neil-davidge
Latest
Billboard: Halo 4 highest-charting game soundtrack yet
Halo 4 won't be out for a few more days, but the official soundtrack from composer Neil Davidge has been widely available since the middle of October – and it's done well. Billboard ranked it in the #50 spot for its Billboard 200, which is the highest a video game soundtrack has ever reached on the charts.Davidge's score sold 9,000 copies in its first week and Billboard says it outperformed all the series' predecessors in the Top Soundtracks category. That includes the Halo: Reach soundtrack, which made it to number eight back in 2010. The official Halo 4 soundtrack reached third in Top Soundtracks.The Halo 2 soundtrack still has a record over Halo 4's score, however. It managed to move more than 9,000 albums during its second week on shelves. The previous record holder for top video game soundtrack on the Billboard 200 was the soundtrack to Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock at 107. Yup, the honor goes to an album of a video game in which you play along to that album.
Halo 4 soundtrack lands Oct. 22, Special Edition runs $75
Two versions of the Halo 4 soundtrack will become available on October 22, but only one of them will cost more than the game itself. Composed by Massive Attack alumni Neil Davidge, the standard edition Halo 4 soundtrack will encompass 15 tracks from the game's score in both physical and digital formats for $13.98.The Special Edition 2-Disc Box Set, on the other hand, will set you back quite a bit more. At $75, the package includes the standard soundtrack, a 14-track remix album (sorry, no Skrillex), a behind-the-scenes "Making of Halo 4 Music" DVD and accompanying hardcover book with "composition notes from Neil Davidge plus exclusive behind-the-scenes photos and exclusive artwork images." The kit also comes with a 12-inch art print signed by Davidge, an honest-to-goodness vinyl record with Cortana and Master Chief on the disc itself, and a special shirt for your Xbox Live avatar.Whether your Halo-music monetary threshold is $14 or $75, both versions will be available at Halo Waypoint.
Halo 4's music composed by Neil Davidge [update: samples]
With Bungie moving away from the Halo series, audio lead Marty O'Donnell is gone as well, meaning that Halo 4 will probably sound different. Edge revealed the identity of the new, non-O'Donnell music team today: composer Neil Davidge, formerly of Massive Attack, and orchestrator/conductor Matt Dunkley (The Dark Knight, Black Swan, Inception)."Hopefully the Halo fans will see that we're being respectful," Dunkley told Edge, "but we've also taken it somewhere else, and maybe onto a higher plane. If you're always trying to reference back, you're not creating new things.""It's a new journey, it's a new story, it's a new arc," said self-professed Halo fan Davidge, "and so I feel like my job is not to revolutionise or reinvent but to continue the evolution, and I have a slightly different voice to those guys."Update: Check out a "ViDoc" about the new composers above. And listen to some samples after the break.
