Jack Wall

An interview for Spitfire Audio re: his score for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War states:

The majority of the synth sound was done using a Moog Sub 37 that also doubled up as a hardware controller alongside a wide variety of modern synth libraries. Wall’s experience as the lead composer for the Sci-fi RPG series Mass Effect also proved invaluable, allowing him to revisit updated versions of the softer synth libraries he used over a decade ago.

Rather than hire a 70-piece orchestra (which he did for Myst 4), Wall turned to libraries, choosing from the Vienna Symphonic Library, Project SAM for brass, SAM True Strike Orchestral Percussion library, Sonic Images sample library, Peter Siedlaczek’s Advanced Orchestra for some of the woodwinds and “a sprinkling” from the Gary Garritan Orchestral library. The result was more than 90 minutes of score (including cinematics and in-game) that was then divided into tracks that were one-and-a-half to two minutes long.

The Myst III score was largely written at Jack's home studio, so I asked him about his equipment and sounds of choice. "I use a G4 Mac with Digital Performer because I've just been using that forever, and I have GigaStudio on a PC. I use the Garritan Orchestral Strings library, and I've got a couple of Akai samplers and a JV2080 stuffed full of cards. I'm looking forward to the Vienna Symphonic Library — I heard a demo of it at the AES show here in LA in October and it blew my mind. It's all about trying to make the music sound as real as you can before fleshing it out into the orchestration."

The Myst III score was largely written at Jack's home studio, so I asked him about his equipment and sounds of choice. "I use a G4 Mac with Digital Performer because I've just been using that forever, and I have GigaStudio on a PC. I use the Garritan Orchestral Strings library, and I've got a couple of Akai samplers and a JV2080 stuffed full of cards. I'm looking forward to the Vienna Symphonic Library — I heard a demo of it at the AES show here in LA in October and it blew my mind. It's all about trying to make the music sound as real as you can before fleshing it out into the orchestration."

The Myst III score was largely written at Jack's home studio, so I asked him about his equipment and sounds of choice. "I use a G4 Mac with Digital Performer because I've just been using that forever, and I have GigaStudio on a PC. I use the Garritan Orchestral Strings library, and I've got a couple of Akai samplers and a JV2080 stuffed full of cards. I'm looking forward to the Vienna Symphonic Library — I heard a demo of it at the AES show here in LA in October and it blew my mind. It's all about trying to make the music sound as real as you can before fleshing it out into the orchestration."

The Myst III score was largely written at Jack's home studio, so I asked him about his equipment and sounds of choice. "I use a G4 Mac with Digital Performer because I've just been using that forever, and I have GigaStudio on a PC. I use the Garritan Orchestral Strings library, and I've got a couple of Akai samplers and a JV2080 stuffed full of cards. I'm looking forward to the Vienna Symphonic Library — I heard a demo of it at the AES show here in LA in October and it blew my mind. It's all about trying to make the music sound as real as you can before fleshing it out into the orchestration."

"I worked on the orchestration for the pieces we were going to record with the Northwest Sinfonia in Seattle with my orchestrator Steve Zuckerman. I'd basically take a MIDI file and work it out so all the voices were separate before giving it to Steve, and he'd send it back to me with his ideas. I'd change a few things and send it back and we went through seven or eight passes for the main title, adopting a similar process for everything else. Finally, I recorded all the MIDI tracks I was going to keep for the final mix onto Tascam DA88s, along with many audio tracks, including certain percussion tracks, the duduk, and the boy soprano. I took these tapes to Seattle and we sync'ed it up with a click and recorded the orchestra on top of it."

"I switched to Logic from Digital Performer for this project and I will never go back! It is so much more musical in every way. Now that 64-bit is here, it is the greatest system ever. I have the Mac Pro 8-core as well as 2 loaded up PCs running V-STack and GigaStudio respectively. I use 4 monitors to view all of my plugins and a 46" flatscreen to view the movies. I hate to dig for plugin control."

"I switched to Logic from Digital Performer for this project and I will never go back! It is so much more musical in every way. Now that 64-bit is here, it is the greatest system ever. I have the Mac Pro 8-core as well as 2 loaded up PCs running V-STack and GigaStudio respectively. I use 4 monitors to view all of my plugins and a 46" flatscreen to view the movies. I hate to dig for plugin control."

Wall used Arturia soft synths for their recallability factor, as well as having some fun with the dials on his Moog Sub 37. His go-tos, u-He Diva and Zebra HZ, also made it into the mix, along with Omnisphere, which is “still the most relevant synth I own for just about anything,” he says.

Wall used Arturia soft synths for their recallability factor, as well as having some fun with the dials on his Moog Sub 37. His go-tos, u-He Diva and Zebra HZ, also made it into the mix, along with Omnisphere, which is “still the most relevant synth I own for just about anything,” he says.

Wall used Arturia soft synths for their recallability factor, as well as having some fun with the dials on his Moog Sub 37. His go-tos, u-He Diva and Zebra HZ, also made it into the mix, along with Omnisphere, which is “still the most relevant synth I own for just about anything,” he says.