Background
In the summer of 2004, Halo 2 composer Martin O'Donnell and album producer Nile Rodgers decided it would be a good idea to present Halo 2's music in two distinct volumes. The first volume would contain the game's themes that were finished and mixed as well as "inspired-by" offerings from other artists. The first volume was released alongside the video game as Volume 1 on November 9 of the same year. As the soundtrack was finished before all the in-game music was completed, none of the tracks written by O'Donnell appear in Halo 2 in the same arrangement. The bands featured in Volume 1, including Breaking Benjamin and Incubus, were enthusiastic about adding music to the soundtrack. Incubus was tapped to produce a suite of music which appears scattered throughout the soundtrack as four movements. Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger said that "Halo is the only video game that ever inspired us to write a whole suite ."
The first pieces of music O'Donnell wrote for Halo 2 were promotional in nature; O'Donnell scored the cinematic announcement trailer for Halo 2 on August 2, 2002, and followed up with interactive music for the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2003 Halo 2 demo. O'Donnell confirmed that the chanting monks of Halo: Combat Evolved's choral theme, along with additional guitars by Steve Vai, would return in Halo 2. O'Donnell noted that the new setting of Africa prompted him to look at "Afro-Cuban" influences, but most of this type of music did not make it to the final product. Rather than write for locations or use leitmotifs for all the different characters in what O'Donnell called a "Peter and the Wolf approach to music", O'Donnell wrote "sad music for sad moments, scary music to score the scary bits and so forth." Recurring themes developed more by accident than planning. Recording of orchestrated music was completed over several sessions with the Northwest Sifonia orchestra at Studio X in Seattle, Washington.
Nile Rodgers produced both volumes of the soundtrack, in addition to writing and performing the track "Never Surrender" in collaboration with songwriter/remixer Nataraj. Rodgers himself is a video game player, noting in an interview that "30% to 40% of the budget was spent in downtime playing video games. Since all that money was going to that part of the recording session, I decided to figure out what was so compelling about it, and I got hooked ."
Due to legal issues, the second Halo 2 soundtrack containing the entire finished score, Volume 2, was not released until more than a year after the soundtrack had been mixed and mastered. The volume's music is formatted in a 'suite' structure that corresponds with the chapters within the game, or order to create a "music representation" of the video game. O'Donnell stated that this presentation of the music as a concept album was natural because the overall story and atmosphere of Halo 2 directly influenced the sound to begin with.
Read more about this topic: Halo 2 Original Soundtrack
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