Song Exploder - Brian Reitzell - Watch Dogs

Episode Date: August 6, 2014

In May 2014, the video game company Ubisoft released Watch Dogs, about a vigilante hacker in Chicago in the near future. Here's how the game is described on their website: "You play as Aiden Pearce, a brilliant hacker and former thug, whose criminal past led to a violent family tragedy. While seeking justice for those events, you'll monitor and hack those around you." It sold over 4 million copies in its first week of release. The music for the game was made by Brian Reitzell, who played drums in the bands Air and Red Kross before becoming a composer and music supervisor for films like Lost In Translation and Beginners. He also creates the music for the NBC television show Hannibal. In this episode, Brian talks about the unique challenges posed by scoring video games, where players control what happens on screen and as a result, what happens in the music. He'll break down a piece called Donovan, which he wrote for a chase sequence within the game. He also describes the instrument he created from a hundred year old piano. This episode is presented in conjunction with Polygon.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. In May 2014, the video game company Ubisoft released Watchdogs about a vigilante hacker. Here's how the game's described on their website. You play as Aidan Pierce, a brilliant hacker and former thug whose criminal past led to a violent family tragedy. While seeking justice for those events, you'll monitor and hack those around you. It sold over 4 million copies in its first week of release. The music for the game was made by Brian Reitzel, who played drums in the band's Air and Red Cross,

before becoming a composer and music supervisor for films like Lost in Translation and Beginners. He also creates the music for the NBC TV show, Hannibal. Coming up, Brian talks about the unique challenges posed by scoring video games, where players control what happens on screen and as a result what happens in the music. He'll break down a piece called Donovan, which he wrote for a chase sequence within the game. He'll also describe the instrument that he created from a hundred-year-old piano. This episode is presented in conventional. conjunction with Polygon. My name is Brian Reitzel and I am a film and TV and sometimes video game composer.

I was asked by Uvisoft. They had an idea to approach their video game like a film. They were looking for a film guy instead of a video game guy. I'm not really sure they knew what they were going to get from me, but I had done a video game previously called Red Faction Armageddon. And that was quite a challenge for me. It was my first video game. I didn't understand what I was doing, but I had the confidence after I did that one. And I really liked doing video games

because it's a completely different thing than doing a score for a film or a TV show or any other thing that I've had to make music for. This piece of music that we have up, the Donovan Chase Loop, it was a car chase. And Aiden gets to, into a car, they would give me a work order, and the work order would say, Donovan Chase Loop two minutes, and then you would take those two minutes, and you would break that down as much

as possible into as many different loops that you could. You try to do things so that it never sounds like it's looping, and that is the biggest challenge with working on a video game, is to make music that is a modular, and B is something that feels like it isn't modular, like this living, breathing, moving piece of music that is also scoring what you're doing, even though that's really an impossible feat. So you have to keep a layer of ambiguity to it.

You kind of hit the broad stroke tension. He's in a car, you know. So you make exciting things, and you try to be as compelling. you can, I guess. They were interested in doing a very electronic score. The game also takes place in the near future, you know, so to put a spin on it, I told them that I would do it, but I was actually more interested in doing it like the sort of orchestrations that were in those early Tangerine Dream records, like Zite and Phaedra, analog arpeggiators and, you know,

sequencers and things. So I started like that. and then did a delivery or two, and then it completely changed, because, you know, it just felt like it needed to be its own thing. And that meant it being a hybrid of the analog sense, but also with more orchestral percussion, you know, other things that might be unique to its sound. Oftentimes, for me, with video game music, it's propulsive. It's very rhythmic because I'm a drummer. I programmed parts on the machine drum.

It's a Swedish drum machine. But instead of using the sound of it, like kick snare hi-hat, I'm actually using it to play the keys on a keyboard. But I'm using drum patterns. Instead of the kick drum being a kick drum, in this case it would be a C or a D or whatever. And then your snare drum is playing a fifth or vice versa or a fourth or whatever. just kind of make all these really interesting intervals using the 16 rhythmic steps of the pattern.

And then I'll just change from different patterns and then you'll get something like this. So that's just the one stem. And then everything was built on top of that. So I played along to that with the bell rhythm. There's a guy in Scandinavia, I think in Norway, that makes these really great wooden rods. And I collect them and they're all different. They're different kinds of wood. and I use those on metal, which gives it kind of a nice industrial feel that sits really well with synthesizers,

but a human's playing it. So I would play that, and mostly what you're getting from that is the human dynamics, the different accents played by a human, use that track to have its dynamics sent to a modular synthesizer to trigger the synthesizer, essentially just adding another percussion instrument to it, because it's being triggered by my performance. It's automatic in time. I played real kick and snare and hi-hat to this, and then cut them apart. I essentially sampled myself.

I don't think you should ever really do that if you're making a Neil Young song or, you know, so long. But in this case, it's more percussive than it is, like rock drums. The hi-hat for me is one of the music. of the most boring things. Often drummers play it only because they can't play the drums without it and I find that to be really boring so I need to change it up or I need to take it out or whatever so I will often have lots of things. There's a shaker as well. It adds a nice color. A shaker is a really good glue. I will usually play them close to last and just listen to everything else and it makes the whole thing just feel it. I do love

electronic drum machine shakers and stuff like that but for this case trying to make people not feel like something's looped all that kind of stuff you can play on top of it helps it feel alive I give them the ammunition so they can program it however they want if they wanted to they can the minute a door is shut for example you could cut out everything except this stem or these four stems or however they want to program and as deep as they want to program it. I give it to them so they could really be sophisticated with that. But this is modular music. This is, you know, this is a very different kind of music. It's more like being a line cook in a restaurant where you have prepped up all of your

things. You've done your research. You know what instruments you were going to use. You know what the sound of this thing is. This was meant to add an element of of fear, of danger, of tension. And I'm doing it by bowing some bronze symbols. It makes that kind of elephant sound because I'm bending it as I'm bowing it. I found using bronze instruments and bowing it to pull the harmonics out of it

and pull those weird overtones out of it. It sounds like just a really scary brass section. I took the part that I had recorded with the machine drum and then distorted the crap out of it. But we also did something I rarely ever do that's pretty trendy these days, which was to side chain. I don't normally do things like that, but it seems to really fit. And it gives a nice kind of sucking feeling.

So it sounds a lot. Then there's the Bode piano. This is an instrument that I created several years back where I took my 100-year-old piano and bowed the strings. And I made my own orchestra because I was working on an indie movie that didn't have the budget for proper orchestra, yet it needed to have a orchestra. It needed strings. I just recorded a piano with two microphones. I used horsehair to bow the strings. I did each note on my piano.

Everyone I could reach. It's an upright piano so I couldn't reach through high strings. It was a very long process that I did. What happens with the piano, because, you know, the piano, you've got the three strings of your bone. As the sound decays, you hear all the lovely harmonics the way they unfold. And it's really interesting. Once you start stacking those on top of each other,

you get this really rich, beautiful, sustaining notes. sitting down and doing this with pen and paper, more like sonically sculpting. Well, in the case of this music, a lot of the melody is meant to be found by the person that's listening to it. I'm not trying to cram a melody down to anyone's throat. I'm trying to give them actually a whole lot of options. And that's one of the things that I like about the bowed piano and about writing music in this way for this kind of medium, is that it allows it to be so melodic without it being really crammed down your throat. And then you get this really rich, harmonically dense music.

And once you stack up those chords and those different timbers together, the melodies kind of come out. Time-wise, it's quite interesting. Because if you're going to keep hearing the melody the same way, even if I subdivide it eight or ten different ways, you know, I modulate it. It's still going to be that same thing. But by creating a lot of ghost melodies and things

in your music. You don't ever really hear it the same way twice. In terms of letting go of music, video game is the hardest because you don't know if it works because you can't see it. You're not in that moment and there's no way for you to know. It can be really difficult. I'm a guy that came from the world of being in bands and making music to listen to. And this is a completely different job, though it's really important to me that if you extract the music from the game and just listen to it, that it's really, really cool. And to do both is tricky, but that's the only way to do it. That's the only way to keep yourself happy, because it really is challenging to work in this way, and it's fun. All the sections and various permutations that were created for the Donovan

Chase Loop were edited and arranged to create one linear piece of music for the soundtrack album. And so now, here's that version of Donovan by Brian Reitzel from Watchdogs. SongExploder.net or Polygon.com for more information about watchdogs and Brian Reitzel, including a link to buy the soundtrack. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career.

And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album,

with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website,

Rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net, slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of songexplor at songexploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi-Kesh your way. Thanks for listening.