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Continued from page 41 am a video game composer. I started composing a lot of TV episodes for kids. I worked as a staff composer for Fox Kids between ’94 and 2000. All the ones that you don’t want to see, like Power Rangers, Beetleborgs, Eskaflona, and all the rest of them are definitely a labor of love or… Never mind. But one good thing that it gave me, it gave me a lot of craft and the ability to work with synthesizers with MIDI, and especially to work fast. In 1996, I think, I got a phone call from a gentleman who has a very radio-phonic voice [Bob], and he says, “Would you like to do music for a video game?” And I said, “No, thank you.” And that was pretty much the end of it. But Bob was very, very persistent and he told me that I was going to record orchestras, that there’s a lot involved like orchestrations, a lot about art. And I said, “Yes, yes.” And [he said] it pays this and this per minute, and I said, “Sure.” So this is pretty much how it all started. Since then, I think I’ve composed over 50 titles, and I am very happy in this field. I was going to ask later, but I might as well ask now because the topic just came up. How much does it pay per minute? Inon: Shall I say? Well, if my name is Hans Zimmer, then about $400,000 a minute. If my name is Inon Zur, it usually ranges anywhere between $1,000 a minute to $2,500 a minute. Wow, that’s substantial. Bob: I’d like to elaborate on this a little bit, because I’m sure everybody has a lot of interest in that. It depends on a number of different things, obviously, much like film and television. If it’s a top title, a franchised title, they’ve got a bigger budget, not only for the creative fee, but for the production fee—meaning live music—so on and so forth. Then, of course, the second thing is the caliber and the celebrity of the particular composer. And going back to what you were talking about, the respect given to the composers, I really don’t find it interesting, but, when you talk about the celebrity of film and TV people, they don’t know. The consumers don’t know, you know. I mean, if you walk around… They might know Danny Elfmann from Oingo Boingo, but beyond that, if you stand outside a theater and you say, “Hey, what do you think of James Horner?” or “What do you think of Allen Silvestri?” or “What do you think of Hans Zimmer?” “Don’t know.” You go to a video game store, stand out in front and say, “What do you think of Cris and Sascha?” Wow, they will know the games they scored, so on and so forth. “What do you think of Inon Zur?” Same thing. So in the pricing and the income, what also comes into play—not only if it’s a franchise title or it has a big budget—but is it a celebrity composer such as Cris, Sascha, and Inon? Yes, that adds to the salability. It’s a PR aspect that they can play into the medium, so on and so forth.

But to go back to the answer to the question, video games will pay ranging from for a low-budget kids game, all sampled music, $800 a minute, typically doing, let’s call it, 30 minutes per game. In the franchise titles for a start-up composer, probably $1,000 a minute. For a medium-ranked composer, if you will, $1,200 a minute. And for people like these gentlemen, you’re talking in the $2,500-per-minute range. And, typically, they’ll also give these gentlemen a live-music budget as well. Sascha, so they give you a fee on top of your creative fee to cover the cost of hiring a live orchestra and the studio costs, etc.? Sascha: Well, that is the creative fee, which is pretty much our fee that we charge for writing the actual score. And then you have the production fee, which is going to be the orchestra, the orchestration, you know, booking all the musicians and all the stuff. It really varies, and I think Cris knows a lot more about that than I do—about actual numbers. How much of it is done with live musicians? If you’re doing something like what we just heard, will you use 80 pieces with strings, horns—the real deal—it’s not all synth-generated or virtual instruments? Sascha: Yeah, it all comes back to the budget. If the budget is there, then we try to get an average of 65 people for the orchestra we record with. Then we do a lot of doubling to make it sound like it’s more people, obviously. It all depends on the budget of the developer, if they want to spend the money. So Cris, when you score something and you know that you’ve got a budget to work with live musicians and you’re going to have 65 pieces in the room, when you started out, did you learn how to conduct an orchestra? Did you learn how to write charts? Did you have to develop all of those skills before you could do video games? Or did you develop it all on a keyboard and then learn how to translate it into a room full of live musicians? Cris: No, I actually studied music at UCLA and got my degree in composition, so I did study orchestration and conducting. And I did do that for a while when I first started games, but I learned that usually there’s not a lot of time. I really felt this more on the composition side of things, so Sascha and I have kind of developed a team. We use orchestrators and copyists and conductors. Sascha, tell us more about how you two work together. Sascha: I come from an electronic music background… I’m originally from Germany, so I grew up with the industrial movement over there—a little bit of an electronic scene, obviously. So I’m kind of bringing that to the table, the engineering sides, all the percussion, all the custom sound design, which we put a lot of pride into that, doing like a custom palate for each game. We do go to crazy lengths to really make it sound unique. Then, Cris is doing the orchestra, obviously, but we have sort of like developed this collaboration where even I can have an idea on the piano—like a melody or something—and then play it for Cris, then he will say,

“Dude, this sucks,” and then I will hang up. No. [laughter] And vice-versa. Sometimes Cris comes back and has ideas and says, “You know, I really think that baseline could go this way,” or whatever. So it’s really a collaborative effort, and we just found a really good balance, and we can work really quickly. But I wouldn’t call the material that I do DJ. It’s more just the base of electronic, whatever you hear underneath, all the electronic elements, and then the final mixing is all done by me.

Cris: And I don’t think it’s that much of an unusual
collaboration, either. I think you’d find almost a large percentage of, not only game scores, but TV and film are done through a collaborative effort. But maybe a lot of people just aren’t getting credited. We are actually equal partners when we work together. It’s not like he just hires me to write one little thing; I’m not just hiring him for a couple of cues. We are really collaborating. Do you guys work together almost all the time now, or do you work individually and come together on occasion? Sascha: We have our separate projects that we are working on. But on all the big projects like Prototype and Borderlands, which just came out, we work together, pretty much. Bob, is this field something akin to the record industry, in that in order to get representation—to get an agent such as yourself, or any agent of any value—do you have to create value? In other words, in the record industry people have to tour and sell 5,000 CDs and get radio airplay, and get it going on their own before a record label is generally interested in signing them as an artist. For somebody who wants to get into the business of being a video game composer, do they need to land a pretty good title, or a couple of smaller titles on their own before they can come to you, or will you represent them purely based on their skills and talent? Bob: Generally speaking that is the case, that you need to have a job landed, or they are ready to sign the contract and you come in, “I’m already generating X amount of dollars per year, would you please represent me?” Generally speaking, that is correct. But that is not true with me personally… You are not going to make it out of this room alive. [laughter] Bob: Yeah, but you have to climb a mountain to get to me. And let me tell you what the mountain is.

Inon: And Sascha is the mountain, so be careful.
[laughter]

Bob: Let me tell you what the mountain is. The
greatest joy I get out of music—and we’re going to talk about this later—but where I have always found the greatest joy was in discovering new talent. That is what keeps me going. So, if somebody comes to me and says, “I have no credits. I have nothing,” I say, “Great,” and here’s the mountain. “Go listen to Sascha and listen to Cris and to Inon. If you’re better Continued on page 45
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Recording - May 2010

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