Feature By

Thom Moyles

Ron Jones is a composer with over 20 years of experience providing scores for TV, film and games. He has been the recipient of numerous awards for both music composition and music production. With music playing more roles than ever before, Ron has turned his attention towards scoring videogames, including providing the scores for both Star Fleet Command and Star Fleet Academy. As games come further to the forefront in the entertainment industry, crossover from existing composers will become more and more important, and more traditional scoring techniques will have to be modified for the unique nature of videogames. GameCritics.com is delighted to discuss some of these issues with Ron Jones.

How did you get involved in composing music?

I started messing around with sound as a kid. Whatever things made sound or were musical I took apart to see how they worked, so we had a lot of broken radios and organs at my house. I could not put them back together, but I sort of learned some ways to make interesting sounds. Around the time I was 12 years old a shift occurred after hearing a big brass and percussion ensemble. As the sound hit me like a wall of bricks, I was hooked. I had to learn how to make that big sound myself. First I got my friends to play my music then eventually the Jazz band, orchestra, choirs and whatever I could find group. There were no arrangers or composers to learn from in my area, so I started taking music theory at the local college while I was still only a high school junior. The more I wrote and heard back, the more I would be excited to write more. I played in the Jazz band in college so I could write for them. My charts helped our band to win many first place awards for the college and several outstanding musician awards for my composing.

After college, I went straight to Los Angeles to study at the Dick Grove School. This place was amazing in that all the teachers where professionals, no one just had gotten a degree as qualifications. These teachers were the real cats. I worked as a copyist while at Groves to help pay the rent. One of the major accounts we copied music for was Hanna-Barbera. I would ask to take the scores and parts to the sessions. While there I heard the music, met the players and discovered that I could do this. So, I started bugging the great music director, Hoyt Curtin in the hallway, during breaks. I told him I could do this and eventually he gave me a shot. I nailed it. It was some Casper cartoon. One of the cues I wrote was a circus march that totally blew them away. So even before I graduated from Grove's I was composing for a major studio. In a short time I could flip through the major networks and hear my music under several shows simultaneously. That was my start.

How did you get involved in composing game soundtracks?

Well, I was minding my own business working on various TV shows when I received a call from a couple of former scoring students I taught in a scoring course at USC graduate school. They were working at a large game company named Interplay and they where looking for someone to score a Star Trek game. Since I had scored Star Trek: The Next Generation for four years they thought I would be perfect to give them that authentic sound.

Do you play any games yourself?

Sometimes I will sit down and play, just to get a feel for what is going on. In my house, my wife and my son are the gamers. My interest is so much in music and particularly, film music that I find it difficult to play most games because the score is sub par or distracting to the point that I can't get involved in the game. It hurts my head as I am a person trained to listen at a high level so my brain locks in on the music and then the rest of the content. It is like I see only the sonic architecture first. I would imagine it is the opposite for most game people. I am interested in what games will become when all the power of cinema combines with the game playing technology. That is going to be a great day. That is why I am involved.

Were there any games that made you sit up and take notice as a composer?

Until recently, I would have answered no, but I have been digging deeply into the game music library and have found some better scores than I thought were out there. A nice one is the score to Metal Gear Solid 2 by composer Harry Gregson-Williams (and others). A bit derivative of some of Hans Zimmer, but crafted well musically.