Last week, video game publisher Activision announced that it’s bringing down the ax on the Guitar Hero series. For the gaming world, it’s the end of an era—in six short years, the original Guitar Hero and its many sequels became the third-largest video game franchise in history. They revolutionized the very notion of what hit video games could be, turning color-coded button-pushing into a rock-star fantasy for the 21st century and selling 25 million games in the process.
That same day, in his tiny music studio in the Soquel hills, 33-year-old Nick Gallant reminisced about what it was like to create the songs for the most popular music video games ever made. In the early days, Guitar Hero developer RedOctane (which was acquired by Activision in 2007) couldn’t get the rights to songs like David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” or the Chili Peppers’ “Higher Ground,” so Fremont’s WaveGroup Sound was contracted to create cover versions of them. Though most of the games’ players never knew his name (the songs had credits like “’I Wanna Be Sedated’ as made famous by The Ramones”), many of the songs they were clicking along to were actually being played and sung by Gallant.
Hired by WaveGroup while they were in production on the first game to do some of the mixing and recording work (he eventually went on to perform on all the instruments and sing on several songs for the even more popular Guitar Hero 2, Guitar Hero 3 and Guitar Hero 80s), UCSC graduate Gallant remembers working 90-hour weeks on the music for the series.
“A typical day for me would be to show up at the studio super tired from the night before, drink a cup of coffee, go in and play the guitar and bass and do the vocals on a cover of Dio’s ‘Holy Diver,’” says Gallant. “Then by evening time, get some dinner, and then go back in the studio and be figuring out the guitar part to ‘Juke Box Hero,’ and then find myself at midnight belting out ‘He heard one guitar…’”
When Gallant wants to belt, he can really belt, and his imitation of the former Foreigner lead singer gives Lou Gramm’s fifth octave a run for its money. But his preparation for the recording is an example of the now-legendary lengths to which the producers on these music video games have gone to recreate the songs with precision.
“Lou Gramm sounds like his voice is just on the edge of being blown out, like he might have done a lot of coke the night before or done some heavy drinking,” says Gallant of the original. “I wanted to get that, so what I had to do to get there was do a bunch of screaming beforehand to get my voice nice and rough. That’s me after being in the studio and just going “Rahhhhhhhhhhh! Rahhhhhhhhhhh! Rahhhhhhhhhhh!’”
“Juke Box Hero” appeared in Rock Band, the subsequent Guitar Hero competitor Gallant also worked on the music for; his other credits include Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, Samba De Amigo and many more. Creating video-game cover songs fed his inner music geek, the one that led him to Berklee School of Music for a degree in music production and engineering.
“It’s almost like being a musical archeologist. I’m in love with trying to crack the code, figuring out how people get things to sound that way,” he admits. “What we were really doing was reverse engineering these classic songs, and trying to figure out exactly what they were doing.”
But something was missing.
“I’d been working so hard in this anonymous world of cover tunes, which was gratifying,” he says, “but I think there was a hole that needed to be filled.”
Man Facing South
Good-looking and gregarious, with slightly shaggy blond hair and a bit of a Matthew McConaughey vibe, Gallant looks way more Santa Cruz than Silicon Valley. Whatever he’s made off the decade’s most popular games, he still drives a beat-up Tacoma pickup with a surfboard in the back and a bumper sticker that says “No on Prop. 8.” He looks like the last man on Earth who’d want to play a video game.
And truth be told, he is.
“I hate video games,” he admits. “With all due respect, because it’s paid my mortgage and it’s a pastime of a lot of my peers and people I’ve worked with. But I’m just a very outdoorsy person. To me, video games are something that could keep me from the outdoors. People say, ‘How can you not be into video games and do this?’ I say, ‘Because I’m into music.’”
The mortgage is the one he pays on the house that sits above his cramped studio on a hill overlooking a gorgeous view of trees, green fields and the Monterey Bay. He shares it with his wife, Kendra Baker, the ice cream maker and co-owner of the popular Penny Ice Creamery in Santa Cruz, and their 8-month-old son, Nolan. Gallant and Baker have been together 13 years (they married three years ago). They went to UCSC together, then both packed up for the East Coast—she for culinary school, he for Berklee. As quickly as possible, they returned to Northern California, where she was a culinary chef at some prestigious spots like Los Gatos’ Manresa before opening her shop on Cedar Street last August. Meanwhile, he was working at WaveGroup.
Gallant’s new solo album, South Facing Slope, is named for the hill beneath their house. It was what he saw looking out from his studio, where he sang and played all the instruments on the album. Because of the couple’s grueling schedule, and eventually their new baby, it was recorded mostly between the hours of 9pm and 1am, over two years. Even when he was helping out at night in the first months of the ice cream shop, he didn’t lose his passion for the record.
“When you do music all day for a living, doing your own music is this thing you’ve been waiting to do all day long,” he says. “For me, it was a release.”
Ironically, though he was looking for an escape from the video game world, it was also video games that renewed his passion for his own music. One of his songs, “Turn Yourself Around,” was used in Tap Tap Revenge, which was the most downloaded free game in the iPhone App Store in 2008. His song became something of a hit around the world, and suddenly he had people emailing him from all over saying how much they liked it, and a teacher friend of his in Colorado calling him to ask why his students were suddenly asking him if he knew Nick Gallant’s music.
“When you’ve got an app that’s got 16 million users, it’s amazing how quickly your music will get out there,” he says.
In some ways, the experience was a mixed bag. On the one hand, he was crushed at how many people pirated the song, a harsh reality for everyone in the music industry now.
“You basically only have a couple options,” says Gallant. “Option one is to be heartbroken about it. Option two is to get that that’s the way it’s happening, and figure out other ways to make money. Getting your music into video games, getting your music into these things that are actually making money. Video games made more money last year than movies and music combined. As independent artists, what we need to start doing is trying to figure out those avenues to get our music heard instead of trying to do it the old way.”
Just What He Needed
Even with the illegal downloads, sales were still good, and the success of the song re-ignited his drive to make his own music.
The range of styles he had had to master for the Guitar Hero games also freed him up as a singer-songwriter—though rootsy in comparison to the pop-funk of “Turn Yourself Around,” South Facing Slope has a wide breadth of sound and instrumentation.
Most importantly, though, Gallant found himself using many of the production tricks he’d learned in his video game work on the record, which sounds impeccable.
“The records you grew up with, even if you think it’s just a guy with a guitar, it’s not,” he says. “When I had to recreate the Cars for Rock Band, ‘Just What I Needed’ or something, it was 32 tracks of just vocals. That’s the stuff on the radio you never even heard, you could just hear this thickness. That kind of stuff, learning about production, has translated into my music.”
The album’s opener, “My Wicked Heart,” is deceptive in just that way. Though on the surface it’s a simple but powerful acoustic number with a shuffling beat along the lines of Devil Makes Three or Fred Eaglesmith, a look at its ProTools file reveals layer upon layer of sound.
“That’s four-part harmony, doubled,” he says. “That’s what I wasn’t doing before I did all the Guitar Hero stuff.”
Gallant has also begun playing live again, with a five-piece band, in support of South Facing Slope. And he has a bunch of funkier electrified songs (more along the lines of “Turn Yourself Around”) that he plans to release as a companion album, North Facing Slope.
In the meantime, he’s had a few distractions, like traveling to the White House to sit with the First Lady during the State of the Union address last month. Baker and her business partner Zach Davis were invited because Davis had made a YouTube video explaining how Obama’s stimulus package had made Penny Ice Creamery possible. The White House caught wind of the video, and Joe Biden called the shop to invite them to the president’s speech. Gallant and Nolan went along for a whirlwind trip.
“We’re at the White House before the State of the Union, and Michelle Obama comes over to talk to us,” he says. “We talked to her for about five minutes, and she’s the most charming woman, of course. I said to her, ‘Listen, I hear your husband does not like ice cream.’ And she knew the exact thing to say, such a politician. She said, ‘Well, you know, Barack’s from Hawaii, he’s a shaved ice kind of guy.’ I’m like, ‘You’re so good!’”
Gallant still works for WaveGroup and does music for games. The demise of Guitar Hero isn’t likely to affect him, since the series had stopped using cover songs by Guitar Hero World Tour. And though he loved it at the time, Gallant looks back at those 90-hour weeks and is glad that everything happened the way it did.
Otherwise, he says with a sigh and a smile, “I’d be dead by now.”
