Adam Lastiwka on composing sound for Gears of War: E-Day

When the picture tells you what to do

For Lastiwka, the difference between writing a soundtrack and writing a standalone piece of music is what informs the next step. "If you know which questions to ask and you have the right degree of curiosity, the score writes itself," he says.

A picture, in his words, doesn't feel like a blank canvas, because it tells you what to do. He also finds it inspiring to work with hundreds or thousands of other people's work and be the last person to put a creative flair on it.

Writing music for its own sake comes with an expected structure and form. Writing to narrative is different. "What's on the page could be absolutely insane and make no sense, but you have to make musical sense to complement that."

Limbic triggers

When he composes music for a story, Lastiwka looks for what he calls limbic triggers. These are sounds that the primal part of the brain responds to emotionally before you can consciously process them, such as thunder, an animal growling or a baby crying.

His first step in composing is to find instruments that can bend beyond their conventional sonic range. That might mean going a little lower, adding texture or offering more resonance, so a familiar instrument sounds just beyond what listeners are used to hearing. "Anything that enables you to get a little bit closer to sound, sound design in general, not just music, is going to be really, really powerful in a scoring context," he says.

Big sound from a small room

Lastiwka once had a very large studio that almost got wiped out in a flood. He moved into a two-bedroom condo for what he expected to be a short time. It turned into a couple of years, with his main studio in a 12-by-15 space.

That forced practical questions: How do you do a full string ensemble or a full percussion ensemble there? "How can I play these sounds quieter but make them sound massive?"

Research led him to DPA 4099, which he calls "a form of enabling technology." Being able to spot mic specific parts of an instrument let him "create this massive wall of sound." He thinks of it as "microscopic amplification", honing in on details of an instrument you would never hear just playing it.

Those details include the scraping of rosin over the bow, thumps, low-frequency percussive sounds and kinetic motion that would be impossible to capture with a distance mic. With the mic fixed on the bridge, right up against the string, he isolates that sound and blends it into the mix. The result, he says, is "a single instrument take that can rival a full orchestra in its power and its energy."

Bowed buck horns

One of his favorite parts, Lastiwka says, was bowing buck horns. He built an instrument with a bridge that holds any object that fits in it. Bowing buck horns on it gave him melodic content, a deep, resonant bass and a percussive, kinetic slapping effect that "just made it sound so vicious."

"It wasn't just a gimmick," he says. "It actually made something that I couldn't recreate on any other source."

What brotherhood sounds like

Lastiwka describes brotherhood and survival as the emotional core of the game, set in a world of pervasive dread where "the earth is literally caving in." His first aim was intimacy and closeness. He would almost call it suffocation: "Everything is blowing up around you, but you're just packed tight, trying to survive."

The music aims to create moments where the player can take a breath. That, he says, "required a lot of closeness in the recording techniques." The guiding question was conceptual: "What does brotherhood sound like?" The answer was to make it "close and tight and warm and binding and intimate."

Recomposing "Mad World" and "Adagio"

When Lastiwka was asked to recompose "Mad World" for a trailer, the team had already spent about two years defining the sound of the game, a process of building and breaking instruments. The request was to recompose "this iconic series song that's been part of it for 20 years," and he approached it with the sound already established for the game.

"Mad World" runs through the entire cue, not only the final moment. Everything leading up to it is a slow, stretched-out, "Gears-ified" version, with string, choral, synth and brass parts layered in a sorrowful way. He used every element he had already built for the game to recompose it.

He also recomposed "Adagio" for the third trailer, spending months practicing and learning the cello, string and bass parts as a personal challenge. Of the two, he found "Adagio" a lot more daunting. "It absolutely humbled me and made me in absolute awe of classically trained musicians and what they're capable of."

Watch the full DPA Journeys video.