Ramin Djawadi

Photo: Matt Martin

With a CV that includes Westworld, Game Of Thrones and Prison Break, Ramin Djawadi is one of the busiest composers in Hollywood.

To mark the eighth and final season of the wildly successful HBO series Game Of Thrones, the Fender Custom Shop created the Sigil Collection, a set of handcrafted guitars inspired by the iconic houses of Westeros. In a YouTube video that has gained over 40 million views, Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave, Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme, Scott Ian of Anthrax, country star Brad Paisley and Game Of Thrones co‑creator Dan Weiss jam with the composer of the theme, Ramin Djawadi.

“That was a very special day!” smiles Djawadi. “They were all my guitar heroes, so to be able to play with them was amazing. I could have done it all day! When I was a teenager, I was a big rock guy, and the guitar is actually my main instrument. I’m a much better guitar player than I am a piano player.

“I have an Ibanez AM200, a semi‑hollow body guitar that I played throughout my jazz days in college. In the background, you can see the Ibanez Universe, which is actually the Steve Vai guitar — it’s a seven‑string guitar with a low B string and I’ve had that since I was a teenager. The acoustic guitars that you see were used in Westworld. The one in the front is played [like a guitar is usually played], but the other one, the Yamaha, I bowed using a violin bow, Led Zeppelin style.”

Theme Of Thrones

Ramin Djawadi’s score has helped to make Game Of Thrones one of the biggest hit TV series ever.

The 49‑year‑old composer, recipient of the BMI Icon Award 2024, has come a long way since he was a guitarist in a band as a teenager growing up in Germany. Djawadi’s music has accompanied dragons, ghouls, superheroes, convicts and an impossible physics problem over his two‑decades‑long career. This year alone, he scored three shows for three separate streaming platforms: Amazon Prime’s Fallout, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem and Max’s House Of The Dragon (Season Two).

One of his early gigs as a solo composer was the hit TV show Prison Break. It turned out to be a bootcamp in becoming a composer‑for‑hire, with Djawadi writing close to 45 minutes of music per episode, per week. It taught him, among other things, how to write fast — an absolutely crucial requirement in an industry where the deadline is always ‘yesterday’.

His career achieved escape velocity with Game Of Thrones. For eight seasons, Djawadi’s music underpinned the visceral power struggles between the warring families of Westeros, crafting a musical language that is vital to the show. For his efforts, he won back‑to‑back Emmys, took the soundtrack on tour, and was invited back to score 2022’s prequel House Of The Dragon. In fact, the Game Of Thrones main theme was so iconic that it was retained for the new series as well; there is no Game Of Thrones extended universe without Djawadi’s score.

When he first heard the finished piece, one wonders, did he sit back, knowing that he had an absolute banger on his hands? He laughs. “I don’t know what to say. At the time, for me, it was just like any other piece I’d written. Every piece I write, I do try to like it myself and stand behind it, but I could not possibly anticipate the amount of reach that piece would have.”

No Flutes

The original version of the theme features the cello as the main instrument. Djawadi explains how that came to be: “The one big thing that [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan told me was that they wanted to stay away from medieval flutes. So I came up with the idea of the cello being the lead instrument. It’s such a dark show where nobody is safe — any character can die at any moment — so I felt a cello was the right thing. There’s such a nuance to the way it can be performed, right? It can be very emotional and sweet, but it can also be very raw.”

To capture all the sonic textures of the instrument, Djawadi chose to mic it very close, “so you really get the [sound of the] bow; it feels very in front. I love many things about the cello, a big thing being the range. It has such a huge range: it can get really low, down to the bassy lower register, but it can also play up high into the register of a violin, yet it has a totally different sound than a violin, even on the same note — it has a much thicker sound. On top of that, it’s a lot more difficult to play that high for a cellist compared to a violin in that range, so there is always a little bit of that struggle that you hear with the instrument and that adds this extra emotion that I’ve always loved.

“It also has the ability, with the bowing technique — which other stringed instruments like the viola and violin have as well — to interpret the same notes ever so slightly differently depending on where the bow is placed, how hard it is placed, and how quickly it’s bowed. Also, just like on the guitar, you’re able to do a tremolo, and because you don’t have frets, you can really glissando between notes. There is so much expression! I could write for the cello all day.”

Beyond The Orchestra

Ramin Djawadi writes for more than just the cello, of course. Each project he’s worked on has a distinctive sonic signature. The post‑apocalyptic drama Fallout on Amazon Prime is his third collaboration with creator Jonathan Nolan, and features three different main characters to interpret sonically. Djawadi elaborates: “We have Lucy, who starts off very pure and innocent, so sonically we stay pretty straightforward with strings and piano for the most part when she’s still in the Vault [a luxury underground fallout shelter]. Then we have The Ghoul, for whom we have a lot more sounds from the wasteland: broken instruments, loose strings, things that rattle. One sound I can point out that we used quite a bit for him was the fretless electric bass, so he has that gunslinger tone and there’s a yodel too, a callback to the classic Morricone spaghetti Western. For the third character, Maximus, it’s more of a militaristic sound: very rhythmic, and with a melody that is often played by the French horns. As things go sideways and Lucy leaves the Vault, her themes and her motifs blend with that of The Ghoul and Maximus as they cross paths.”

Character‑specific composition is not new for Djawadi. As far back as 2008, he left his signature on Iron Man, which marked the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In what now looks to be a rare choice, the standard sweeping orchestral score was eschewed in favour of a distorted guitar‑heavy soundtrack, inspired entirely by the lead character’s personality. Djawadi recalls, “I give [director] Jon Favreau full credit for that, because he always said, ’We need rock guitars! Tony Stark is a rock star; he listens to AC/DC when he’s in his workshop, and that needs to cross over into the score.’ I thought that was super...