Composer
Alan Silvestri was originally hired to write the score for
The Curse of the Black Pearl, having collaborated with director
Gore Verbinski on
Mouse Hunt and
The Mexican. However, due to creative differences between the producer
Jerry Bruckheimer and him, Silvestri left the project before recording any material. Verbinski and Bruckheimer decided to go with
Hans Zimmer's team instead, who were frequent collaborators of their productions. Verbinski asked Hans Zimmer, with whom he had worked on
The Ring, to step in. Zimmer declined to do the bulk of the composing, as he was busy scoring
The Last Samurai, a project during which he claimed he had promised not to take any other assignments. As a result, he referred Verbinski to
Klaus Badelt, a relatively new composer who had been a part of
Remote Control Productions (known as
Media Ventures at the time) for three years. At that point, Badelt had only composed a few films, including
The Time Machine,
The Recruit,
K-19: The Widowmaker and
Basic. Zimmer however ended up collaborating with Badelt to write most of the score's primary themes. Zimmer said he wrote most of the music in the space of one night, and then recorded them in an all-synthesized demo credited to him. This demo presents three of the score's themes and motifs, concluding with an early version of "He's A Pirate" which differs from the final cue and includes a development of a melody Zimmer wrote for the score to
Drop Zone. Since the schedule was very tight and the music was needed for the film in three weeks, seven other composers —
Ramin Djawadi,
James Dooley,
Nick Glennie-Smith,
Steve Jablonsky,
Blake Neely, James McKee Smith, and
Geoff Zanelli — were called upon to help orchestrate the music and write additional cues. The resulting score was recorded with a group of musicians, credited as the
Hollywood Studio Symphony, over the course of four days. The short time frame demanded the use of a different recording studio for each session. The
Metro Voices, a male choir, was recorded in London and added to the finished recordings. The soundtrack album, consisting of 43 minutes of the film's score, was released with Klaus Badelt credited as the composer. The cues were edited for length, and minor changes to the mix were also made. For unknown reasons, the mixing of several cues are executed with gain levels so high that it causes distortion. This is noticeable particularly during the action cues and the reprise of the love theme in track 14, "One Last Shot". It is also noted that besides the first cue, the tracks' generic names were unrelated to their contents. According to the official website of composer
Geoff Zanelli, this was because the production "schedule was so short that [they] had to decide on the track names for the album packaging before the score was even written!" Badelt was credited as the conductor on early batches of the disc, but it was actually conducted by Blake Neely. ==Orchestration==