London Philharmonic: Video Game Heroes Blog 5

Concert day and the aftermath:

Friday 2^nd September.  Gig day.  I like gig days.   There’s a certain amount of fear but unlike recording days you know there is one shot at it and no agonizing over whether this take is better than that or whether you’ve really captured something.  It was a funny day though because in the morning Radio 6 (I love you!) played a few extracts – early mixes of a couple of the tracks.  In particular what they did I think was to play original 8 bit (bleepy) versions and then cut straight into my orchestral ones which was not a bad idea and made me look good!  Then loads of other radio stations who heard that in the morning starting ringing either the PR company or even my mobile directly when I was trying to chill a bit on the big day, even once when I was trying to get a little trim in the barbers and then the BBC World service just as I was about to go on stage.  Bit late for publicity at that stage!  Also I did an interview with Nintendo that day which I was terrified about because I know about music but I’m by no means a games expert (mind you I’m thinking about rectifying that over the next two years with my good friend Joss – time to be 21 again!) but they were in fact gentle with me and didn’t ask me too many awkward questions!  Apparently this interview can be viewed via the Wii … although quite why anyone would break off from their exciting game of COD Black Ops or whatever to watch me wittering on is beyond me but perhaps they will.

The gig itself was pretty amazing – it went down really well with the audience (standing ovation darling!) and the orchestra played magnificently.   It was great to see which ones the audience liked and what sort of reaction there was to the funny ones and how absorbed they seemed in the whole thing.  Great audience.  (It nearly got off to a very bad start though because my friend, the composer Anthony Phillips, who was there told me that I was literally centimetres from completely knocking myself out on the conductors podium metal bar with my very first bow!!

I was lucky to have a few old friends in key roles on that day - not least of which the wonderful Rabbit (aka Wayne Sargeant) on front-of-house.  In other words he has a massive mixing desk with almost every instrument in the orchestra coming in separately!  Scary stuff.  There are very few people in the world I think who can really make an orchestra louder without making it sound worse at the same time.  Much, much worse usually!  This was a triumph in that respect I think because well placed spies in the audience told me it sounded like the LPO (best orchestra in the world) but a bit louder, which is what I wanted.  Also we had a total crazy genius on lighting, Richard Knight, who, once I had persuaded him not to simulate machine-gunning me through the head while I was conducting (his idea for Battlefield!!!), came up with the most amazing yet subtle lighting design which really helped with all the different twists and turns.  The least funny thing that happened from my point of view was when the wonderful choir (who were truly truly amazing) didn’t come in at the beginning of the last piece Liberi Fatali from Final Fantasy.  Since they begin this on their own this was a problem!  Once I had recovered from my heart attack I tried again thinking I might have to sing it myself if they don’t see me this time … but phew, they came in.   The joys of live performance!!

Anyway I could go on listing the various great individual performances (brass wow!, drums wow!, strings wow! conductor - a bit dodgy in places …) but onwards ….

Now we’re mixing and editing the album for all this in Angel Studios.  This is exciting partly because I don’t have to do very much in a way – just sit there and admire the awesome skills of Steve Price and his assistant Jez as they go through every little tiny piece of the tracks and bring it all together gradually.  The thing is of course it already sounded good.  You’ve got a great orchestra in a lovely room with at least 70 grand’s worth of microphones hanging up.  It should sound good!!  But somehow Steve still finds ways of making it far far better after that and it was incredible on Tuesday night to sit down and check out the first 16 mixes coming off the desk.  I think we have something very special emerging and I think these are going to be the very best versions of these wonderful pieces of music yet  recorded. 

I feel really spoilt on this job – everyone involved has been so brilliant and supportive and let me get on with it.  If people don’t trust you, you can’t do this kind of thing because you end up second-guessing what they want and you lose touch with your own instincts.  Probably we didn’t get everything right but we entertained, and hopefully moved, a large number of people some of whom had never been to an orchestral gig before and we had a great time ourselves.  What more could anyone want!

London Philharmonic: Video Game Heroes Blog 4

This is only going to be a short blog because I have set myself the (possibly too ambitious) target of deciding on the setlist for the concert next week by lunchtime.  Just to bring everything up to date; I came back from holiday at the weekend (although since I left 35 degree sunny Bordeaux for this rainy nonsense I’m wishing I hadn’t) and went pretty much straight into the BIG recording day with the orchestra at Watford Townhall with Sam Okell from Abbey Road recording.  I’ve never seen so many good mics in one room – Neumann city for those interested in such things.  Overall charge on this project on the recording side is the wonderful Steve Price from Angel but he was not free on this day and Sam fortunately was able to do it for us.  It is unbelievably important to get the right person behind the desk (or upturned crate in this case!) for these things because they need a ton of technical & musical knowledge but also the ability to quickly communicate to me how it’s all coming together when I’m out there conducting.  Steve and Sam both terrific on all fronts.

Anyway it was tons of fun to have the whole orchestra together in the refitted Watford Colosseum – the loudest room I’ve ever been in I think!  A big highlight was recording music from Dead Space which had been specially arranged for us by composer Jason Graves; also the Final Fantasy pieces were spectacular and Legend of Zelda was hairs on the back of the neck time with some John Williams-esque fanfares and also some incredibly beautiful woodwind solos.  It was also great to have some old friends of mine from The Divine Comedy playing bass and drums on a couple of numbers – we recorded Super Mario Bros Gusty Galaxy and decided to do it in the style of Neil Hannon crossed with Dynasty (the idea of Neil in big shoulder pads was enough for everyone to get the right vibe!)

Then yesterday the choir – the final session.  Lots of fun; I love working with choirs and hardly every get asked to.  It’s the way it goes – I know a lot about singing so never get to work with choirs, I know nothing at all about orchestral playing so I’m always getting asked to work with orchestras! What’s going on there?

Today …. the setlist!!! So difficult, so many possibilities but I’ve got to do it.  Everyone from the lights man, the sound man, the presenter, the presenter’s agent, orchestral marketing dept, the boss, the teaboy, the drummer … is screaming for this list.  Well politely enquiring I suppose would be more like it – it is a classical orchestra we’re talking about. 

So …. Super Mario Bros theme goes beautifully into Orb of Dreamers from Little Big Planet - but is that too much cheese in one go?  Nah – cheese it good but we should probably follow it up with something serious …. like Legend of Zelda!!!   I’m losing some perspective here …

London Philharmonic: Video Game Heroes Blog 3

Great day in Angel studios  - day two of the recording.  What a mixture – a morning of brass & woodwind, an afternoon of percussion and then drums and bass in the evening.  This was a tricky day for everyone logistically and I suspect I was not all that popular for a number of reasons!  First Angel is a slightly tricky studio to get large instruments into because of the stairs and not very big doors and then the percussion list for this was pretty epic as you’d expect I hope.  We had pretty much everything you could hit or scrape and we did hit AND scrape most of it.  This was such a fun session and the guys couldn’t have been more helpful.   There was very little setup time between sessions and one minute the room at Angel was full of percussion and the next it had all gone and we had a drum kit on a riser at the far end.

The morning was equally spectacular with mighty brass fanfares, woodwind flourishes and generally epic behaviour.  Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune made us all feel like heading off for the New World there and then, Fallout Theme just got even more grimy and wonderful and both tracks from Call of Duty were wonderfully heroic.

Putting the drums and bass on in the evening was brilliant because it started to pull things in a less conventional direction for certain tracks and I started to realise how wonderfully diverse this album is going to be.  A lot of video games involve some of adventure or exploration and I started to feel that we were, ourselves, right in the middle of an epic journey and I hope we can take that into the gig itself.  It should be interesting but we’ll only get one life so if we fall off in the middle it’s all over!

London Philharmonic: Video Game Heroes Blog 2

Just finished day one of recording with the LPO.  Phew!  Bit of a marathon but it was very cool.  I guess none of the players knew what to expect really and at this stage they are only hearing part of the story because we have yet to add in brass and woodwind and of course the percussionists (without whom no games music would be complete!)  They were brilliant and enthusiastic and even helpful after pretty much 11 hours of recording.

So, we were in Angel Studios on Upper Street in Islington, which is like a little brother to Abbey Road and Air Lyndhurst I suppose in that it is a little more compact and bijou but none the worse for that.  Excellent studio and very friendly and at least there is somewhere decent to eat and drink after a session which is very important …. But it was a really full room with about 48 string players plus some brass and woodwind in the evening.  Luckily the air-con was working.  Oh and piano and harp of course – and me conducting.

It was incredible to hear all the music coming to life; Metal Gear Solid starting it’s epic journey, Fallout surprisingly exciting (in a filthy, sleezy sort of way) given that it was not my favourite going into the sessions.  What else was good?  My new arrangements of Angry Birds and Tetris certainly amused me and there was some absolutely glorious string playing from the guys and girls in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Uncharted.  It’s going to big and beautiful when it’s all done.

Now I have to force myself to get back in front of the computer and start sorting out the stuff for the big sessions on the 22^nd August where we have the whole damn lot of them together in one room making some fine noises.  This is when it all gets very epic with some Final Fantasy favourites, some Warcraft.   Also I met the American composer Jason Graves last week and very excitingly he has agreed to send me over a suite from his score for Dead Space which is weird and wonderful.  I haven’t played this game but apparently it is super scary and even the usually phlegmatic 20 year old Joss, who is a sort of consultant for me on this, says he never plays it at night time.  Just too scary – and Jason’s score is a lovely mixture of wild and dark string effects but also some beautifully lyrical writing.  Can’t wait!

Right, back to doing battle with Legend of Zelda Theme before heading off to hear some Ravel at the Proms after which as usual I shall have to do some “not worthy” soul-searching about my orchestration because as everyone knows it doesn’t get any better than Monsieur R. (…. well it depends on my Super Mario Bros orchestration turns out – maybe I’ll give the old boy a run for his money yet!).

London Philharmonic: Video Game Heroes Blog 1

So … to begin this blog I should explain that a couple of months ago I was at Air Lyndhurst Studios when I got a call from Graham at the LPO asking me if I was interested in conducting the orchestra in a recording and concert of videogame hits.  Having thought about it for all of ten seconds I of course said yes – who would pass up the opportunity to work with such a great orchestra?  Then of course the reality sunk in – videogame hits!  What’s that all about? 

I of course wasted plenty of my younger years playing things like Defender, Meteors, Donkey Kong and then Mario Bros, Sonic, Gran Turismo and Warcraft etc..  The arcade games always had an extra draw in that I wasn’t really allowed in arcades by my mum … which of course immediately doubled their appeal!  Anyway even though I’d played a lot of these games I had not taken a lot of notice of the music …  except of course that you can’t miss the music and when you hear it again years later there is some weird Pavlovian response to it and your right thumb starts to itch, your pulse races and your eyes start to ache!

Then of course I discovered that some of the more recent games have these huge epic film scores attached to them and I began to see that there were enormous possibilities here.  More of that later …..

So one week to go until the first recording sessions with the LPO.  Are we in good shape?  Yes and no!  At this stage of arranging and orchestrating (i.e. getting the dots on the page for the orchestra) you can’t quite believe you will ever put that final note in or that last dynamic marking but in fact I think we’re going along pretty nicely.  There is also the feeling of working on this complicated jigsaw trying to work out what will be recorded where, when and with whom.  The percussion list alone runs to many volumes! But the exciting part is that I’m beginning to be sure that we can do really great versions of these tunes – they will be more epic and yet more beautiful than ever before …. I hope!  Then we’ve got to think about the small matter of doing it all live in September!