Ilan Eshkeri dissects his scores for Ghost of Tsushima and A Perfect Planet

Sounds Eshkeri recorded and turned into samples using KONTAKT.

Samples may not replace an actual orchestra, but they are a huge part of the modern scoring process, explains Eshkeri, who began his career at 19 working for British composers Michael Kamen and Edward Shearmur and spending summers at London’s famed Abbey Road Studios. “When I started, people were still recording on two-inch tape and Pro Tools was the new thing. I had to work out how all the new digital equipment worked for the composers that I was working for. At that time, sampling was still in Emulators and Kurzweils, and Hans Zimmer was just beginning to evolve that whole world into something bigger and greater than it had been before with recording his own samples. Soon after, Gigastudio happened, which was a computer-based sampler, and then shortly after that’s when Native Instruments came in with Kontakt and it’s been that way ever since! But the industry went through this change during my 20s where suddenly a piano sketch wasn’t good enough and clients expected you to create a full symphonic mock-up.”

What you hear increasingly is orchestral scores that sound like the samples, and that is through lack of education. So I encourage everybody to learn what the orchestra can really do.

“The good thing about working with the computer in general is that it turns you into an audience member,” he continues. “I can try out a piece of music, sit back and listen and decide whether I like it or not. I can save another version, or try something else infinitely.” Mockups made using VST instruments are shown to film directors or whomever is commissioning the project for approval before they make their way to musical notation and on to live players. “The sample is a tool to get you from one place to the next,” explains Eshkeri. “And that’s why I use the Kontakt sampler all day, every day, as part of my process – it’s very interactive and easy to use and it doesn’t get in the way of my creativity. It’s got great complexity, if you want complexity, but if you just want to do something really basic and simple, you can do that super quickly. And so that makes it a really versatile and useful tool in the studio.” Eshkeri is particularly a fan of Kontakt’s drums, the timpani and celeste from the Symphony Series and creating his own Kontakt instruments with samples he’s recorded from live instruments.

Ilan is still a strong believer in taking things out of the computer and having real humans play what he’s composed, or at least mixing the two. “There’s a lot of complexity now in the way that people use virtual instruments, and expectations of what can be done. But with everything I do, I always make it real. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure in the industry to do things with samples, but I think you need the performance. You need the heart and the soul. Art, at its foundation, is about authenticity. Without authenticity it has no value. And I think the other real danger with samples is that people start writing within the limitations of the samples instead of the instruments. What you hear increasingly is orchestral scores that sound like the samples, and that is through lack of education. So I encourage everybody to learn what the orchestra can really do.”

Ilan is quick to explain that he doesn’t mean he can afford an orchestra on every project. “A lot of times I can’t! I did a film with Ralph Fiennes where we just did everything with a solo violin and a solo cello. There was a huge train crash in it and it was like “How do I score a huge train with just the violin and the cello?” But it’s all about creativity. Often the limitations are what force you to do something interesting.”

No matter how large or small the project, Ilan always starts with a vision and a framework. “You need an idea. And that concept becomes a construct around which the music is based, which helps give it purpose and significance. When I worked on the videogame Ghost of Tsushima, that was all about authenticity and Japanese music. I decided to work within the framework of Japanese harmony, which was complex – in Western music, you have a 12-note scale, but in Japanese music, you have different types of 5-note scales. If you work solely within that harmony, which they did for a thousand years, you’re quite limited. And that was very challenging. I kept thinking, ‘How am I going to make Japanese instruments fit with an orchestra?’ Then I thought, ‘What if the Western orchestra only played within the confines of Japanese scales and tonality?’ Traditional Japanese music is sort of homophonic; they don’t really have chords and harmony in the way Western music does. So I devised a system of chords that were built out of 5-note scales. I created this process of writing music, and then once I’d created all the rules, I broke the rules all the time!”

Eshkeri didn’t just study Japanese music from afar for Ghost of Tsushima, he immersed himself in Japanese culture and traditional music. “I used shakuhachi, biwa, taiko drums, a whole load of percussion, koto, Japanese chanting Japanese solo female vocals, a Japanese flute called the shamisen. They typically wouldn’t have been played together very much at all so that’s how I used them, in a soloistic way. The musicians I worked with were really extraordinary and extremely patient – they really took the time to talk to me about the instruments, how they’re played, what’s stylistically unique to them. For instance, the koto (a zither-type plucked instrument) plays these five notes across two-and-a-half octaves; you can alter the scales, but not during the performance. You can bend a note a quarter-tone, sometimes the lower notes you can bend up a whole tone. And that’s it – that’s the limitation. Whereas a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, is different – you can underblow the note a semitone or overplay the note a half step; if you overblow a whole step, it’s too screechy. And then of course in your sample library, the sample comes up and it plays every note of the scale – it’s easy not to consider what’s actually possible, but in this case I wrote specifically for the instrument and what it could do in real life.”

“The instrument I loved the most was the satsuma-biwa, which was the instrument of the samurai, they used to play as part of their epic storytelling. The art was nearly completely lost but there’s this incredible woman, one of the most soulful and the most amazing musicians I’ve ever worked with, named Junko Ueda who plays it and taught me about it. There’s this piece of music on the Ghost of Tsushima album called “Forgotten Song” and the melody is a shomyo Buddhist chant that Junko Uedo sang for me. I used the melody and arranged it and had it orchestrated. But that melody is over a thousand years old, it’s ancient, and it sort of pierces my soul whenever I hear it. The great thing about art is that there’s a point at which, it’s not just notes, it’s greater than the sum of its parts. It has some meaning and it carries weight and history, and that connects deeply on some level.”

4 cues that KONTAKT helped create

“I create my own samples often. In these pieces below, you can hear things that I’ve recorded myself that I’ve used. Again, it’s all about not getting in the way of the creative process. I make a sound, I’ve recorded it, I want to get it into the sampler really quickly and work with it. I want it to be as simple and direct as possible, and Kontakt is really good at that.”