# Episode 97 - The Music of Chris Granner w/ Chris Granner **Source:** Wedgehead Pinball Podcast **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2025-08-25 **Duration:** 78m 43s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** Buzzsprout-17708289 --- ## Analysis A retrospective podcast episode featuring legendary pinball sound designer and composer Chris Granner discussing 15 of his iconic pinball game soundtracks spanning the 1980s-2000s. Granner reflects on his creative process, collaborations with designers like Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie, evolution of synthesizer technology from Yamaha FM synthesis to BSMT sampling, and the artistic decisions behind memorable compositions from games including Addams Family, Fishtails, Whirlwind, and many others. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Chris Granner has composed music for over 40 pinball machines throughout his career — _Host Alan states: 'He has over 40 pinball machines that he's worked on'_ - [HIGH] Pat Lawlor would sing the choreography and technical direction to Chris Granner during game design, not the music itself — _Granner explains: 'Pat would just say, do your thing. When it came to music, he mostly just said, do your thing. He was much more involved in the transitional choreography.'_ - [HIGH] The Mamushka mode in Addams Family features a Russian-themed variation of the Hava Nagila theme — _Granner: 'it's a little russian you know it's a little uh you know uh kind of a sideways version of the hava nagila theme'_ - [HIGH] Fishtails is Chris Granner's personal favorite pinball game of all time with no close competition — _Granner states: 'My favorite. My absolute favorite. No close competition. This is my favorite game.'_ - [HIGH] Steve Ritchie composed the main theme melody for F-14 Tomcat, with Granner transcribing his note bends for the synthesizer — _Granner: 'Steve wrote that song... he was able to bend notes and do things that the Yamaha chip couldn't do. But that was Steve.'_ - [HIGH] Early Millionaire soundtrack used no pitch-bending capability, a feature that became available on later games — _Granner: 'we didn't have any way to bend the pitch. So all of that, like slide guitar stuff that I love so much. Couldn't do any of that stuff in this game at all.'_ - [HIGH] John Hay co-wrote tracks on Earthshaker and Jokers after being brought in to help on Jokers when Granner was double-booked — _Granner: 'I was double booked and didn't have time to rewrite some stuff... John came in and wrote some some nice stuff to replace my main tune and multiball tune for that. And then he got involved in this one as well.'_ - [HIGH] Transition from Yamaha FM synthesis to BSMT sampling synthesis presented creative challenges due to an established instrument library he did not create — _Granner: 'by the time I got to the BSMT system, Brian had long gone... I didn't have very much luck at all making new patches for the BSMT and I largely relied on the work that those guys did'_ ### Notable Quotes > "There's me at my best in terms of like way that I use compositional structures. And then there's me at my worst." > — **Chris Granner**, discussing Big Guns high score theme > _Granner's self-critical analysis of his own work quality and compositional discipline over time_ > "My favorite. My absolute favorite. No close competition. This is my favorite game." > — **Chris Granner**, discussing Fishtails > _Explicitly identifies Fishtails as his personal favorite game, emphasizing emotional connection to the work_ > "A million notes per nanosecond" > — **Steve Ritchie (referenced by host)**, discussing Mamushka track density > _Industry shorthand for Granner's characteristic composition style with extreme density of musical information_ > "Just sort of like paints this sort of, you know, middle layer. That middle layer was the basis of the high score tune in this game" > — **Chris Granner**, describing Millionaire composition technique > _Reveals compositional methodology of building new pieces from subtle background textures in previous work_ > "I sat there for like an hour and listened to this tune it's like 35 seconds long but I it just it just really really struck me and it stuck with me for, you know, it's still with me today." > — **Chris Granner**, discussing Millionaire high score theme > _Demonstrates personal emotional investment in compositional work and method of reflexive listening_ > "sound guys sit around and talk about when we get together in those undisclosed locations we you know we talk about right i want to kind of cover a game" > — **Chris Granner**, discussing how sound designers interpret pinball rules through audio cues > _Insider perspective on how sound design team collaborates to create audio narratives matching rule progression_ > "Just like how you pique people's interest in in something that's happening in the game in a certain game state... I know something important is happening." > — **Host Alan**, discussing Granner's use of audio to signal game state urgency > _Validates Granner's technique of using sound design to guide player attention and create psychological urgency_ > "Pat would just say, do your thing. When it came to music, he mostly just said, do your thing." > — **Chris Granner**, discussing Pat Lawlor's direction style > _Clarifies the creative freedom Granner had with Lawlor despite Lawlor's famous detailed design direction_ > "I was going through a period where I did that on every game and I did that over and over and over again... I was really like figuring out how to make those kind of like really crazy wild guitar sound effects" > — **Chris Granner**, discussing Whirlwind high score theme and Van Halen influence period > _Identifies a specific creative phase and evolution in his sound design approach using guitar synthesis_ > "These are Chris Grander games, and I can kind of see it, but you can hear the difference as well, which is very interesting." > — **Host Alan**, discussing stylistic consistency across different synthesizer platforms > _Validates Granner's distinctive compositional voice despite changes in hardware platforms_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Chris Granner | person | Legendary pinball sound designer and composer with 40+ games; subject of podcast episode discussing his career and creative process | | Pat Lawlor | person | Legendary pinball designer; frequently collaborated with Granner on games including Addams Family, Roadshow, Whirlwind, and others | | Steve Ritchie | person | Legendary pinball designer; composed melody for F-14 Tomcat main theme that Granner transcribed for synthesizer | | John Hay | person | College friend of Granner; collaborated on Jokers and Earthshaker sound design; wrote complementary tracks to Granner's work | | Vince Pontarelli | person | Live guitarist who performed guitar tracks for Roadshow including main theme and Vegas/Miami themes | | Brian | person | Original architect of BSMT synthesizer instrument library; created majority of available sound patches before Granner's era | | Kyle Johnson | person | Sound designer who contributed to BSMT instrument library alongside Brian | | Alan | person | Host of Wedgehead Pinball Podcast; conducted interview with Chris Granner about his pinball soundtracks | | Alex | person | Co-host of Wedgehead Pinball Podcast; participates in discussion of pinball games and sound design | | Greg Dunlap | person | Game designer who worked with Pat Lawlor on Ripley's Believe It or Not for Stern Pinball | | Addams Family | game | 1992 Pat Lawlor pinball game; best-selling pinball machine of all time; Granner created Caribbean-style alternate theme and Mamushka mode | | Fishtails | game | Mark Richie pinball game; Chris Granner's stated personal favorite game; features Orange Blossom Special-based jackpot sequences | | Whirlwind | game | Pat Lawlor pinball game; Granner's first composition channeling Eddie Van Halen influence in high score theme | | Big Guns | game | Mark Richie and Python Angelo pinball game; features invincibility mode and queen rescue multiball with diverse fanfare sequences | | F-14 Tomcat | game | Steve Ritchie pinball game; main theme composed by Ritchie with note bends transcribed by Granner for synthesizer | | Earthshaker | game | Pinball game featuring collaborative composition between John Hay and Chris Granner on high score theme | | Millionaire | game | Pinball game featuring early Yamaha synthesis without pitch-bending; high score theme particularly meaningful to Granner | | Roadshow | game | Pat Lawlor pinball game featuring city-specific themes and live guitar work by Vince Pontarelli | | Ripley's Believe It or Not | game | Pat Lawlor Designs game with Antarctica theme featuring marimba/xylophone elements | | The Sopranos | game | Pinball game featuring Stugatz multiball mode; example of BSMT sampling synthesis sound package | | Yamaha FM synthesis | product | Real-time FM synthesizer platform used in early pinball; Granner grew up with and helped develop sound library for this system | | BSMT sampling synthesis | product | Sampling-based synthesizer platform used in later Stern pinball games; presented creative challenges due to established instrument library | | Wedgehead Pinball Podcast | organization | Podcast hosted by Alan and Alex; produced two-part episode series with Chris Granner on his career and soundtrack work | ### Topics - **Primary:** Pinball sound design and composition, Synthesizer evolution and technical constraints, Creative collaboration between designers and composers, Pat Lawlor game design and direction methodology - **Secondary:** Audio-based game state signaling and player psychology, Compositional technique and musical style development, Pinball history and legacy games, Career retrospective and personal reflection ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.85) — Granner is reflective and generally positive about his work, with some self-critical moments regarding composition quality. Hosts are enthusiastically appreciative throughout. Dominant tone is nostalgic and celebratory of his contributions to pinball. ### Signals - **[community_signal]** Granner owns a prototype of Fishtails at his office and maintains active gameplay relationship with it; son works at Zynga and competes on high score table (confidence: high) — Granner: 'I own a prototype of fishtails and it lives at our office now. And my son and I, my son works at Zynga. He and I have a pretty spirited, friendly competition on fishtails.' - **[design_philosophy]** John Hay served as complementary composer on Earthshaker and Jokers, with Granner contributing lead work to Hay's base compositions, demonstrating collaborative composition methodology (confidence: high) — Granner: 'He wrote the little... bubblegum tune. And I added my taxi guitar to it... He said, you want to write a lead for that? I go, sure... And the lead that I wrote was the one that you hear there.' - **[design_philosophy]** Granner uses live instrumentation (Vince Pontarelli's live guitar on Roadshow) alongside synthesized sounds to achieve specific tonal qualities and overcome synthesizer limitations (confidence: high) — Granner: 'I got to work with Vince Pontarelli closely... on all that guitar stuff on the main tune. That's live guitar. And that was Vince playing. Same thing with that last Vegas and Miami, that rockin' thing.' - **[design_philosophy]** Granner evolved from technical composition constraints (no pitch-bending in early systems) to deliberate stylistic choices (Van Halen-influenced guitar synthesis effects in Whirlwind-era games) (confidence: high) — Granner: 'I was going through a period where I did that on every game... figuring out how to make those kind of like really crazy... wild guitar sound effects' and 'Yes, we had [pitch-bending]. No question about it' by Whirlwind era - **[design_philosophy]** Granner uses sound design to signal game state urgency and guide player attention, embedding musical cues that indicate when important scoring opportunities are available (confidence: high) — Host Alan notes: 'like it's that, you know, subtle, subtle effect on the mind where I'm immediately like, oh, I need to get this done. My super jackpot is lit... Yeah, part of the thrill for sure.' - **[industry_signal]** Sound designers collectively understand pinball rule progression through audio design; sound team collaborates to create audio narratives aligned with rule/objective hierarchy (confidence: medium) — Granner: 'sound guys sit around and talk about when we get together in those undisclosed locations we you know we talk about right i want to kind of cover a game that i love quite a bit' - **[community_signal]** Granner demonstrates reflective listening practice as compositional validation method, sitting with looping themes to evaluate emotional impact and long-term resonance (confidence: medium) — Granner discussing Millionaire high score: 'I sat there for like an hour and listened to this tune... I got into the bad habit... of just sitting there letting it loop... this one I sat there for like an hour... It just really really struck me and it stuck with me' - **[community_signal]** Pat Lawlor employed different creative direction approaches for different game elements—detailed choreography direction but hands-off music direction, giving Granner full creative autonomy on soundtracks (confidence: high) — Granner: 'Pat would just say, do your thing. When it came to music, he mostly just said, do your thing. He was much more involved in the transitional choreography.' - **[product_concern]** Granner maintains distinct awareness of composition quality variance within his own catalog, explicitly identifying pieces he considers weaker and acknowledging compositional experimentation phases (confidence: high) — Granner discussing Big Guns high score: 'There's me at my best... And then there's me at my worst... the form and the structure of that tune was one of those ones... oh my God, is he really going to do that again?' - **[technology_signal]** Transition from Yamaha FM synthesis to BSMT sampling synthesis represented significant creative adjustment; Granner struggled with new platform due to pre-existing instrument library he did not design (confidence: high) — Granner explains: 'I literally grew up and invented many of the sounds and many of the musical building blocks of the Yamaha system... by the time I got to the BSMT system, Brian had long gone... I didn't have very much luck at all making new patches for the BSMT' --- ## Transcript Thank you. Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I'm Alan, your host of this show. Joined once again, as always, my co-host Alex. How are you doing? I'm doing good, but you know, I don't think people care about me today. They're not here for me today. They're here for somebody else. In our last episode, we were fortunate enough to chat with one of my personal pinball heroes on this show, the legendary sound designer and composer Chris Granner. We dug into his career and picked his brain on his creative process. But in this episode, we're going to listen to some of the GOAT's work and see if any of these clips can jog some memories and stories from our guest of honor. We did a lot of talking in the last episode. We're going to do a lot of listening, some music, so you can hear them. And hopefully these pieces will hit harder now. He has over 40 pinball machines that he's worked on, but since that would be an impossible task to go through each and every one of them, we are going to explore 15 different games from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s on the show today. I tried to make it a good mix of some of his most well-known works or greatest hits, so to speak, along with some deeper cuts for the true grander heads out there to appreciate. But some great tunes almost certainly got left out, and I am sorry. There's too many good ones. There's too many. He's too much good work. But welcome back, Chris. Are you ready to revisit your pinball days with us? I am, yeah. Thanks again so much, Alan and Alex, for having me. And real treat, great episode, last one, and looking forward to this. Awesome. This will be a fun one. It's always really fun for me to listen to pinball music through like a pair of headphones or outside of the game where you can actually really like hear all of the nuance and you're not, you know, fighting for your life. For that reason alone, this is going to be a fun one. Yeah. Awesome. We'll start right away. The little game called The Addams Family, which I'm sure most people are familiar with. Pat Lawler game, of course, best selling pinball machine of all time. Also based on a licensed IP with a very distinctive theme song. But I want to highlight Chris's kind of Caribbean take on it. So we're going to do the alternate kind of Caribbean style theme with some like steel drum type of sounds. Then we're going to do the family lock and then the multiball start, which I'm sure every player has heard before. I did these without the voice calls on them because I want to focus on the structure of the composition of the music. But I'm sure y'all will hear this in your head. Thank you. All right, here's the lock and multiball start. And finally, the mamushka. Make it stop. Make it stop. You know, at some point, somebody's got to go, hey. That's why I left the sound call outs, because I want the listeners in their head. I'm sure you heard Raul Julia screaming Showtime at the end of that. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. That's a great set of clips. Tell us about the alternate Caribbean-style theme that you did, and how did you get to even do that? It was just a – I just thought of it one day. I thought, oh, this would work as a, you know, as a kind of a bouncy, you know, caribou thing. And, yeah, just – and it did. Totally did. You know, it's like everybody, you know, it's in the game as a jackpot tune. Right. And so it's a big, happy moment at the top of a long climb, you know, that you've done to get through most of all. And, you know, like the jackpot, you know, make the shot in time and enjoy, enjoy big points. You know, so it's a great moment in the game. And this is a weirdly dark comic, but dark theme. Right. And to have a moment like that at the kind of the top of the of the rule set, that's just, you know, pure, unadulterated, happy. You know, that's it. That was a nice thing to do. Pat, you always have a lock lit theme. I always thought that was a little funny. It's like, you know, you're really calling attention to a very specific sort of little very niche moment in a game. But lock lit. OK, we're going to have lock lit. So that's what this was. And then multiball lit, you know, turned into the more dark, you know, the darker, more mysterious view, the power thing, you know, the magnets are going and the lights are going and it's all pretty crazy. And then, you know, you finally make that shot and he goes, now you've done it. Got that huge buildup. And listeners to the previous episode will remember me talking about how Pat would sing this game to me when he would describe a game. he would he would like literally sing the choreography to me as as we went through it and and use all these technical terms to to describe what he wanted and that build-up sound he described that and did it just like that and i'm like i'm gonna make it sound just like that and i did that's that is what he sounded like so that was definitely cool then the mamushka is a uh you know again harking back to taxi you know you can never get too much taxi the hey is the is the pickup sound that we're going to hear later uh you know when we get down to the taxi section um that's when you pick up character that we've very affectionately called gorby uh because you know he was the russian guy and this is a little russian you know it's a little uh you know uh kind of a sideways version of the hava nagila theme you know whatever and uh a fun little bell like an instrument i found and um uh just a yeah just again just a goofy happy reference to you know i like how it like it speeds up as it goes on it'll kind of like insanely fast like instrumentation in there and that's what i was going to say the Chris Granner sound a lot of like the things that i associate with your very iconic tracks like the mamushka track is that they're batshit crazy in like a very positive way but you could never play this stuff on like physical instruments like you know like you talked about in the last episode steve ritchie used to refer to it as a million notes per nanosecond right on with that mamushka listening to it isolated you're like oh my god there's so much going on there that all layers together beautifully yeah thank you thank you very much good good set well we're gonna move on to another game a game with uh Mark Ritchie as the designer big guns Mark Ritchie and Python Anghelo i have the extra ball and this is invincibility when your little shield is up and the queen rescue i kind of did medley Dude, that's a good track. I don't know big guns very well. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. And then here's the multiball, which is one of my all-time favorite Chris Grinner pieces. And of course, you know it's a Chris Granner game. It's got a high score. Thank you. I've been sleeping on the Big Guns music. So good. Thank you. Thank you. The multiball sequence is a really fun sequence. I was a little sorry that you didn't play the main plate theme, which I actually enjoyed that. The most of all the tunes in this game, that was the one that really spoke to me. It was one where it was an early look at something that built up. you know, the ball two and ball three added instruments and added, you know, sort of, you know, extra layers and depth. And I really enjoyed that a lot. And it's sort of a texture and a melody that I think that holds up really well. We were really getting deep into, you know, how many different fanfares can we play in a game, you know? And that extra ball fanfare, you know, is one of the things that I was, I think maybe I might have sort of been at the end of my rope and it's like, what else can I do here? You know, and so I did that one and Listening to it now, it's like, yeah, I could think of a few things I could fix about that. And the high score tune, that definitely fell into the category of, yeah, maybe we'll use that later. You know, that was definitely a very early track. You know, definitely not one of the ones that, you know, where it was like, I'm going to get this into a game sometime. It was like, OK, I got to have something to do with this thing. I've got this old tune. I'm just going to throw this in there. There's me at my best in terms of like way that I use compositional structures. And then there's me at my worst. And I kind of felt like the form and the structure of that tune was one of those ones where it's like you develop this little melody that had this shape and had this rhythm to it. And then you repeated it and then you repeated it again and then you repeated it again. And then again, you know, and it was like, oh, my God, is he really going to do that again? And I'm like, oh, make it stop. Oh, my God. So not one of my favorites, but it's okay. You know, if you like it, I'm happy. Chris. If you think it's cool. It's one of my favorites. Oh, wow. It's so good. You know what? It's so good. There's just no accounting. no accounting for taste but i'm glad you like it no i like i like this game it's and it's got some good it is a fun ass game to play it's got some of the craziest programming this was a bill foots and reuter game foots was nuts and one of the ways in which he was nuts that this is an experiment that he did on this game where he decided to have timers and he had timers everywhere he had multiple things that were timing out in timers in a pinball game are typically done with lights and he'd blink a light and the light would blink faster and faster and faster and faster. And at one point he said, I need a sound to go with that light blinking. And I'm like, okay, you know, so I made a, I made a handful of little, little plinkety plink sounds for him to play. And he scattered these sounds around on these timers. But the thing was he had like six or seven timers going at once and and it's like bill all this thing is doing is playing these it's like no make it stop stop don't do that we made him turn it off it was bad it's an interesting idea it was an interesting successful experiment with negative results so turn it off forget it we're gonna go back into the steve ritchie realm with his game F-14 Tomcat, and this is the main theme from Tomcat. Just got to say that Steve wrote that song. That's awesome. And what you were hearing, that the lead instrument play were the notes that he played. It's my transcription of them, you know, and he was able to bend notes and do things that the Yamaha chip couldn't do. But that was Steve. And we did that a lot. We did that with the multiball team tune from T2, and we did it later with T3 as well. We did it with stuff that we did on that game later as a stream project. We got T3 on the floor right now, dusted that off, and it's on the floor at Wedgewood right now, and that's a hell of a game. That's a hell of a good game. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. It slept on. It's not nearly as famous as the second one, but damn, that's a fun game. Yeah. Agreed. Next up, we've got Earthshaker. This is the main theme. We have the high score from Earthshaker here. So the thing you have to know about Earthshaker is that the first fairly deep collaboration that I did with John Hay, who was an old friend of mine from college, and we brought him in shortly before this to work on Jokers. I was double booked and didn't have time to rewrite some stuff that they didn't. They ended up deciding they didn't like first go at that game. And John came in and wrote some some nice stuff to replace my main tune and multiball tune for that. And then he got involved in this one as well. And the track that, you know, you were having some trouble with there, the multiball and jackpot track. That's actually John's track. Thank you. it's a really fun track and a lot of the stuff you know if you went down into john's deep catalog you would find things that were refined versions of what is here, kind of a raw take. But, you know, he was also enamored of a lot of notes per nanosecond and kind of went at that same approach. The high score tune was a collaboration where he wrote the thing that you hear the first half of what you hear with no melody, just kind of like the jam. He wrote the little, you know, kind of like heart and soul, you know, bubblegum tune. And I added my taxi guitar to it, sat like that for a long time. And he said, you want to write a lead for that? I go, sure. And then a month later, he goes, when are you going to write that lead? I want you to do that lead. Finally, I did that lead. And the lead that I wrote was the one that you hear there. And so that was my lead that I added to it. Music interesting that you say that because i was listening to the track and not even knowing that that was john hay or it was a collaboration and then i'm like i'm like listening to this i was like this is a little bit different from chris and then the guitar the guitar comes in i was like there's chris right there this is what made it a grander piece that's funny yeah yeah i also like that's the one you had mentioned pat giving you a bunch of direction on or whatever like he did with most of his games you worked on him with in that main theme feels very much like you were saying like a road trip am radio kind of like just chuck berry type thing perfect exactly right yeah right so that was you know that one was in the that was in everybody's wheelhouse you know everybody can do that kind of stuff that was super fun super fun to do for sure yeah great great uh Great package. Now here's... Ooh, bitchin'! It's Sunny Drive Time. I love the call-outs in that game. Really fun. It's Sunny Drive Time. That's Mark Ritchie saying that, right? Yes, it is. It sure is. How funny. You know, speaking of, you're saying everyone could do that. I don't think anyone else could do this next game, Fishtails. Oh, right. Which I know is one of your favorite games of all time. My favorite. My absolute favorite. No close competition. This is my favorite game. So we're going to listen to, you have kind of two versions of the main theme, which we'll listen to now. Thank you. And then here is a jackpot medley for all your jackpots in the multiball. Thank you. so then of course we have a famous kind of little bonus meltdown fanfare and then the high score tune for fish tales here That is a great set of stuff. That jackpot set in particular is a fun bit because the first thing you hear there is actually what Mark originally called the rule is time lock. And playing multiball and you relock the ball. And what you're hearing there is the opening passage of the Orange Blossom Special. And that's what kicks in at that point. And then if you make the shot in time and you go to the first level of jackpot, which is called freshwater jackpots. No, I guess the first multiball set is freshwater multiball. And if you get to the freshwater fishing, right, second bit is. And the third bit is deep sea fishing, right? So you're doing these various other fishing things. But the main part of the Orange Blossom Special is the tune that you hear when you get to level two multiball. That rockin' sort of Texas Madman multiball tune that you hear at the end, that's actually the deep-sea fishing, the third-level multiball tune. And the thing that you hear at the very end, that da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, with the fills in between, that's the super jackpot lit theme. And all of that buildup is just like a really cool and really intense sequence. Very difficult to do, but the way to big points. That is the way to really, you know, to get a billion on this game, you kind of have to play the jackpots. If you can get to the super jackpots, you know, you can rack up these 50 million points on a shot, you know, over and over. You know, we had a couple of people that I own a prototype of fishtails and it lives at our office now. And my son and I, my son works at Zynga. He and I have a pretty spirited, friendly competition on fishtails. He's pretty darn good. At the moment, his name is all over the high score table. I've been a little bit a little bit. I've been M.I.A. a little super, super fun game. And that high score today tune is just adorable. I just I just love that. Again, that Caribbean thing is is so much fun. The only thing I wish that you had shared with our audience is the bonus countdown sequence that you hear at the end of. And you wouldn't you wouldn't do this, you know, just as you know, if you're just like calling out test fixture, you know, call outs. you'd play the bonus sequence and you'd get what we heard here. But what you didn't get was the little coda section where it goes, it tells you how many fish you caught and then how many tails you told, right? And that's a nice, that's a musical tag to that, to the coda, to the bonus coda. And the version of that that you get, if you happen to get bonus held on the last ball, you get that held bonus as like a bonus bonus. It's like it repeats the sequence and the little coda tune that plays then. That's my favorite thing in the whole game. It's just it's the most glorious, glorious sequence. But you got to go and get you have to go and get the boat ramp and then score bonus held on the on the boat ramp captive ball on the last ball. And then you will hear the sequence. And it's best if you do it with fish caught and tails told. The full sequence is really the special one. And so you got to got to check that out. gotta check that out i like how you think of like pinball rules and objectives in terms of like how to get the different audio cues to play oh yeah i mean it makes sense it's just very funny to be like oh if you want to hear this song you gotta hit this and hit this and do that and i'm like this is the first time i've ever heard pinball rules explained in that way it's just cracking me up that's what our sound guys sit around and talk about when we get together in those undisclosed locations we you know we talk about right i want to kind of cover a game that i love quite a bit i love this game indie 500 and it's got again some great sound in this and i just picked out a couple but there's lots of great sound in this as in all your games but this is the main theme and then the dueling drivers We'll be right back. And then this is the Quick Pit and then the Super Jackpot from Indy 500. We'll be right back. Yeah, those tunes are, you know, that's a really great example. We were talking before about how you develop a style. And then even when you change systems and architectures, you know, that style doesn't go away. And, you know, that was a very Yamaha-y sound package, even though that it was a DCS package. Had a lot of fun, especially, right? You know, that was a game where the direction was, let's make it e-sports. You know, let's make it, you know, sports, sports broadcasting, like a wide world of sports sort of a theme or a sports center type theme. And that's very much what that what that was. And then the, you know, the mode tunes are, you know, the dueling drivers tune. I think that's my favorite, favorite tune in the game. I just really like the way that, you know, the drums that you hear at the very top of the tune just really set you into this into this like super heightened sense, you know. And then the syncopation and the flow of the basic sort of melody texture sort of emerges out of that drums. I just thought it ended up really well. It was like one of the first things that I've written not for the Yamaha that I was really kind of happy with and proud of. So, yeah, this was a good one. I mean, it's a fantastic game, and I just like the way you handle hurry-ups. That's why I included lots of hurry up style stuff or like how you how you pique people's interest in in something that's happening in the game in a certain game state. Yes. Like just with the sound on a Chris Granner game, I know something important is happening. Now I need to figure out what I need to do and try to cash in on it. And like it's that, you know, subtle, subtle effect on the mind where I'm immediately like, oh, I need to get this done. My super jackpot is lit, you know, like I need to collect, you know. Yeah, part of the thrill for sure. All right. The next one, we got this game Millionaire, and this is the main theme from Millionaire. Very tasty, very fun, very early example of instruments that were barely sort of like scratched the surface of what the voices, you know, definition library that we ended up with, you know, by the time we stopped using the Yamaha, you know, how far we had come, how many thousands of voices we had had, you know, voice patches we had created or made variations on and stuff like that. So this is a very, very early on. You can also tell that the programming is also is very early. We didn't at this at this time, we didn't have any way to bend the pitch. So all of that, like slide guitar stuff that I love so much. Couldn't do any of that stuff in this game at all. Really sort of faded away from it. There's also, if you go back, the next time you listen to this, Alan, you want to sort of zero in on the inner, the very soft passages. You've got the bass and the drums, and then you've got the horn sort of, you know, the horn section sort of playing the melody. And then there's like a, you know, maybe you could call it like the reed section of a jazz band or something playing this sort of soft, very noodley sort of texture in the background that doesn't really sort of directly connect with what the horns and the melody are doing or what the rhythm section is doing, but just sort of like paints this sort of, you know, middle layer. That middle layer was the basis of the high score tune in this game, which was the first one. Well, I don't know. I mean, you know, Road Kings was the first one that I did. and the high score tune for that game was also really fun and I really got into it a lot but this was the first one that I you know where I set this thing up and I wrote it and I got it you know tweaked it and got it more or less right and I just sat back and listened to it and all of our tunes just loop and so I got into the bad habit it really is a bad habit of of just sitting there letting it loop and let my mind wander and this one I sat there for like an hour and listened to this tune it's like 35 seconds long but I it just it just really really struck me and it stuck with me for, you know, it's still with me today. I mean, I could sing it, sing that thing by heart, you know, really cool, really cool tune. And yeah, thanks for bringing that one up. That's a, that's a fun one to blast from the past. I wanted to do a deep cut here on a game that a lot of people haven't maybe played or, you know, don't think much about, but just think about how there's good music. And I also wanted to make sure that we highlighted some of the very early work you did and how kind of developed it was even at the time, Alex and I, we do a segment on our show where we go back some episodes. We highlight a year in pinball and we give out like hindsight awards. We're like, hey, look back, you know, like we just did 1985, which is, you know, in the dark days of pinball. Sure. And just the sound packages from then to like a year later. It's nuts. Nuts. Yeah. It's nuts how much better they got. So that's why I thought putting Millionaire on there would be a great one. Plus, I think it's just a great tune. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. The next one, we have our friend Greg Dunlap worked on this game for Pat Lawler Designs when you were at Stern. This is Ripley's Believe It or Not Antarctica theme. I love that marimba or whatever that is. The little xylophone part back there. I don't know what I was thinking there. I can tell. I can tell from the meter that it must have been, was that like a multiball mode? Is that a quick multiball mode? I honestly don't remember the rules, you know, very well on that game at all. It was one that really, you know, kind of blurred together with a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, BSMT, really distinct sound, no question about it. And then the next one is we got the Stugatz multiball on Sopranos. Nice. Yeah. There's quite a lot of content in that. Like I said, you know, like I said before, I actually struggled with with BSMT and and getting it to sound different one thing to the next to these tracks and realizing how different it was to work in an environment that was similar to the Yamaha because it was a real time synthesizer. You know, that Stern was using the BSMT system was a was a sampling synthesizer, wasn't an FM synthesizer. But other than that, it was a way that the system made sound is the same way, you know, a microprocessor sending notes directly to the sound chip and the chip synthesizing them in real time. You know, so that was still going on. But the thing that was different was that for me, I literally grew up and invented many of the sounds and many of the musical building blocks of the Yamaha system. and by the time I got to the BSMT system, Brian had long gone, you know, and it was 10 years old. There was an extensive library of instruments that were available that Brian had mostly made or Kyle Johnson had made a few along the way, but, you know, I didn't have very much luck at all making new patches for the BSMT and I largely relied on the work that those guys did to just sort of build a library and I just wrote. A lot of those things, you know, kind of sound the same to me a little bit. And these two tracks are a good example. You know, the music, you know, like the basic music style and stuff is quite different, but just the general sound of it is, you know, pretty similar. A great set of rules on that game. Much of what made that game special was all of the VO in the game, all the call-outs, you know, really, really great stuff. It's interesting to hear you talk about the differences in the systems, because I always felt that way too, being a big fan of your work and I'm always like, these are Chris Granner games, and I can kind of see it, but you can hear the difference as well, which is very interesting. And it makes sense that you're being plucked out and then having to kind of learn a whole new instrument again. Yeah, exactly right. Next up, we got a trio from Roadshow, a game you did with Pat Lawler. This first one is the pre-launch and then into the main theme. And then we've got a bunch of cities in the game. that you road trip to and I think some of these themes kind of carry over cities but uh the first one Kansas this you know this state Kansas uh has its own theme and then we're going to do one that the shared theme for Chicago and Denver Then also from Roadshow, we got Ohio, Vegas, Miami. We'll be right back. Those were fun things to have resurfaced back in my life. I really enjoyed these ones, you know, from things other than the Yamaha world, because the Yamaha world stuff I know pretty well, you know. But these things, I didn't live with them quite as long. And my website doesn't have excerpts of a lot of this stuff. But this was a really fun package because I got to work with Vince Pontarelli closely on, you know, all that guitar stuff on the main tune. That's live guitar. And that was Vince playing. Same thing with that last Vegas in Miami, that rockin' thing. Those are some of Vince's really nice work on that. But the other elements you still can hear, you can hear that Yamaha style and you can hear that Bruce Hornsby, you know, echo. Yeah. From some of those tracks, you know, very, very similar to some of the deep cuts in Whitewater. Dude, that Kansas track is insane. Yeah, the Kansas track is a trip up. That's really wacky. You know, I must have really been channeling a lot of Twilight Zone or, you know, something super kind of eerie and trippy. You know, no question about it. I'm sure Pat was just singing it to you. You were just transcribing what Pat wanted. No, sir. No, that was you off the chain. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, no. Pat would just say, do your thing. When it came to music, he mostly just said, do your thing. He was much more involved in the transitional choreography. That was really where he sang to me. So tune-wise, that's all me. Roadshow's another hell of an underrated game. So I just want to make sure we got it shine on this episode. But moving in is another Pat Lawler game, another famous game that I'm sure everyone knows. And Chris, of course, did the sound for. This is Whirlwind's main theme. and this is whirlwind this is the medley of lock multiball and then finally high score so We'll be right back. Thank you. That's a really nice medley. That lock tune is something super eerie and kind of tense and suspenseful about it that really, really works. I really enjoy the harmonic language there. And then that high score tune, that's one of the first tunes where I was really sort of like channeling some kind of twisted idea of, you know, you have imaginary characters in your head, correspond to real people. And Eddie Van Halen is a real person, but that's me imagining myself. I was going to say, and I went through a period where I did that on every game and I did that over and over and over again. And this was kind of like the first one, that high score tune. That's the first place where I was really like figuring out how to how to make those kind of like really crazy. You know, these wild, you know, just guitar sound effects and stuff like that. As the games wound down from there to Twilight, I just got sort of like more and more deeply into that, that whole thing. One of the favorite sort of arcs that I like to go through and play through the Van Halen collection, you know, you could call it. That was one of the first ones. So, yeah, great call. Yeah, I was going to say it's pretty evident you had figured out how to get the Yamaha to do the note slides at this point in time, huh? Yes, we had. Yes, we had. No question about it. Do you happen to remember, I know Pat gave you instruction or gave you direction, I should say, on a lot of like the main themes and stuff. Do you know what he kind of gave you for Whirlwind? That's such a cool track, but I have a hard time really like pinning down the influence, I guess. To tell you the truth, this game was done on an incredibly difficult and challenging, very, very aggressive schedule. We did the whole thing in about nine weeks, which was insanely quick. And basically he just said, look, I trust you on the music. You know, it's supposed to be tense. It's supposed to be storms coming and all that. So make it tense, but just do whatever, you know, anything you think is fine. And so, you know, it was something that, you know, I listened to this and, you know, the main theme is really a fairways tune. You know, it's just it's just right down the middle of the fairway. You know, nothing, nothing too fancy, nothing, no big risks or anything like that. The lock tune, the lock lit tune that that I started to get kind of adventuresome, but it wasn't very long. You know, and that worked out well. The multiball tune, you know, it's not my favorite multiball tune. It doesn't have great energy. It's got that weird triplet figure in it. And every time I hear it, I think, God, that was a stupid idea. I guess that's an example of something that I wish I'd done differently. You know, I could have done I could have written a better version of that tune. But that high score tune, that's a great tune. That's a really nice tune. So, you know, what's funny, Chris, is that at the Northwest show, when you're giving your talk, we watch you. I know somebody that came up to you after and asked a question and they said, why didn't you include the whirlwind multiball theme? That's my favorite piece of your work. And it's funny that you said that here. I just think it's very funny, the difference. And we've had it a couple of times between you and I already where it's like, I love this. You just never know. And you're like, I don't really like that. You know? Not me. Not me. But I do like it. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, I don't think I'd change anything on Whirlwind, though. Oh, that game is so good. That game is so good. It was successful. It was, you know, fit in a place at the time and it worked out for us. And, you know, no regrets. Definitely no regrets. All right. the next up we got Chris Granner's personal favorite piece of music that he wrote for a pinball machine this is Taxi's main theme Thank you. Thank you. And this is the medley of all the different passenger or character jingles, one after another. It's funny to hear them all back to back. I know. I could collect them that fast. And then this is the multiball lock on Taxi. did that bass fill Dude, it's so good. Then we have Taxi's bonus and then high score tune. Nice. Yeah, that main tune, that gives me a little frog in my throat every time. There's a moment just before the main melody section comes back for the last time that just plays this wild little bit of it's a simple little progression. the melody turnaround that gets you back to the beginning is just like the most inspired set of notes that I've ever written. They're just the perfect notes. They're just perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. And every time I think the same thing, I was like, I am so glad I wrote that. I'm so glad. I really am. We're glad you wrote it too. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. All right. All right. So we agree on this one. Yes, we got that. We got that going for us and a fun high score tune. two initials too no question i love all the like the little each character has their own little jingle when you collect them too like i love all that stuff oh yeah it's just a really i mean obviously it's a really good sound package overall but this is one of the ones that like it really makes that game for me it's also one of the only games i think that my wife will like start doing the call outs for because the character call outs are like they're just funny and good nice nice That's good. Yoo-hoo, taxi! So the other thing that you have to know about this game is, I hope I can take just a couple of minutes to tell this story. Of course. Brian Schmidt and I were, you know, we're working, you know, kind of side by side at this point. And one of the things that we thought of to do because of what this game was kind of calling for, which was a lot of car horns, right? You know, so basically every time you go around one of the figure eight ramps, you get a different sample on ramp complete. But then when you come down through the return lanes, you get what I call the La Cucaracha horns. One of those things. And I just thought it would be really fun. Or, you know, Brian and I were just talking about this and he goes, wouldn't it be cool if you could transpose the La Cucaracha horns into the key that the music is in at that moment? And I'm like, huh. And we and we sat there and it took us about 15 minutes of just kind of talking it through to figure out sort of what we had to do to make that happen. And he goes, OK, I'll go and write the note list, you know, compiler function that that we need to make this happen. And I go, OK, I'll go write the thing that runs on the 68 or nine, you know, the games microprocessor that that will play it when it happens, because we both knew what it needed to do. And an hour later, we had this thing in the game and and I went through and and put in these markers all the way through the tunes where the markers would just say, OK, the tune is now playing an A chord and now it's playing a D chord and now it's playing E chord. Now it's playing a chord again. It would go around and around and around. then all of the fanfares, all of the horn, little musical horns were all written in the key of C, but they were all transposed on the fly in real time into whatever key the tune said it was in right now. And so one of the things that you that would happen a lot, I'm going to sing this for you now. And it sounds so silly when I do this. But when you hear this live in the game, it's just the most sublime thing. If you heard if you imagine that you heard. And that was one just one version of the La Cucaracha horn. And I had a dozen of those those little fanfares and they would all just like crazily transpose like that. And when we play that game, that's what we're listening for. We are listening to hear what what version of those horns are we going to get this time through these return lanes? And it's just so fun. And if you know that that's a little piece of something that you can appreciate. You get to know that because we're doing podcasts and we're talking about this, you know, and that's why you get to know. And now you guys can go and play a taxi and you can listen for that and you can enjoy it as well. So. So I hope you do. Oh, man. Taxi is such a good game. It gives me another reason to go play taxi taxis. Absolutely. As if you needed another one. We need more of those stories for like Millionaire and Road Kings. Yeah. Well, we weren't quite as far. We're quite that far along at that point. But by the time we got to tax it, we really had it down. That's for sure. 100%. We're going to move into another one of your Pat Lawler games. This is Twilight Zone. This is the camera one and two and then the piano. Nice little fanfares there. And then this was labeled as Hurry Up and Powerball Mania. Thank you. Nice. That was the only tune in the package, that Powerball tune. That was the only tune in the package where the original DCS version, the version that I did in my project studio, sounded distinctly better than the Yamaha version. That was one of the things that I was sorry we weren't able to get in front of more players. but really just a really wild package. Some of the things that I wrote for that game were just so wacky. We leaned into just the eerie sense of the whole Twilight Zone thing, you know. Yeah, really cool. I really like here the two camera, like, little stings or, like, the little cues. And the piano, like, that's etched permanently into my brain playing that game. The little sounds on this thing make it. And then the like off kilter, everything it sets the music on this game makes the atmosphere so much more than any other piece of it to me. Yeah. And what's interesting is like that's why I included kind of the the Twilight Zone theme, but how you hyped it up. And that's what I think is great is even on your licensed games, you really like you made that thing work in the world of pinball. The difference between a good sound package or an acceptable one and just like what is sublime and excellent. And like all these like little tweaks and twists and variations. If this plays like this, but if it in this game state, it changes to this. And as a player, I mean, it just makes the experience so much more rich and fulfilling and satisfying when you're playing it. Thanks for pointing that out, Alan. That's that's that's a really good point. And I'm glad that that's coming through. Yeah, you're crushing it. Hey, a little bit of trivia before we move away from Twilight Zone. Did you guys actually send George Coimans or the Golden Urine guy that had written the Twilight Zone track? Dutch song. Did you send him a game? Oh, you'll have to ask Roger or Pat or somebody. I don't actually know. I just seen that pop up somewhere because I know you had used a little bit of that melody in just to make sure everybody was OK with it. they had sent him a game as like a peace offering i was curious about it uh interesting i thought that was like officially licensed i didn't realize that that wasn't officially licensed things things were things were different back then we didn't we didn't understand a lot of things that we understand now that we would do things very you know we would we would interpret our license to do things in in a very different way i think these days you were just very creative you know You were just thinking about how to creatively license it My musicology professor said nobody steals from anybody It all a shared tradition Yeah there you go I like oh OK Somehow I don't think that John Williams would agree. But we'll get there soon. The next game up, it's Whitewater. This is I'm on the record as this is my personal favorite pinball machine. I'll allow it. A lot of the sound packages. is this is the game that spawned another interest of mine which is whitewater rafting for real so wow in the northwest i i got into pinball living in the northwest and having location pinball around then i was playing this game fell absolutely in love with this game and i was like oh there's rivers around here i wonder if they do that out here and of course they do and then now i have my own raft and uh you know it's something that it's uh one hobby spawns another hobby but this is definitely the game that i was playing that was the first time i took entire notice of a pinball machine sound package yeah i was gonna say this is the game that made me like look up who did the sound for yes like this was absolutely and it's like one of those moments when you're into any sort of art or whatever like you watch a movie and you really love it it speaks to you and then you're like who directed this thing you want to like look it up and then you're like and i'm sitting there and I'm like reading your your list of games credits on IPDB and I'm just like of course of course this is one guy like doing all this stuff all my favorite stuff so I want to thank you for that but the first thing we're going to listen to this is kind of a long piece but if you play Whitewater there's all the different raft classes one through nine until you get to the wizard mode wet willies and they all have you know variations on kind of this main theme so that's what we're going to listen to first We'll be right back. Thank you. We'll be right back. Thank you. so that was the whole progression of the game and i always just really loved that you know you kind of you always know where you're at in the game because the main theme changes based on raft class but this is the hurry up man overboard And then this is the bonus. And then into the high score theme that Dennis Nordman didn't like, didn't like a week later for Dr. Dude, but then somehow got snuck into the end of this game, and it's fantastic. We'll be right back. Thank you. that's what i'm talking about just sit back dennis and just enjoy it just enjoy it i'm glad you fought for that i'm glad even after you said no and it didn't make it on the game that you're like this is going on one of your games i fought i lost and i regrouped that is the losing the battle and winning the war isn't it you eventually won yeah i love how that song hung on for dr dude i'm not getting games mixed up right it's a system 11 yeah and that's i mean it's a it's a wpc yeah it's a kind of i guess it was a wpc game it was it was 1990 it was 1990 we were working on in 1990 because that was somebody okay yeah but it was before funhouse which was the first correct pc correct okay that's right that transitionary but it's i'm still glad that it hung on across generations that's a pretty fun game i have to say there's there's a lot there's a lot in there that that's really fun the uh the gift of gab tune with ed boone and george petro doing the the dueling raps well my life was dull and my life was drab till i acquired the gift of gab so great so great just just magical um anyway yeah no whitewater is also one of my favorites i that bruce hornsby like you know kind of vibe that I kind of got into there, that Colorado vibe, I call it, you know, maybe something, you know, Great West, something Big Sky vibe, really worked. I'll never forget that, you know, I got the main tune and the first couple of legs of the tune in and, you know, a couple of days went by and Ken Fedesna, the general manager and, you know, VP of the shop for a long time, you know, ran, you know, walked past me in the hall one day and he goes, Chris, that Whitewater tune, that's just beautiful. That's like some of the best stuff I've heard you done. And I just like, wow, Ken, thank you. Ken was the guy who really made that shop go. Not enough people know just what an insane asylum he rode herd over and managed to keep us all, you know, in the building and working and, you know, getting along. Barely, you know, but getting along. And he's an amazing guy, you know, still a good friend and very proud to know him. He was the guy who actually hired me, William. That's awesome to hear more about that. And he's right. I mean, the Whitewater sound package is just striking. It's perfectly suited. And it is kind of the grouping of Taxi, Fishtails, and Whitewater to me are like, if I had to show somebody games that explain Chris Granner's pinball music, those are the three that I would show them. That's well said. And those are ones that are the closest to my heart, for sure. Certainly, Pinbot, very special and contains a lot of really amazing, you know, leaps forward. You know, many of the games, you know, especially Adams and Twilight for, you know, that I did for Pat and Funhouse for that matter, are very, very strong, you know, pushed in very strong directions there. But I'm with you. The Taxi Fishtails Whitewater series is a that's a pretty nice little triptych for sure. I do have a question. Who did the voice for Wet Willie in Whitewater? That was done by a game programmer named Warren Davis. Warren Davis was the programmer. He was at Mylstar, as a matter of fact, and he was the creator of Qbert. Oh, wow. He ended up being more of a theater actor than a programmer or anything like that. We're still Facebook friends. We still pop, you know, we still, you know, run into each other here and there every once in a while. He's a great guy, and he just had that voice. You know, he had that, grab hold of him. Yeah, dude. Grab on them. The call outs are just very good. When you miss the man overboard and then you just sort of solo, he's like, dang, lost another one. Like it happens all the time. At one point he was just messing around, you know, and he goes, I don't think we put this in the game. I could be wrong. But, you know, he's like, head for the blinking light, you wanker. Yeah, it's in the game. Is that in there? It's in the game. I guess we did allow it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe that was just obscure enough, but it doesn't happen a lot. There's some stage of some setting. Yeah, yeah. You hit it somewhere where it's like it happens maybe 1% of the time or something. He did. He did a great job for sure. That's awesome. I didn't know that. And I've always wanted to know that. So thank you. We're going to end this episode with Indiana Jones and the pinball adventure. And, you know, another Mark Ritchie game shortly after this, you and Mark both went over to Capcom with Python. So it kind of feels like the end of an era. at Williams here. So I wanted to play this to end the episode. And the first one we have is the Raiders March and Eternal Life, uh, multiball. main multiball start and theme so This one we have Mode Medley between Monkey Brains, Streets of Cairo, Minecart, and Castle Grunewald. The End And then this is jackpot lit. And then this is a fanfare medley of completing the indie lanes and then the path of adventure and then shoot again. Which I love. I love all those good horns. Yeah, very good. I told the story at Tacoma and I've told it a few times. But the winter of 93, I took delivery of a file box, you know, file folder box full of 18 by 11 score pages of the entire conductor's score for all three films. At that time, the only three films. And I sat there in my living room for six weeks watching those films, listening to the soundtrack recordings, trying to follow those scores and basically learned action adventure, orchestral instrumentation and textures and how to write for those. an absolute master, you know, a true, true master, you know, of his craft, put together this just spectacular, spectacular package. And all of that, all of those themes, I mean, you just heard, you know, we just heard it, you know, more than a dozen different themes. That barely scratches the surface of what this soundtrack contains. I mean, it's just, it's mind-bogglingly so, it's so deep. It's so amazingly deep. This was the first DCS game, and we barely had enough, barely had any memory at all. And we had to crank down the compression to such a painful level. It hurt, you know, it hurt to take this just beautiful material and, and hit the quality, you know, as hard as we had to hit it in order to get it all in. But like we say, you find a fidelity that you can live with, and then you live with it. And 30 seconds later, you forgot that there was ever a choice. And that's the, just the beauty of your, our brain's ability to, you know, to adjust to the situation that you have and just adapt to it. And that's what we do. And that's why it's okay. That was not my favorite part of this process. One of the things that was not my favorite part of switching to DCS at all was that we went through that period. First four or five games, you know, it was just painful. And then we started getting, the algorithm started getting better. We started being able to afford more RAM. And generally, you know, things just went to higher and higher fidelity, you know, where we've sort of gotten to today. Yeah, that was an amazing, you know, I mean, I've never learned so much in a six week period than I did during that, you know, working on this game. I just, and still to this day, whenever I'm in doubt of what to do, I just steal something from Raiders. It's, it's in my, my bones and my blood. I don't lift his compositions. I don't, you know, but I definitely steal his textures and his rhythmic writing and how he gets certain qualities with different orchestrations. And, you know, you can apply those lessons to any music, but you know, I am applying them all the time. I apply them every day that I sit down and write something. Yeah. Still to this day, that's going on. Man, what a, what a hoot you guys. We, that was quite a journey. Yeah. We got through it. I know we're keeping you up late. We have a little time change when we're recording, but I mean, I really just can't say enough how much I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and take a trip down memory lane and listen to some of these tunes and kind of give us some backstory. I think this was very successful because I, I think just like listening to the themes really brought out some interesting stuff I had never heard before. So, yeah, this has been a lot of fun and just really appreciative of your time with us and your time in the industry making so many great games and so many great games even greater with your addition to them. Thank you very much for the kind words, you guys, and for the opportunity. I really do. You know, like I said, Alan, when you asked me, I really like to say yes to these, mostly because it's really gratifying, obviously, to, you know, told how great I am and stuff like that. But more to hear why you think something is cool. Because, you know, just as we found there, we don't think the same things are cool necessarily or for the same reasons or anything like that. We each have our own experiences and histories that we bring to the table. And it's great to hear other people who love the game, you know, to hear what you love about it and how you kind of approach it and, you know, stories that you've had from your career playing and operating games. And, you know, we're doing something, you know, this is going to end up being a podcast episode and people are going to listen online and sort of, you know, feels like an online, you know, a little piece of online life. But these are three people getting together and talking about something that they love. That's real socializing and doing something that's socially important, I think. And so I'm really glad that you asked and I'm really happy to have done it for sure well that's i mean that's nice man i i feel very strongly about your place in pinball's history and how important you were and how much your work made the games that i love that much better i mean even to the point where i've argued with other pinball people when they dislike uh one of your pieces of music and i that'll that'll that'll rile me right up like i'm like how dare you speak on chris granter's name anybody anybody insulting uh chris granter's work is the number one way to go on alan's shit list yeah you will absolutely get on my shit list oh dear oh dear don't take it too hard man it's okay we've all got our ways but uh yeah no thanks i appreciate it you're a basketball fan so i saw you wearing a you know you're always wearing a bull's hat oh yeah oh yeah i feel like one of those mj super fans whenever whenever new people are like i don't know about that mj guy and you're like you don't listen you don't know you don't know yeah yeah you didn't see the games yeah i'm telling you well hopefully coming out of this episode they've heard the clips now there's no way they can deny it no it's all there that's right go out everyone listening take this time now go out and play some pinball in location use the map find some of these games play a chris granner game after listening to this episode or play a couple of them because they're fantastic i want to thank him for his time we want to thank you for listening And until next time, everybody, good luck. Don't suck. Good night, everybody. Thanks again. I'll see you next time. _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 1ea017d2-8f49-4c22-a16e-3a62263aa578*