Interview by: Brandon Cackowski-Schnell
If you've played a video game or seen a movie trailer in recent years, there's a pretty good chance the music you heard while playing or watching was composed by Tom Salta.
His work has been showcased in Tom Clancy's: HAWX as well as Tom Clancy's: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 & 2 as well as the original Red Steel, among other games and used in trailers for Toy Story 3, Astro Boy, Coraline and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. One of his most recent works is composing the music for Red Steel 2, Ubisoft's recent hack and shoot, western samurai mash-up. Mr. Salta took some time to answer our questions about the process of making the soundtrack for Red Steel 2, the benefits of stealing from himself and the games he plays in his spare time.
First of all, I wanted to say how much I enjoyed the music in Red Steel 2. In fact, it was one of my favorite things about the game. Unfortunately, due to space limitations I neglected to mention in my review how great the music was, but I get a chance to remedy that now. Given the addition of the Western themes to the game can you explain how you went about approaching these two disparate genres, western gun-slinging and samurai sword play, and how this approach may have differed from your work on the original Red Steel?
Thank you for your kind words. Red Steel 2 was a very unique challenge. It was a non-sequel that went in a completely new direction both game-wise and musically. The audio director was very specific about the kind of styles she wanted and allowed me to decide how to blend them together. In basic terms, the Western side was represented by three different guitar sounds and the Far East by Chinese Pipa, percussion and Japanese drums. I wanted a short recognizable guitar riff for our main character that symbolized both East and West. The first five notes on the baritone guitar represent the West and the pentatonic chord that follows represents the Far East.
Tom "relaxing" at work
On a related note, when dealing with two very different genres, on the one hand, your musical options must grow, but finding a way to mesh such different sounds must be daunting. What's the key to striking the right balance between finding sounds representative of both cultures, but also making them work together?
My goal was not only to create something that blended east and west, but also something that I would enjoy listening to while playing the game. That was really my main personal benchmark. Finding the right blend took a bit of experimentation. We ended up having the main foundation be based mostly on western-styled guitar riffs and then develop them with all the Asian elements.
Can you give our readers a brief explanation of the timeline for a video game composition? How much access do you have to the game throughout the process? Is it a continual back and forth between you and the development studio or a more scheduled, milestone based approach?
Every project is different. For Red Steel 2, we had a couple of months which isn’t bad at all. However I had to work on another project at the same time, Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands, which made things a bit more challenging. We set milestones along the way, focusing mainly on one level at a time. Access to the game during the scoring process can be minimal and it varies with different developers; when it’s not possible sometimes the developer will provide you with some video captures of various sections of the game. For Red Steel 2, there wasn’t much footage to work from at first, but once I saw a few of the fights, I immediately got a sense of what it needed.
