Guild Wars 2

Was the new music including with HoT a live band or samples?

I’m pretty sure it’s live, at least mostly live. Various interviews with the composers have had them saying they’ve enjoyed the recording sessions, and I’m pretty sure Diemer once said he liked the live sound they’re using.

For a brief answer, OP, the music you hear in Heart of Thorns actually includes both sampled and orchestral tracks. Some tracks are newly composed/recorded while others are reused from past content releases (Living World seasons 1 and 2).

For a more detailed answer, the following contains some story spoilers for Heart of Thorns in relation to its music, so read below at your own risk:

Based on the tracks that fans have uploaded on Youtube so far, there seems to be about an hour’s worth of newly recorded orchestral music for the expansion when all the short combat cue variants are included, give or take. Some tracks still haven’t been uploaded online, though, so we’ll have to wait a bit longer for all of them to be uploaded by fans or for Anet to release the full, HD soundtrack on SoundCloud or via other means to have a full analysis.

The OST also has some new but sampled themes in addition to the orchestral ones. For example, the themes for the Mouth of Mordremoth and Avatar of Mordremoth boss battles (for the Dragon Stand meta event and the final story mission for Act 4, respectively) use sampled instruments (the choir in the latter sounds sampled to me too but not 100% sure on that without the composers’ confirmation) instead of a live orchestra. This may be because of budget and/or scheduling issues as pieces were still being written, finetuned and orchestrated by the time recording sessions were already taking place abroad from what I remember from the composers’ earlier comments.

The rest of the soundtrack consists of recycled orchestral and sampled pieces from Living World seasons 1 and 2 (e.g. the “Twisted Marionette Part 1” from S1 used in some larger boss encounters at times, the “Tower of Nightmares” from S1 played as one of the cycled cues in Dragon’s Stand, “Crystal Oasis Redux” from S2 played as one of the cycled cues in Tarir’s Inner Chamber, and “Shadow of the Dragon” from S2 played during the Vinetooth battle in the final mission for Act 1).

I hope this helps with answering your question or at least sating your curiosity for now. I’d suggest keeping an eye on Anet’s SoundCloud page for future music updates, but if you’re impatient, a few people have already uploaded quite a few HoT tracks on Youtube too for our listening pleasure.