Sean Wilson chats to the Tomb Raider and Far Cry composer about what makes a truly great score…
Video game music has come on extraordinary leaps and bounds since the early days of 8-bit synths. Orchestral sophistication and symphonic power is now the order of the day, and at the forefront is acclaimed, award-winning artist Jason Graves.
We caught up with Jason to discuss his work on the rebooted Tomb Raider series and other hit video game franchises, discussing his musical process and what it means to honour the musical legacy of console gaming.
What you and your fellow soundtrack composers do is truly remarkable, adding further layers of emotion to our favourite games and films. How did you get into the industry to begin with?
I started working in LA when I was still in school for a degree in Film and Television Music. That job gave me a lot of exposure and experience to different clients and musical genres over a few years. I moved home to North Carolina after that and knew a friend of a friend that needed music for a game. That was almost twenty years ago. From then on I was hooked!
As a soundtrack reviewer, I’d class Jerry Goldsmith as my favourite composer for his innovative and visceral style – who would you say is your biggest influence when it comes to your music?
Jerry definitely ranks high among my favorites, as well as Bernard Herrmann and John Williams. Plus William Walton, Percy Grainger, Gustav Holst, Igor Stravinsky… the list goes on and on!
You’ve garnered significant acclaim for your extensive video game scores for the likes of Far Cry and Tomb Raider. It’s a soundtrack niche that has really boomed in the last few decades – would you say that music for games is now at a level to rival those written for films?
I think the compositional quality and production levels of music for games is definitely getting better every year. And I also think the appreciation for game music has risen. Most AAA game scores work with the same musicians and studios as their film counterparts. A lot of times the only real difference between the two is how the music needs to be recorded and implemented into its respective project.
Let’s talk about the process of composing for a game. In movies, the composer will sit down with a director and spot the movie – how does it work when composing for a game? Is there one particular person you work with closely and feedback your ideas to, or is it more of a collaborative effort?
Of course there are an infinite numbers of ways to approach it, but my usual experience is working closely with one or two specific people, usually an Audio Director and possibly a Creative Director. It makes it a lot easier to streamline decisions and workflow when you have a single point of contact. It is still very collaborative and a team effort.
Do you feel it’s better working alongside someone who is literate in music composition, or someone who talks in general emotional terms and gives you more freedom as a writer?
Either one is completely legitimate. I actually prefer general emotional terms as they are universal and easy for anyone to communicate and understand. Music is essentially the language of emotion, so it’s a lot easier to speak about it in those kinds of terms than worry about precise, formal terminology. Quite often I will be working with someone else who has been formally educated and we still speak within an emotional context.
When it comes to a franchise like Tomb Raider, there’s already an established musical legacy that stretches back 20 years. How much of a challenge is it to steer around that whilst establishing your own voice on the series?
Fortunately for me, the developers were keen on the whole re-boot idea, and that included rebooting the music. So I was off the hook, musically speaking, and given complete freedom to compose. So really the biggest challenge was an internal one – I wanted to try as hard as possible to live up to the musical legacy I was carrying on.
Another of your projects, Dead Space is of course horror-inflected and this is a genre that allows composers to go all-out with terrifying textures and creativity. How much fun is it to compose for this genre?
Completely freeing and a blast to do! Scoring for horror is literally a “throwing the rulebook out the window, going outside and fetching it back, ripping it to pieces, stomping on it, burning it in a fire and eating the ashes” kind of thing. Anything goes! And what’s really fun about the whole thing is the further “out there” you go, the more effective and creepy the music becomes.
Your Far Cry: Primal score is brilliantly imaginative, utilising all sorts of textures like ram’s horns and Aztec whistles. How did the tone of that particular work come together?
Thanks a lot! Pretty much the same way every score gets started – it’s completely inspired by the game and the world you inhabit as a player. The first time I visited the developer in Montreal they were showing me concept art of different characters. Wonderful, creative uses of bones, antlers and animal fur all over the place and I couldn’t help thinking, “I wonder what it would sound like if I walked up and started playing that with some sticks?
That was really the impetus behind the sound of the entire score. My first to-do when I got home was a trip to the local hardware store – clay pots, gravel, bricks, tall plants, shrubberies, firewood – anything that didn’t included metal and could have possibly existed during the pre-Bronze Age. Then it was simply a matter of forming my one man prehistoric band back in my studio, miking them up and seeing what happened when I started banging on things.
How did you get involved with the Oculus VR experience Farlands and what musical ideas are you bringing to it?
I worked with Tom Smurden, the Audio Director at Oculus, on Murdered: Soul Suspect and was helping Oculus with some of their prototypes and tradeshow demos. I was in Seattle for PAX and stopped by to see him and he asked if I would be interested in working on Farlands.
The idea I pitched to him and the Creative Director that day was having a “band” of sorts that was made up of unusual instruments. Or regular instruments that were performed or treated in unusual ways to make them sound different. We all agreed some kind of “organic sci-fi” sound should be the thread of the score. In the end I used lots of plucked instruments – harp, mandolin, banjo, dulcimer plus five or six acoustic and electric guitars plus a few bass guitars for pitched instruments.
I added some odd and obscure percussion sounds, like ten different metal mixing bowls, a marimba, vibes and electric piano. Everything had plenty of reverb and delay on it to “sci-fi” it up a bit, but the simple act of using those specific instruments and playing very relaxing, quiet music was how the whole score was produced. I basically wrote a new song each day and sent it to Oculus over a four-week period. It was unlike any score I had done before and was a wonderful, relaxing experience!
In three words, what’s the secret of a truly fantastic soundtrack?
1. Lots
2. Of
3. Coffee
Lastly, what have you got coming up next?
Lone Echo and Echo Arena just came out July 20th, two Oculus games by Ready At Dawn Studios, who I had the pleasure to work with on The Order: 1886.
Jason, thanks very much!
Totally my pleasure!
Sean Wilson is a journalist, writer, soundtrack enthusiast and can be found on Twitter here.
