C&C 4 - Finding Jason Graves

[Sonic 302]

The second in a series of three blogs from Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight Audio Director, Nick Laviers, has been posted Official C&C Site. In the blog he discusses the work of Jason Graves who composed the music for the GDI campaign. Plus we get a look the "Music Mind Map", part of the how the music was composed.

 

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?

Click here to read the rest of this blog.

[recover 2]

You forgot to mention that there's also a competition in this blog post. I submitted one guess, hope I'm right.

[Sonic 302]

Anyone who reads that blog will find out just as you did.