Gustavo Santaolalla

Born on 19th August 1951 in the El Palomar community of Argentinaʼs capital, Buenos Aires, Santaolalla had a difficult time growing up under the harsh civil prejudices of the government. He connects this with Naughty Dogʼs The Last of Us  for whom he composed the soundtrack for in 2013, in the way that he can relate to traveling  “on the road” and constantly just moving from one place to the next, much like the protagonists, Joel and Ellie, do throughout the story. His contribution to the game was the 62 year oldʼs first experience in the video game industry. He has been musically active since the age of 5, when his grandmother gave him a guitar and has

formed and performed in multiple latin rock bands. He mainly plays the Guitar and itʼs bolivian cousins, the Charango and the Ronroco, on which he actually composed the main theme for the game. However, he has also been known to sing, play piano and bass guitar as well as adapt to and express skills in instruments in which he is not trained. He never learnt to read or write music so he performs so works purely by ear. He has a strong ear, strong enough to force his guitar to quit with him when aged 10! The academy award winner jumped at the opportunity to work with Naughty Dog on this project as he loves “working from the script”. He claims that one of the main reasons he was able

to create some really diverse and powerful sounds for this game was due to the freedom gifted to him by creative director Neil Druckmann.  For this game, the music needed to hold a certain rusty tone and relate to the post apocalyptic atmosphere of the game. Being a composer of traditionally latin music, Santaolalla incorporated the melodies and scales of it into many of the tracks, using fingerpicking techniques on his acoustic guitar. He very much enjoyed the idea of using a wide variety of different instruments to create range of different sounds.  Many of his compositions for this game feature the mournful scales of string instruments and create a heart wrenching sense of fictional nostalgia through that. The main theme, performed on the south American Ronoroco combined with the backdrop of low orchestral tone, creates a hopeless yet epic vibe and therefore incorporates many aspects of the gameʼs story into itʼs theme. The second track, The Hour, features just a small guitar and the drone of a synth. The quiet, tinny major chords of the guitar sound painfully humble and feeble and hint at memories of the gameʼs characters, memories of what life used to be like. This causes the audience to feel a great sense of emotion as too does the heart breaking sound of the string sections in the main theme, The Choice, Never Again and A New Dawn.  Santaolalla used a range of instruments that he didnʼt necessarily hold much experience with playing during the composition process. He extends his knowledge from basic instruments such as the organ/synth in Vanishing Grace to bowing a broken violin and blowing through several sawn off industrial pipes in The Quarrantine Zone.  Overall, he truly manages to grasp both the environmental effects of the game on the player as well as the emotional effects and convey them in his music in both melody and texture.

- Composer for Naughty Dogʼs The Last of Us