CnCSaga.de Interviews Nick Laviers

[dbjs2009 25]

CnCSaga.de has just posted a new interview with Nick Laviers the audio director and composer of Command & Conquer 4 and Red Alert 3 soundtracks. In this interview he speaks about his general life and his long experience with EA, especially the famous C&C franchise. Here's a couple of the questions.

 

CnCSaga.de: Were there some problems in the music-production or was everything right?

Nick Laviers: Nothing major went wrong that I can remember. There was the challenge I already mentioned of conceiving a unique music style for NOD which offered the full range of emotions. The only other problem was keeping the total length of the score within our budget of 100 minutes. The full score came in at around 120 minutes, so we didn't manage this, but did manage to stay on budget financially by being careful about what we chose to record live.

 

CnCSaga.de: How do you have got this ideas for the soundtracks? Were they coming at night in a dream or did you have to work hard some days?

Nick Laviers: My role is to come up with inspiring ideas for the composers, for when they some direction. You have to put yourself in a place and a frame of mind where ideas can flow. Jason Graves likes going for walks. One of the other composers has great ideas in the shower. I go jogging every morning to get myself relaxed so that I can have ideas. I also like talking things through with a lot of people (not just composers and sound engineers) and listen to their ideas. A recent innovation that I love is programs like Last FM. You can use them to 'accidentally' find music you haven't heard before, that can then be used as reference material for the composers.

The full interview can be found right here. It's also available in German.

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I guess it's always fun to read these interviews. Keep 'em coming.