September 2021
Richard Beddow is an Ivor Novello award-winning composer, game audio veteran of 23 years and Audio Director at Creative Assembly, responsible for the audio on the BAFTA-winning Total War series.
Richard, you’re up…
MASA: Can you tell us how your interest in music and sound began to materialise and how your career path has progressed to where you are now at Creative Assembly?
RICHARD: As far back as I can remember, I’ve had always had a love of music, sound, video games and film. Growing up in the 80’s, the exposure to these mediums and the colourful array of pop culture at the time has been a big influence on my direction of travel. As the 1990’s rolled on, music technology and electronic music production boomed, it was an exciting time – so many new music styles and fusions. Through these times I played keys, drums, learned synthesizer, sampler and MIDI programming whilst starting my compositional journey. I formally studied music and performance, and moved to London to complete a degree in music. Music, sound and its emotive power, coupled with the creativity around it, resonated so strongly with me that by my university years I already knew I wanted a career with creative audio at its core.
I have worked professionally in audio production for 23 years, both in-house and as a freelance. My roles have embodied everything from content creation, production and supervision duties. I was fortunate enough to get my first ‘job’ working for the development studio Criterion in Guildford UK, mostly working on the then new SEGA Dreamcast console and PC projects. I worked on a variety of video game projects during my earlier years with various studios and publishers, on different platforms and technologies and also started to produce music for companies including the Bertlesmann Music Group through their BMG Zomba label.
My journey with Creative Assembly started in 2006, when I joined and established the UK audio operations. Over time the studio grew. I believe there were around 80 staff when I came on-board, now 15 years later they are over 800! The firm’s growth supported developing more concurrent products, expansions and downloadable content releases. As a result, the audio department I founded changed and grew, becoming more specialised and streamlined. At present I direct the 23-person audio department for the multi-award-winning Total War franchise.
Working in video game audio has been an incredibly exciting and rewarding experience. It’s a unique artform, blending creative and technical worlds with interactivity and storytelling, creating an end user experience not rivalled by other mediums.
MASA: You’re currently working on Total War: Warhammer III. What can we look forward to this time? Anything you can divulge about the audio and your compositions?
RICHARD: Warhammer III is the biggest and most demanding video game I have worked on to date – the sheer scale of it is huge. Representing the final part to the trilogy, the audio styling has to keep consistent with the direction we established in the previous titles, fusing the pseudo-medieval and fantasy genres together. Regarding the scale of challenge for the audio department, the enormous success of the first two instalments has really pushed our ambitions as a team to unprecedented heights; from the narrative, to the playable races and gameplay features – everything aims to be bigger, bolder and better than what has come before it. Musically we have created around 7 hours of music, which we produced, recorded, mixed and implemented over about 15 months in addition to creating v2.0 of our Ambient Music System and its content, which generates real-time music as the gameplay progresses. Our dialogue team had to cast and record around 100 actors, voicing no fewer than 140 highly stylised and designed performances to represent some of the most iconic characters and creatures to feature in the Warhammer fantasy universe. In terms of sound design effort, we saw another epic undertaking to support the detailed animations and sheer quantity of characters, vehicles, magic, weapons, UI and more. This culminated in excess of 1500 days of creative and technical effort! Finally, in terms of in-game cinematics (linear movies) we had around 60 minutes of footage to support with sound design, music and dialogue.
MASA: Ok, wow, what an incredible project to work on. Just generally, how do you initially decide what you want to achieve with the music for your projects? With more than one composer is it a challenge achieving a consistent sound?
RICHARD: The process with every project begins with a period of learning about the game itself, to understand what the aims, pillars and aspirations of the development team and game director are. During this period there will be a lot of conversation between the game director and myself as we explore these areas. Sometimes these might, even at an early stage, involve discussion around musical ideas or concepts that the team already think might be interesting for us to explore – this can be in the form of particular styles that they feel resonate with their view of the project, or something more conceptual. At other times it can seem to be more nebulous and we’re really just working from the aspiration for the game and what we’d like to achieve with the music. Ultimately, my aim through this process is to distil the results of these conversations into something that can fuel a musical research phase, where I can begin to determine what might, or might not, work. With a focus on originality and creativity, I always strive to bring something new to each project, helping bring a unique sonic identity to the game – sometimes this can require a leap of faith. The musical direction is often informed as much by the notion about what you want to avoid or not do as it is about what you think you might like to do.
When you are dealing with projects that can require a fairly sizeable quantity of content delivering or that might require content to be developed in a shorter time frame, having a team of content providers to work with you is essential. As a composer, and producer/supervisor I’ve always enjoyed working with creative individuals and honing our produce. However, being able to speak the language with the music team enables a shorthand and fluidity to get the best from the team. We’ve learned a great many things along the way to help with this, but some very simple and early learnings revolved around ensuring tonality and style was clear, either through creating reference tracks or themes to use in the projects, or generally discussing things in a broader aesthetic context. It’s been important to be consistent with feedback both on the creative/compositional front but also on the technical production regarding MIDI programming and mix craft.
Typically we record our scores live so the final output has a uniformity that comes from that process, but we also ensure that composers, orchestrators and engineers conform to agreed standards with regards to libraries, plugins, setups and deliverables.
MASA: Technological advancements must have allowed the sound on the Total War franchise to develop drastically over the last two decades since the first release? Can you pinpoint the main ways you’ve seen this happen?
RICHARD: There have certainly been technological advances which have helped improve the audio experience since Total War’s early years. Notably the move to Audiokinetics Wwise audio engine was substantial in improving our capability and simultaneously freeing up programming resource for other areas of development. Wwise put more direct control in the hands of the audio practitioners, speeding up workflows, implementation and mixing. Wwise also added new things to our tool set that were not available to the same degree beforehand such as a well-equipped interactive music system, advanced and simplified DSP setups, profiling and a GUI for implementing and balancing audio.
We also further developed our in-game audio technology, which sits between Wwise and the game. This allows us to create the most immersive audio experiences that we can, yet maximising the clarity we can achieve. We refined our offline tools for tagging audio to our characters, entities, effects, and environments. The games themselves naturally have evolved to be more complex and detailed over the years, which has necessitated the development of the audio systems to support them, in addition to the explosion of content that has been needed. Our systems involve dynamic loading, advanced culling, prioritising and spotlighting functionality alongside the more typical ducking systems and dynamic EQ’ing, carving space out for featured audio elements and helping to focus the mix.
Total War has now evolved to incorporate multiple dynamic music systems. One found on the battlefield, which utilises playlists of pre-authored alternative music mixes that can be deployed in response to game play events. The other system is for the turn-based strategic portion of the game. In addition to playing regular music tracks, this generates music in real-time from collections of pre-authored parts assembled during game play, responding to the player actions or game play events, with the goal of maximising variety and supporting the ebb and flow as the drama unfolds.
Finally, the development of test maps, in-game audio debug tools and other integrity/test based functions have helped us refine our technical setups and quality assurance processes. This ensures that our product is as optimised, solid and complete as possible.
MASA: Can you give us details of what roles make up your current audio team?
RICHARD: The audio department for Total War at present is a 23-person division. This consists of sub-discipline teams generally covering sound design, music and dialogue. Supporting these teams we have audio programmers, quality assurance and production staff. On a typical project you’ll find an Audio Director, Lead Sound Designer, Lead Dialogue Engineer, Sound Designers, Dialogue Engineers, Music Designers, Audio Programmers, Audio QA, Administration and Development Managers. We also work with a wide array of external partners across most aspects of audio production covering music production, orchestration, live music recording and mixing, sound design, foley and location recording, dialogue production and linear post-production.
MASA: How much of your music output do you tend to record? Do you have favourite music libraries you like to use?
RICHARD: Empire: Total War (2008) was the first of our Total War titles to feature wide scale live ensemble recordings. Since then, the majority of the compositional output for Total War projects is recorded live, either with orchestras and choirs or recording specialist soloists and session musicians. A typical major Total War project has around 3.5 hours of bespoke music, and on top of this we may create alternative mixes and/or utilise the Ambient Music System to sustain many hours of gameplay.
In terms of templates, tools, software and libraries, it really depends on the game and what type of music style we are producing. For instance, on our most recent project, Troy, our style could be described as hybrid contemporary. Much of the sound would be derived from using synthesizers (real and virtual), cinematic and atmospheric sounds, textures and grooves with world and orchestral elements layered on top. The Cubase template I use for writing is huge, and I make use of libraries from many of the main sample studios such as Cine Samples, Spitfire Audio, Orchestral Tools, East West. We also do a fair amount of custom recording and sampling sessions for the projects. I have a fairly extensive armoury of hardware / software synths, samplers and drum machines too which make their way into the productions as and when called for.
MASA: And last but not least, can you tell us what you were looking for when judging this year’s Music+Sound Awards?
RICHARD: In broad terms I was listening for a sense of dynamics, variety, consistency, mix balance and finally, creativity.
MASA: A really enlightening chat Richard, thank you so much for your time and for sitting on the jury this year. We await, with bated breath, your future work…
To find out more about Creative Assembly’s titles, visit their website here.
