Top 40 Ramin Djawadi Quotes

For me, always, the big inspiration really comes from talking with my creators, my showrunners and my producers, and seeing what is their vision for their project.

What I love is that ‘Game of Thrones’ is always up for surprises.

What I love about ‘Game of Thrones’ is that the positioning of the music is so well done, because it’s not overdone. When the music cuts in, it really has something to say.

My task is to tell a story with the music. I always like to have themes in terms of characters or plots, and things that can tell a story always interest me the most.

I began making music at the age of four. According to my mother, once I just sat down at the piano and played back a tune by ear. My parents were watching and said to each other, ‘Maybe we should give him music lessons.’

When I work on multiple projects, I’m really good at dividing my days, so I start in the morning with a clean slate.

The computer is limited in expression. It can’t do what the human player can do. What’s dangerous is that you fall for writing for the computer and what sounds good on it instead of writing something that actually sounds good when a player performs it. It’s dangerous when you go down that road.

Many times, the way I write my themes or melodies is that I hear it, and then I sing into my phone or something, or I’ll scribble down on a piece of paper.

I literally work every day and weekends.

What’s amazing about ‘Game of Thrones’ is that it’s set in a fantasy world; it’s a fantasy story. So I always say that with the score, we’re open to do whatever we want.

Really, I get inspired by just switching projects and instrumentation and things like that – that creative part of just being different every time is really what inspires me.

I think a melody is a melody. And the way I usually start is I start writing my themes without even writing to picture to just try to find the tone for the movie or the TV show.

I collect many ethnic instruments, and as a guitarist, I’m usually able to play any sort of instrument – as long as it has strings. That’s why I like to experiment with different sounds.

‘Game of Thrones’ offers such a wide range of instruments that I use and stylistically for what I’m doing, but ‘Westworld’ is the same.

I always like to think of music as if you were to turn the picture off, actually. Just by listening to the piece of music, there’s a story there and a connection to the characters and the plots and all of that.

I’m a very visual person when it comes to writing music. I like to see something besides just a script, even if it’s just a storyboard or pictures from the set.

My dream that I followed and that I’m living now is that I actually always wanted to go to music college, play in a band, do a world tour, and then eventually get into film music.

I would sit at the organ and just start making up things by myself – I was maybe 7 years old, which was too young to even know how to notate music. So I never wrote anything down, but when I’d make things up, I’d memorize them.

When I work on my music, I always kind of just try to do my best work.

Silence can be a very powerful tool. Sometimes it’s more powerful to leave you with nothing.

I wanted to play in bands and get signed by a record label and tour the world and stuff, but that never really worked out.

I’m one of those artists who, if you’d let me tweak, would probably keep going and going, so it comes to the point where sometimes you just have to let go and make the decision, ‘Okay, that’s it.’

I feel choir just has a great sense of power when used with an orchestra, or even by itself.

With ‘Iron Man,’ I have to give Jon Favreau great credit for the score because he always said, from the beginning, ‘Tony Stark is a rock n’ roll guy.’

The music I wrote as a kid already was always instrumental. It was never based on lyrics.

In the case of ‘Game Of Thrones,’ I’ve been to set a couple of times, and it’s really exciting and inspiring for me to see the set and the actors in action, meet them and talk to them, so it definitely helps. If I can go to set, I will.

I like to have recognizable themes and sounds that really connect to the project and that you can identify with that particular project. My goal is always, ‘When that theme comes on – even if you’re not in the room – you hear it and say, ‘Oh my show is starting, I gotta watch.’

We knew we wanted to have our own tone for the show. And then the big instrument that actually we came up with was the cello. It has a big range. It can play really low. It can play high. And it has a dark sound, and ‘Game Of Thrones’ is obviously – it’s a dark show, and the cello became the featured instrument.

I’ve worked with Jonah Nolan on several projects. I really love collaborating with him.

I always like to tweak things and push things forward.

I don’t listen to film music at all. I don’t want to be influenced.

I guess with any type of music or any art, there’s always an evolution.

With ‘Game of Thrones,’ the most dominant instrument would definitely be the cello. That’s something I just felt really captured the mood of the show very well.

What’s so great with ‘Game of Thrones’ is that there are so many characters and they’re so many locations and that it’s just very inspiring.

It’s always daunting to start from scratch, but it’s exactly what I love about my job.

There’s been a great development with scale on TV, but my approach is always the same across projects, whether it’s a video game, a movie, or a TV show: I always try to set up my sounds and my themes. I really try to stay with the characters and do the storytelling through the music.

There is an emotional aspect to live players that, no matter how good the samples are, you cannot replicate.

I might even go for walks, just kind of come up with ideas in my head and then even sleep over it. And, yeah, the next day, when I wake up in the morning, I feel like that’s when the ideas come, because you kind of wake up fresh and clean. You’re not influenced from music on the radio or any other source.

In ‘Westworld,’ I really got to explore new areas, stylistically. We had the Indian world, we had Shogun world, so I got to play with new instrumentation – and also, a lot of new themes.

I always try to pick projects by: Is this something that excites me? What are the people like to work with? Obviously you spend a lot of time in a room together with them, so I always try to find projects that hopefully have great people attached.