Music 4 Games interviews Kenji Yamamoto and Retro Studios’ sound team
Jayson Napolitano of Music 4 Games posted an interview yesterday with Nintendo composer Kenji Yamamoto and the Retro Studios sound team regarding the sound of Retro’s latest game and Yamamoto’s latest work, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (co-composed with Minako Hamano and Masaru Tajima). It’s a rather nice read, detailing the technical, creative, and organizational processes that went into making the sound and music of Samus’s latest adventure:
As for the music for Metroid Prime 3, we knew we wanted to move in a more orchestral direction, but one that still maintained the game-y and synthetic nature of the previous Prime soundtracks. I sat down and identified some reference game and movie soundtracks and progressive electronic music to present to Yamamoto-san as possible style guides and references. Soon after I compiled my references, we found out that Yamamoto-san was coming to the states and was interested in visiting Retro Studios himself. This allowed me to present to him my musical references and style guide in person and for us to have a face to face dialog. He was very easy to work with and really understood our desired aesthetic. The cool thing was that after we got our musical direction discussion out of the way, we were able to geek out and exchange ideas about audio tools, music in general and even have a quick jam session. It was truly an honor that I got to play drums behind Yamamoto-san’s excellent guitar playing and our CEO Michael Kelbaugh’s kick ass bass playing.
Yamamoto also talks a little bit about his past work as well. Check out the full interview at http://www.music4games.net/Features_Display.aspx?id=174.