Lawrence Schwedler

I’m a classical guitarist by training, although I also played the club scene in Los Angeles in the early 80s as lead singer for the band Midnight Fiction (Lawrence’s Bandcamp page) After earning a Masters degree in music at UCLA I worked as a production assistant for a multimedia company. That led to a job as composer/sound designer for The Dreamers Guild, where I worked on I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, FaeryTale Adventure II, and some other PC games. Eventually I wound up at Nintendo Software Technology in Redmond, Washington.

Every project is different. A franchise demands that you honor what came before while adding something new. But you can’t go too far or you’ll piss off the fans. I started by studying the music and sound from previous Metroid games and thinking about how our game might carry on the tradition and still break some new ground.

Being a media composer means delivering on a deadline, so writer’s block becomes an existential threat to your livelihood. You learn how to deal with it or you find other work. I schedule a regular time during which I won’t be disturbed and then force myself to produce anything during that time, regardless of whether it’s any good or not. My good friend film composer/record producer David Kitay once told me that he sets a goal of writing several minutes of bad music a day – in other words, disengage your internal critic and simply get something done.

It really depends on the project. The Metroid franchise provided a large body of work to serve as a style guide, and the Metroid universe itself suggested a dark, dangerous, tense, sci fi, epic, serious approach. The DS platform heavily influenced my process because I had to create my own virtual instrument sound banks, which in turn influenced my choice of instrumentation. I also rely heavily on the use of models (a compositional technique I learned from my mentor at UCLA, guitarist and composer Theodore Norman) in which you take an element of an existing composition – rhythm or form, for example – and use it as a scaffold on which to build an original composition. It’s a great way to get rolling – after a while you abandon the scaffold and do your own thing.

As a staff composer at NST, I was paid a salary to produce music and sound for all our projects. By successfully developing sequels for a number of other franchises, such as RidgeRacer, WaveRace, and 1080 Snowboarding, I guess we earned the right to do one for Metroid.

It was stressful to work on such high-profile games with such a huge fan base, knowing that everything we did would be compared to legendary Nintendo games we all loved. Every game developer loses sleep before their game is released, worrying about all the things they didn’t have time to do, sweating over how their work will be received. But it’s also a lot of fun. I got to work with an amazing team of programmers, designers, and artists, many of whom I still know and work with.

I was not that familiar with Metroid before starting work on Hunters, but I quickly became a big fan.

I played Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime as I prepared to work on Hunters, so those two are probably my favorites. I loved the fast pace and tight control of Fusion, which I played on the DS. I got lost in the expansive mood and story of Prime.

I’ve only played the first bits of Dread, and I haven’t yet devoted the time to get good enough at it to progress very far – I’m the first to admit I’m not a particularly adept video gamer 🙂 But I watched my son play it for several hours, and absolutely love the heart-pounding panic of being pursued by an E.M.M.I. The level design alone boggles the mind.

Soon after I began working at NST I realized I wouldn’t be able to do everything myself, and so I hired James Phillipsen as the second member of NST’s audio team. We’re both composer/sound designers, but on Hunters I did the music and James did the sound design.

The DS had technical limitations which had a big impact on music and sound design. One consequence was that I made all my own sound banks and used control data to render the music at runtime. The advantage to this approach is that performance data is extremely malleable, unlike digital audio data, allowing for instantaneous shifts in key and tempo with almost no cost to cpu.

I was always allowed extraordinary freedom in my work for Nintendo, perhaps because they trusted that I understood the role of a media composer for franchise titles.

I don’t recall which libraries I used. I used my Fender Stratocaster, my Guild D25 acoustic, a Specter bass, and a fully-weighted 88-key synth/MIDI controller.

I think it’s great! It’s a practice that dates back at least to the Middle Ages, where composers would use the music of their predecessors as the foundation for new works. I should also point out that as a salaried staff composer, all of the music I wrote for Nintendo is considered “work for hire” under U.S. Copyright law, meaning that I have no ownership of any kind. That said, I am extremely grateful to Nintendo for giving me the opportunity to make a good living doing what I love to do.

I recorded my own samples in order to build custom sound banks that could fit into the limited memory of the original DS. I used a special adaptor that allowed me to send MIDI data directly from my keyboard into the DS SDK so that I could play my sound banks in real time and hear them on the DS speakers and headphones. I built my orchestra to sound as good as possible on the target hardware.

Nintendo’s Kenji Yamamoto, composer for the Metroid series (including Super Metroid and the Prime trilogy) came to Redmond early in development to instruct me in the ways of Metroid. I could not have done what I did without his guidance. Mr. Yamamoto taught me to appreciate the role of music in the Metroid franchise and its specific application to gameplay, and I took the lessons to heart.

My memory of working with Mr. Yamamoto is that he was supportive, generous, and patient. James and I were newbies to the world of Metroid at the start of the project, and yet he treated us with respect. That gave me the confidence to try to add my voice to the Metroid canon.

My colleague James Phillipsen was responsible for all the sound design in Hunters, and I can’t remember much in the way of specifics. I seem to recall him saying he had to get pretty creative to make the “big” sounds for Hunters sound big on such small speakers. When I left Nintendo in 2012 to teach at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, James stayed on as NST’s audio director. His latest title with NST is Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury.

There’s nothing quite like working on a game eagerly anticipated by millions of people. It’s not all fun & games – you can’t help but feel that you have big shoes to fill, and imposter syndrome invariably rears its ugly head. At the same time, it’s thrilling to know that millions of people will hear your music.

I’m not sure how to answer that – I think I find inspiration at the moment of creation, when I’m running with the barest hint of an idea and the sound of the instruments carries me away into some new place.

I don’t recall. As I learned from Mr. Yamamoto, the Metroid franchise has a hierarchy of melodies that serve specific functions: the unlocking of a door, the acquisition of an artifact, the arrival on a new planet, the completion of a mission. We took this system into account as we designed the music for Hunters.

I was referring to the stingers and melodies that are common to all Metroid games – melodic phrases tied to specific game functions. Other than that, I remember having extraordinary freedom as to the background music in the game, once we got rolling and I had a handle on those functional melodies. As I recall, it was my choice to arrange pre-existing Metroid background themes for some of the tracks, and to write original music for the rest.

First Hunt was a proof of concept demo, while Hunters was a fully-developed game. We used what we learned on First Hunt in order to deliver Hunters two years later, including a full single-player story mode and an awesome multi-player mode that quickly became the team’s favorite part of the game.

It’s a complete honor! I didn’t even know that music from Hunters was in Smash Bros. until I heard about it from one of my students.

I’m not sure if we held anything back. I don’t usually throw stuff away; instead I just keep working it until it fits.

As a parent, I’ve learned not to play favorites 😉

One of my favorite memories of NST was not from Hunters, but from 1080 Avalanche. At the beginning of the project the whole team went to Mt. Baker for three days of snowboarding to get a feel for the sport. Many of us had never snowboarded before, and I could barely walk when we got back because of the muscle strain. We drank a lot of beer and had a blast – it was a great way to kick off the project.

That there’s nothing like working on a great team. The friendships you make last a lifetime, and they’re ultimately more important than any reviews.

I have two words for you: Metroid Dread.