Film Composer Talks About His Work On GUNS N' ROSES' 'Chinese Democracy'

Legendary Italian film composer Marco Beltrami ("Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines", "Resident Evil", "Scream", "Blade 2") recently spoke to IGN.com about his work on the much-anticipated new GUNS N' ROSES album, "Chinese Democracy".

"That was sort of just work for hire," Beltrami explained. "I guess they'd heard some of my orchestral music of mine. I met with Axl [Rose] and he played me these songs, asked me my ideas about them, and I told him what I thought they needed. They gave me four songs to orchestrate. A couple of them I did more than orchestrating, I actually wrote some melodies and stuff. It was a fun project. I really enjoyed it. The music was eclectic and at the time that I was doing it there were no lyrics on the songs that I was working on. People ask me about the album and I really have no idea about the release. I thought it was coming out last September. I'm the wrong person to ask about that.

When asked if he was ever in the studio with the members of GUNS N' ROSES or if the band came to him with the finished tracks, Beltrami said, "No, they had finished tracks. On one song I actually wrote a guitar part, but they pretty much had the band tracks down and then I added orchestral stuff on top of it. . . [I worked on] A song called 'Seven', which is the one that I did the most work on, I actually did some writing on. There was one called 'Thyme', one called 'The General', one called 'Leave Me Alone'."

Regarding he experience of working with a rock band and whether he has any future plans to work with other groups, Beltrami said, "I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was different than doing film music, but it was a lot of fun. I would probably do it again. It would probably be more fun at some point, to do it as a more collaborative affair, starting more from scratch, working and writing stuff [together]. But it was definitely fun."

Check out the rest of the interview here.

(Thanks: Here Today… Gone To Hell!)