Tom Salta: Battle Score
You’re Captain Scott Mitchell, commander of the Ghost and Special Forces allies. Deep in the urban chaos of Mexico City, you deploy your team of soldiers in a desperate quest to save the president of the U.S., recover stolen nuclear codes, and eliminate a vicious band of renegade soldiers. You’re playing “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter,” the latest installment in Ubisoft’s squad-based action franchise video game.
Your heart pounds as you battle through GRAW’s high-stakes story line — a pounding made all the more intense by the accompanying music, which actually changes in-game as you play. “This is the first time in the Ghost Recon series where music is used in-game for dramatic effect,” says composer Tom Salta. “It makes the single-player experience very exciting and cinematic. Interactivity is the buzzword for today’s gamers, so GRAW is truly a next-gen experience.”
Salta is a composer and producer with an impressive list of game credits, including the original score for “Cold Fear” and the cinematics for “Need for Speed Underground 2.” He has also created electronic and orchestral recordings (under the moniker “Atlas Plug”) and film, TV, and commercial scores. He’s known for powerful melodies that blend lush grooves and hard-driving electronica. And he does it all with Logic Pro 7. “Everything I write and mix — main themes, secondary themes, all the pieces and cues — starts and ends in Logic,” he says.
Jubilation and Panic
Creating an interactive score requires the strategic brilliance of an advanced warfighter. “In the previous Ghost Recon games, the only music was in the cinematics and menus — there was no music during game play,” Salta explains. “But in GRAW, the music is used dramatically throughout the in-game experience — it reacts and adapts based on how well or badly you’re doing in the game.”
Building in that fluidity demands careful planning. “I have to consider the interactive nature of the music right from the beginning because there are certain things I can and cannot do,” says Salta. “I have to be careful, for instance, of the keys and tempos I work in.”
Working with Ubisoft artistic director Manu Bachet, Salta structured the music for maximum responsiveness. “We decided that every main level of the game would have several intensities of jubilation and panic,” he recalls. “I wrote the score so that at each bar, if the music jumps over to another intensity — whether positive or negative — it sounds natural.” That’s necessary, he adds, because “every player is different. You might be doing badly, then start to do well. You’re caught in an ambush or you reach a checkpoint, and your fortunes turn better or worse. So depending on how it goes for you, the music switches.”
Tom Salta caresses the keys. Photo by Enid Alvarez.
Clear Direction, No Picture
Salta appreciated getting clear artistic direction from the creative pros at Ubisoft’s Paris headquarters. “I was asked to compose a high-speed, action-oriented score that combined a traditional Hollywood orchestral style with memorable melodies, high-tech elements, and strong percussion,” he recounts. The client described exactly what pieces of music were required, such as Panic level 1, 2, and 3, Jubilation level 1, 2, and 3, and so on.
However, Salta had no completed visuals to work from. “As is often the case when you’re scoring video games, I didn’t get to see the finished game as I was working on it,” he notes. (To avoid further extending long development cycles, game companies get the composer started before their product is finished.) That, says Salta, is the most challenging aspect of his task: “I have to draw on my experience to imagine how the music and the visuals will work together.”
For most of the GRAW score Salta worked from scenarios, rather than scripts. “You’re scoring an emotion,” explains Salta. “They might say, ‘We need a one-minute cue that plays when things are not going so well; the gamer is not sure what’s around the corner, but it’s not yet at the point where all hell breaks loose.’” The composer’s challenge is to translate each sequence of possible events into a musical feeling that heightens game play.
