This game scoring process was VERY interesting. As you can see in the photo below, we don't have masks on! That's because the first recording sessions for this game were done in Fall of 2019. Ah, pre-Covid times. We recorded a full orchestra for the first sessions of the game at Ocean Way Studios in Nashville. Then, Covid hit, and we didn't have everything recorded yet.
So, we had to get creative. Recording a full orchestra for the final recording sessions wasn't going to be possible. You couldn't get that many people in one room anywhere in the world!
All we could do was record one person at a time. So, we hired a recording engineer that had a home studio in Nashville with a separate entrance to the recording room.
Each individual player came in one at a time to the engineer's recording booth and performed every line of the music one line at a time. One trumpet player played all of the trumpet lines. One flute player played all of the flute lines. Etc., etc. We did this for every woodwind and every brass part. But what about the string and percussion instruments? Violins, celli, bass drum, crash cymbals...what do we do about them? They couldn't fit in the tiny recording room, so we had to use my computer-generated "samples" of the strings and percussion.
Our mixing engineer had quite the task. The majority of the recording sessions had been done with a full orchestra on a big scoring stage with lots of room. Then, there were many recordings with TONS of tracks by individual musicians that had to be mixed with string and percussion samples. Our mixer, Steve Kaplan, did a fantastic job of making the final mixes sound phenomenal and uniform. Listen to the soundtrack (links below) and see if you can figure out which tracks are with a full orchestra and which ones where done with the individual musicians. ;)