The Command & Conquer 4 Soundtrack is now available on iTunes or Amazon.

CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW THE ENTIRE C&C 4 SOUNDTRACK

Hello, Nick Laviers here with my second blog of the set of three I promised. This time, I'm featuring the work of Jason Graves who composed the music for the GDI campaign.

Jason Graves is well known for his composing on the audio award-winning Deadspace, as well as other accredited games and movies. Click here to visit his official site.

This story goes right back to the beginning of production on CnC4. Our lead sound designer Sam Bird and I were brainstorming what the music should be. In that session, we decided that we'd have very different sounding scores for NOD and GDI, so that CnC4 sounded like a completely different game depending on which faction you were playing. We also coined the term ‘Anglo Military’ for the GDI music, but still had to figure out what that meant! Here’s our mind map...

Click to view the mind map

Not long after this mind map was created we decided that GDI would be completely orchestral and NOD would be completely electronic (a rule that we were later to abandon, more on that in Blog #3). I then went away and listened to loads of film scores from the sci-fi genre trying to home-in on orchestral music that had that 'Anglo Military' vibe we were looking for and which also sounded dark and serious. I think subconsciously I was looking for orchestra music that had the same dark, tense feel as the electronica in CnC3. I eventually found some material that fitted the bill. There was one movie in particular that pretty much had exactly the sound we wanted (I won’t name it...because I think there’s a competition in there somewhere!) It was very dissonant with lots of mad aleatoric (musical term for 'random') sounding bits. It had a dark, almost 'horror' feel which was very cool and led us to decide to play-up the darkness a bit. The main melodic themes were in the brass and the percussion was almost all snare drums, which together gave it a military sound. We made a mock-up of the way the music would sound in game using snippets from this movie score. We all thought it sounded great, but could we find a composer that would take this direction and create something special and unique for our game?

Deciding on the right composer is to me one of the scariest aspects of the music production. It's easy to just keep hiring composers you know, but everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and I believe you need to 'shop around' to find the perfect fit for what you’re trying to achieve. But of course, it’s risky working with new people...supposing you don’t 'click?' I'd heard about Jason Graves because of all the fuss that was being made over Dead Space at the time. I played the game and really liked the dark textural music. Almost like ‘musical sound effects’. I decided to rendezvous with Jason next time he was in LA. We eventually met in a Santa Monica book store, had dinner together...and really 'clicked'...all good signs!

Back at base, we made a brief to send out to the short list of composers we'd selected to pitch, along with a 'sound effects only' version of our mock-up to write music for. The brief mentioned our reference material but didn’t explain how we'd used the temp music in the mock-up. Thus leaving a lot to interpretation, and the composers' creativity. We got an excellent selection of demos back and as ever it was very hard to choose! Jason's work on the GDI music stood out, matching the vibe of our mock-up while having a cool-style all of its own. So he became our first composer choice for the project.

The intention was to have different composers for GDI and NOD as we felt this was the most obvious way of achieving ‘completely different’ sounding scores! It took a little while longer to find the other composers, but we had to move fast bringing Jason on board because we only had two weeks to complete and implement the music for our first press demo at the beginning of June 2009. In the demo you played as GDI on a desert map. Jason had to write 11 music cues amounting to 11 minutes of music in less than two weeks. Here are some snippets of what he turned in:

We loved the music and were so amazed at the speed that Jason turned it around, we gave him our coveted 'star performer' award (usually reserved for members of the in-house team!) According to Jason his adrenalin was pumping from another project he'd just finished and so he 'hit the ground running'. Whatever the reason...we knew we'd found the right guy for GDI!

That's it until blog #3 in the series. I hinted at one particular movie score that really inspired us earlier in this article...If anyone can figure out what we were listening to, I'm sure APOC might be able to find something cool in his swag bin to send your way!

Send your guesses to APOC@ea.com

Cheers,
Nick

Command & Conquer 4 Audio Director