Sly cooper game informer

Those days doing both technical and composition at LucasArts were tremendous preparation for creating the music I do now. Obviously, you were pretty early in the digital recording movement, are you percent digital now? How do you feel about the digital vs. Well, my mixes still get bounced through a British mixing board, because I like the sound. I think that each has its place, and most recording is best done in the digital domain, although for some classic instruments and sounds you just want to find the original analog instrument if you can.

You also worked on some of the classic LucasArts adventure games like Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, I imagine those games were really fun to work on, just because they have such a different vibe than the usual action-movie type game experience. Do you have fond memories of working with Tim Schafer? I was really blown away by the Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time soundtrack.

Thanks, and good noticing — Mancini was a huge influence on all the Sly Cooper scores. With Thieves in Time I think we were able to really take things to a new level.

It was a thrill to be able to write so much music, and to have such an incredible team of producers and musicians to work with. How many pieces did you write? Do you work closely with the developers to learn what they need for specific gameplay segments?

Do you help implement the soundtrack in the game, in terms of streaming it in dynamically according to events in the game, or do you just hand over the tracks? With the Sony team, I just got to be the composer, which was a true pleasure. They made sure I had all the art, gameplay footage and documentation I needed to score the action just right.

And they put together everything for the recording sessions, including orchestrator, conductor and the musicians. Jonathan Mayer and Michael Bricker were my guys at Sony, and they made sure everything from initial scoring to final implementation went without a hitch. And they have a deep bench of mixing engineers. I think in the heat of mixes they had just about the whole Northern California audio crew working on it. Talk about the recording process, the recording sounds pretty live, was it all tracked live with real instruments?

Unless you count the one koto sample. The whole thing was real people moving real air. At Ocean Way Recording in Nashville. I believe we had five winds, five brass, two double reeds, horn, bass, drums, guitar, piano, 2 percussionists, mallets and 30 strings in the sessions. One thing I noticed was it sounds like a live drummer with a trap kit, almost like old big band drummers like Gene Krupa. Who played drums on the soundtrack? Yes, we had a couple of guys playing drums in different sessions.

Serious Nashville veterans. While the entire soundtrack retains that jazzy soundtrack vibe I mentioned, I was also impressed by how diverse it was. In the different time periods, the score definitely reflects the setting, be it Old West or Middle Eastern.

For example, The oud parts were played by my friend and former band mate Larry Klein, who currently lives in Turkey. The harmonica tracks were recorded in Darfur, Sudan, by my friend Damien Masterson, jazz harmonica player extraordinaire. Share Facebook Post. Twitter Tweet. Email Email. Comment Comment.

Andrew Reiner. From weekly trips to arcades to owning every system that hit the market since the Atari , Andrew has dedicated his life to video games. Email Twitter. Popular Content. View the discussion thread.