Dave Sheard | The Man Behind Sprues & Brews New Music!
Eagle-eared community members may have noticed something brand new on our latest videos and our latest podcast.
That’s right! We have some brand new music!
Not only is the music new, it’s been made exclusively for US! Sprues and Brews has it’s own exclusive music!
Who do we have to thank for this? A music composer named David Sheard. He’s kindly allowed us to interview him so we can learn more about this musical magician…
Hello Dave! Let’s kick start this interview by learning more about yourself! Who are you, and what is it you do?
Hi! My name is Dave and I’m a composer. My focus is primarily on video games but I do music for other things too, particularly if it’s of the nerdy persuasion, like music for Sprues and Brews!
What inspired you to get into music? Has it always been a passion?
I’ve been playing music since I think I was about five, possibly even younger. I had piano lessons at a very young age, started learning double bass when I was ten, and it wasn’t long before I was playing in orchestras. In my teenage years this led me to playing bass guitar in rock bands, which in turn led me to learn guitar and singing. Music is as much a part of my DNA as breathing at this point! Scoring has been a more recent development from me. I found my way into it initially by writing music for dungeons and dragons games with my friends. That gave me the confidence to do a masters in music for video games, and it’s just gone from there really!
Where would you most love to hear/have your music featured?
I think I’d love to work on a score for a Warhammer game. The venn diagram of overlapping interests for me there would just be a circle. Jesper Kyd’s work on the Vermintide series and Darktide has just been phenomenal. His work on Vermintide II in particular is absolutely one of my favourite game scores. It’s on Spotify and if you just give it a listen, even within a couple of tracks there’s just so much going on and it fits the game so well. It’s gritty and the scratching and skittering sounds he uses are just so evocative of rats’ claws, they’re a perfect fit for a game where the primary protagonist is skaven. Cris Velasco’s work on Space Marine is fantastic as well, and I’m really looking forward to Space Marine 2. I’d say it’d be an absolute dream for me to get to work on a Warhammer game!
The music you have made for us here at Sprues & Brews perfectly encapsulates what we are about. How did you approach making these tracks? What form of magic did you use to make it sound so spot on for us?!
I’ve been listening to the show for a few years now, so I’m very familiar with the existing material. It’s big and bombastic, and it’s got quite a heroic feel to it. I wanted to keep that epic sound while introducing flavours of other interpretations of that. The most ambient track I’ve done in particular felt quite gothic sci-fi to me, with some discrete church organ blended in with the synthesizers. At the other end of the spectrum the main theme has a very contemporary hybrid sound that mixes orchestral elements, electric guitars and electronic drums to create a big sound in a different way. I wanted listeners to be able to associate the theme with Warhammer specifically through the “hammer, hammer” vocals, and I couldn’t resist putting the “waaagh!” in there when I had the chance!
How and when did you get into Warhammer and hobbying in general?
I was first introduced to Warhammer back in second edition when I was about seven. I used to live in St Albans in Hertfordshire and my parents are churchgoers, so we’d go to church every Sunday. I had some friends who also went, who one morning after church took me and my older brother along to the nearby Games Workshop. The staff there were fantastic; they’d begun organising Sunday morning games where a bunch of kids our age would go along, they’d hand each child a unit out of the window display, set them up on opposite sides of the table and we’d just do Open Play 40k one side against the other. We all got hooked pretty quickly. I think it was less than a year after that that I ended up going to my first Games Day with the trip organised by the shop, and in hindsight those were actually the first conventions of any kind that I ever went to. I owe pretty much all of my nerd fandoms indirectly to those Sunday mornings. I moved away from the hobby a bit through secondary school and university, before getting back in a few years ago while I was working as a web developer. I needed something to help me de-stress and the last thing I wanted to do in the evening after staring at a screen for work all day was more screengazing, so I dusted off the paints and fell in love all over again. Now my studio desk is almost completely covered with things I’ve painted since then.
What’s your favourite faction for Age of Sigmar & Warhammer 40k? What drew you to your choices?
As a kid I liked chaos undivided in Warhammer Fantasy, as well as Wood Elves, Dark Elves and Orcs & Goblins. The problem with collecting at such a young age is that your focus tends to wander very quickly between factions, so while I’m grateful that I never actually got rid of any of my old stuff, it’s a real mish-mash. Since getting back into the hobby a few years ago I’ve taken a real liking to Maggotkin, and I’ve now got just shy of 2000pts painted with a Glottkin and a few other bits still in boxes. I’m very much a painter, and the Maggotkin models are just hideously wonderful. I also took an interest in imperial guard around the start of 3rd edition when they began receiving their multipart kits for catachans and cadians, so I’ve got a couple of boxes of catachans, an old leman russ exterminator, some of the original 90s metal ratlings, and the first plastic sentinel that was recently retired. I pulled these out recently and they’ve since formed the foundation of the astra militarum arm of my pan-Imperium force, which currently includes Guard and Deathwatch, but will soon also include Imperial Knights thanks to the Christmas battleforce, as well as an inquisitorial retinue and an old metal callidus assassin I’ve had for about as long as my old guard.
With 10th edition recently being announced for Warhammer 40k, what are your thoughts on what we have learned so far?
As a guard player, after waiting for a new codex for the entirety of 9th edition I really hope to get some games in before the book becomes redundant! That aside, I think the simplification will be a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, the game used to be more complicated in ways that were interesting, but with the success of Horus Heresy I think we’re now in a situation that none of us ever thought we’d be in, where we have not one but two versions of Warhammer 40k to choose from. Horus Heresy ably serves the need for Warhammer to be crunchy and technical, while 40k itself serves the need for Warhammer to be open and accessible. I think if we were looking at 10th edition being simplified without the existence of Horus Heresy, we might have more of an outcry on our hands across the fanbase. Because HH does exist, however, and does what it does very well, there’s leeway for 40k to double down on simplification in order to entice more people in and grow the hobby, which is a win for everyone in the long run.
Should our community want to check out more of your awesome music (which they really should, as it’s fantastic!) how would they go about this?
You can find my website at davesheard.com, where I keep my main showreel. You can also find me on Spotify, which is currently home to some of my older rock stuff, or you can just send me a message on Twitter at @Dave_Sheard and ask me what I’ve been working on recently!
We’ve thanked you a lot over emails, but we would like to thank you again within this article for creating these tracks specifically for us. It honestly means a lot!
Not at all! As a fan of the show I’m more than happy to give something back, and creating the music for you guys has been a blast!
Fancy checking out some more of Dave’s painting? Have a look at the slideshow below!
Want to listen to our new music? You can check out the intro and outro on our latest videos, including our more recent one which you can find below:
Alternatively you can also hear it on our latest podcast episode, which is available on all good podcast platforms, including Apple, Google and Amazon. Alternatively you can listen to the podcast via Spotify below:
Also Available on Spotify & Google Podcasts
Sprues & Brews 