Mar 31, 2009 6:45 PM, By Matt Gallagher

Tom Salta in his project studio, Persist Music

How did you use your studio for this project?
The way I put the H.A.W.X score was put together was that I did the entire thing first in my own studio. That means everything: the fake orchestra and every single instrument. Once the cues were fully approved and done, which sounded pretty good the way they were, we were then able to secure additional live budget—not as much as I would have hoped, but enough. It was 60 minutes of music and I didn’t have enough money to do two full days with a large orchestra. I figured out, [along] with my orchestrator, that we would be able to do one full day with all the people we wanted. On the second day we had to cut it down to half, so we prioritized the cues and put all of the cues that required the big orchestra on the first day, and the remainder on the second. It worked out really well. The cues already sounded very full and big and when you put the full orchestra on top of that, then it’s just massive.

So you record the full orchestra on top of your full-sounding tracks? Do you ever need to take elements out of your electronic score to make room for the orchestra?
Well, most often I’m not taking things out since I know what the orchestra will do. Usually [the orchestra] is an additional layer and I might remove certain fake orchestral parts.

Your studio has a dual quad core Mac Pro G5 running Apple Logic Pro 8. Which soft synths and virtual instruments did you use for this project?
I’ve always loved Spectrasonics’ stuff, and currently, that mostly means Omnisphere and RMX. Native Instruments also has a wonderful suite of software that I use, including Kontakt, Absynth and FM8.

Was Logic’s EXS24 your primary sampler?
Yeah. I try to use that as much as possible just because it’s so CPU and RAM-efficient being that it’s the native sampler that Logic uses.

Did you do any custom sampling?
Sometimes. For H.A.W.X I spent a lot of time creating unique rhythm beds, generating my own combinations of textures that I would use to create the backing rhythms for a lot of these cues. I wanted to have the right blend of modern and traditional percussive elements, so I focused quite a bit on that.

Did you do any audio recording in your studio?
In my personal studio I recorded additional solo vocalists for certain geographical areas in the game, which required certain ethnic styles. We also recorded some guitar work here as well. A good number of the soloists were actually recorded remotely from other studios—gotta love the Internet!

So you completed everything at home and brought all of these files into Legacy Studios for those two days.
That’s correct. I did all the prep here [in Persist Music] and then we prepared the Pro Tools sessions for Legacy. That’s where we recorded the orchestra. I didn’t want to deal with 40 or 50 tracks, so we actually mixed at Legacy to bounce it down into smaller groups of stems, and then I would lay those into my sessions and they all synched up. I did the final mix here and then sent the stems over to Ubisoft for any additional mixing or variations they wanted to do later.

Considering that you do most of your production work “in the box,” do you have any favorite plug-ins?
A friend of mine turned me on to Sonnox Oxford Plug-Ins a while ago, and when I had chance to listen, they jumped out at me. I really liked the Inflator, Dynamics and EQ. I tend to do things very instinctively and try not to lock myself into patterns. Because of the nature of the work I do and my desire to stay fresh, I give [the Oxford EQ] a chance on everything. I’ll often put the EQ on the Master Bus. The EQ in particular just had a very sweet sound to it. It’s a subtle quality that my ears, after so many years, just know. If I take the high end and just tweak it up a little bit, you get a certain quality to the sparkle that reminds me of very high-end hardware EQs.

Legacy Recording Studios hosted two sessions with orchestral ensembles comprised of musicians from the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Do you remember the setup at Legacy for the orchestra sessions?
I remember the engineer [Jason Stasium] placed mics all over the room and of course [used] some close miking. I don’t remember the specifics about those particular mics—but [they were] much of what you would expect. The most notable thing I remember is that I deliberately rented some vintage Neumann M 50 microphones for the orchestra, which we used in the Decca Tree—they sounded fantastic.

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