Composing the Trial Chambers

What melody captures the moment of meeting a breeze for the first time? And what does successfully navigating a trap-filled trial chamber sound like?

Take a musical journey into the trial chambers and listen to the Tricky Trials album on your favorite streaming platform – today! In fact, why not listen along as we speak to the three composers behind these beautiful tracks: Kumi Tanioka, Lena Raine, and Aaron Cherof to understand what composing for a game like Minecraft is like, what inspired them, what challenged them, and more!

A musical journey into the trial chambers 

Trial chambers are a very special feature of the Tricky Trials Update not just because they’re full of traps, tricks, and treasure; but because each trial chamber you find will have a different layout, different mobs to do battle with, and different challenges to face!  

Lena Raine is no stranger to challenges. Having gained her degree in composition, Lena struggled to break into music, and instead focused her early career on her love of game design. Later, she was able to combine her passions for composing and video games by writing the music for Celeste. Since then, she’s composed music for several video games, including Minecraft! Composing for the Tricky Trials Update proved a little challenging for Lena, too as she wanted to do something she’d not tried before: 

Aaron Cherof, who has been composing for games for fifteen years and worked on the soundtrack for the Trails & Tales Update, used darkness in a different way in his composition process – by creating one of his tracks while sleeping. This is a level of multitasking I can only dream of – and even then it doesn’t happen!  

Kumi Tanioka worked at Square Enix until 2009 before going freelance, and now as well as composing music for a variety of games (including Minecraft!) she publishes her own original albums, and performs her music live. For Kumi, the challenge of creating music for the Tricky Trials soundtrack was all about trying to find a perfect balance, not just for her but for Minecraft fans who create their own worlds within the game.

A Chorus of New Challenges 

I’ve never thought of myself as a competent combat player, but for this update I’m determined to give the trial chambers my best shot, and clasp my blocky hands around one of the smashing new weapons: the mace! Of course it’ll probably take me hundreds of attempts and lots of broken armor, but you know what they say! If at first you don’t succeed, run away screaming try, try again. 

Kumi Tanioka tried something new in her composition process, too – to surprising ends!

I think I might try and learn from Kumi, and approach the trial chambers from a different perspective, too. Perhaps the breeze just wants to be my friend? And if that’s the case, then maybe I shouldn’t thwack it with a sword? Sure, befriending the breeze wouldn’t be a conventional way of trying to get a trial key, but according to Lena Raine sometimes breaking with convention is sometimes a good thing.

Unexpected Surprises

The mace is one of the new weapons coming as part of the 1.21 Update!

Aaron Cherof understands the trepidation and excitement of approaching a new challenge. When composing the track for one of the music discs, breaking new ground dirt blocks was something really important to him. 

Consider me inspired, Aaron! On top of claiming the mace and befriending the breeze, I’ll now be going on a hunt for the music discs included in this update so I can bring the feeling of the trial chambers home with me, starting with the wonder you feel when you first uncover that rectangular structure deep underground. This quiet sense of amazement is something Kumi Tanioka wanted to preserve in her compositions, too: 

Hypnotizing melodies 

Kumi Tanioka’s music is so dreamy that I can find myself utterly hypnotized while mining for resources (I want all the new decorative blocks coming with the Tricky Trials Update!). Of course mindless mining can be a little dangerous in the trial chambers, especially if you stumble across a trial spawner! Then things get tense really quickly, something Lena Raine has tried to weave into her music.

This update is filled with surprises, from the breeze’s wind charges triggering everything from switches to tripwires, to the way enemies scale based on the size of your adventuring party! Aaron Cherof dropped a few surprises into his compositions too, in celebration of Minecraft turning a very big number: 

“It’s Minecraft’s 15-year anniversary this year, and I wanted to celebrate that by using mostly minimalistic instrumentation. Piano has always been at the heart of Minecraft music, and many of the songs I wrote for Tricky Trials have piano at their core – along with a few extra surprises along the way for listeners. I hope players can enjoy a feeling of nostalgia even when listening to songs they’ve never heard before as they embark on an adventure through the unknown!” – Aaron Cherof

What's your favorite track?

Asking a composer to pick their favorite track is a bit like asking me to pick my favorite wolf variation – impossible! But of course I asked them anyway.  

“Of course, I like all three songs because I put my heart and soul into them, but I especially like “pokopoko”. In this track I wanted to express a bird's-eye view of the world of Minecraft while delving a little more freely into it. To craft “pokopoko”, I travelled throughout the Overworld, listening to all the great Minecraft music as I explored, and then I imagined the world I wanted to express.” – Kumi Tanioka

“’Deeper’ really sticks out for me. Perhaps because it's a bit of a weird one in terms of how I came up with it, because I had to throw away two days’ work and start from scratch! On my second attempt, I started with a glitched-out piano synth which can be heard after the intro, before it goes into the main groove. The way it cuts up the rhythm into different rhythmic groupings was really inspiring to start playing with polyrhythms and build up the mood. I also played with the processing on the synths to create this wonderful sense of tension.” – Lena Raine 

What’s your favorite track of the Tricky Trials album? Listen to it today on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you like to listen!