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!