“The first section is closest to the normal practices of scoring to film, when you have access to specifically timed, linear footage to work from in the form of cutscenes,” says Jackson. “Then from there we spot the music in the game like a film – say, when you go from starting the mission riding with a song and then get to the outside of a town, the music will change in mood.”
“The second part is where it becomes nothing like scoring a film. It is usually based on 11 Stem, 4 to 5-minute loops. This is not your usual song stem session where you just split up the parts into drum/bass/guitars/melody and everything can stack on top of itself but rather it caters to what will or could happen during gameplay.
“For Red Dead Redemption 2 we spotted where an emotion would change, like getting to a certain place during the mission which may or may not have dialogue, and then instead of just using the normal stacking, we can switch to entirely different key and tempo. This gives you more of the feeling of being in a movie rather than just playing a video game.”
‘We wanted to come up with a signature sound of our own’
Jackson worked with Rockstar on the first Red Dead Redemption game, as well as on the Grand Theft Auto series. He says that the first Red Dead was steeped in spaghetti western sound, but for Red Dead Redemption 2 -a prequel set at the dawn of the 20th century- Rockstar wanted to ‘come up with a signature sound of their own’.
The result is a score that uses a lot of modern technique and Hollywood orchestral pomp but remains unmistakably Western-influenced. Helped, in part, by meticulous attention to detail on individual instruments used. Jackson says he acquired a 1920s Gibson Mandobass used in Steve McQueen’s Bullitt that perfectly recreated the ‘ominous’ sound of a bell, a nylon guitar used on Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and ukuleles from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
