Hulick's work is done and this may not come as much of a surprise but I think I like his version better.
So here we have it—Mass Effect: Universe - Sam Hulick Edit:
I'm not a music critic but I know what I like, and I really like the Mass Effect soundtracks. There's a broadly common sound threaded through all three games (I didn't play Andromeda so I'm just pretending it never happened) but they evolved over the course of the trilogy, too: Hulick told me his music in this trailer is "'a balancing act between paying homage to the original trilogy and exploring new ground", but leans most heavily toward Mass Effect 1 and 3.
"Mass Effect's earliest tracks were more about raw analog synth blended with orchestral elements, but more subdued and 'vibey' for lack of a better word," Hulick said in a recent chat with PC Gamer. "Mass Effect 2 leaned more into orchestral bombast (as with Jack Wall’s forever-famous 'Suicide Mission'), and Mass Effect 3 combined the best of both worlds, with plenty of epic, fist-pump-into-the-air orchestral moments, as well as sparse, moody synth-forward tracks like the ones I wrote for Mars."
Jack Wall, for the record, was lead composer on the original Mass Effect while Hulick served as co-composer; the Mass Effect 2 soundtrack brought back Wall and Hulick and added Jimmy Hinson and David Kates to the lineup, while Mass Effect 3 featured Hulick plus Sascha Dikiciyan, Christopher Lennertz, Clint Mansell, and Cris Velasco.
"I would've loved to have actual songs (with lyrics) to elevate the more emotional moments in the game, whatever they might've been. Fans loved the ME1 end-credits song by Faunts, so why not bring more of that back?"
The passage of time is also a factor in Hulick's approach to new work on Mass Effect. The Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3 came out in 2013, 13 years ago, and he hasn't been sitting idle since then. "I used to rely on synth presets, but these days I mostly create my own sounds from scratch, since it's faster than scrolling through a list of 1,000 premade sounds," Hulick said. "On top of that, the quality of my music production has definitely improved since 2013! Everything in the trailer re-score should sound more polished, but still feel like it belongs in the Mass Effect universe (no pun intended)."
There are some big stylistic shifts over the course of the trailer, made even more notable by its brevity, which Hulick said are meant to showcase different approaches to ambient, cinematic, and combat music—"paying homage" to the original scores while simultaneously exploring new ground. The fight scene near the end of the teaser, for instance, is where Hulick "let the synthwave side come out," while the rest of the music is more in keeping with the music of the original trilogy.