Harry Gregson-Williams is a Golden Globe- and Grammy-nominated British film and video game score composer. He is the brother of Rupert Gregson-Williams, also a film and video game score composer.
Gregson-Willams was a music teacher in the 1980s at the Amesbury School in Hindhead, Surrey, England (his brother Rupert, also a film composer, also taught at Amesbury School during this period). He later taught music at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where he had once been a pupil, and also for a short period in both Egypt and Africa.
Hideo Kojima chose Williams to do the music for Metal Gear Solid 2 after seeing the film The Replacement Killers and decided that style of music was perfect for the game.
Harry Gregson-Williams has been known to use computers to generate music as well as other composers in the business. With this, he is also known to add techno twist and also comes out with tracks alone that are just basically techno. In Metal Gear Solid 2 & Metal Gear Solid 3, he has been adding orchestra and techno together to form the style of what Metal Gear Solid stands for.
Williams always has a running theme or motif in his theme music for Metal Gear Solid. All of the theme music for 1-4 has a lot of the same phrases and in some cases those phrases stay in the same key as their previous use in other Metal Gear themes. The themes use the keys Dm, Em, F#m, and, C#m. As stated the same interval of notes are played through the themes just in different keys. This constant motif always seems to connect the Metal Gear Solid games and capture their mood perfectly into one calculated use of sound.
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