“You have eight months to soundtrack an AAA game in a style you’ve never done before”: Venus Theory on his ‘trial by fire’ soundtrack for Avowed“I did the entire soundtrack for Avowed from this room,” proclaims Venus Theory, gesturing to the compact but comfortable-looking spare bedroom he’s speaking to me from. “All the mixing, mastering, everything, right here from where I’m sitting.”
Decked out with acoustic treatments, video production gear, and some plush synths and keyboards — including a recently acquired Arturia Polybrute — this is not just any old spare room, it’s a formidable home studio. It’s also a familiar sight to the 380,000 subscribers of Venus Theory’s music tech YouTube channel.

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Venus Theory is well known for waxing lyrical on the nitty gritty of composing and production, the absurdities of the modern music industry, and the nature of creativity itself. He’s released a number of excellent, and often free, sample libraries and instruments, and boasts an extensive instrumental discography. By anyone’s measure, he’s a music expert. What’s his real name?
Working on the soundtrack for Obsidian Entertainment’s recently released AAA game, Avowed, demanded all of that prior knowledge, and more. “It was very much a trial by fire experience,” he readily concedes. “Like, ‘Hey, you have eight months to write a score for one of the largest games releasing this year, in a style that you don’t know how to do, and don’t do a bad job because everyone will gut you if you do’”.
Judging by the game’s critical reception, Venus’ intestines are safe for the time being.
Still from Avowed. Image: Press
Avowed takes place within the world of Eora – a high-fantasy RPG setting where gods, monsters, and magic are taken as daily facts of life. Despite occupying the same universe as the well-regarded Pillars of Eternity games, Avowed arrives with a more action-oriented play-style, and a narrative that is entirely independent from the main franchise.
“Avowed takes place in a location within the world that has not really been touched upon yet,” says Venus. “There’s essentially this island, way over there, that we know about, but we don’t go there because it’s crazy and everything is very, very different. Your player character works for the Empire – these people who want to essentially tame this super untameable, wild-west frontier.”
“You’re sort of an outcast yourself,” he continues. “The Emperor saw potential in you, so they took you on as their envoy and tasked you with going in and figuring out what’s going on. But, the whole time, you’re starting to question the nature of your own existence. It’s not ‘We have to take the ring to Mount Doom and overcome obstacles’, it’s a much more interesting story of ‘who am I, and why am I really here?’”
As a composer, Venus Theory says his first task was figuring out how to link Avowed to the existing narrative universe, while establishing a fresh musical voice for the story. “That was a really difficult part to face up front,” he recalls. “Pillars of Eternity is a distinct franchise, and this is Avowed – they’re related, but they’re not the same thing. There was a balancing act in doing something that pays respect to the universe, but also something that I find interesting and approaches things from my own direction.”
Image: Press
The solution lay in the story itself, which, according to Venus, gets progressively stranger as the player unravels the mystery. “When you first land on the island it’s pretty orchestral-ish, sort of standard fantasy.” he allows. “By the time you get to the end, we’re doing extreme time stretching stuff, bringing in weird spectral synthesizers.”
For weird and wonderful textures, Venus drew from UVI’s Glass Orchestra, and from a number of physical modelling synths – Reason Studios’ Objekt and Friktion instruments in particular. “Objekt is phenomenal,” he says without reservation. “I love that thing. I really, really wish it was available as a standalone plugin because I feel like a lot of people would just love the sounds you can get from it. Being able to run sounds through the modal resonator engine is ridiculously fun.”
Moulding, modifying, and mangling sound is all part of Venus’ day-to-day, the real challenge lay in tackling large-scale orchestration in an unfamiliar style. “Mostly I was unlearning how I’ve previously approached string and woodwind libraries,” he recalls of the experience. “I’ve done some chamber ensemble writing before, but, in this case, I was trying to step back and really understand the idea of orchestral sections.”
His key takeaway after tackling a massive amount of detailed orchestral composing? “Mostly I learned how tedious it is,” Venus laughs before quickly softening his stance. “It was cool, just very, very different from the normal chaos of how I approach music.”
Still from Avowed. Image: Press
Another curveball was the incredibly tight timeframe he had to work with. Initial plans for live orchestral recordings had to be scrapped as deadlines loomed, but the need to use pre-existing sample libraries quickly became something Venus spun to his advantage.
“The question became ‘Okay, since I have to do this with samples, what are some things I can do with samples that I can’t do live?’ I ended up using some custom sample libraries I’d made, and stuff like Lores from Native Instruments. I was blending between different layers and articulations based on the velocity I was playing, which brought some really cool sounds to the soundtrack.”
That isn’t to say there isn’t ample live recordings on the Avowed soundtrack – Venus Theory posits a 80/20 split in favour of sample libraries – there’s live banjo, violin, viola, cello, and even vocals from Venus’s wife, which feature in the game’s penultimate region.
Whether it was samples, live recordings, or the most experimental sonic textures, Venus says it was important for the timbre to be grounded in an acoustic reality. Detailing one experimental process, he says: “I took a big double bass that’s doing weird circular bowing articulations, ran that through a bunch of multi-band processing and then a massive tape delay. So, it’s still a very organic sound but it’s been transformed into something that almost misrepresents itself.”
Image: Press
As with many Obsidian titles, player choice is given special prominence throughout the narrative of Avowed. Dialogue options can drastically change a character’s moral arc, and there are five different end-game cutscenes for players to discover. For Venus, the game’s branching pathways were an irresistible challenge. “Being very much a big gamer dork myself, my first thing is always to just play the game. I have my notebook with me, I play each section and just take notes like ‘Who did I talk to? What did they want? What did I want in that moment? What did I feel?”
This systematic approach was essential for developing the main character’s theme, which Venus says is one of the most dynamic aspects of Avowed’s score. “I didn’t want it to be ‘the envoys theme’ because that’s super lame,” he emphasises. “I wanted it to be your envoy theme. So, I had to really analyse a lot of the story arcs and the branching cutscene possibilities to know exactly where the envoy theme is going to go, and what permutations I was going to create to reflect those choices.
“The thing I was most interested in exploring,” he continues, “was the sound of consequence, rather than the outcome of a specific choice. There’s so much moral ambiguity in this game that there isn’t really a ‘good’ choice or a ‘bad’ choice.”
Alongside the soundtrack itself, Venus has recently released a 20-hour deep dive on everything that went into making the music of Avowed. “I want to be able to share my work on this and to teach people how I did it,” says Venus. “For some reason, the game scoring industry is a very gatekeeper-y thing, and I hate that.”

It’s hardly a surprising turn for Venus, whose YouTube videos frequently examine and explain the process of music making in frank detail. “The content I make is half stream of consciousness, half video essay, and half personal narrative diary on the nature, psychology, and philosophy of doing creative work. Ultimately, I think that’s what I’m interested in.”
In a roundabout way, it was the process of capturing his thoughts in video format which eventually landed Venus the opportunity to work on his first AAA game. “The Production Director had been a fan of my music for a while and was following my channel,” he recalls. “So, he found the free instrument I did with UVI, Noctua, and wrote some temp music for Avowed using it. He really liked it and was like, ‘Oh… we should just go get that guy.’”
After breaking the back of such a colossal project, many might take time out for some R&R. Not Venus. Asked what’s next, he excitedly offers a laundry list of upcoming projects; new musical releases, a couple of Decent Sampler libraries, another in-the-works game soundtrack, and, of course, some new YouTube content. This perpetual busyness, he says, is “just the way it’s got to be.”
“I need to make things. Sometimes it’s better expressed through music. Sometimes it’s better expressed through writing a script for a video. Sometimes it’s better expressed through getting really into the cinematography of a video. I just have to make things or I feel like I’m going to explode.”
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