When you're composing, what are you given? What do you begin with? Do you get guidelines or a paragraph description? How much is prescribed to you and how much do you discover on your own?

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.