Words by Mat Ombler

Call of Duty is one of the best selling video game franchises in the world, spanning 24 titles that throw players into everything from coliseum battles with occult zombies and breaches in outer space to real-life events such as the storming of Normandy beaches and the Cold War. 

Composing music for such an expansive timeline requires someone with a lot of experience working across a diverse range of musical styles. It's the perfect job for composer Jack Wall, who in addition to scoring video games such as Myst, Mass Effect, Jade Empire, and Splinter Cell, has also worked with the likes of John Cale, Dr. John, and Patti Smith. This impressive repertoire of work and Wall’s adventurous music palette has taken the Black Ops series in a new sonic direction as a result. 

Wall’s Call of Duty debut was 2012’s Black Ops II, which combined futuristic hybrid sounds with homages to classical WWII music. It was a huge hit with fans, picking up the Best Video Game Score Award at the ASCAP Film and Music Television Awards as a result. His subsequent work on Black Ops III and Black Ops IV broke free of the typical conventions that you might associate with an action-heavy first-person-shooter series, featuring solo performances from contemporary jazz vocalist Antonia Bennett sitting alongside big band jazz arrangements and massive orchestral anthems. 

With the latest instalment in the series, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, mainly rooted in the Soviet era of the ‘80s, Wall was able to approach the score from a different direction, tapping into his passion for storytelling through sound with lived experience of growing up as a kid in the ‘80s. This has led to Wall’s most dramatic score to date, one that combines heavy 1980s modular synth work with live orchestral performances and, of course, a 32-piece Russian choir – because why not? 

“I felt this is probably one of the more cohesive single-player campaign stories in the series,” Wall explains. “That's not actually always the case with Black Ops. Sometimes it [the story] can be hard to get your head around.” 

Before he started working on Black Ops: Cold War, Wall completely immersed himself in-game material provided by Treyarch’s audio director, Brian Tuey. The weeks that he spent studying scripts, story treatments, and documents covering level design and the game’s flow inspired ideas around instrumentation, timbre, tonalities, and ultimately the type of score he was going to compose for the game. Since the game was set in the early ‘80s, he wanted synth work – and lots of it – but to modernise it.

“The danger was, you do synth work from the 80s and it ends up sounding like Stranger Things, Halt and Catch Fire, or any of the shows that have scores like that,” Wall explains. “We didn't want to do that. Those shows are great for what they are, but that type of sound immediately makes you think of Stranger Things. We wanted to give the game a different sound.”

He wrote two themes based on that idea, 1981 and Bell’s Theme. 1981 was the first piece that Wall composed, while the ideas in Bell’s Theme came about when he spent time researching the character and understanding his motives. 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. 

One of the aspects that Wall says he was ‘super interested’ in exploring was the Russian perspective of the Cold War, rather than the American perspective. To do this, he introduced a Russian choir to the score that further developed the synth parts he was working on. Assembling a choir in normal circumstances wouldn’t have been too difficult, but things get a little tricker in the middle of a global pandemic. This left Wall with what he calls an ‘interesting problem to solve’, but one that he managed to pull off thanks to Grammy-winning singer Ayana Haviv, who produced the choir recording process and assembled 32 singers who could all record at home. 

That was just one problem solved, though. Wall still had to figure out how he was going to write authentic Russian lyrics and have the choir, none of whom were Russian speakers, sing them perfectly. He hired Nino Sanikidze, Head Coach of LA Opera’s Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program, who translated and transliterated lyrics written by Wall and Shapiro into Cyrillic. This method of transliteration meant that Wall had to rewrite certain pieces of music because of how the lyrics were phrased, but the work didn’t stop there.

Sanikidze would then record a slow voice memo teaching the choir how to pronounce each syllable in the words. After that, Haviv would take those syllables and redo them to create shorthand segments using different vowels and slurs, and finally, she’d create a guide track, which had to be approved in terms of pronunciation. Wall admits that the entire process was a ‘lot of back and forth’ between him, Sanikidze, and Haviv, but it was worth the result. 

Since Wall had the guide tracks from each lead member of the SATB, he would fit them together to make sure it was what he wanted, before instructing individual singers. “The singers then had around four or five days to turn around two passes,” Wall says, who also had a creative solution for instructing the home recordings too: “We’d get them to do a pass directly in front of the mic, and then one further away at a distance, just so we could get a nice mixture of colour and timbre.” 

Wall wrapped up the choir segments in just two weeks, and once he had the 64 tracks, they were sent across to mixers and engineers to clean them up. While many video games, particularly AAA titles, have suffered delays due to the pandemic, the development of Call of Duty: Black Ops hasn’t been badly affected. Wall’s work on the game started back in February last year, with the occasional break as he waited for new levels to come in. Everything was mocked up using sample libraries as he continued to keep prepping for the orchestra sessions in June, and the final music was delivered in the middle of September. 

One of the pieces that Wall says he’s most proud of from the game is Cold War, which plays during the opening segments of the game and came to him a lot later during the second set of sessions before they finished recording. 

“They asked me to write a 40-second movie piece while they were designing how the entrance to the game was gonna work, and they had this looping bit until you hit ‘press play,’” Wall says. “We did that, but everyone was saying how much they loved that first forty seconds and just wanted it to keep going.” 

Wall was asked if he could stretch it out to make it longer, an opportunity that he jumped at given he was initially disappointed he had to keep the piece so short. Now he was able to create the ‘full-blown theme’ that he initially envisioned. To support the darker unravelling of the narrative as the game unfolds, he decided to use a choir comprising just bass and tenor. “I wanted to make it dark and make it very, very Black Ops,” Wall says, who used the choir to talk about the USSR. The back half of the track was taken from a chord progression that he’d written for a level set in the KGB level headquarters. “It’s just all so Russian-sounding,” Wall continues. “I think Cold War is the track I’m most proud of because it just captures the signature of the game so well.” 

“When I write for a video game, I treat it like I’m writing a film score,” Wall says. “I come up with themes first, and as I get every new level, we’ll do spotting sessions, just like you would for a film, and decide where that music’s gonna go,” Wall says he never just writes music that just gets edited into the game. Instead, he pays attention to the story; the rises and the falls, to try and keep the right tonality through a level and give it some shape musically. This lets him avoid multiple action cues, that he says can get especially repetitive in a first-person shooter series. 

“As a composer, I can add to the immersive quality of that level; I can add to the emotional shape of the level that the story is trying to provide, and enhance that. That’s always what I focus on,” he explains. 

He cites Black Ops II as an example, describing how he created themes for the game’s antagonist, Nicaraguan drug lord Raul Menendez. Wall spent a lot of time researching Nicaraguan lullabies and found one in the public domain, which he wrote around with lyrics and music. “I love the concept of Raul Menendez, bad guy, but what makes him interesting is that he's not completely a bad guy. He’s not a one-dimensional character – he’s got a younger sister, Josefina, that he’s trying to protect, so he sings this lullaby to her.” 

After nine months of work scoring Black Ops: Cold War, Wall is currently taking a well-deserved break in Portugal. While he says there are no new projects he can talk about at the moment, you can listen to the Black Ops: Cold War soundtrack on Amazon and Spotify, while pre-orders for the 4XLP Limited Edition Mass Effect boxset will go live in February.