Star Citizen Live: Let's Talk About Pedro

Yeah, it was 2012. I can tell you it was just wonderful. I was still not a father, and I was going to the echo with my wife to hear the first heartbeat of my son. It was the first time. It was still October 2012. And I remember that I went there, which I was curious, and I heard this heartbeat for the first time. And I don't know how many of you that are hearing this are fathers, but that really struck me deep, like, wow, there's a human living being there, which is not me or my wife. And on the same day, I read about Star Citizen, because I was a huge Wing Commander fan when I was very little. I played Wing Commander One many times. And also my father did, he really liked it. And I say my father did because meanwhile he passed away at that point in time. And that's when I decided to write music. And it was curious then when I myself was going to become a father, I felt that I should email Chris Roberts to say hello, something like that. I don't know what I wrote. There's no good words. It's just a bit of luck and whatever happens. And for some reason, I wrote him an email. It was very short. It was, hi, my name is Pedro. I really liked what I saw. There was a couple of images on the internet, on the Kickstarter page as well. And I would love to pitch for your project. I think it's a wonderful idea to do this. It just rang a bell inside me, a really strong one. For some reason, it was coincidence, but he actually replied to the email. I took my shot. I actually had just had a major concert piece premiered, and there was beautiful footage of the orchestra with the choir with the Requiem, which I wrote early in 2011, and it was premiered in early 2012. So I showed him that, which I think he also enjoyed. So that helped as well. And yeah, so the journey started there.

And it's curious that even though my task was to write what would become the main theme for Star Citizen that many of you must have heard by now, my first real test, because up until that time I was just making some pieces that weren't being shown to anyone but the internal team, was when the first 300i commercial came up. I really liked it. It was me, Hannes Appell, the cinematic director, and Chris Roberts, and sound design. And the music was to be done one week before my kid was going to be born. So it was very emotional. I literally finished writing that cue and sent it, and then I became a father. So I think the Star Citizen journey started in a very special moment in my life. It became even more special, maybe because of that, I don't know. So in every project, but in this one in particular, it's very close to my heart. It was very sentimental. I think that's the music. Music is about feelings, in my opinion. And for some reason the commercial was quite successful, not because of me, but also a little bit because of me, perhaps. The funding in the game increased a lot after that commercial. And then other commercials came after that. And I think the project grew into something much larger and much more fantastic, in my opinion, than I initially imagined it would be. So it's been an honor to be with you.

And I have to say this before ending this long conversation. Seeing people that after all these years, after each track that I've been making, some people at least say, oh, this is my new favorite track or something. It feels good because it gives me a pressure that I don't want to give the feeling that each track that comes feels like something generic. I really try hard. I put a lot of effort into trying to make each zone and its location have a soul. That's what I try to do. It's never use recipes or reuse the stuff that's been done in cinematic music, or at least avoid it at all costs, and just try to create something unique that people enjoy eventually.

It is Star Citizen Main Theme on YouTube. If you write that, at least it will come up. I did write other themes for Star Citizen a bit later on, which I gave some names so we would know. One I enjoyed a lot, and I think Jared also enjoyed, was a homage to '80s sci-fi, which we called the Arena Commander theme. I think that was very cool as well. I love that one. I went back to my roots. All the movies that I saw that really inspired me as a kid, and probably Chris Roberts as well: Star Wars, The Last Starfighter, which was a great movie as well. I really loved that one because I also loved games. I've always been a gamer. Star Trek a bit as well. But more Star Wars, Last Starfighter. Those movies were very influential for me.

You don't hear any Last Starfighter at all in the Arena Commander theme? No influence at all?

No, I don't think so. I don't remember the music from The Last Starfighter, at least. But probably there is some here or there. But when I did it, I thought it also has a bit of Superman influence from John Williams. It's not direct influence. It's just the tone, the contour of the music, if you will.

I don't know if any of you ever played games on the Amiga, but that was a very fond memory I had with my father. He was a music fan, he was a game fan, he was a sci-fi fan, like a nerd, but he never composed or played anything. But his passion passed on through me. I studied and I was able to execute what he loved. And he loved the Amiga. We played together so many hours of Amiga games, Commodore Amiga. There's some great stuff from that time. For example, Shadow of the Beast, that's something that comes to my mind right now. It was an amazing soundtrack at the time. You can see there were limitations on the Commodore Amiga, but it was quite astounding for the time that we were living in. Actually, it was on the Amiga that I started writing music. My first track was written on the Amiga, and my father was able to hear only the first track in his life.

And I remember a reference that I actually used in Star Citizen, which I really loved, was a game called The Chaos Engine. It was a beautiful shoot-'em-up game with two characters at the same time. We could play with two players. I used to play that with my father and with friends. And there was something there that when you fired up a node, it would say, node activated, node activated, with a very particular tone and character in the voice. So when I did the music for the first racing module in Star Citizen, I called it Speed Activated. That was the name of the track. And in the music, when you get to the climactic part before the music starts with the kick, I pronounced that sequence, but said 'speed activated'. And you can hear me saying that, but I EQ'd it a lot so it would sound like it's from the game, from The Chaos Engine. I always like to bring into every piece that I do a little something that is kind of a small secret for me. So that's why it's called Speed Activated. Also in that particular track, I wanted to bring in the composer from The Chaos Engine. I wanted to use the kind of bass he had in his original soundtrack, but sadly he passed away quite many years before, so I actually spoke with his brother. But since he passed away, I couldn't use anything, so I had to do it. But at least I said 'speed activated'. So that was a reference or a homage to a great Amiga game. Another great Amiga game that I love, but which I still haven't used as a direct reference, and I will once we get a game inside Star Citizen that looks like it, maybe it will never happen, was Speedball 2. That was from The Bitmap Brothers as well. It was a fantastic game.

Other good references that are very strange to realize: I like math a lot. I always loved math at school. So in the music I do, not always, but many times, I try to create some patterns in melodies or rhythms that have a meaning in math as well. I can remember the ArcCorp theme that I wrote. I noted down the upward intervals, and the sum of the first two, which are prime numbers, gives a second number, which is also a prime number. Since ArcCorp is such a perfect city, a mathematically perfect city that fills the globe with construction, and it requires a lot of engineering to merge all this stuff together, I thought it was a cool way in the melody to also reflect that mathematical perfection, if you will, in the music. You don't have to think about it. I like the melody by itself without the math, but it also has math. I wrote that in the description of some YouTube video. No one would ever get that one if I didn't explain it, because I think it was too nerdy. But I enjoyed doing that. So it has some strange references, perhaps.

That's, I don't know. I seriously don't know. Do they feel sad? My goodness. I think it's about being emotional. I think that state between sadness and hopefulness is the state where you are passionate and hopeful about something. There's a bit of sadness about being passionate, and I definitely feel passionate about this game and music in general, but also about everything that I go into. I usually have to feel a lot of passion. Otherwise, I don't think any good music would come out of it. I think the secret is to be delicate, but sometimes less is more. At least that's a bit of my motto. I can go big in songs, really big, but I try to say the most with as few elements as possible. So that fragility of the fewest elements possible maybe gives the very slight passionate sadness or whatever.

I think when it comes to music, there is of course the emotion that an artist is trying to infuse into it. But the wonderful thing about music is there's also the emotion that it elicits in other people, and they're not always one-to-one. So obviously the person who submitted this question is going through a broad range of emotions when they're listening to your music. That may not necessarily be what you've infused it with, but it elicits that response in those people.

Exactly. Above all, I think the worst thing that can happen is when you write something that doesn't ring a bell to anyone. They just hear it like, oh yeah, it was cool. What I always try is to never reuse recipes that have been used, tested and true, or at least I avoid them. Or if I am requested to use some recipes, I try to reinvent them in a new way. Because if people listen to something new, and above all, truthful from you... music has to come from you. It cannot be something that you just do to fill the agenda because you have to do this and that. Well, sometimes it has to be, but I think for Star Citizen it would be a disaster if the music came out as just music where you'd say, oh yeah, I usually hear this here and there, and it doesn't give you a connection. Because it's different, you pay more attention. And if you pay more attention, maybe it's emotional and makes you feel something different, or pain, and makes you think about something. But that's good. Thank you. I think that's a good compliment. I like the description of being both sad and hopeful. I think that's not a bad description at all.

Well, it depends on who I'm working with. Star Citizen has had different audio directors along the way, and there are also the cinematics from the commercials, which also have directors, and directors have a completely different way of thinking about music from audio directors. When I'm working with audio directors, they tend to be a bit more clinical: I think this will work with this ingredient and this ingredient and this ingredient, so can you please try to make something with these ingredients and come up with a nice dish for me to taste? Which is kind of a challenge, and it's great and I also enjoy it, but it's always a challenge because you're restricted to those ingredients. But they have been working a lot with the team, they speak with the art team and they know best what works, because at the end of the day I'm here to serve the project and to make the project successful, so the artists and Chris Roberts see that the creation is actually what they want.

When I work with the cinematics team, I'm given a bit more freedom. The descriptions are more like, I want this to be hopeful, or sad, or dangerous, or adventurous, do your magic and let's see what happens. You have more options, so you wonder what ingredients you'll use, but I choose the ingredients, which is also good in a way. For example, when I scored The Reunion, which was a very long one and a very hard one to score, it was not a direct request, it was me. I said, I think I'm at that point in my life where, even though it was made in MIDI, so maybe at some point we'll get a live recording for the commercial but not right now, I wanted to write something consistent enough to be compared with the likes of John Williams. It was a self-imposed challenge. But I felt it really made sense because it was a commercial for a ship that had a kind of Star Wars vibe to it. I didn't want it to sound like Star Wars, so I literally tried to avoid the trumpet staccatos, for example, those kinds of ingredients that speak loudly of Star Wars, so people don't think, oh, this is Star Wars. It's a wonderful device that creates tension, but it really became linked with Star Wars.

When I work with Chris Roberts, it's pretty different. I really like it. He gives me the feelings he wants, like a director, because he's a director after all. But he also gives me some cool references: oh, I would love it if it could feel like Out of Africa from John Barry mixed with whatever from Hans Zimmer or from Jablonsky, film scoring stuff. He wants a mix of two or three movies together, which is not one ingredient. It's a complex group of ingredients, and it's kind of a puzzle game to see which ingredients from each of them come together, work well and serve the purpose of what he wants. So that's also very cool.

I know exactly what I try to do, in a very simple way, though of course it always depends on the people who are in charge and what they want. Remember that the composer is not free to do whatever he wants in any project at all. He has a hierarchy of people that need to say, OK, we move on to the next phase. What I feel Star Citizen is the most is space. I've been more and more focused on locations that are planetary based, but space itself is orchestral. That was my initial goal, and I still hope that we can push it more and more orchestral, because I think space is eternal, is grand, and when I'm in space, I want to hear that lush orchestra that feels a bit like a modernized John Williams vibe. Of course, there are some synths that go with it, so there's a bit of modern spice around it, but I will never consider it to be completely synth or a hybrid score.

When you're in locations, I think that's the opposite. I try to bring in much more hybrid, more alien elements to the orchestra, because you have the culture of the place mixed with the space from the orchestra. As if there is orchestra everywhere, and each dot, which is a place or a zone, has its other elements, and they mix in a bottle and become like a cocktail of different elements. I hope that once we get some of the most important hero locations done, and once I score much more of the space element of our game, it really becomes evident. Of course, there will be synths and some hybrid cues for diversity, but in general you'll feel that when you're in space, there's an orchestra going with you that feels, for example, like E.T. I also like it when ambient music feels a bit more traditional or a bit more contained. Maybe that's where you get the sad slash hopeful feeling, because that's what we feel from the '80s. But once we go into more action, it really goes into a very modern action score that you'd hear from a big-budget modern movie like Transformers.

Of course, it depends. When you move system, for example to the Pyro system, this won't be exactly true, because I believe Pyro should feel different, probably not very orchestral. But at least in the system that we are working on right now, most locations should feel more orchestral.

Well, about the aliens, I did some stuff when I worked on The Reunion, because there was Mas. I can't wait to know what happens to Mas. My goodness, I can't wait. But there's a glimpse. Also, Geoff Zanelli did a wonderful job on a commercial for an alien ship, the Banu. I think it will be very interesting if in the end it's a match of both me and Geoff's work that defines it. Sometimes things just come along the way. The definition I had of Star Citizen at the start is a bit different from now because the game is much larger. The planets are much, much richer than I ever thought they would be. Who would ever think a planet like ArcCorp would exist in a game? I certainly didn't. Not even the planet tech I would expect, but certainly not a planet like ArcCorp. Because initially I thought locations would have a score which would be much more minimal compared to space. But then when you see ArcCorp, you say, oh, holy moly, this is wonderful. I love space, but this is also astronomically beautiful. So it needs to have grand music also.

It will also depend on the design. I really love the design of the Banu and of all the alien races, and I think the team did a wonderful job. It's really inspiring. And I like what came out, without thinking too much, on The Reunion trailer: the woodwinds, very subtle, with some synth. I liked it, but I don't know if it will stick. Remember, the company has many people and many very good thinking heads. It's not just me and my ideas. I'm just one guy having ideas. There are so many good ideas, and I take them to my advantage. That's why I say it's not fair sometimes to take credit, because sometimes from a simple conversation, someone will say, oh, I really love this kind of music for this, and then I see it: this is great, that's what needs to be done.

Well, first of all, thank you so much for enjoying it and saying it's awesome. That's very kind. I keep repeating this, but one of the best things this game has is the community. It's such a supportive community. Thank you a lot. The tools: I personally use Cubase, because I started using it in 2008, and all the music I've done up until now is on PC. It's a beefy PC, a really big one. I have two. If you want details, they're fast Core i9s with 128 gigabytes of RAM each, and it has 12 SSD drives. It's not all M.2. It's four M.2s, 8 terabytes, and the rest are normal SSDs, and they all have large capacities. Pretty much 70% of the capacity is filled with libraries running in Kontakt, which connects to Cubase, and Cubase handles everything, not just Kontakt, because you have a lot of synths.

Also, just as Geoff has his own private orchestral library from Hans Zimmer, I recorded two private orchestras for myself. Of course, we always prefer to use live musicians, and I always intend to have everything recorded with live musicians, but because of deadlines and so on it's not always possible. So to get a bit more realism, even though I own almost every commercial library that exists, and they have a lot of strengths and I use every single one you can think of, Spitfire, Orchestral Tools, Vienna, CineSamples, so many good ones, and I'm just speaking about the orchestral part, I also recorded my own stuff and it sounds really great. It was done by the guy who now runs Performance Samples, who's a great sampling guru. One of them was done by him for me and four other people, and then there's another one which was done just for me. And I really think it makes a difference in the quality of the orchestral part. Then you get the percussion, which is a whole other world, with hundreds of terabytes of percussion that I either recorded myself or purchased. And then there are synths, which are hardware synths. I've got a Moog One here, which I use, and a Sub 37, which I really like. Those are the only hardware I use. There are a couple of other good ones, but these feel most appropriate to my workflow right now.

Oh, I just know it. I can't explain why or how. No one tells me. That's a good thing: all the people I work with on the PU never set me a boundary. They just say, around this. They never say it has to be this, not one second more or 30 seconds less. I think music speaks just like when you're saying a sentence. I speak too much, because I'm better at writing music than doing this, as you've probably guessed. But in music I actually know when to start and when to stop. When the music comes to a conclusion, you know it's over, because there is nothing else to be added. And personally, I have to hear it a couple of times and feel, okay, that's what I want to say. It's a feeling. It's a great feeling.

That's your superpower then, because most artists I've encountered in life, what's the phrase? Art is never finished, it's only abandoned. You just come to a point where you have to stop.

No, no. I only stop when I really think it's done. There's only one piece, the Requiem, where I still have to make a revision, because there are two moments where I should have placed the harp playing and I never placed it. Just two moments. In 45 minutes, I have three seconds of music that is missing a harp. But apart from that, I hear it from start to end and I say, I have nothing to add. That's it.

I play in a heavy metal band. That's a surprise for you. I do play. It's a local band. It started because they called me two or three years ago asking if I could help them make the orchestral arrangements. And I said okay. I always loved metal. I'm a metalhead. I love all good music. There's bad metal and there's good metal. I love good metal. And there's a new band right now whose singer I really, really love hearing, which is Spiritbox. It's freaking amazing. If you haven't heard her, you have to hear her.

So they asked me, and I said, okay, send me the songs. The first impression I had was that the sound was very unpolished. They recorded it in their living room. But there's a very deep meaning in each song. The band leader is very kind, and it has to do with his mom's death. So he created a band, and the first track that I got was a letter from him to his mother in heaven. So it was metal, but not just nonsense metal or metal just to say bad things. It was metal with some soul in it, and I really liked it. So I mixed it. It was terrible because the stems were not professionally recorded. But I mixed it with all my plugins and sent it to them, without orchestra, just synths and everything, and they really liked it because it sounded almost like an album already. And meanwhile they invited me in because they enjoyed what I'd been doing with them. When they invited me into the band, I said I didn't want to perform. I just wanted to be the side guy that would arrange stuff, but they really insisted, so I'm a pianist, and I play synth and piano on stage for them. I don't think metal should have a big thing on piano, at least not in this band. I think it's good to be there to give a modern edge with the synths and the production. There's a video of me playing with that band. At some point I will share it. I think we will have a video clip soon, but I haven't had time to work with them for quite some time because I've been busy on Star Citizen, because that's our priority, of course.

But it's good because it gives me a new perspective on how they think about music. The drummer is not too musically educated. The bassist is now his son, who plays very well and is very musically educated. The singer is a COVID nurse. She actually volunteered to be one of the first nurses to go against COVID here, which is amazing, because at the time no one knew how bad it was. She's shy, but when she gets on stage, she sings quite well. One of the guitarists knows how to read music and plays well. The other one just plays by ear. So it's interesting to see how all those musicalities work. And I like to work in a team, so that's a good team.

The biggest struggle was with Chris Roberts, on the track for the Mustang commercial. That was the hardest one. I did, I don't know, 37 versions of the track. And not just half versions. Many of them were complete reworks. Super hard to nail it. One of the versions is a song that many people like nowadays in Star Citizen, which was then used in the South by Southwest trailer, the first song. But that was actually initially made for the Mustang. And I really love the Mustang commercial because it has a really great line. The narrative is wonderful. I don't know who wrote it, but I felt it was Chris's mindset that was written there. Basically: Sam, if you dream small, you'll never get anywhere. Only if you go outside your limits can you maybe do something special. It's a commercial that actually describes what Star Citizen is. So it really felt special, and it was very special to Chris. And I think the score was quite nice in the end. I really liked it. It was me playing the piano on that one. It was just beautiful. I just loved it. It was the hardest one.

Oh, there was Star Map music that came out in just one hour or whatever. It was super fast. There's no rhyme or reason to it when it happens. There's a subgroup of music, the music that I sometimes do for CitizenCon, which is a huge amount of music, which I love, but sometimes in a very short time, because the demo sometimes switches many things midway, because suddenly a bug is fixed and they can explore a whole area that had a horrible bug. Because as you know, demos are actually played live on stage. So it's very stressful. So sometimes it's a few days before the show and they say, okay, we have like 25 more minutes of music to do. Okay, I'll probably sleep two or three hours in the next three days or something. So it's easy, but because it has to be, not because it was naturally easy. But sometimes I did some cool stuff. I remember the New Babbage music that people like was done on that timeline, in just a few hours.

I like many of them, but one that has a lot of feeling for me was when I wrote the music for ArcCorp, in 2019 if I recall. That was not fast, it was slow music. It took quite some time. But when I did that music, I thought not only about the confluence of cultures in that really big planetary metropolis, but it also made me think a lot about the world as we exist. And that's not what I feel when I'm doing Star Citizen, that's why I love doing it, but you just go to work and come back from work and you become like a zombie. The idea of a huge city with millions of people who almost never speak with each other, because everyone is just going to their work, doing their thing, coming back, going to sleep or taking care of kids. And I remember, that's why I uploaded it to my YouTube at that moment, I actually put timelapses of traffic going by in busy cities, because that was the inspiration. And I remember thinking, sometimes you need to stop and look at Earth. I don't want to get environmental here, but it kind of felt like there's something that could go wrong. And coincidentally, one year later, there was the pandemic. But it was very meaningful, because the music tells the story of the soul of a planet, if you will. There was a culture, and if everyone worked together, it could be something even bigger. I'm not very good at explaining my music. But it was very important to me.

There was another one that was very important to me, which I called Lullaby to Casey. One of the backers of Star Citizen wrote a tweet thanking Star Citizen, and he mentioned the music as well, because it really made a difference in the last two years, when his two-year-old son had a liver problem and had to have a liver transplant. It was very terrible stuff. I reached out to him and said, thank you so much, and he shared some photos of his son. I thought about my children, and it stirred some strong emotions inside me. So the next track I wrote was a lullaby to his son Casey. And it's actually in the game, on Lorville, in the fancy part of Lorville where there are all those displays of the family that runs it. I thought that was a good place to play that track, because the track is very sentimental. You see something so beautiful in the middle of something that is in a very bad condition. Everyone lives in bad conditions on that planet, yet there's someone who lives such a lavish life. It's kind of a sad counterpoint. Like a dad who looks at his child: when you're healthy and your son isn't, it feels like, this shouldn't be like this, it should be me. At least I thought like that. And when my son also had health trouble at some point, it was after I wrote the song. So that's one that's very special to me as well. And then there's the main theme, which actually made it possible for me to be here.