“I actually enjoy the fantasy world quite a bit. You have no boundaries.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“The tonality of the flute almost has a mystic element to me.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“Find your own style, whatever it is. Whatever is inside you, bring that out. I think that’s when you have something unique.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“One of the most fun parts about my job is that when the music gets recorded live at the end of the project and real musicians play it, I still get goosebumps every single time.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“Silence can be a very powerful tool. Sometimes it’s more powerful to leave you with nothing.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I can almost see the music. It comes in the form of colors – colors jump out at me, and that translates into notes. They come fully formed: the orchestration parts, not just the melodies. Even though they’re not always the right ones to use, the initial idea comes like that.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“When I work on multiple projects, I’m really good at dividing my days, so I start in the morning with a clean slate.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I used to just scribble things on a piece of paper whenever an idea would – came to mind. Now with cell phones. It definitely has gotten a lot easier because I can just take it out and just – I’ll just sing into my phone.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“Absolutely, I’m living my dream. Yeah. My wife always jokes, says I’m a big kid, you know, playing in the studio and coming up with melodies and sounds. And, you know, I wouldn’t know any other way because I just have music in my head all the time, and I just love it.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I used to love American Westerns, growing up in Germany.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“Deep down, classical Romantic music is what I love: Brahms, Tchaikovsky, the Romantics.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“At the beginning of each project, I like to create a palette of sound for that particular project.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I don’t listen to film music at all. I don’t want to be influenced.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“Performing was always something that I actually used to do before I settled in the studio as a composer.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I love to do animation movies, and those might be some scores that are lesser known, unless you really kind of dig through my work and see.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I guess with any type of music or any art, there’s always an evolution.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.’”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I myself am a huge Radiohead fan.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“With ‘Westworld,’ the player piano plays a very important role.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“’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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“What I like about ‘Game of Thrones’ is that there’s such a wide range. We have everything from very small, just solo instrument pieces, just the solo violin or solo cello, and then we go all the way to these bigger action moments.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.’”
― Ramin Djawadi
“There’s so many great themes from the ’80s: ‘Magnum,’ ‘Miami Vice.’”
― Ramin Djawadi
“When I write music, these colors pop out of me. It’s hard to describe, but basically when I write music, I paint, and I add colors, and I add notes.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.’”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“When you know you have great support from the studio, that’s a great feeling, and when it’s the creative support, that’s great.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I’m actually really good at keeping secrets.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“’Game of Thrones’ is one of the most groundbreaking series on TV. The fact that I get to make music every day is such a privilege, and I’m incredibly grateful to be doing so with an amazing show such as this.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I always like to tweak things and push things forward.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“That’s what I like: to kind of get up and start working right away in the morning.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.’”
― Ramin Djawadi
“First, I started to play the organ. I did that until I was 11. From the age of 11 to 13, I gave up music entirely. And then at 13, I picked up the guitar, and after one and a half years, I started practicing intensively. I began playing in rock bands, and it was there that I discovered that the music I liked to write was always instrumental.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“After high school, I moved to the U.S. and studied music in Boston, at the Berklee College of Music.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I literally work every day and weekends.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I think it’s great to see that there is such a connection to film music and the way people react or connect to a character or scene.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I’ll say, ‘I really like Daenerys,’ and then I go, ‘Wait, but I like the Stark theme, too, and I like the Lannister theme.’ I keep jumping around. But I think that’s kind of the beauty of ‘Game of Thrones,’ that there’s so many different ones, and they’re all kind of different, and they do different things.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“The music I wrote as a kid already was always instrumental. It was never based on lyrics.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I just always hear music in my head. I thought that was normal. My wife said, ‘Ramin, that’s not normal.’”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I associate colors with music, or music with colors.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“What’s so cool about ‘Light of the Seven’ – and what I love about ‘Game of Thrones’ – is you never know what’s going to happen.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I started out on an apprenticeship in Hollywood working as an assistant to Hans Zimmer and another composer Klaus Badelt. That’s how I got my foot in the door.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“As a film composer, you have to be a good collaborator.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I listen to either romantic classical music, Brahms or Beethoven or something like Mozart, or I go all the way contemporary and listen to Metallica or Adele, Radiohead, jazz, whatever it is that is completely opposite.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“What I love about film music is the variety. On one movie, you might be asked to do a completely electronic score, and then another might ask you to do orchestral only.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I was born and raised in Germany, so I was classically trained. Classical has been deep in me from a totally early age. Then, as a teenager, I picked up the guitar and was really into rock music.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I always really wanted to do film scoring, largely because I hate writing lyrics. I just won’t do it. I need help with the words.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“A lot of people have said, ‘Do a Westworld tour!’ I definitely have ideas, because we could do a whole concert from just the first season. The player piano plays such a huge role in that one, so it’s a must-have as a centerpiece.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“Most of the time, I’ll be conducting the orchestra, but there will be some pieces that I’ll be playing an instrument as well, just because I love playing. There’s pieces where I want to grab an instrument and play with the rest of the group, like ‘The Light of the Seven,’ for example; I would love to play the piano for that.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“What I love with ‘Game of Thrones’ is, every season, I get to continue to develop the existing themes; every season, I also get to write new themes.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I feel choir just has a great sense of power when used with an orchestra, or even by itself.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“The piano is not really in the language of the ‘Game of Thrones’ score.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“The piano has a huge dynamic range that almost no other instruments have. It can play very low, and it can play very high.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I love performing on my own scores. I do it quite a lot.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“What I love is that ‘Game of Thrones’ is always up for surprises.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I love getting time to write a piece of music that can settle in and set the tone of the show.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“It’s always daunting to start from scratch, but it’s exactly what I love about my job.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“When I work on my music, I always kind of just try to do my best work.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“When I work on a movie, I look at the script or watch the film, and I talk to my director or producers and make a plan: this is our main character; we need a theme for this plot. We need a love theme.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I’ve worked with Jonah Nolan on several projects. I really love collaborating with him.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I’m usually pretty good at remembering the melodies that I wrote.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“You could argue that ‘Game of Thrones’ has been around longer than ‘Westworld,’ but honestly, either one – I don’t have a side or anything – I love them both equally.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“When I grew up in the ’80s, all of my favorite TV shows always had these great openings, and it always got me excited.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“I always have a hard time describing myself.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“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.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“What I like about the piano is that it’s a beautiful hybrid instrument in the sense that it can sound very warm but also very cold.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“There is an emotional aspect to live players that, no matter how good the samples are, you cannot replicate.”
― Ramin Djawadi
“The piano is such a timeless instrument.”
― Ramin Djawadi
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