Tom Salta: A Video Game Composer In Control — Scoring for Prince of Persia, Red Steel 2

May 16th, 2010 by Trenton

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NORWALK, CT: All work and no play make it mighty hard to be a successful video game composer. So Tom Salta plays and plays and plays, and the more he does it the better things seem to go for him.

Tom Salta

First off, he plays with ideas. Possibilities – musical, technical, career, life – are like so much putty in his hands, as he imagines a future and then simply makes it happen. Salta has progressed smoothly from the role of music performer/programmer/producer (Peter Gabriel, Junior Vasquez, Everything But The Girl, Deep Forest, Mary J. Blige, Sinead O’Connor), to becoming electronica artist Atlas Plug, to his current status as one of the top video game composers in the business.

Then he plays with music. Originating from his Norwalk, CT studio, his latest scores for the Nintendo Wii video game titles Red Steel2 and Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands (from Ubisoft) pair up perfectly with the awesome visuals and drama of these games. Standing alone, Salta’s soundtracks are transporting experiences that are intense, subtle, inspired and gripping works of art in their own right – matched with the game play, they make magic.

Salta’s other game scores are eye-openers as well, including Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1&2, Crackdown, and many more. Film/TV/trailer scoring credits also include the likes of Toy Story 3 (Web Trailer), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (theatrical trailer), Marine Corps’ recruitment trailer “America’s Few”, and Volvo.

Most important, Salta plays video games. LOTS of them, controlling the controllers and getting inspired by each title’s action and creators.

He’ll also play the crowd — he’s the keynote speaker for this week’s three-day Music and the Moving Image Conference put on by NYU Steinhardt (speaking 10:00 AM Friday, 5/21 at the Loewe Theatre downtown),  starting May 21st. First, he gave SonicScoop an inside perspective on how to always move forward creatively.

Q: You seem to have a pretty expansive composing practice now. How did your career unfold?

A: The first fifteen years of my career were based around the music industry — programming, recording, working on records, and generally it was not music-to-picture. I had started my pro career touring with Bobby Brown as his keyboard tech and sound designer, then with Mary J. Blige.

After years of that, I decided I’d rather be in the studio where I could be signing new artists and developing new projects. In that time I worked with Junior Vasquez doing dance remixes, and even collaborating with him on Cher’s Believe album. It was interesting and a lot of fun.

But right around 2001, shortly after the original Xbox came out, I started playing games like Halo and Rainbow Six. Given the fact that I was an avid video game player — a gamer since the pre-Atari 2600 days — it was always a big hobby of mine, but never in a million years did I see these two worlds colliding until 2001.

Then I had my epiphany: “This is what I need to be doing. I’m not feeling the record thing anymore.” I kind of fell out of love with it, and in love with pursuing a career in creating music for video games. But that was a scary proposition after 15 years in one industry, switching careers. I had a wife and kid.

I decided I better come in strong, so I started attending the game conferences, and I did a lot of observation. I got the impression that composers were perceived to be a dime a dozen, but artists were considered cool. I decided, “Why don’t I become an artist?” So I developed Atlas Plug, an alter ego that I used to break into the video game industry. I put out an album of electronica orchestral music, and it was intended to be licensed in video games, TV and film trailers.

Q: Wow, not quite the same as Steve Guttenberg posing as his own agent, but still a switcheroo. WHAT HAPPENED?

A: The plan worked. Before I was even finished with the album, Microsoft approached me and wanted to license four songs for video games in 2003. More licensing followed, and gave me some credits to my name to launch as a game composer. The first major game I ever had the chance to score was Need for Speed Underground 2. The music for that was very similar in style as for Atlas Plug, and that’s how I gained the attention of Electronic Arts. This is where I wanted to end up.

That’s where it all started, and since then I’ve slowly gained more credits, doing various video game scores of every kind of style you can imagine. That’s what I love to do: break into these new, uncharted territories of musical styles.

Q: When I reviewed your credits, I was struck by that diversity you achieve – you see everything from Wild West to electronica to military to classic Japanese. How can you switch gears from style to style with such authenticity?

A: When I was pitching the original music for Red Steel to Nintendo for approval, the first thing I did was create this Japanese choral piece, sung in Japanese. It was authentic in every way, and when it was presented to the executives at Nintendo, they assumed I was Japanese when they heard it! I take that as a very big compliment.

But I love immersing myself in a style. I compare myself to an actor. There are some actors who take on a role, and totally morph into a character you’ve never seen before. That’s the style of composer I try to be.

When a session comes up, I try to grab opportunities to reinvent myself, and/or find a musical style I’ve never done before. That comes from a lot of years listening to so many different styles – for 15 years in my career, I was never stuck on just one thing, kind of like the Forrest Gump of the music industry: “How did I get here?”

I was certainly not a Japanese expert. But I studied it. I’m very close to New York City, which is fantastic, because you can find anybody or anything. I called the Japanese embassy, looking for Japanese artists and singers. Eventually, I found three Japanese opera singers, plus two other musicians there who I recorded with. I asked them to teach me the core things about what makes Japanese music Japanese. I enjoy the adventure of it. It’s an excuse to explore things I’ve never done before. It’s a lot like traveling the world, but the world is music.

I’ll be explaining more about that experience when I do the keynote address for Music and the Moving Image at NYU Steinhardt  on May 21st.

Q: We music types are aware that not all composing is the same. What is unique, especially technically and logistically, about scoring for video games, as opposed to film and TV?

A: The world of video games is definitely a very unique market. People who are into games, this is what they live and breathe. There’s a culture about video games. So if you’re interested, at least try and learn to play them, or watch someone who does. Learn the vocabulary and style, and attend some events and conferences that are about video game audio. It’s a field, another world. There’s a completely different set of rules, players. It’s its own community.

That’s the research part. But as far as the practical, let’s-get-down-to-making-music part, basically video games are a more non-linear experience. That’s the biggest difference. Watching a movie or a TV show is a linear experience: Beginning, middle and end. Video games have the same beginning, but fifteen middles and ends. And things jump around and last for different lengths of time. A level of a video game could play out very differently. I could get through it fast, or get killed in a battle. The music has to adapt to that.

That can be done in many different ways. The simplest way is to compose shorter chunks of music that can connect, like musical Lego blocks. A :60 battle cue, depending on if you win or lose, can have two different endings.

Or you can have layers of cues, where the audio engine of the game can support multiple streams of music, and the game mixes them depending on the status of the game. For example, there can be three intensity layers, and when a few things are going on, you have the first 5.1 stream. Then you’re fighting some enemies, the second layer comes on as well, maybe takes out the first level, and when you’re being bombarded the third layer comes on as well. Maybe the first layer of music comes out then — it can be different every time.

It often requires flowcharts, which would freak out most traditional composers or musicians. In a nutshell, you have to think of music non-linearly. Consider the key, tempo and all the places it could reconnect so you could say, “Hey, I meant to do that.”

And the other major thing is we don’t always have the luxury of seeing what we’re scoring to. Many games take years to put together, and music is often done right at the end. So when a composer does the music for games, it’s quite common that they hand in the music, and the audio team will implement it into the game. Those are the people who decide where it stops and starts, and they sometimes chop it up into segments. That’s implementation, a part of the process which the composer often has no control over.

Q: That’s a really concise video game audio primer, thanks a lot. So, do you think an increased amount of video game work is now in the offing here in NYC?

A: In my case, I don’t depend on local work. Most of my clients are remote. Now if I had to plop myself down in the ideal geographical location for video games, I wouldn’t pick New York. But where would I pick? In the US, maybe LA.

But depending on who my clients are, I might live in another country. Ubisoft is based all around the world: Romania, Paris, Shanghai, Vancouver, Quebec City. That’s common for a lot of big companies like Ubisoft and EA, they’re spread out all across the world.

But in general, a career in video game music doesn’t require as much face time as does film composing. In film composing, more often than not, the director might want to sit in with you, or have you stop by the scoring stage. That’s not as common in video games, so as long as they don’t purely depend on the local companies to get the work, I’d say there definitely is hope for NYC video game composers,. – David Weiss