Joseph Rueter: [00:00:00] If you had three things to suggest, and maybe you do this with some of your students along the way, for a composer, you're walking in, AI is going to do what AI is going to do. You're going to get cool experiences in life. You're going to make some cool stuff. You're going to make some stuff that pays the bills.
Like what are like three core principles that you take to your work that you've generated along the way that could guide another creative person in their pursuits of, creativity?
Garry Schyman: Always, do your best. You never know what some project that you think is Oh, this is not so good, but you don't know who's going to hear that.
And it's going to be an opportunity for you that will surprise you. So always do your best work. Don't take it for granted.
Nate Kadlac: Welcome to the Hey Good Game podcast where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you [00:01:00] secretly play in the cracks of
Joseph Rueter: your day. Nate, we just got off with Gary Scheiman and there's a rather hilarious part about hell that's coming up here. I was very intrigued and interested to ask him that last question and delighted with his response that was just like, do your best work.
What stuck out with you on this conversation?
Nate Kadlac: He had a few great takeaways around the process and composing music, but just a fan of his whole thinking around bringing it together. People and musicians to create scores and really trying to understand like what is the theme of this game going to be and how do I create something and articulate something through sound that kind of sets the stage and he really shares some great stories around there.
So excited to have Gary on. Let's get to the pod.
Joseph Rueter: I'm Joseph Reuter and I'm here with my co host Nate Cadillac. Today we're [00:02:00] excited to speak with Gary. Shimon, a well known film, television, and video game composer. Now, I haven't talked with a lot of composers that's for old people, like really old people, but we're excited to get into Gary's work in film and TV.
It's wide and diverse, ranging from documentaries to TLC work, which is far more than what Beethoven ever put together. Some work on maybe Revenge of the Nerds. He's an adjunct professor, so he knows this college context at the University of Southern California, the Thornton School of Music, and he's been teaching for a long, time.
So Gary's well known for his work in video game music, creating scores for like critically acclaimed stuff like the Bioshock series, earning him multiple awards. He also composed for other well known games such as Destroy All the Humans. Middle Earth series, Dante's Inferno, Front Mission Evolved, and [00:03:00] here we go, like it's a big list.
And so we're thrilled you're here, Gary. Thanks for joining us.
Garry Schyman: Thanks for inviting me. It's a
Joseph Rueter: pleasure. So much fun to talk games. I know that's not right down your path, right? More on the musical side, but what's your favorite game to play right now?
Garry Schyman: All right. it's my favorite game. And I always say this because it's true.
Portal and portal two are like my two favorite games of all time. I just think they're brilliant. Amazing. I'm absolutely genius. And. If there's ever a Portal 3, they'll probably never make Portal 3 because Steam makes Valve so much money that their incentive to make games is highly diminished, I think. that's my theory anyways.
It's oh, there's no hurry. we're making tons of dough with Steam. cause they, they make Half Life. They've made so many really cool games. It's a great developer, but where are the games? In any event, so that's my favorite. I'll say that one of my games, Bioshock, [00:04:00] is also one of my favorite games, which I played three times and not because Oh, I want to hear my music for a third time because that's that interesting to me, but because the game is just so much fun.
I haven't been playing any games for the last, Year or so, to be honest, I really haven't, I just haven't had the time I've been working and yes, teaching. I do, I have taught at USC since 2010. I teach in a program there called Screen Scoring, and it is a one year master's class for people who want to become film, TV, and game composers.
And I teach the game component of that, the game scoring component of that, and have since and I love it. I really love it. I feel like I've made friends and some of those composers have gone on to wonderful, amazing careers. And I've contributed like one 10th of 1 percent to that really happy about it.
Joseph Rueter: In that class, what are the insights students who leave have along the [00:05:00] way that they might not anticipate having?
Garry Schyman: it is, most of them come in understanding the basics of scoring the film and television to picture, as we say. But gaming, it's about interactivity, and of course the basic, the most simple basic way to generate interactive music is to just loop your music so that it seamlessly replays forever.
if you'll play some,
Joseph Rueter: yeah,
Garry Schyman: exactly. It just goes on and on,
but it has, it works. it just, some one person, let's say you're, you are playing a game. And you're, playing it for the first time and you enter an enchanted forest. Let's say it's a triple A game. So there they've spent some money on it.
So you're going to want to wander around and see this cool forest, but let's say you're playing it for the third time. You don't give a shit about the forest. You're just going to go straight for the monster and kill it and then move on to the next game. part of the game. So that one person takes 30 minutes to explore and the other person takes two and [00:06:00] a half minutes.
How do you score that? one way is a loop, of course, that just will work for anybody because it'll just go and then it fades out. the games, I want to, get your questions, but the games have interactive software that know what the player is doing and can generate audio based upon So if you run into somebody and start talking to you, the lip sync, it's in sync because the game can sync with the visual imagery.
And similarly, the game's middleware, the software that controls audio, which includes sound effects, dialogue, and music, can notice what you're doing. And so it can start music, it can crossfade to different types of music based upon how you've developed the interactive, aspects of the music. So I teach them these techniques, and also, I've been doing this for a long time, so I teach, I talk about the aesthetics, I talk about the everything about film, TV, and games that I've learned for the last, many years.
I started in the 80s. [00:07:00]
Nate Kadlac: That's fascinating. So if you were your 10 year old self, would you have imagined you'd be doing this? Is this something you've been dreaming of, for a long time or is this something later in life?
Garry Schyman: Not since 10, but since 19, I'd say after about a year of college. And I discovered that music was the only thing I wanted to study.
And then it made sense. If I wanted, especially if I wanted to be a composer, which is what I would want to do, that the only way you can make money, unless you want to teach, I do teach now, but at the time I was like, the last thing I wanted to do was teach. I wanted to score things and write music and film and television because games weren't a thing in the eighties.
they were, but the scores for Pong were, Not terribly interesting, they didn't exist. So literally those games were very different from the kind of composing I do. And it wasn't until the 90s, I actually scored a game in the early [00:08:00] 90s called Voyeur for Philips Interactive, which was, Philips is a big Dutch electronics firm.
And they developed their own hardware system, didn't last very long, but it was, it did exist, and it was called CDI, like a CD, compact disc, CDI, CD Interactive, and basically, it was a real, a true video game, because they had little filmed vignettes, and based upon your choices, you'd go this way or that way, and Boyer was like, If anybody's ever seen Alfred Hitchcock's movie Rear Window, which is a cool movie.
it's, if you like Hitchcock, it's a really cool movie. It's about a man who has got a broken leg. He's immobile. And so he's in this apartment in New York and he's looking, he's like spying on people. And he thinks he sees The neighbor killed his wife. Now he's got to find evidence for that. So that's what the premise of Gleyer was.
And so you had [00:09:00] to determine, and if you called the police too soon, the police said, oh, we can't arrest anybody. You don't have any evidence, stuff like that. So I scored that game. And, but because it was CDI, it permitted you to write. traditional kind of scoring. I had an orchestra. This is in 1993, and there were no orchestras and video games at that time because it was all like MIDI triggering, like these little synth engines in there, that eight bit sound that we now honor was because of the minimal technology that was available back then.
But that wasn't interesting to me. And some people wrote some really cool eight bit music. I'm not denigrating it. I'm just saying But all of a sudden, my, a friend of mine was making this game, Boyer, and he, hired me. And so I discovered that, and I had an orchestra for that, which was cool. And that may be, I don't know for sure.
That may be the first video game with an orchestral score ever. So that's that little tiny bit of history made there. If that means anything to anybody, then
Joseph Rueter: cool. Wow. [00:10:00] A whole slew of humans with instruments trying to work together. Yes.
Garry Schyman: Yes. You had to actually have microphones and pick up sounds and record It it was great.
Joseph Rueter: So curious. So take me through the process of scoring something. You're the, the mind behind emotional manipulation.
Garry Schyman: So when you say something, do you mean a video game? Yeah, a game. Let's do a
Joseph Rueter: game. Yeah. These are these moments where you're like, why do I feel like I feel, Oh, the music.
Garry Schyman: that is the, it all starts with this phenomena and nobody's ever explained it, why it is, first of all, no one really knows why humans love music so much, how did that help us evolve or survive? We didn't need music. We could have. Maybe it did, but obviously there's some mysterious love for this organized sound that we call music.
And so that's mysterious and it affects us emotionally in all kinds of ways, or it may just be a lot of that's really fun to listen to, or maybe [00:11:00] I hate this music. It could be any number of things. so there's first, so beginning with the Chicken or maybe the egg. It was like, we love music, and music affects us emotionally so that these are, so now that we have this now, somebody in the 19, twenties decided, even before that, you had people playing piano to film silent films, so it added something, it, it was adding something emotionally.
But then of course we had synchronized. Music to picture. And by the way, games do have what are called cinematics or cut scenes. And I'm sure you guys know that. So these are videos. These are. Short films, usually that we see at the end of a level that we're playing and it is entertaining in some way, but it all often gives us some information.
Okay. Oh, wow. We got through that, but now we've got to fight those guys, that kind of thing. And, but they often are scored. and we score those just like we would [00:12:00] score to film or television, where it is a piece of music that is tailored specifically to the exact. Moments that we are saying, and yes, sometimes we're catching and changing the music and sometimes we're just playing through that and just creating a generalized mood.
It just depends on the style that you're composing in or the thing you're scoring. Okay. But games, of course, as I articulated earlier, we don't know how long it's going to take people. To get every player's experience is going to be unique, even if it's just like a few milliseconds off everyone's, so someone's got to design the interactivity because the interactivity will inform how you compose the music.
Now, sometimes that's the composer, but often I, especially on bigger, what we call AAA games. Almost always, they have an in house audio director and sometimes even an in house music director. Someone who is really making these sorts of decisions. In [00:13:00] which case, they'll hire someone like myself, who is sometimes referred to as a contracted composer.
So I'm not like an employee of that company, but I'm hired to provide assets. Just like they would hire other companies to provide other game assets that aren't necessarily by the employees. And by the way Right now we are moving more in that direction. A lot of game companies are reducing their development teams and contracting more of their, what they need.
So because, if you have a hundred people working on a game for five years and you do the math on the salaries, it's a lot of money. So if you can get by with a core 25 or 30 people and just contract out those parts that you need. It can be very cost effective. I'm used to that model. Now, people who are working at game companies who are losing their jobs, I really feel for them because they're paying mortgages and, sending kids to school and stuff.
So that can be [00:14:00] very painful, but I'm used to that because I've always been a contracted composer. okay. So that aside. Games are all a little bit different, but the first thing you're going to do, which is, analogous to what you do in a film or television, it's like, what does the music sound like for this game?
What does it need? What's the right approach musically? And that's sometimes it's obvious and sometimes it's time consuming and it's experimentation. And hopefully they'll give you that time to experiment and make mistakes and try something stupid. That's cool, but no, nobody likes it. Might around Dante's nup.
it's set of course, in the time that, it's set in the, during the time of the Crusades.
Nate Kadlac: I, I'm curious though, going back a little bit in design, you might do a. a mood board or something along those lines to set the stage or draw inspiration from elsewhere.
Are you thinking of existing music that you're trying to theme against, [00:15:00] or are you just creating new stuff for people to react to? And like, how do you set that theme for a game?
Garry Schyman: sometimes The team, the development team has some very specific ideas in mind, and they will actually send you, maybe here's a whole, here's what we've been listening to, here's our favorite music from, and it could be from any source, it could be from classical music, it could be from other film scores, game scores, it could be pop music, it could be really anywhere, ethnic music from some culture that maybe is relevant to what they're doing, and they'll send that to you.
Other times they go, we don't know what we want. We want you to come up with something really cool. So that's, it will vary from project to project. I liked getting a little bit of sense of what they but sometimes like on Bioshock, they didn't know what they wanted musically. and the only direction I had from the audio director, Emily Ridgewell, give her credit, she was great.
She said it shouldn't sound like any other film, television, or game score. [00:16:00] So I was like, Oh, what the hell is, what do they want? That was actually something new. That's never been done before. There's something that's never been done before. So I had, I started experimenting and I, and a lot of ideas I was throwing to her.
We had worked together on destroy all humans. So we knew each other and she really liked my work. So that's why she hired me for Basha. And so I was trying stuff and she would, she protected me. She didn't like, okay, listen to this. Oh, nobody likes that. you don't want to do that. She just, she didn't like it.
She just said, nah, this is the wrong direction. I kept trying things. And then one day. I was experimenting, so I was just like putting some deep think into this. okay, this game is dystopian. It's set in a city at the bottom of the sea. It's broken down. There's crazy splicers attacking you left and right.
And there's also some kind of interesting things going on philosophically because. It was built by Andrew. Have you guys played Bioshock either? Have you played Bioshock? I've not played Bioshock. [00:17:00] It's a world built by a guy named Andrew Ryan. His acronym for his name is AR, which is also Ayn Rand's. If you know anything about Ayn Rand, she had a very strong philosophical, she was very interesting early mid 20th century, philosopher and author.
Atlas Shrugged and, other books. Poundhead. Yeah, Poundhead. So she's still influential to this day. So Andrew Ryan was this sort of, there's this philosophy, which is like really cool. I, how many, I've worked on games of this, like really not much. Deep philosophy involved, but this had that at its center.
So I thought, okay, this is intellectually interesting here. So there was that aspect of it. It was also the dystopian sort of tragic aspect that humans keep trying to create utopias and it ends up like costing 20 million people, their lives, Soviet union or whatever. And then there was also the aspect of this is there's [00:18:00] water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink, but literally there's, you are surrounded because it's a city at the bottom of the ocean.
It's like New York city. In the ocean, so that's really fascinating. And so I just was taking all these ideas and shifting them around. and I, one day I did come up with an idea that involved creating this sort of dissonance eariness, and I added a solo violin to it, those are all samples.
So not live at this point. And I thought that is really interesting. that's really different too. Also, I'm getting, Emily's, requests. It's that doesn't sound like anything I've heard before. And so I created a kind of an interesting cue doing that. I had a very nice sample that sounded really like a really beautiful violin.
There was, there's something beautiful about the violin. It gets all this dissonance that was like, there was something, they were just in a cool way. Creating this like contrast and I sent it to her and she just said, she said in five [00:19:00] minutes, she said, that's it, that's the Bioshock sound. And it's yes.
And now I had something. Okay. And it's that was the beginning of like then really finding and fleshing out the full score. So yeah, so that's, the process is sometimes as complex and difficult as that. And other times it's oh yeah, this is like a Lord of the Rings game, but they also like Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, they're two Mordor games you mentioned.
Those I wrote with a composer, in house composer, Nate Griggs, and they said they didn't want it to sound like Howard Shore's famous, I think it went two Oscars for those old Peter Jackson movies. We didn't have to do that because they had, it had its own unique score. it's complex. you're drawing on all of your musical references from your whole life that you've had.
And hopefully you have had a wide variety of these and like synthesizing them and [00:20:00] intuiting and getting some intuitive final question. You have experience of doing it for many. In my case, decades, so it's and then you just work and actually, as we work on something, that's when ideas start, that's when ideas start to come to us.
if you just really think about it and you try things and then, Oh, what if I did this? and then all of a sudden you start, you come up with something interesting. So you know, that, the process is to come up with some approach and then, My joke is I can write anything I want as long as they like it.
So they have to like, you're the team who's hired you, who's paying you a decent amount of money and has a hundred million dollars on the line here. If the game goes completely, flops, they care. you're, you are, and I tell my students this is if you want to write.
Your own music, go for it and play for your mom. She will love it to trust me. She will, your mom, mother would love everything, right? If [00:21:00] you're like working on a thing as something for somebody else, it's you, it is a collaboration. You have to like, find something that they, also really connect to and they have the added advantage.
They have a disadvantage. They don't under usually they don't understand music. They can't tell, that was, it should have been D minor, that bar seven there, instead of A flat. And if you hear that, like run for the hills, it's Oh, you're in deep to do it. they're going to dictate the music.
So let them write it. But no, almost never you hear that, but they know their game. They've been involved with that game since the beginning of its, and this is true of films too. a director will have written the scripts. Six years ago, and I've been thinking about this and it finally got the money a year ago and it's finally being made.
So they have a deep connection that you don't share because you just haven't been involved in [00:22:00] it for, since the very beginning of the process. So they often, not always, sometimes they are wrong. They really have bad ideas, but usually, and I'd say this more times than not, Their insights and wow, that music, that's cool music, but it's not working.
And then I used to, when I was much younger, I used to go, Oh God, there, I hate them. They don't like my music. And I get this physical reaction. And now it's I'm 180 degrees. I'm like, tell me more. What, tell me how I'm missing the mark. Oh, I get it. Okay. Now. The second pass, I'm much more on the mark because I missed something, or I didn't understand an emotional connection between two characters, or what the deeper meaning of something was, or just like they grew up and their parents hated this kind of music or something, that you didn't, just didn't know.
[00:23:00] And so then you can move on and Find something. And it is iterative music for any project is iterative. Sometimes I've had projects where they've liked every cue, the first version of it. And it's great. That's wonderful. there's a call, like we put version numbers on every key, every piece of music.
So it'd be version one version two. So it's there's all the ones it's I some pushback because it can actually make the score better because it'd be what I just described as. incorporating their deeper understanding, but sometimes you just are nailing it. And other times it's like iterative version after version on and subtly.
And sometimes it's Major changes, or, yeah. Or we'll fire you or, you don't wanna be fired. Obviously it's not good. I don't know. That's a long-winded answer.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. Yeah. How do you, designing or developing a [00:24:00] game, or even if you're designing a website, you can do a form of user testing and like getting.
Stuff in front of people to figure out if it's working or not. Is there a form of this in music? Can you, do you ever try to get broader feedback, from, or do you just launch this on into the world untested and just fingers crossed? Like, how do you,
Garry Schyman: the feedback you're going to get is from the development people you're working with because you've signed an NDA.
They do not want other people knowing what you're working on, what it's about, what the music is going to sound like. When I scored Bob shop, before it came out, I was being interviewed. Something like this, I was at a Hollywood bowl and I was like, Oh, I think this is an amazing game. And I've used some solo violins and make some really cool stuff.
and then I was got home and I sent, I said, Hey, check this out. I'm giving, I thought it was like doing something cool. I'm getting PR for the game. [00:25:00] They freaked out. You shouldn't have mentioned anything. And fortunately I was able to, five people had listened to it. And so I was able to get it all stopped.
don't, take it off the air. They can take it down from the internet. they are very sensitive game companies, more than film and television, I would say to talking about anything about that pressure until it is publicly. Released and their PR teams have talked about it and done all this.
so that, so you have to be cautious. So you can't really do that, but I can play it for, I can maybe play it for a friend or my wife or, my son or, but more generally, because there's a lot of music, I will play it for the audio director or the music director and get their feedback from it, for that too.
Does
Joseph Rueter: that make it extra hard to go to parties? Hey, what do you do? Can't talk about it. It's like everybody thinks you're in the military. [00:26:00] I'm a composer. I'm a composer. But I, what do you work at? Sure you are. I can't tell you what I work at. I cannot tell you
Garry Schyman: what. Unless I have a gun and I kill you right after the conversation.
no, you really, you, it is something you have to avoid. but if you've done a few things, they go, I did this. Oh, okay. You did that. Okay. So you, I guess you are actually composing. So from
Joseph Rueter: a composing standpoint, do you have a mass number of instruments that you're capable of creating music on?
Do you collaborate with certain persons regularly? take us through that process of the wrestling to find. An approach to a scene or a, like a challenge that's in front of you.
Garry Schyman: even if you are a project that has the budget for orchestras, which are very expensive or all kinds of musicians, you still have to do what we call mock up and this would be true of film, [00:27:00] TV, or games.
And basically we have these tools now. That have been around for 25, 30 years. they're not new. They've gotten better, however, and they're, we have synthesizers and percussion instruments and orchestral samples that sound very good. So it's in our computer. We call it out of the box composing.
So we can, out of our computer, we can generate some very interesting scores. And some of the scores we hear these days are like, there's not a living musician on it other than the person, the composer playing it in. So I have a keyboard, like if you saw my desk, I have a pull out keyboard that comes in and out.
And then I have a computer that's got tons of samples, literally. multiple string libraries and, brass. Woodwinds and synthesizers and percussion and odd, weird [00:28:00] instruments. I've got thousands of sounds. That I can choose from. The part of the problem is that there's so much that you, it's like, where do you start?
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. you walked right into the question. Like the question behind the question is what are we doing with AI when it comes to these systems, right? Because they have access to soundbites and snippets and work under prompts and Oh, there's some music. How are you currently thinking about either using it as part of your creative process?
Or what the future is on, different classes of games.
Garry Schyman: it worse, it feels existential. Like it's going to end my profession, 20 years, Oh, people used to compose this music, wow, that's crazy. Or, and, or maybe it's just another tool that allows us to be more creative. Probably somewhere in between where some music, some, there's [00:29:00] these things called, production music libraries, and there are companies that have like tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of music that if let's say you're making a film or documentary and you don't want to hire a composer, but you can go and you can license this music for a modest amount of money.
So I think that's called production music. And I think that's in danger right now, potentially, because, AI can generate some pretty interesting stuff is just generic sounding because they had modeled it on our music, those assholes. So we, they can sound like us, it's just if you model it on some actor's voice, then it can sound like a
Nate Kadlac: Scarlett Johansson.
Garry Schyman: Yeah, you can sound like Scarlett Johansson, make another Verizon
Nate Kadlac: lawsuit or something like that.
Garry Schyman: Yeah. It's pretty amazing. So I don't know how, what AI is going to do and how it's going to affect the future. I have no clue. Other than it could be, [00:30:00] concerning. I'm not at the beginning of my career anymore.
So I've been doing this for 40 years. So it's not going to affect me, to be honest, that much. If I retired in five years, OK, I'll go and do whatever, play golf. but for young composers I hope you're on a
Joseph Rueter: stage someplace with a guitar and a mic and a bunch of people having fun. It's or golf.
Garry Schyman: if I'm on a stage with a guitar, it will sound like shit cause I can't play the guitar.
Joseph Rueter: Oh, but maybe a piano.
Garry Schyman: I've got my piano back there. Maybe a little, a piano would be fun. And,
Joseph Rueter: It's more this is, is it Marshall McLuhan history of scientific revolutions, right? Where it's generational, like you'll see big advancements in certain kinds of technologies, but the tenured professors hold the line.
Until they're not tenured anymore, like they're [00:31:00] off the way. And then, Oh, look, Hey, we can have a scientific revolution. It feels like we might be there right now, but the tech has more force than maybe previous generations.
Garry Schyman: Yeah, AI just feels like one of those things that are unstoppable, it's like gunpowder, banned gunpowder 700 years ago or something, there's a very strong incentive to develop weapons and kill people throughout the history of man, unfortunately, it's just feels like it's gonna come and, whatever it brings, hopefully, it's like the internet, here we are, and we're having this conversation, we're all on our own, Homes and it's all because of the internet, all because in the 1970s, I think the defense department developed this basic technology that then kept getting better and better.
And I remember there was, you guys may or may not remember this in around 2000, there was a big crash in the stock market. It was [00:32:00] because we had the internet and everybody was anticipating. So the stock market went through the roof for all these tech companies. And then they go, how are you going to make money with it?
we don't know yet. So there was a kind of a huge crash and now people have really, companies have figured out a way to harness it. And so AI may be the same, maybe it'll be faster. People really figure out a way to make money with it. And when, and that's just like a gunpowder, just like humans have a strong incentive to kill other human beings with weapons, we also have a strong incentive to make money.
So it's like, how do you stop it? if you don't, it's Mutually assured destruction, the Soviet Union and,
Joseph Rueter: Nuclear weapons. So if we don't
Garry Schyman: do it, the Chinese will do it. If we don't do it, people, the Canadians will do it or whatever, the Germans.
It's
Joseph Rueter: one thing to focus it on text and then it's a whole separate thing to go okay, now photos and now you've got like comp to video pulled [00:33:00] together. And now your comments about Music being a driving force in humanity, I think it might be music that's the most kind of elusive and odd and weird to hand over to an AI system, like because it manipulates emotion and it's not emotional as its own kind of generative conduct.
I think it's like maybe the biggest sleight of hand of all of the AI stuff seems like on the music side.
Garry Schyman: I think. We're a long way from being able to replace really innovative I'm talking specifically about scores where it really worked like computer would never come up with a Bioshock score because it's so maybe now because they can analyze what I did or something, but it was a hodgepodge of different, really crazy techniques.
And it was just like, what if I did that? Wow, I could do that. And it's but I've got my, what I've listened to for my whole life prepared me. [00:34:00] And things that I like that no most people don't even know exists. The music Re I used that, which was this technique used post World War II by French composers, and they, because of the advancements in recording technology after World War ii, it permitted them to record real world sounds and create sound montages.
Now, how many people know about music? Concrete? Not many, but I did and I added it. In with this crazy sort of, and so that's what humans can do best lateral
Joseph Rueter: thinking.
Garry Schyman: Yeah, really interesting lateral thinking, and computers are more logical, obviously. And so it's harder for them, but maybe they'll, maybe that will develop, and
Joseph Rueter: yeah,
Garry Schyman: I don't know.
Maybe we'll all just all be Wally and we're going to sit in our. Little chairs with a sipping off
Joseph Rueter: drink, weighing 300 pounds. I hope it's good. I hope it's good. I hope that drink is good. some of our research here [00:35:00] uncovered maybe, an opportunity that you had along the way to conduct an orchestra on a famous road.
Is this true?
Garry Schyman: Abbey Road.
Joseph Rueter: Really?
Garry Schyman: Yes. Abbey Road is a great studio. A lot of scores are recorded there and it is a wonderful studio and the musicians that London is blessed because they love classical music. They have three or four major orchestras so that they have a very deep pool of high, very high quality musicians.
And then you have this fabulous studio. Studio one is massively big. It's a huge, it's a huge facility. And, you could get like a hundred musicians in there and record them at once. I was there for Dante's Inferno. You mentioned that earlier and that I had the, what's called the Phil Harmonia Orchestra, which is a first class orchestra and a choir, a very big choir, and just a week to record all this music.
And I was, I got to score [00:36:00] hell. Cause that's what Dante's Inferno is about. It's about it. character ends up in hell. So it's, you're just in hell and there's like incredible imagery. And I got to write wild and performed by some of the best musicians, orchestral musicians on earth. So that was just cool.
Cool as can be.
Joseph Rueter: There's a reoccurring theme where we take little snippets of phrases that people utter and then talk about them on a t shirt. And I got to score, hell would be a t shirt. I could wear that. I could legitimately wear that.
Garry Schyman: Not everybody can really legitimately wear that.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. We'll sell a couple on sneakerheads. net or whatever it is, but it's not a wide seller.
Garry Schyman: I actually, I want to make that t shirt. I get like an image from back from the game and put it on my t shirt, on a [00:37:00] t shirt that says I got to score hell and then a picture from the game and I think that'd be a great t shirt.
I love it.
Nate Kadlac: Or
Joseph Rueter: score like hell. That's, I score I
Garry Schyman: score like
Joseph Rueter: hell,
Garry Schyman: which could be interpreted two ways.
Joseph Rueter: Totally, double meaning. If you had three things to suggest, and maybe you do this with some of your students along the way, for a composer, like you're walking in, AI is going to do what AI is going to do.
You're going to get cool experiences in life. You're going to make some cool stuff. You're going to make some stuff that pays the bills. what are like three core principles that you take to your work that you've generated along the way that could guide. Another creative person in their pursuits of creativity.
Garry Schyman: always do your best. You never know [00:38:00] what some project that you think is Oh, this is not so good. But you don't know who's going to hear that. And it's going to be an opportunity for you that will surprise you. So always do your best work. Don't take it for granted. Be literate in the sense that you've read and understood, and you've seen artwork.
if you're, even if you're a composer, read great books, go to museums and look at. Great art. Don't be so hyper focused. You don't know what those things are. Cause you can be influenced by the other arts and creative people, that have go to a dance performance, something there could be really interesting.
And of course, listen to a lot of different styles of music. Don't just listen to what you're comfortable with. Don't ever do what you're just comfortable with, because I do think that if you don't put yourself. Out and [00:39:00] look for those paradigm shift opportunities. You're going to be limited. this is my opinion.
I, there certainly have been composers who have made careers and it's just been very narrow. They do the same thing their whole career. I love. Writing different styles of music wildly. And I've written wildly different styles of music from pop songs to big orchestral scoring hell and the most dissonant music, really crazy.
That scares you to beautiful music that hopefully inspires you and makes you feel good. So I love writing all that. So don't be so narrow that, You can't do anything, but I just did this one thing. And I that may be true of some pop musicians. They I don't think Bruce Springsteen is going to be listening to, Stravinsky writer spring probably.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's listening to all kinds of music from [00:40:00] all over any place.
Nate Kadlac: he's playing Bioshock right now. Who knows?
Garry Schyman: He may very well be. It may be, but in any event, I think, especially for people who score things, cause you're just going to be, if you have a full career, you're going to be asked to record and write music in many different styles.
And I think you should love that too. And I do, I really do. Enjoyed that pretty much. So be open to paradigm shifts. And one of the things, like one of the things I do in my class before I give an assignment that I think requires that sort of thinking is like, because people, if you've ever been in a class where everyone always sits in the same seat every week, even though there's no assigned seat, they sit in the same place.
So I had to say everybody sit in a completely different spot. Does that feel a little uncomfortable? At first it does. I go, good. That's a tiny little paradigm shift and that's what you should be doing with your music, feeling a little uncomfortable and doing something different. And I've never done this before, and that's really cool.
So I think [00:41:00] that's maybe good advice. I think it's not an easy profession. Any of the creative arts are not easy ways to, if you want an easy way to make a living, I don't know what it is these days. I don't know what there is. No, because he used to say, Oh, I can't become a doctor. Maybe become a doctor if you want to like that, but maybe not so much anymore.
if those are tough gigs and these say lawyers, but not lawyers are struggling to there's AI is affecting lawyers. AI is can analyze contracts now and tell you where the problems are. Yeah, there you go. I have an AI, I have an AI link for music contracts. And because you have pretty good feedback, it would be, I wouldn't, I still wouldn't want to depend on it, in 10 years, you probably can depend on it better than the lawyer that you think is doing it.
And is maybe just perusing it himself, but maybe it doesn't catch something.
Joseph Rueter: Lawyer runs find and replace better than your real lawyer, [00:42:00] right?
Garry Schyman: Bingo.
Joseph Rueter: In charge. So it charges a lot less
Garry Schyman: pennies on the dollar. So in any event. It's not easy. But you have to ask yourself the question, am I, is this what I really want to do?
Am I really passionate about this thing and willing to put in the years and maybe sometimes experience a lot of frustration to do this because I'm so passionate about it. It's just, I have to do it. My, I liked not to analogize this. historical thing where this, there was a Greek general who landed his troops, on, these boats, on, on, on the shore to go fight the enemy.
Okay. And then he burned the ships. He goes, there's one way to live, defeat the enemy or you're going to be, you're going to die. That's very, that's an intense incentive there. So I burned my shifts. I don't do it. I can't do anything else. I can wash the dishes. [00:43:00] Maybe I could be a dishwasher.
I don't know, but I don't really have any other skills. So I had to find a way. And that's, that really. All of a sudden you're being very creative and you're putting yourself out there to meet people because ultimately you get hired for the quality of your music, but also your ability to reach out and connect to people and have conversations.
And by the way, if you are well read, maybe you can have a really cool conversation about James Joyce or something. And the director is a James Joyce. Who knows? any, it can be anything and you just nerd out with somebody. And all of a sudden you're like, best friends, and then they hire you.
Joseph Rueter: I have a sneaking suspicion that you would end up a dishwasher and very quickly be elevated to line cook. And then, cause that's the standard process, right? And then very quickly into like front of house, you know how people feel and you can help them feel. Good about [00:44:00] dinner. And yeah, that's my sister.
I suspect
Garry Schyman: if I ever become a dishwasher, I hope you're going to be a line cooks. by the way, as I watched it, I think you should add a little bit more, lemon juice to that. if you don't mind me saying so.
Joseph Rueter: Oh, you come on. I will. Yeah, your knife skills get really good because the line cooks just do prep for the first week.
That'd be great. what's next for you? It seems. Like a joyful career. You're going to continue to do your best.
Garry Schyman: I'm starting a project contract to come next week. So I, and that's always a start, but you always know you're truly hired. If you have a contract that comes and you sign it and they countersign it, okay.
And then they send you some money. Cause there's always, you're really happy. You really are hired that's coming next week. And that I'll start that, and, not [00:45:00] immediately, but within a month or so. And I will be recording. with an orchestra. They're giving me an orchestra for that, that I know.
So I always, I love that part. and then I'll be recording in Los Angeles probably early next year, the 1st, January, February, I'm guessing on that. But so that is a game project. So I have that and, and continue teaching at USC. So that's, those are the only things I can count on at the moment, but I'm used to, I've lived my whole life of not knowing what's coming next, and I'm, I have gotten comfortable with it, I have to say.
I think that's important too, to like, some people, that is not the life for them. They really need to know that they have salary and health insurance. Now I get health insurance through USC, so that is helpful there. But they really do need to have that, the job. And that's the only, they don't feel comfortable.
But I I've just, this is my whole, [00:46:00] I would not probably do well in corporate. I've read to sit in a cubicle and, that, that would not be my
Joseph Rueter: one of us, Gary. Once you're happy, I've met you
Garry Schyman: once you're free range,
Joseph Rueter: you're not going back to the cage.
Nate Kadlac: if people wanted to find you online, Gary. Maybe you don't, but if
Garry Schyman: everybody is welcome to go to my website, Gary shyman. com, what are the chances of that, that my name is the same as my website? It's like
Nate Kadlac: rare these days. Yeah. Tough to find a good domain
Garry Schyman: in any event. So they can just go in theory with two R's Gary shyman.
com. And if you want to send me an email, there is a way to con there's a contact page that you can reach out to me. I respond to everybody who reaches out to me. And, happy to, to reach back and just say, yeah, sometimes they have questions sometimes. [00:47:00] They just want to say, I really liked something you did or whatever, I'm happy to do that as long as it's not time consuming or lending you money.
Mr. Scheinman, I really love your music. Could you please send me 10, 000? No, I can't do that.
Joseph Rueter: Hook your Bitcoin wallet up to this thing.
Garry Schyman: What did you say? It was a pleasure.
Joseph Rueter: And thanks for responding to our inquiry about games as we're, nosing around in the all things games where we've got a streak here on the audio side, and it's been wonderful to learn from folks like yourself and to share your stories with our co conspirators and fun and brainy games.
So my
Garry Schyman: pleasure. My pleasure. You guys are delightful chat with, and you have radio voices, you were, you would have been. 30 years ago, you would have been made, you've been great [00:48:00] DJs, I
Joseph Rueter: have to tell my father in law he was in radio. He has
Garry Schyman: a radio voice, right? I think you do too. I think you have a radio voice.
You would have been great pitching.
Joseph Rueter: There are these moments where you hear him on the radio. You're like, what the, are you in the car with me? What's that?
Garry Schyman: I think probably radio. Folks maybe had a special voice for the radio that they put on. Yes. And welcome. Oh, KJ and
Joseph Rueter: a percent, 100%. Yes. Okay. thanks for being here.
Cheers.
