6 minute read
JOHN ROBERT MATZ
Best known for his work on video game scores as diverse as the BAFTA-nominated Gunpoint, Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator, For The King, and the award-winning Fossil Echo, John Robert Matz is a Chicago-based composer, arranger, multiinstrumentalist, and music educator. Classically trained, he graduated with honors from Elmhurst College, majoring in music education, with an emphasis on brass and vocal performance. As a composer, he has incorporated his multidisciplinary musical training throughout his works, performing a variety of wind, brass, string and percussive instruments in his game and film scores, and using his knowledge to stretch instrumental timbres and find new sounds. John Robert is a member of ASCAP, the Game Audio Network Guild, and the video game brass quintet The Game Brass, and has recently been honored with a nomination for Best Video Game Score for the ASCAP Screen Awards, and in the 2017 G.A.N.G. Awards, winning Best Interactive Score for his work on Fossil Echo, and being named G.A.N.G.’s Rookie of the Year for 2017. In his spare time, he enjoys worrying about his Steam backlog, reading good books, and removing cats from his MIDI controllers. Apart from Mythgard and the recently released Ambition: A Minuet in Power, he is currently working on the second game from the Fossil Echo team, Tchia.
FROM ROOKIE TO MVP
G.A.N.G. Staff (GS): Congratulations on winning the 19th Annual G.A.N.G. Award for Best Original Soundtrack Album for Mythgard. What were some of the highlights working on this project?
JOHN: Thank you! It’s a tremendous honor. The nominees this year were outstanding, and I’m still a bit in shock that we took the award. Highlights for me, honestly, are a bit predictable – that feeling when you get to see your music working in context is always near the top. We built a custom interactive music solution that functioned platform-agnostically – running within Unity, functioning on Mac/PC but also on browser and mobile – and finally getting those transitions, triggers, and loops working properly was a wonderful feeling.
GS: Can you tell us about your process pursuing this project? Did you provide a custom reel or was it less formal?
JOHN: I’ve worked with A Shell in the Pit Audio on several projects in the past, and when they began working on this project, Gordon McGladdery, their studio head, reached out to me. I put together a playlist of cues I’d written previously that I felt were in the ballpark, and he passed it along to the team, along with some descriptions of how I’d approach the unique world of Mythgard. They loved it, and I was on board.
GS: Your use of unique sound design and textures, combined with traditional instruments such as piano, made for a very interesting and compelling score. How did you approach designing the musical palette for Mythgard?
JOHN: Thank you! Mythgard was a unique setting, and, as such, I felt that the instrumentation needed to reflect that. The world is a fusion of mythology and cyberpunk-styled alt-futurism, so I arrived at a textural palette that featured equal parts of Orff-esque large orchestral colors, old-school analogue synths, and an array of more… mystical sounds. We didn’t have the budget for live players outside of my own in-studio capabilities, so I leaned on things that I could do well and make sound good, like recording my own live brass section (horns, trumpets), coming up with unique sounds with analogue synths, and running an array of flutes, reeds, and ethnic woodwinds (duduk, bass clarinet, celtic whistles) through strange batteries of effects and guitar pedals. GS: What was the collaboration process with the audio team at Rhino Games? Did you meet on a regular basis? How much creative freedom did you have?
JOHN: I worked pretty closely with our story team, especially when scoring all of the cutscenes, but really, Rhino is a small company, and pretty much everything happened on Slack, with me posting works-in-progress and receiving feedback and new material to work with. It was a very free, creative process, with a lot of flexibility in approach. Honestly, the things that were the most formal in structure, with meetings and revisions and such, were our promotional trailers. Everything else was quite freeform.
GS: As a composer, you spend a lot of time working in solitude. How do you balance work with your social life?
JOHN: *Laughs nervously*
Next question, please?
In all seriousness, it’s a hard thing to balance, and I’m not particularly good at
it. I really do lean on social media, talk to folks regularly on Teams and friends on Discord, and carve out time for weekly D&D sessions over video chat. Especially over the last few years, making time to just … say a few nice things to a friend, or check in with someone you care about, has become all the more important.
GS: What are some of your favorite genres of games to score and why?
JOHN: Oh, this is a hard one. I admit, I do very much enjoy writing things in fantasy worlds, and leaning into magic and beauty, violence, and drama in equal measure is quite fun. That said, I really do enjoy getting to write things that trend more on the mystical, spiritual, relaxed side. Fossil Echo was a joy to write, and Awaceb’s next game allows me to live in that space a bit
MAKE FRIENDS”
as well. Honestly, I enjoy all sorts of genres, and while I know that’s a bit of a cop-out answer, I appreciate the kaleidoscope of styles, genres, and worlds I’ve gotten to score in my career.
GS: What kind of advice do you have for composers trying to make their mark in this industry?
JOHN: It’s a tricky thing, working in game audio. Every single person I know who’s “made it” (and I hesitate to count myself in that number just yet) has taken a different path to get there. Sometimes radically different, sometimes flukes of luck, wonderful opportunities, right-placeright-time stuff - things that are not always easy to recreate. Obviously, you should work on your craft, become adept at writing and producing music in a variety of styles, find your own personal compositional voice, build a website, have a demo reel – those are all excellent things to build towards, work on, and
Make friends.
Not just friends amongst the game developer world, and not just people who seem like they might have jobs for you, but make friends amongst your own colleagues, your peers. “Networking” may be the buzzword of choice, but don’t go into it looking for what people can do for you. Go into it looking to meet new friends and learn things from them. The game audio community is a weirdly welcoming, encouraging place, and getting to know the people in it as comrades and colleagues instead of, say, rivals, has helped me make more career inroads than anything else. Plus, you know, I’ve made several dear, dear friends in the process.
GS: Thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk with you.
JOHN: My pleasure!
