Grand Theft Auto - 25th Anniversary Composer's Mixes (2024)

— Colin Anderson

Contents

These days most people couldn't imagine Grand Theft Auto without its satirical radio stations, but when we started working on GTA in 1995 that idea didn't exist yet. We certainly didn't know that the radio station format we eventually built into the game would go on to be a central pillar of every subsequent version of the franchise for the next 25 years. We were just doing the same thing we did on every game DMA Design made - trying to create an audio experience that would be as innovative and entertaining as it possibly could be.

During development of the game we'd create playable demos to share with our publisher BMG Interactive and other stakeholders, such as the team that were converting it to other platforms, etc. We started making CDs together for each of those versions with whatever tracks we had ready at the time. Sometimes that included tracks that never got finished, and sometimes it included partially finished tracks that were polished further afterwards.

When we were making Grand Theft Auto in the mid-1990s smartphones didn't exist. The idea of being able to use your phone to record ideas for songs as a solution to the eternal composer's problem of forgetting your great, new song was science fiction. Instead, I used to carry a small, handheld tape recorder with me all the time. I used it to opportunistically capture random sounds or pieces of music I heard that I liked or found interesting. Most famously, I used it to capture the sound of a visiting Hare-Krishna group while in Dundee city centre for lunch with (fellow GTA creator) Mike Dailly, and we ended up using that sound for the chanting sound of Hare-Krishna's in the game.

This track was my 'problem child' of the game. I set out with the intention of creating something inspired by more guitar-oriented electro-punk crossover acts that were emerging around then, most notably with The Prodigy. I'd been really inspired by their 1994 album "Music For The Jilted Generation" and particular by tracks like "Their Law", "Poison", and "Break & Enter". I was looking to do something like those, that incorporated sampled drum loops with heavy guitars.

The structure came together fine, but no matter what I did I just couldn't get the sound I was after. In the end the project wrapped and I just had to go with the best I had at the time, which is what appears in the game. I was never happy with it; however, after it released I noticed Craig had used an earlier mix of the track in his "Top 5 countdown" on Head Radio and I actually preferred that to the final mix I'd done for the game. After going back and listening to the earlier mix I discovered that it sounded way better than I remembered and I was left wishing I'd used that mix instead of the later one. So, for this 25th anniversary "definitive" release I've decided to make the earlier mix available for the first time to correct a mistake I made 25 years ago in a rush to get the game out the door. This version also includes an extended intro that was chopped to make it fit within the time limitations we had for the stations.

Programming, Guitars, & Vocals: Colin Anderson
Music & Lyrics: Colin Anderson

This was the last track I wrote for GTA's "Funk" station, and it's fair to say I was running out of ideas for ways to disguise the fact it was the same person doing all three tracks by this point. As a result this one makes less of an attempt to borrow standard funk tropes and so it's probably the most authentically "me" sounding track of all the pieces I did for GTA.

It's the only track on the Funk station that doesn't feature John Gurney's drumming, and I have a vague memory of having to play the bass for it with just 3 strings because someone else in the audio team had taken the low E string off it and I didn't have time to go and get another one. To this day I've no idea why they'd taken the string off!

Guitars, bass, keyboards, & drum programming - Colin Anderson

I probably used the dictaphone until I stopped working on game audio full-time, which would be around 2000, and so many of the tapes were reused over and over during that period. Consequently most of the original GTA stuff was recorded over, because we just thought we were making another game at the time. If someone had told me we were making history I'd probably have bought new tapes!

One snippet that did survive is this sketch of the track that became "Aori" by Ashtar from GTA's funk channel. Aori was the last track I wrote for GTA, and I have a memory of going into the studio during the Christmas holiday in 1996 to work on it because I knew I needed to have it done in time for the soundtrack being mastered early the next year (we were still expecting GTA to launch in the first half of 97 at that time). The benefit of using a dictaphone to record notes rather than paper and pen was that it could capture both performance (what notes, what rhythm) as well as tone (what sound, what effects). In this clip you can hear me making a careful note at the end of the day of the effects chain I'd used to create the wah-wah'd clavinet sound that became the backbone of the track, along with both the riff and the basic chord structure. The Korg X5 you hear me mention was a relatively affordable ROMpler synth (as they became known) that was the 'standard' workhorse keyboard of our audio setups at the time, and the RP-10 was the Digitech RP-10, a floor standing guitar multi-fx that I used as the main way of getting guitar sounds in the studio before Line6 invented Amp Farm and the POD. I'd then refer to this the next time I went back to the studio in order to recreate the sound so that I could begin the process of recording it 'properly' into our Pro Tools system to make what would become the final track that made it onto the released soundtrack.

The idea of putting a country & western track in GTA started off as a joke and ended up becoming a defining hallmark of the game. Early on in development it was really hard to convey this concept of "radio stations" to people on the team or at our publisher. There wasn't another game I could point to at the time as a reference for how it would work because it hadn't been done before, and there were lots of people who were really sceptical about whether players would accept it, because up until Grand Theft Auto launched games only used a single style of game throughout.

It might seem odd looking back with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time lots of people in positions of influence didn't like the idea of mixing multiple styles of music in the same game and were arguing against the idea of including "radio stations". In order to win over hearts and minds I'd explain how players would love it, because the music would reinforce the stereotype image of each different vehicle in the game. I'd tell people, "you'll get Pop in the sedans, Hip-Hop in the convertibles, Rock in the muscle cars, and even Country & Western in the flatbed pickups!", in order to get them excited about it and hopefully have them support the idea.

Long story short, it worked, but it also created this belief within our US publisher that there would be a country & western track in the game. Each time I spoke with them after I'd successfully got us the greenlight to do 'the radio station thing', they'd keep asking how the country & western station was coming along. Eventually I realised that things had gone too far and we weren't going to be able to get away with not including a country & western track, because they were now using the same pitch I'd used to get their sales teams excited about the idea. They needed a country & western track, and since I felt responsible for bringing the extra work involved on the audio team I reluctantly said I'd take the bullet for writing and recording it rather than ask Craig or Grant to do it. I then had to figure out how I could get away without having to create a whole new channel with three country tracks, which is where the idea for the DJ saying, "That was so good, I reckon I'll play it again" at the end came from - purely a design choice to minimise the extra work involved.

I had no idea where to start, and didn't really know the first thing about country music. I was able to enlist our staff writer, Brian Baglow, to create the memorable lyrics, as well as several members of the local Dundee music shop "Rainbow Music" to provide an authentically plausible "country" sound. The cherry on top was vocalist Drew Larg whose band "The Buzzards" I used to go and see every Sunday night at Chambers bar in Dundee. Drew and his band played amazing covers of classic soul tracks, but I could hear that his voice would be perfect for what I had in mind, and he graciously agreed to do it, even though he confided he never really liked country music.

So, TL;DR, one of the most memorable tracks from GTA was never intended to be in the game at all. It was the price we had to pay for successfully selling the rest of the team and our publisher on the idea of putting 'radio stations' in the game. It all worked out in the end though, thanks to Brian Baglow and the staff of Rainbow Music, Dundee, Scotland.

Vocals - Drew Larg
Backing Vocals - Drew Larg
Guitars - Chris Marra
Pedal Steel - Chris Marra
Violin - Michael James
Banjo - Chris Marra
Bass - Colin Anderson
Drums - John Gurney

Music by Colin Anderson
Lyrics by Brian Baglow

I probably used the dictaphone until I stopped working on game audio full-time, which would be around 2000, and so many of the tapes were reused over and over during that period. Consequently most of the original GTA stuff was recorded over, because we just thought we were making another game at the time. If someone had told me we were making history I'd probably have bought new tapes!

One clip that did survive is this recording of me jamming the track that would eventually become "The Ballad Of Chapped Lips Calhoun" with my cousin and inspirational guitar guru Kevin Singer. As a guitarist, before the internet the only way of learning new riffs, licks, or techniques was either to figure them out yourself from scratch or have someone else show you. At the time I was working on GTA Kevin was (and remains to this day!) the best non-YouTube guitarist I know. He's a few years older than me, and that extra time (plus a healthy dose of extra talent) meant he was able to figure out all these cool guitar parts and techniques, and he'd show me them whenever I went round to visit, which was pretty frequently.

So when I ended up working on a Country & Western track for Grand Theft Auto, Kevin was the first person I went to see, because I didn't know the first thing about country music! He was kind enough to show me everything he'd learned about country picking by that point, and what you hear in this clip is him jamming over the chord changes, trying out various licks and phrases to see what was going to work.

In the end the track featured way less guitar than I'd originally expected and so didn't feature any cool country guitar picking. My quest for a pedal steel player led me to Rainbow Music in Dundee and Chris Marra and Michael James who worked there offered to come in and do sessions for me. By the time I'd recorded all their parts there was simply nowhere left for a guitar to sit in the mix, so the only guitar on it is me (and Chris I think) strumming chords. All the parts I'd originally envisaged to be guitar were performed by pedal steel, banjo, or violin instead, and so I never had the opportunity to work with Kevin on the track.

However, just because his playing never made the final cut doesn't mean it wasn't important. Kevin's influence on me as a musician, not just as a guitarist, was profound. When I listen to any music I've written and recorded throughout my career, including all the tracks I did for the GTA series, I hear Kevin Singer's influence all over them. From the note choices in the 'guitar solo' of the Uniracers theme I did for Super Nintendo to the chord structure I used as the main theme for Autonauts, I can trace them all back to something Kevin once showed during the many hours we've jammed together over the years. Other than the few 'bands' I grew up idolising Kevin has been my biggest musical influence without a shadow of a doubt, and I know for a fact I wouldn't have been able to do what I did with GTA if it wasn't for his help and generosity. He's definitely the best musician you've never heard of, and I want to take this opportunity to dedicate "The Ballad Of Chapped Lips Calhoun" to Kevin - couldn't have done it without you cuz!

This track was the first one I recorded for Grand Theft Auto, and along with Craig's "Grand Theft Auto Hip-Hop track it played a big part in selling the team and our publishers on the idea of adding "radio stations" to the game.

It makes use of many vocal samples from the infamous Zero-G Datafile sample CDs. The first iteration I did was actually done back before we'd been given the greenlight to create a CD soundtrack for the game. I'd done a version of this track as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate how we'd be able to create convincingly real radio tracks purely from a bank of audio samples. I remember having to borrow equipment from all across DMA's audio team in order to create a set-up that was capable of playing it back, as most samplers were limited to 32Mb of memory at the time. But by chaining them together it was possible to make something approximating a hard disk recording system.

At that point I had no idea how we were going to make that work in the game, but I felt confident we'd figure it out. After it was finished I demoed it to the rest of the audio team and I remember Craig Conner remarking something to the effect, "well, that's certainly upped the bar we're aiming for!", which was exactly the effect I was hoping it would have. In the end we didn't have to go to all that trouble as the game switched to having a CD soundtrack, I persuaded DMA to invest in a Pro Tools hard disk recording system, and we were able to record all the tracks without having to resort to masses of samplers and sample banks to provide the playback.

However, the track kept its "sample based" roots, and many of the Datafile vocal samples made it to the final track.

Drums: John Gurney
Keyboards: Stuart Ross
Bass, Guitar, and Programming: Colin Anderson

Music: Colin Anderson
Lyrics: Zero-G Datafile Volumes 1, 2, & 3

This version of "On The Move" is from a demo version we put together in March 1996 and includes the BMG Interactive DJ that were removed later. BMG had put together a soundtrack to play on its booth at one of the trade shows (might have been CES/E3 95, but I forget now. Anyway, as well as a whole load of cool music it also included a bunch of humorous radio style voiceovers in between the tracks. The US team sent a copy to the audio department after the show and we immediately chopped the voiceovers out and stuck them in our prototype radio stations to make them sound more authentically 'radio'. In the end they had to come out because of the whole transition from BMG to Take2, as well as different publishers distributing the game in different territories around the world.

This early version features Stuart Ross's keyboard parts but still has the MIDI drums that were later replaced by John Gurney. This track, along with Craig's "Grand Theft Auto" hip-hop track were the first tracks finished for the soundtrack in/around April/May 1996.

When we started working on Grand Theft Auto it wasn't going to have a CD soundtrack, and we didn't have access to a multitrack recorder to make one even if it was. All that would come much later. So before I knew how all that would work out I did this early version of "On The Move" as a proof of concept, to showcase just how good we could make the music for GTA sound even if we had to construct them from banks of samples using a MIDI file (which is what this version is). Before moving onto Grand Theft Auto I'd spent a lot of time making sounds and music for some Super Nintendo games DMA had in development. The Super Nintendo only had 64Kb of memory to store every sound it needed for the music and sound effects for a level, and only 8 simultaneous channels with which to play them back. Any more than 8 sounds, then something wasn't going to be getting played. That had taught me a LOT about being really economically with sample sizes and polyphony, and I came to GTA armed with a whole toolbag of tricks and techniques for making really limited audio sound way better than it had any right to. It wasn't an experience any of the other musicians on my team had really had much exposure too, and so they still believed that it wouldn't be possible to do anything that sounded 'real' with only 'MIDI Music'. Rather than debate it I just created this track by pulling together all the synths and samplers (it was mostly samplers that were the hardest part) from around our studio to create this one mammoth hardware setup that could play the track back in realtime. I forget now all the technical hoops that I had to jump through to make it work, and I'm sure it wasn't easy, but it worked which was the main thing. After it was finished I got the rest of the audio team together and said, "this is what we can make GTA sound like, even without access to a CD". I remember it getting to the end of the first verse and Craig Conner turning round and saying, "Well, that's certainly upped the bar!", which was exactly the reaction I was hoping for. It put a line in the sand that proved we could get to a certain standard that no one else on the team believed until that point.

In truth, I'm not sure how close to this we could have got if we'd actually had to do a PC release on floppy discs, or even a version for Nintendo 64, but that was a problem for "Future Colin" to deal with at the time. At that point I'd done what I set out to, which was set the benchmark higher for the music in GTA than it might otherwise have been, regardless of anything. As it turned out, "Future Colin" never had to solve those problems because the game switched from floppy disc to CD, and Nintendo said they didn't want it on their platform, and so "Future Colin's" problem became persuading DMA Design to invest in a state-of-the-art audio recording system, instead of figuring out how to cram 60 minutes' worth of music into sample banks that could fit inside a Nintendo game cartridge. A problem that turned out to be just about as challenging!

This track was deliberately designed as a showcase for Brian Socha's amazing bass playing. I'd been introduced to Brian through a mutual friend a few years earlier and we had a shared love of prog rock bands such as Rush, Jethro Tull, and Marillion. We'd played in bands together and so when it came time to record some tracks for Grand Theft Auto I knew I wanted to write one that would give Brian the chance to really shine. I'm a huge fan of bass guitar, and if I had my time over again I'd probably make bass my main instrument rather than guitar - I love the way it sits right at the apex of the competing aspects of rhythm and melody, able to move seamlessly between both aspects as required.

I had Brian come in and record a bunch of takes which I then composited together into the final performance you hear on the track. If memory serves we had to do two sessions. The first session got everything I needed for the verses and choruses, but the middle section (in 5/4 time) wasn't working for some reason. So Brian came back in and overdubbed some extra parts to really make that section special. If you listen carefully to the 5/4 section you'll be able to pick out a Jethro Tull reference as Brian plays a bit of "Living In The Past". Fortunately I don't think anyone from Jethro Tull ever noticed or cared, but it amused us at the time.

John Gurney's drums are similarly spectacular on this track. John's performances became legendary - he barely ever had to do more than a single take, and his ability to groove along to a click track and infuse feel into the track was incredible. I used more of the Zero-G Datafile vocals to make it sound more like a 'song' again, as I'd done with On The Move, but Brian and John were the stars of this one. Their inspiring performances makes me still enjoy listening to this one even 25 years on.

Drums: John Gurney
Bass: Brian Socha
Guitars and Programming: Colin Anderson

Music: Colin Anderson
Lyrics: Honestly can't remember now...

This track is one I wrote and recorded for the game's "Rock" station. I provided our in-house writer, Brian Baglow, with the opening "I was cruising down the freeway..." line of the lyric and he then dreamed up the rest, including (I hasten to add) the "X" rated chorus! Paul Mackie and Allan Walker then revised some of the lyrics while we were in the studio recording the vocals, which then turned into the final lyric heard in the game.

The opening guitar riff and song title were ones I'd originally created a decade earlier with my best friend and life-long songwriting partner Neil Horsburgh, but never found a use for. The "wo-oh-oh-owa" section was his idea, and he was kind enough to let me keep it in the song when I eventually found a home for it on GTA's rock radio station.

The title was a misheard lyric from Bon Jovi's "Bad Medicine" ("That's what you get for *four letter love*") and deliberately evokes the spirit of classic 'glam metal' bands of the mid/late 1980s, such as Motley Crue, Ratt, and Poison. The guitar solo was played on my 1994 Fender American Standard Stratocaster (which is the only guitar I had at the time, so it features on everything else too), and while I'd love to say I played it in one take I think the truth is I can play it in one take now:)

Vocals - Paul Mackie
Gang Vocals - Paul Mackie, Allan Walker, Craig Conner, and Colin Anderson
Guitars - Colin Anderson
Bass - Brian Socha
Drums - John Gurney

Music by Colin Anderson (with the "wo-ho-oh-ah"s section by Neil Horsburgh)
Lyrics by Brian Baglow (with some small contributions/edits from Colin Anderson, Paul Mackie, and Allan Walker)

After a recording session was finished at the DMA studio I'd still have to drive back home, and so I often used to record rough mixes onto cassette tape so I could listen to them in the car on the way. This is an example of one of the rough mixes of "4 Letter Love" after Paul (Mackie) had been in to do the vocal, but before I'd tidied it up and added all the other layers, such as the gang vocals at the start, the improvised sections alongside the guitar solo, and the harmony vocals. You'll hear the tell-tale tape hiss and occasional dropout, just as I'd have heard it at the time.

I'd use these mixes to make all sorts of creative decisions about tracks - relative volumes of instruments, timing and phrasing of performances, where extra parts were needed, all sorts. I listened to so much music in my car at that time that hearing my own tracks in that environment meant I could instantly hear when something wasn't quite right. And likewise, if I could get it sounding great coming off a cassette tape in my car then I knew it was going to sound great off CD in the game. I think only Dave Jones was posh enough to have a CD player in his car at that time, no one else I knew did, so cassettes were king.