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Interviews
On the Track: A Guide to Contemporary Film Scoring
by Fred Karlin
On the
Track is available at
amazon.com
Film Score
Monthly
"Downbeat"
by Jeff Bond
Sammyville is an independent feature from director Christopher Hatton,
loosely based on a real town in which one man’s word is law. The film
stars David Drayer as Cam, a drifter drawn back to his hometown after
the death of his adoptive parents, and Deep Space Nine’s Chase Masterson
as a social worker searching for a missing boy. The film marks the first
feature assignment for composer Jonathan Price, a graduate of the USC
film scoring program whose previous work has been limited to
direct-to-video movies like Merchants of Death and Vampires of Sorority
Row, and assisting composers Chris Young and Pete Anthony.
Price’s status as an alumnus of the University of Iowa
got him noticed by fellow UI graduate Hatton, who saw a letter in the
alumni newspaper and asked Price if he’d be interested in scoring
Sammyville. “I sent him a demo CD and he liked it but he kept on
looking, and after about a month he called me back and said he hadn’t
found anybody better.”
Price’s score was shaped by the film’s elusively dark
subject matter and its minuscule budget. “The music ended up
representing the mystery and threat of what Sammyville is,” Price
explains. “The whole story behind the death of the parents, because we
don’t find out what happened until the end of the movie. Musically, the
bulk of it plays on that mystery. There’s a theme that comes out of all
this, sort of a hope that they can get beyond the mystery and the
murders.”
The opening cues dealing with the departure of Drayer’s
character Cam for Sammyville deliberately plays against the outcome of
the story. “At the beginning of the story the music is guitar music that
is playing Cam’s surface qualities. It’s very much a classic rock sound
because he’s riding a Harley. At first my idea was to play Cam’s inner
injury and hurt with a piano melody or something, but that would pretty
much tip the hat about what he’s going through, which we don’t find out
about until about a third of the way through the movie. What we ended up
doing was something that sounded like road trip music.”
While Drayer's and Chase Masterson’s characters have
music directly associated with them, Price avoided doing this for Paul
Wadleigh’s pivotal character of Sammy, a lurking figure seemingly in
control of the town. “The character of Sammy doesn’t really have music
associated with him, but the town definitely has a sort of musique
concrète atmospheric thing going on. The people of the town have a stick
rhythm that comes in and this also is associated with Sammy in this
well-done shot where he comes back into town and there’s no sound except
for the music. I stayed away from nailing Sammy every time he appears in
the film because we’re not exactly sure what his role is. The mystery
music and the threat music surrounds the areas that he’s in.”
The film’s low budget meant that Price had to generate
most of the score’s sounds with his own equipment. “Even if I’d had a
larger budget it would probably have ended up sounding similar,” the
composer admits. “I talked to Chris about getting live musicians but it
turned out that the budget wouldn’t make that possible. So I originally
started scoring it for synthesized acoustic instruments on a few scenes,
and I realized that those scenes needed things that were more like sound
design anyway. Then there were other scenes like the hot springs scene
and the final scene that really needed a fuller sound and we didn’t have
the budget for an orchestra. What I did was to synthesize everything
that I could, and whatever didn’t sound right I pulled in a live player
for. It turned out that I didn’t use much brass except for a solo horn,
and the strings and woodwinds were easy to fudge with, to make them
sound close enough that you could get an idea what I was going for. I
ended up pulling in a live solo horn player for one cue and a guitar
player.”
Despite the heavy presence of synth pads and sampling,
the score often has an uncanny acoustic sound. “I threw a lot of the
rules of synthesizing out the window. I decided I was just going to go
through my ear, using reverb on reverb. A lot of people say to keep the
patches in mono and use a stereo spread and then put everything through
the same reverb patch, and what I did was record every single instrument
differently, put them through a couple different reverb patches, record
them all in stereo using Digital Performer, and actually control the
volume expressively. I decided not to do that with a volume controller
in MIDI, but rather to record everything digitally at full volume and
then go in and actually graph out the volume chart paths for each one. I
think that made the difference, because I was able to get string attacks
that made sense for each phrase, as opposed to just going in and having
the same string attacks for everything,”
For one key scene, Price tried his hand at songwriting.
“There are live instruments on the song, ‘I Didn’t Know.’ Chris had
temped that with a period song from Blade Runner that Vangelis actually
wrote for the movie, and there was no way they could get the rights to
that. They tried to get another period song that would fit, but Sammy is
listening to a Victrola in a long scene where there’s no dialogue and
really nothing much happening except for Cam sneaking through the house,
so it’s a tense, important scene and the music is really in the fore.
They weren’t able to find anything that captured sort of a bittersweet
romantic love song, and I said I’d love to do something like that.
Hatton was worried that we’d have to synthesize a lot of the sound but
in the end not very much was synthesized. I think the piano and some low
trombones are in there that I didn’t bring up very much in the mix. And
the sound guy stalled the frequency to make it sound like it was coming
out of a Victrola.”
Film Score
Monthly is available at
filmscoremonthly.com
Keyboard
Magazine
"The Unreal
Orchestra"
by Michael
Prager
Software instruments and
ultra-realistic sample libraries are more than the rage: They’ve
revolutionized how symphonic music is produced and delivered. Here’s a
look at how top pros make the most of their virtual symphonies.
Whether comprised of racks of MIDI modules, stacks of
samplers, or gigabytes of software instruments, virtual orchestras are
an essential element of every composer’s arsenal. With mind-boggling
frequency, technological advances foster new sample libraries that offer
ever-increasing control of expression and realism. You read about these
in the pages of Keyboard every month: the Vienna Symphonic Library,
Quantum Leap’s Symphonic Orchestra, the Garritan Personal Orchestra, and
other new virtual instruments let composers get much closer to the ideal
of a highly expressive digital orchestra. They also make it easier to
produce great-sounding orchestral tracks in a phenomenally short amount
of time. As you might imagine, this comes in really handy in the world
of film and TV music, where it seems nanoseconds can make the difference
between a successful project and a missed deadline.
As fantastic as these new tools are, ultra-realistic
orchestral tracks don’t just flow out the minute you install them. And
even if they did, there’s a big difference between a track that sounds
like a real orchestra and a cue that does its job in a film. There are
many paths you can take to learn how to get the most from your digital
orchestra and hone your chops at creating music for picture, but all of
them combine the knowledge of traditional instruments and orchestration
with a mastery of the technological resources available to you. We’re
here to help you figure out how to do it. We’ve interviewed several
highly successful composers and orchestrators who make extensive use of
virtual instruments.
Christopher Young is at the top of his game these days.
Best known for forays into the macabre with the haunting themes for
Hellraiser and The Gift, he has also covered other genres with his
scores for The Hurricane, The Core, and Swordfish. Assisted by tech guru
Jonathan Price, Chris is hard at work on his newest scoring project, the
upcoming prequel to The Exorcist.
Whether the score is orchestral in nature or not, the
process begins with the same first step: watching the movie itself. This
can sometimes include a temp score, which is a compilation of music that
the director and music editor select to give the composer an idea of
direction in which he or she would like to see the music go. In
Christopher Young’s case, his score to The Fly II served as the temp
score to Jennifer 8, which subsequently resulted in his getting that
gig, too. “The director heard my score and really wanted to hire me,” he
says. “But the studio wasn’t keen on it, as I wasn’t a big name. They
ended up hiring someone else to do the score, but they didn’t like it
and threw it out. Then I came on board to replace that score.
“Before starting the scoring process, I like to see the
film as many times as I can. That way, I’ll have a better idea of what
I’m trying to accomplish, and I can get a feel for where I think where
the music should and shouldn’t be. Then I begin the process of writing
the score out by hand on manuscript paper.”
The next step is the spotting session, which involves
the composer and director getting together to watch the film to decide
where the music should be and what kind of emotion is required. Once
that’s done and some music is written or at least sketched out, it’s
time to create a mock-up of the score, which involves sequencing the
score to make it sound as close to the real thing as possible. This is
where a little tech savvy and a solid grounding in traditional
orchestration comes in handy.
Jonathan Price, a film composer himself in addition to
being Young’s tech, describes how they approach the mock-up process.
“MOTU Digital Performer (still under OS 9) is the hub of his studio,” he
says. “It controls the MIDI, audio, and video. For mock-ups, we find our
Gigastudio system running the Vienna Symphonic Library indispensable.
For synth and sound design, Native Instruments Reaktor, Absynth, and
Kontakt, as well as Spectrasonics Atmosphere, get used constantly.
“After Chris composes a cue in the upstairs studio, he
photocopies the sketch and sends it downstairs to me with a tempo map.
I’ll mock it up with the Vienna Library. If there’s a synth in the cue,
I’ll usually start with a patch from Absynth, D’cota, or Atmosphere and
edit it until it sounds like something Chris would like. If it calls for
designing a sound from the ground up, I’ll turn to Reaktor.”
While having a great sample collection such as VSL or
SO puts you on the road to capturing the realism of an actual orchestra,
it can only get you halfway to your goal. Going the distance requires an
intimate knowledge of what goes into orchestral writing, the
characteristics of each instrument, and a few tricks of the trade. See
“Roadmaps for Orchestral Maneuvers” below for a list of excellent
resources.
Once your parts have been written and sequenced
following the laws of orchestral physics, the next step is to add
expression and dynamics into your work. This is typically accomplished
using expression pedals, mod wheels, or MIDI sliders to control MIDI
continuous controllers. “I’m a big advocate of capturing a real-time
performance with MIDI,” says Price. “I try to use controllers that are
as expressive as possible. I use a Roland EV-7 foot pedal for volume.
Since I play saxophone, it was easy for me to pick up the Yamaha WX-7
wind controller to play in wind and brass parts, or at least to add
expression. I also use the Roland Handsonic to play in percussion parts
in real time — it’s an incredibly sensitive hand drum MIDI pad. The idea
is that if you capture real-time performances, the result will sound
musical. I play in every line of the score. If the strings are
sustaining a chord, I play in each line separately, rather than play all
the notes of the chord in one pass.”
The following books are some of the most relied-upon
guides to traditional orchestration. Read any of them, and you’ll come
up with tons of ideas that will help make your MIDI orchestrations sound
more realistic.
The Study of Orchestration, Samuel Adler.
The Technique of Orchestration, Kent Wheeler Kennan.
Orchestration, Walter Piston.
Instrumentation and Orchestration, Alfred Blatter.
Style and Orchestration, Gardner Read.
Principles of Orchestration, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov.
Anatomy of the Orchestra, Norman Del Mar.
Orchestration, by Cecil Forsyth.
Learning the ropes and then finding success aren’t
steps that necessarily follow one another smoothly. But there are things
you can do to give yourself the best shot possible. Young’s outlook has
always been very positive. “Becoming a film composer is a doable thing,”
he says, “if you have the willingness to go the distance. It takes a lot
of desire to get there, but if you have the talent, it can be
accomplished over time.” In fact, Young will even offer you advice
personally if you contact him through his website
www.christopher-young.com.
Price can also be reached via email at
www.jonathanprice.com.
Keyboard
Magazine is available at
keyboardmag.com
Mix
Magazine
"Composer
Profile: Christopher Young"
by Bryan
Reesman
In a world that seeks to pigeonhole artists, composer Christopher Young
has fashioned a career as diverse as it is prolific. He is now reaping
the rewards. Last year alone, he was nominated for Best Composer by the
Broadcast Film Critics Association and he was nominated for a Golden
Globe for Best Original Score for the Miramax film The Shipping News.
“My typecasting story was that I got trapped in the
horror/thriller thing for a long time,” says Young. “The great news is,
I've finally been able to break that.” Not that he's complaining about
his extensive catalog of dark movie scores, but progressing from films
like Hellraiser and Species to Bandits and Country Bears has allowed him
to expand his musical horizons.
Listen to some of Young's recent work — the jazzy music
in The Hurricane, the full-throttle orchestrations of Swordfish or the
Irish folk sounds of The Shipping News — and you might be hard-pressed
to say that the same composer wrote the music for all three.
“My brain is such that you could pick a CD out of your
rack and send it over and say, ‘I want you to write in this style,’”
says Young. “It's both a blessing and a curse. Because we have to be
jacks of all trades, [film composers] should be able to write in a
variety of styles. I have the ability, as do a lot of film composers, to
be thrown a style or be told that this is the attitude of the music, and
to study it, absorb it and try to make it my own.”
Such skills aided Young when working with techno
luminary Paul Oakenfold on two cuts for the action film Swordfish,
“Music for Violence and Orchestra” (only available on a promo soundtrack
CD). The collaboration, however, was developed in a rather roundabout
way.
“The unfortunate thing was [Oakenfold] got involved
with the film when it was still very rough, and came up with a bunch of
loop concepts, demos of ideas against unfinished film,” says Young.
“When the film was finally completed and ready to score, he was given
permission to go off and do a concert tour. So when it came down to
actually writing the score for the movie, I used some of his loops. I
cut them to fit the scene with my synth guy, then flew it his way, and
he made some alterations. Once the synth bed was finalized, the
orchestra played along to that.”
Young says that he is not a fan of synthesized
orchestrations, preferring instead to work up elaborate mockups. He
never lets these demos be used as temp scores.
“I get scared when I hear [the demos], because when
it's working in my head, it's organically sounding like an orchestra's
supposed to. Then you hear it using the samples they have available, and
it invariably sounds ugly. It's hard for me to mentally make that leap.
I drive my synth guys crazy, because if it's not sounding as close to an
orchestra as it possibly can, then more work needs to be done.”
No one knows this better than Jonathan Price, Young's
engineer. “Chris doesn't like reverb on strings at all,” says Price.
“He's okay with reverb on winds and brass to a certain extent, but a lot
of the sample libraries out there are close-miked. The way that people
usually create a sense of space with a close-miked sample is to add
reverb. But, in this case, we don't add a lot of reverb. It's just
trying to get the balance exactly right so that it sounds like there's
some amount of distance between the listener and the instrument, without
having us swimming in reverb.”
Young's orchestrator and main conductor is Pete
Anthony, although when he goes to England, he works with Alan Wilson.
His orchestral recording engineer is 30-year veteran Bobby Fernandez.
Young recently expanded his studio setup, changing one of the two synth
rooms into a recording space. Studio A is now the main room, with a
control room and recording facilities. When an adjacent office was
vacated in the building where Young and Price work, they built the
recording room, which is approximately 25×15 feet, and had it
soundproofed. “We basically went through to try and eliminate standing
waves and flutter,” says Price. “We had some double-paned windows put in
with a 30-degree tilt. The main synth area is used for the control
[room], as well.”
For recording and mixing in Studio A, the duo uses
Digital Performer. Young runs a Mac G4 with three ultrawide SCSI-3
removable hard drives, and he utilizes three MIDI Time Pieces, a MOTU
2408 and a Roland A-80 MIDI controller. There are two Tascam DA-88s for
recording, and AKG 414 B-TL II microphones are preferred for recording
live musicians. Young has a Pioneer 50-inch plasma screen, PMC speakers
and uses an Aurora digital video card.
“We've got three 02Rs that are cascaded together,” says
Price of their 120-track system. “We also have the [MOTU] 2408 audio
system for capturing.” The new Studio B, a synth room where swing shift
operator Haseo Nakamishi works, has one 02R for recording. The engineers
share mics and cables, and they can transfer recorded material from one
studio to the other.”
On the synth and sampler side, the studio has three
Giga DAWs (assembled by Sound Chaser), a Roland XV5080 with orchestra
card, a Nord Rack virtual analog synth, Studio Electronics SE-1, Korg
Wave station, Roland R-8M, and E-mu Procussion and E6400. Effects-wise,
Young's setup includes a Roland SDE-3000 digital delay, Ensoniq DP/4+, a
Yamaha Rev 7, Lexicon 300, Yamaha SPX90, an TC Electronic FireWorx and a
2290 Digital Delay.
Despite the technology around him, Young remains an
old-school composer. “I'm a pencil-to-paper guy,” the composer
confesses. “If you were to walk into the room that I write in, your jaw
would probably drop to the ground. All I have is an upright piano, a
television with a videocassette machine, a click machine that I can lock
up to picture, and paper and pencil. That's how I write.
“Certainly, I use electronics for mocking up things for
show and tell,” Young continues. “But, in addition, for films like
Swordfish and other action films or thrillers or horror films, those are
the moments in which the electronics become a much more active part of
the final score. In Swordfish, it's obvious I'm using the drum loops,
[that] I'm using the electronics to provide pulse.
“In horror films or thrillers, I resort back to my
musique concrête days [in college], where I used the electronics to
create these unworldly sounds. They're atmospheres, they're blobs of
sonic blood and guts,” he says with a laugh. “That part of the usage of
electronics has always fascinated me much more, where you abandon
tonality. You don't really have to worry about its commercial viability,
you just embrace sound for sound's sake, and try to figure out a way to
work it into the drama of the film.”
Mix
Magazine is available at
www.mixonline.com
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