Call of Duty has been on my radar for years as this iconic video game. So to be invited to join the family of incredible composers that have worked on it and to be a part of the franchise was really exciting.

The whole experience has been nothing but joyful. I worked closely with the music director and within the technical parameters and brief we set ourselves, I had a lot of creative freedom.

We have 2 main characters – Alejandro from Los Vaqueros unit of the Mexican Special Forces and Valeria, the leader of a powerful international trafficking organisation who have their own themes.

Inspired by the Mexican location, I wanted to bring in sounds inspired by the region but not use traditional instruments from Mexico which would be too light in tone for this score.

The score is far from subtle so we needed to find bold differences between their themes. So in terms of the organic sound palette I opted for wind and bowed instruments to keep them separate sonically.

For Alejandro’s themes I discovered the Halldorophone, a hybrid electro-acoustic bowed string instrument that works with sympathetic drone strings and feedback. Each string has a dedicated pickup and it produces a cello type sound which is quite unique. There’s a very dark Moorish quality to the sound which for me harks back to the Spanish roots and Mexican connection. It’s a very rare instrument and the players I found are based in Greece. It’s a very unpredictable and difficult instrument to control as it can turn into this feedback monster if you’re not careful, which actually makes it very exciting to work with. We would have rough melodic ideas in the demos that I sent to the musicians who used those as inspiration. They would then send me back their recordings which really brought the themes to life with sometimes very unexpected surprising results. His theme had to bring out a strong sense of justice, camaraderie, and victory through struggle.

Then for Valeria we used ethnic flutes which of course you do find in Mexican music but I was particularly intrigued by the Kaval flute which originates in the Balkan region. I was always interested in the more gritty , slightly distorted way in which they were played. Valeria’s themes evoked deception, power and corruption.

On top of that we recorded bits of cello and hit and banged on various instruments to enhance the organic but also very treated percussive layers in the score.

As well as the main themes we created action suites with lots of gravitas to portray the high stakes; an emotional suite that’s moody, tense, and dangerous that’s more ambient. And stealth suites that represent the covert, infiltration, going dark type aspects of the game.

The main Modern Warfare game score is very production-heavy in the use of mangled analog synths, tough grooves, live percussion blended with electronic drums, live strings guitars, and lots of creative atmospherics. So for season 3, I was inspired by this production approach but we took it one stage further.

It’s far from a traditional orchestral score, so to make distinctive, we pulled back on some of the very treated organic sounds, so you hear the rawness of the instruments with a bit more clarity. We wanted get more emotion into the music and therefore hear more of the acoustic melodic elements in a purer way as opposed to making it sound so very electronic. We leaned heavily on the contrast between distressed sounds and clear organic elements. explore even further into that space of balancing processed with acoustic elements.

A heavy groove is a feature element of much of the music but we made the percussion sometimes unpredictable, unhinged with different rhythmic meters and not always driven by percussion. Bass driven grooves and ostinati on other instruments and synths go a long way in keeping things exciting while not competing too much with all the gunshots and explosions.

The energy and structure of each piece was designed to make you feel immersed inside what the character is feeling. There are lots of shifts and mood changes with pauses and abrupt changes in terms of sound palette within each piece.

We initially threw everything and the kitchen sink into the themes, writing with multiple layers and creating very dense tracks with lots of ideas. After that, the fun begins ! because after all the recording sessions with strings, halldorophone and flutes, , we effectively re-arranged the pieces making space for the motifs, the recorded elements and chiselling the blocks of music away to end up with tracks with space for all the amazing acoustic elements we recorded.

I brought in the LCO, the London Contemporary Orchestra, who I’ve worked with several times before. We recorded a string section at Masterchord studios in London. Their aesthetic of experimentation is something that really suited the process of this project. We had 8 players with an emphasis on the mid-lower end of the sonic spectrum to create a really dark sound.

Though all the ideas were pre-written before the sessions, we also allowed for some magic to happen where we recorded the main takes and then recorded additional semi-improvised takes in the studio utilising extended string techniques, often playing very close to the bridge where we got a very gritty dry edgy sound.

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