BAFTA nominated Composer Richard Jacques upgrades studio and reflects on twenty years as Canford client Multi-award winning, BAFTA and IVOR NOVELLO nominated composer for film, television and video games Richard Jacques is quite possibly best known for his critically acclaimed orchestral scores. His impressive repertoire of work can be heard on blockbuster franchises such as James Bond 007: Blood Stone (Activision), Mass Effect (BioWare), Little Big Planet 2 (Sony), Alice in Wonderland (Disney), Starship Troopers (Empire/Sony Pictures) Headhunter (Sega) and many more. Jacques’ dramatic music features in numerous TV and movie theatre campaigns for some of the world’s most prestigious media agencies, and top name brands such as Audi, Bacardi, MercedesBenz and Stella Artois. What is less well known about Richard Jacques is that he has been a valued client of Canford for around twenty years. Taking a short break from his busy schedule (currently working on a new soundtrack), Richard caught up with Canford Marketing Manager, Stephen Gallagher to discuss his most recent purchases and the impact COVID-19 has had on his work. How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted your work? Have projects been pushed back and have you found yourself with more time to plan/prepare? Regarding COVID 19, I have been very fortunate in that I often get booked up with work up to 3 years in advance so in that respect I feel lucky that I am working on a big video game soundtrack that will be completed in late 2021. The game development team have all been working from home so we
are still working to schedule and the development has not been impacted. Having more time would have been a luxury but that is not the case in the instance, it’s still 80 hour weeks!! You have two studios. Has lockdown limited your access to both locations? Have you turned to Zoom like so many of us, and how has that worked out for you? My main studio is in Fulham, South West London and I have a small studio in my house with a duplicate composition rig. I made these changes around Christmas time so that I can compose in either studio since my workload is always pretty heavy. This meant that I had to get all the computers set up in the same way, especially with regard to hard drives and sample library allocation, so I can simply take my iLoks between studios and just open up my current Logic and Pro Tools sessions. So far it’s working very well and I haven’t come across any problems. I knew that lockdown was coming so back at the end of February I made sure all my project drives and sample library drives were up to date between studios. In fact I started writing in my home studio about 3 weeks before lockdown. As there was no public transport running during lockdown (except for skeleton services for key workers) I was composing in my home studio until around early May, but due to a few weeks of warm weather during April, it became harder and harder to work there since my home studio is not air conditioned so I was getting up 4am to start writing before the home
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