The Professional Composer's Guide by Paul Thomson

THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE B U S I N E S S A N D C R E AT I V I T Y

By Paul Thomson

THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE BUSINESS AND CREATIVITY

By Paul Thomson

This edition is published by Spitfire Audio Books in 2022.

Copyright © Paul Thomson, 2022 The right of Paul Thomson to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover or form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Spitfire Audio Books, an imprint of Spitfire Audio Holdings Limited, website: www.spitfireaudio.com While the author has made every effort to provide accurate internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites nor their content.

A catalogue record for this title is available on request from the British Library ISBN (eBook): 978-1-3999-1884-8 Unless otherwise indicated, all illustrations and photos in this book are the property of the author. Front cover and author photos by Lee Kirby.

This book refers to many companies’ products throughout. All trademarks, service marks and company names are the property of their respective owners.

Cover design by Aspa Founti Typeset by Pete Barnsley

To my wonderful wife Hannah and children Caitlin, Tallulah, Tabitha and Beatrix, for their encouragement, love and endless patience over the years with me filling various rooms in the house with noisy metal boxes in racks.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements.............................................................................. 1 About the author................................................................................... 3 Introduction............................................................................................. 5 PART A: BUSINESS

Chapter 1: An overview of the opportunities available............... 11 Chapter 2: Equipment and delivery formats – a brief guide........ 25 Chapter 3: Organisation...................................................................... 53 Chapter 4: Budgeting........................................................................... 65 Chapter 5: Showreels and marketing.............................................. 87 Chapter 6: Demos and presentation................................................ 95 Chapter 7: From demo to master recording.................................. 101 Chapter 8: Registrations and royalties............................................ 117 PART B: CREATIVITY

Chapter 9: Creativity in composition................................................ 127 Chapter 10: Creativity in recording................................................... 157 Chapter 11: Creativity in mixing.......................................................... 173 Chapter 12: Make the most of what you’ve got............................. 185 Chapter 13: Understanding your client............................................ 191

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Chapter 14: Self-starting projects...................................................... 197 Chapter 15: Down time and how to use it effectively.................. 207 Conclusion.............................................................................................. 215 Appendix A: Musicians’ Unions......................................................... 217 Appendix B: Useful contacts, UK...................................................... 219 Appendix C: Useful contacts, USA................................................... 221 Appendix D: Royalty Collection Agencies, worldwide................ 223 Appendix E: Recommended further reading................................. 227 Appendix F: Spitfire Audio.................................................................. 231 Appendix G: Trade mark acknowledgements............................... 235

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book was started in 2006, and then promptly shelved. It managed to survive being copied from one laptop to the next over many years until finally in 2021 a global pandemic helped it to emerge blinking into the light. There are a few people without whom it certainly wouldn’t have made it.

Christian Henson, my dear friend and partner in sampling, whose endless encouragement to step out of my comfort zone, and whose enthusiasm for music and life never wavers. Farren Blackburn, my oldest and closest friend with whom I’ve shared highs and lows, success and failure, and who has always been an encouragement and an inspiration.

My friends and colleagues at Spitfire Audio Holdings Limited (‘Spitfire Audio’), in particular Will Evans and Mike Warriner, who saw early unfinished versions and didn’t tell me to immediately delete it and get on with writing some more music. My editor Lucy Warriner, whose corrections and suggestions to the text have vastly improved it by some strange alchemy that I don’t really understand but am very grateful for. The design gurus Pro Constantinou and Aspa Founti, plus my typesetter Pete Barnsley who have wrestled with my complete lack of any visual artistic sense and made it look beautiful. Grace Colebeck-Smith and Charlotte Ratcliffe for their efficient and calm organisational skills that got me across the finish line without having a nervous breakdown. James Bellamy who despite being one of the finest music editors in the industry, also has a Neo-like ability to conjure up webby things and write code Acknowledgements | 1

that is incomprehensible to me. Ben Moore and Ben DeVille whose ability to spot impending doom before it arrives have helped the birth of this project to be painless and calm.

I’d like to thank my contributors – not only for the huge honour for me that they have shared their insights into the world of composition and scoring, but also for being my inspiration for my career in composition. One of the greatest joys of Spitfire Audio is that I’ve been able to meet and work with some of the great composers of our time, who have been heroes of mine since I was young and fresh out of the gate. So huge thanks to David Arnold, Gary Barlow, Kris Bowers, Charlie Clouser, Chris Cozens, Anne Dudley, Simon Franglen, Harry Gregson-Williams, Christian Henson, Trevor Morris, John Powell, Simon Rhodes, Hilary Skewes and Ty Unwin.

Also, my deep thanks and gratitude to the one and only Hans Zimmer – for his inspiration over the years, his kind encouragement to me, for bringing Christian and me into his unique and crazy sound mangling universe, and for being a living example of hard work and dedication leading to artistic success. The thing that always makes me do that extra final polish and tweak pass on one of my Spitfire Audio demos is the vague fear that Hans might listen to it!

Finally, I’d like to thank the Spitfire Audio community. I’ve met some truly lovely people over the years at various events, NAMM, concerts and talks. I think we are building a community of composers that support each other and share knowledge and insight, and that is a wonderful thing. Long may it continue.

Paul Thomson February 2022

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Paul Thomson is an award-winning composer who has written for film, television and games. He started his musical training at an early age, touring the world as a cathedral chorister. Paul has produced albums for a number of artists, and his interest in sound led to him designing bespoke orchestral sounds for films including Avatar and Dunkirk. He co-founded the British technology company Spitfire Audio. Spitfire Audio originally provided exclusive composing tools for A list film composers and has now grown to being the market leader in soundware with a global community. His mission with Spitfire Audio is to inspire a generation of composers.

About the author | 3

INTRODUCTION I am a professional composer. Since 1994, I’ve been working as a composer for hire, writing music for all types of audio-visual projects, in addition to creating music designed to stand alone.

I’ve scored everything from feature films to reality TV, from video games to luxury car launches. I’ve produced full length album projects and written music for boy bands to come on stage to.

I started my musical life as a child chorister in a cathedral choir under the tutelage of the legendary choral director Dr Donald Hunt, singing everything from Monteverdi to Messiaen.

When I was studying music back in the early 1990s there was no public internet – unless you count JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork) which was, if my recall doesn’t fail me, a way to borrow a book from another university library – and very few books about film or television scoring. Just a handful of slightly dry and very academic textbooks. I used to find the odd article about a film composer in magazines like Audio Media, and I would duly tear it out, file it in my ring binder, and pore over the pictures trying to work out what gear they had and how they were working.

I would have loved a no-nonsense book that explained in a concise and clear style how to go about the business of being a professional composer. So, in 2006 I sat down to write it. I got as far as a general plan and outline of the contents – and then life and composing intervened. Over the last year I returned to this project and started to write. I imagined writing this for my younger self of 30 years ago. Included in the book are references and links Introduction | 5

to YouTube videos on my channel in which I expand on some of the material in more detail. I have also included some photos to illustrate some of the different pieces of equipment discussed in the text. Interleaved through the book are thoughts and tips from some composer friends and also some advice from the recording engineer and orchestral contractor perspective. Everyone has their own slightly different take on many things and so I feel these takes from those at the frontline are incredibly valuable additions to the main text.

At various points in the book, I talk about costs. I have deliberately used both pounds sterling and US dollars to help readers on both sides of the Atlantic. These costs are provided as a rough guide from my own experience working on jobs in the UK and USA, but they should get you in the right ballpark.

This book is for anyone who is interested in becoming a professional composer, or anyone who is interested in refining or increasing their technical and creative prowess when writing their own music.

It is split into two sections, the first half deals with elements of the business side, from equipment and budgeting to demos and marketing. The second deals with creativity and strategies to develop your craft, by which I mean the physical process of the music realisation, with many ideas on how you can improve your creative skills in all the areas we need when composing and producing our own music.

Music brings such joy to life – and the act of creativity has many benefits. We know that participating in music making increases children’s sense of empathy, academic skills and ability to work successfully in a team, among many other positive outcomes.

Composing can enrich your life in many ways. At Spitfire Audio Holdings Limited (‘Spitfire Audio’) our mission is to inspire a generation of composers, and I hope that this book is helpful towards that goal.

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Spitfire Audio was founded in 2007 by myself and my dear friend and fellow composer Christian Henson. It grew from our shared dissatisfaction with the musical tools we had at hand to do our jobs as media composers, alongside our fascination with making sounds and experimenting with audio.

We first created a ‘bespoke’ library of Chamber Strings samples, what we would now call a ‘virtual instrument’, that allowed you to reproduce the sound of a smaller string band in the hallowed acoustic of the Hall at Air Lyndhurst Studios in London, which has hosted the recording of many blockbuster film scores, by Hans Zimmer among many A list film composers.

Having gathered a small but intrepid band of film composers together to license the library, giving us the funds to complete the project, we were quickly encouraged by them to do a symphonic Introduction | 7

strings library and then brass and woodwinds libraries too. Within a few years, we had recorded the entire orchestra. When we spent many days recording a percussion library, we discovered that many film composers record their own percussion libraries to taste – and so to recoup the costs we agreed with Joby Burgess, our fabulous percussionist, to release this as a commercially available product, with a royalty on sales. Thus, we stumbled into existence as a company!

One of the projects I’m most proud of is our LABS series of free instruments, which is an important element of our mission to inspire a generation of composers. While this originally was a donation-based project to raise money for charities, we now provide the instruments free and donate 1% of our turnover to our charity partners.

As we have continued to explore sound and make creative tools for composers, we have been joined along the way by a team of truly extraordinary talent, who are also a wonderful bunch of people. I can’t speak highly enough of the team at Spitfire Audio, it is an enormous pleasure and privilege to work with them.

Thank you for reading and I hope that this book helps to enrich your musical life.

Paul Thomson Cotswolds, February 2022

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PART A:

BUSINESS

Business | 9

CHAPTER 1:

AN OVERVIEW OF THE OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE BELOW THE LINE

‘Below the line’ is probably an expression that has outlived its usefulness. It supposedly originates from 1954 when Proctor & Gamble decided to pay their ad agencies a different rate from the agencies that ran their other promotional activity. However, it does kind of help us view the landscape of opportunities for composers in media, especially in advertising.

Everything ‘below the line’ is projects not destined for traditional broad or narrow-cast advertising. It is corporate films, informational films, live shows, product launches, installations, DVD promos, social media items and so on. This is a huge area of growth. As I write this, worldwide digital ad spending this year is expected to reach $375 billion. Compelling video content is the most powerful online advertising tool, with videos being shared thirteen times more than text and image features.1 Many journalism sources are now making short films to accompany their work, with a view to getting ‘viral’ videos shared widely.

An incredible 80% of shoppers watch a YouTube video about a product before purchasing it.2 But TV isn’t totally dead in the water, spend on TV advertising is expected to reach $75 billion by the end of 2022.

1

Source: https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/advertising-statistics

2 Source: https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/advertising-statistics An overview of the opportunities available | 11

COMMERCIALS

Commercials. We all grew up loving at least some of the jingles we were bombarded with daily. Many composers made small (and sometimes large) fortunes from the skill of being able to write ‘earworms’ – some of which become evergreen and run in various forms for years and years.

Commercials can be for local media, national TV, radio, cinema and especially on various forms of ‘new’ and social media, everything from Instagram and Facebook to DVD pre-rolls. It’s worth remembering that if you’ve heard a local radio jingle, someone had to write that and produce it. It’s a larger opportunity area than just the next Guinness spot.

The world of commercials has changed somewhat over the years. It used to be an arena in which a handful of highly skilled composers ploughed a lonely furrow, richly rewarded, as a kind of curious slipstream of the music business. Over the years more and more composers and producers spotted the opportunity to create music for commercials and so the music ‘production company’ ecosystem flourished around London’s Soho, and similar media centres in large cities worldwide. After a period in the late 2000s when a panoply of small ‘kitchen table’ media producers worked their Rolodexes, persuaded a multitude of composers to demo for free, and took 50% (or more) of the fee for any job they could land, ad agency producers realised that getting 100–150 tracks per job made their task that much harder. So the journey back to a smaller number of (paid) trusted composers or music production companies on each job began.

It’s still a bit of a minefield out there but it’s certainly an area of the business you should investigate.

TV THEMES

The skill of writing great TV themes is part art, part craft. While commissioning fees for the actual theme may not be very high 12 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

(£1,000 is a common offer for many light entertainment shows), if your theme is played regularly on broadcast TV you can make a good living from the royalty income. As has been the case for many years, ‘terrestrial’ TV in the UK (as it used to be called – meaning broadcast from land-based antennae as opposed to satellite) is still the highest earner – that is, BBC1, ITV, BBC2, Channel 4 and Channel 5, in that order.

If you get a news theme, or a daily chat show, or especially a game show (the music runs almost without interruption throughout the whole thing), you’ve hit the jackpot. In the USA the big networks are the best payers. There is an inbuilt scaling of royalty income with song the highest earner, followed by theme, and with ‘background music’ (or ‘score’ as we call it) being some way behind. The system uses ‘featured vocal’ and ‘background vocal’ as categories as well, leading to many composers energetically singing all over their tracks in order to win these coveted bumps in income.

However, if you look beyond the Star Trek/Game of Thrones/The A Team level of TV fame, you’ll notice that almost every show on the box has a theme of some kind. So, all those shows will need a composer.

Individuality and creative inventiveness are often key here.

Take the News World of the BBC as an example. From George Fenton’s extraordinary and brilliant orchestral work of the 1990s {https://youtu.be/HKanizbIfGU?t=24}, through to David Lowe’s fabulous themes based around the ‘pips’ that are used to count down to the hour on BBC Radio. Neither of these examples are standard ‘news fare’ – they are both extremely inventive and ear catching. The point of a TV theme is historically to get the viewers back from the kitchen where they have been making a cup of tea, into the living room to watch the show. In an age of streaming, that obviously is no longer the directive, but you still want to metaphorically grab the viewer by the throat and excite them about the show they are about to watch.

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The great, late Alan Hawkshaw wrote a piece of library music so incredibly good that it became the theme not only for one TV show but for two very popular shows – the kids’ school drama Grange Hill and the comedy panel show Give Us a Clue – that will be familiar to UK viewers: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2wo3JdHTWw} Mike Post wrote a ton of memorable themes, and in a demonstration that you can write themes in many styles, Barrington Pheloung’s Inspector Morse theme uses gentle chamber strings, a nylon string guitar, along with the morse code element.

If there’s one takeaway for a good TV theme: very rarely do they not have a tune.

CHANNEL IDENTS AND OTHER BRANDING

Channel idents can run the whole gamut from a super memorable little tune all the way through to solely sound design.

The UK Channel 4 launch logo in 1982 is a great example {https://youtu.be/LUiPdSp-Ins?t=48}. It was composed by David Dundas and orchestrated by Rick Wentworth, who were writing partners at the time – their most notable film score together being Withnail and I. One thing is for sure though, an enormous amount of creative energy and thought is required for this, and you will end up doing many, many versions. It’s not something you dash off. If you get it right though, it can become an almost inseparable part of the identity. 20th Century Fox is a perfect example of this.

This is an area where you can allow your imagination to run wild when it comes to the actual musical sounds you use, in some ways the wilder the better. You want the sound of the thing to be as distinctive and memorable as the melody itself. This is an area ripe for making your own sounds and samples to use on the job.

Sometimes the fun of this is, as with the Stella Artois branding, taking an existing piece (Verdi, La Forza del Destino in that case) 14 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

and composing around it, creating a new piece that ultimately pays off with the well known tune at the end.

Some branding I’ve personally composed for, in addition to Stella, are BBC channels, Euronews, the Capitol Films logo, the mobile phone company Orange and Virgin Atlantic, among others. The inflight gig turned out to be a great PRS earner (Performing Right Society, see Appendix D) – who knew!

TV SCORING

Here I’m referring to the composition of so-called ‘background music’ or as we prefer to call it, Score. This is definitely a craftdriven endeavour, you need to learn and practice this skill, observe how other composers have done it – successfully and otherwise – in noted TV shows and films.

This is also a highly subjective discipline, which in some ways renders it simultaneously easier and more difficult: easier because there are so many ways to score a scene that will work functionally, and more difficult because you need to find one of those ways that also fulfils the vision of the director and makes them happy.

Here are some general guidelines that you might find useful.

Learn to write around dialogue. Done skilfully this can sound incredibly natural, while leaving the necessary space for the audience to hear the dialogue clearly. Experiment and find out which instruments and frequency ranges are problematic (hint – consider the human voice exists centred around 1kHz for males, 2kHz for females).3 You may find that some percussion sounds are useful in some situations but distracting from the consonants of the speech in other situations. There isn’t really a hard and fast set of rules for this, you’ll need to use your ears and see if you can hear the dialogue clearly when the mix is low and your music is still fairly audible. Remember – it doesn’t matter 3 Source: https://www.dpamicrophones.com/mic-university/facts-about-speech-intelligibility An overview of the opportunities available | 15

how great your music is, the film makers want the audience to be able to hear the story, so you’ll need to master this skill.

Learn how to write thematically. What are the components of a good love theme? Or a character theme for different types of a protagonist? Children’s themes? How can you construct good action music – can you do it using non percussion instruments to drive the movement like John Williams does?

Can you mix two emotions into a melody; sadness and hope, emotion and distance, longing and happiness? The more you practice this the better you will get at it. Listen to great examples and work out how they move harmonically and melodically. What is the arc of the phrase, when do the chords move under the melody?

Learn how to change gear. Cues that start in one mood or place and then change scene, gear, meaning – these are great skills to have. How many ways can you make the change – key or chord change? (Beware – the picture editor won’t want you changing key all over the place as it makes trying cues in different places really hard work!) What about starting over a pedal note (an unchanging bass note that has chord changes above it) and then moving that on the gear change? How about time signature change or an instrumentation change?

Tempo? There are so many ways to do this: practice them all and get good at it.

Learn to hit off the one. If you can make a satisfying hit point or ‘sync’ point to the picture that is not on the start of a bar, that’s often a lot more subtle and satisfying than just having them all land on beat one of the bar all the time. Can you write to that hit point in such a way that it feels inevitable as opposed to accidental?

These are all examples of the craft of writing to picture. When inspiration is lacking and deadlines are fast approaching, it is craft that will save you and keep you going. Make sure you have this 16 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

muscle memory to fall back on and underpin your work, it will make your life a lot easier.

FILM

Film has always occupied the rarefied air at the top of the compositional mountain. The ultimate aspirational medium for composers of all stripes – film has a unique draw and mystique, and yet almost every film composer you know looks close to a nervous breakdown and about to keel over at any moment. How can something so good be so painful? Working as a film composer can be incredibly brutal especially as you approach the deadline.

With the modern nonlinear editing technology we all enjoy, the final cut is a thing of the past, relegated to the archive of film history.

A final cut, isn’t.

— SIMON FRANGLEN

The cut will be changing day by day and you’ll need a music editor of prodigious and almost unbreakable stoicism. There’s a reason that many A list composers are surrounded by teams – even if some of them are slightly more clandestine than others! The ability of the composer as HOD (Head of Department) to actually deliver the completed score to a high budget feature in time for the dub in the face of almost overwhelming hurdles, and at the requisite super high-quality level both creatively and technically, is paramount. There are very few people who are able to handle this extraordinary level of pressure and be able to continue being creative – let alone simultaneously managing a large team of people – and that’s why you’ll see a few names appear again and again in the list of the highest grossing composers by box office.

Of course, there is the odd outlier (and yes, it’s John Williams) who maintains the ‘old’ way of working by employing the pencil and paper approach, who doesn’t have quite such a large music team.

But for most of us, we will not take this ‘old’ approach to the gig.

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Having said that, it’s not really the old way. The real old way in the early days of film music and the big studio system was teams of composers all pitching in to the scores, working away in their individual rooms like a warren of creative bunnies the week before Easter. So, we’ve gone a long way to come back round.

Who is the audience for this? It could be obvious, but it might be surprising.

— JOHN POWELL

Obviously, in the smaller ‘indie world’, it’s still possible to be a composer who can work normal hours and be part of a team that decides to lock the cut. This means fixing the edit of the project so that there will not be any further picture changes. The stakes are (arguably) slightly lower, there probably isn’t as much footage to cut from, and there won’t be a massive team of producers panicking and trying to mess with the cut. The director is less likely to be trying to second guess what you are doing and simply be concerned with whether you are telling the story in the way they envisage it.

Indeed, I’m also probably being unfair to many blockbuster directors – my impression of Chris Nolan is that he is a brilliant collaborator with his composers who doesn’t attempt to micromanage every note. It’s not just an excuse from moany composers – you can’t disassemble music frame by frame and reconstruct it and expect it to still work. It’s not just music. The edit has a rhythm and movement to it that will also fall to bits if you mess with it without consideration for the whole.

I’m not saying you should sit in an ivory tower and bemoan the uncivilised philistines who have been appointed unjustly to be in judgment over your masterpiece. Of course, as Hans Zimmer often says, ‘You can’t persuade someone to like it!’ Rewrites are a part of the job. You won’t be able to hit a home run with every cue.

It’s very likely you will do multiple versions of many of the cues.

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So what can we take from this all? No pain no gain. Film is where the most glamour is, but that comes at a price. You’ll be tested as you never have been before, and the larger the budget, the higher the stakes, so the more people will have an opinion on what you’re getting up to. But if you go into it prepared, having mastered the craft of the job, and with an intimate knowledge of all your gear and your samples, and with a little black book filled with great musicians’ numbers, you can survive it.

GAMES

Video games are a massive industry that just keeps getting bigger.

Everything from gaming on your phone through to the latest console games with hyper-realistic visuals and sound – some of these releases surpass Hollywood levels of gross income.

But what is more interesting for composers is that they are also incredibly creative arenas to work in. Game developers are often open-minded and happy to try different things and experiment – trial and error is built into their DNA, as games go through many development cycles and gradually refine into the finished product.

This is in some way more similar to animated film than it is to traditional dramatic film making.

However, the one massive difference is that you are no longer dealing with a medium that is linear. The non-linear element of the story telling in games is something you need to learn how to do technically, but it’s also the most fun and rewarding element.

What this means is that you’ll have to think about how your tracks might loop without becoming repetitive – also how you can make music that works with various layers being added and subtracted by the game audio engine according to what the player is doing.

Each layer must work in its own right as a piece of music. So, you must ensure there aren’t any pregnant pauses in there – as that layer might be playing on its own at some stage – and also that all of the possible combinations work. Typically, you may have An overview of the opportunities available | 19

layers that add intensity, action, sparkle, ghostliness and so on, according to the situation in the game play.

There are two main specialised types of music then in game. The first is ‘Cinematics’ which usually (but not always) get scored to a locked cut of picture – which may still be generated by the game engine but has reliable timings that are repeatable and so you can score to the picture as in film. Then there are ‘Adaptive’ tracks – these are the multi-layered tracks referred to in the previous paragraph. These will not typically have set cuts or timelines, and so they derive their varying levels of intensity from adding or subtracting layers as the player’s level of jeopardy or excitement is supposed to ramp up and down.

CORPORATE NARROW-CAST

An example of this is inflight channel idents. These types of jobs are often branding led and designed for specific limited case uses.

Often there will be slightly compromised audio situations, and it is a good idea, if possible, to try and build this into your mix design.

It’s no good if your inflight drama channel ident gets its dramatic tension from a rumbling sub bass, if that part of the music is totally inaudible when you combine dodgy headphones, a sub optimal amp and the muffled roar of the engines.

You may also find opportunities here on local TV or radio stations – but be aware that you will be competing with library or ‘production’ music, which brings us on to the next heading.

LIBRARY/PRODUCTION MUSIC

Production music as we know it today, began in 1927 with the London company De Wolfe. The company had been involved in silent film scoring, and the coming of talking pictures, also known as ‘talkies’ and sound in film gave rise to a new opportunity – a library of specially recorded pieces of music that could be licensed to these new uses in a variety of moods and styles.

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The income from production music comes in two flavours: synchronisation fees, in which the user pays a set amount to use the music (non-exclusively) for a certain time and use case. Then if the music is used in a situation that would generate a public performance royalty, for example on TV, radio, in the cinema, at a large venue and so on, there is performance royalty income.

See Appendix D for details of the organisations that collect and distribute this revenue.

It’s worth noting that the sync fee is often split with the composer, although in the USA this is less common, with composers being signed on a ‘work for hire’ basis, which means that the copyright and publishing belongs automatically to the commissioner or ‘hirer’ – indeed your contract will need to grant even your composer share of performance income back to you! The sync income will be paid to the production music company and then accounted to the composer every six months.

The performance royalty income will traditionally be split 50/50 between the composer(s) and the publisher(s) – and this will be paid directly by the royalty society.

With production music, you will likely find that it’s a numbers game.

You need to have created a fairly large catalogue of exceptionally high-quality music which will slowly build into a decent income stream, each track earning a relatively small proportion of the whole. There is also the lottery ticket element, a track could end up on a usage that scores a huge income, for example as a news theme, or on a channel on a loop through the night.

EDUCATIONAL

There is a demand for good music for students to learn with.

Everything from the officially published UK Royal Schools of Music exam syllabus, through to ‘easy to learn piano’ style books. This is a competitive field like any other in music, but it’s certainly an area worth exploring if you have an interest.

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Writing music for school bands or orchestras is a great skill to acquire, and we need the next generation to have some good music to play and inspire them.

EVENTS

Writing music for people’s weddings or other special occasions is also a possibility, although a tricky area to get into. You will need a good reel of examples and to make contacts with event planners and similar people and organisations. You could team up with a local string quartet and write them an EP worth of material to use as a demo. You record it, and you could both use the recordings to get work.

Maybe you can write some great solo piano chilled music?

Cocktails need some form of accompaniment, and what better than a featured piece that is bespoke for the occasion, printed beautifully out for the client as a keepsake.

COMMISSIONS

Again, not easy to come by, but writing music to commission is a great way to get your music performed. This is slightly outside of the remit of this text however, so we’ll concentrate on commercial composing to brief and for hire.

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Franglen’s Golden Triangle Only take a gig if: You Earn from it

You Learn from it

It’s Fun

If it doesn’t hit at least one of these, don’t do the gig.

— SIMON FRANGLEN

So, as you can see, there are many outlets for music in the current landscape. In many ways, more than there have ever been. In the next chapter we will look at getting set up with the necessary equipment and what you can expect the delivery requirements to be when you complete a job.

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CHAPTER 2:

EQUIPMENT AND DELIVERY FORMATS – A BRIEF GUIDE SETTING UP YOUR STUDIO

Ergonomics plays a key role in the setup of your equipment. This may sound obvious, but people tend to just stick with where the gear has been since it arrived rather than sit back and think about how they are using it. We rarely get time to sit and scratch our heads, but that time can be enormously productive in the long run even if you feel like you are shirking the job in the short term.

My studio has evolved over many, many years to an ergonomic design that works for me specifically; the way that I compose and where everything is that I reach for at certain points in the process.

What does that mean in practice? Well I have an area of desking that is designed for me to sit at comfortably with manuscript paper, I have the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) desk set up with a sliding keyboard shelf under it so that I can have easy reach of all the controllers I need while I’m playing parts in on the keyboard, and then can slide the keyboard away to work on the DAW at editing or mixing. I have a big TV screen I use as a monitor so that I can see lots of tracks at once clearly.

I have mics set up ready to go through different preamps, so that the piano is always just a click away, or the drums. I have several floating mic stations so that I can quickly grab an instrument like the acoustic guitar or mandolin, or a shaker or xylophone, and be recording very quickly into the DAW. Equipment and delivery formats – a brief guide | 25

All these refinements help me to work quickly and keep the inspirational part of my brain active without having to keep switching over to the practical engineering side. It’s sometimes hard to get an idea down before you’ve forgotten where it was headed, so anything that helps you keep moving smoothly through the creative process is good.

CHOOSING A DAW (COMPUTER AND RECORDING SOFTWARE)

It’s amazing what you can get done with very little in today’s tech environment. It’s also easy to feel you can’t do something because you don’t have Piece of Kit A or Plug In X. Know your equipment inside out and work within its limitations. You’ll find creative solutions rather than technical ones, which are always the best.

– DAVID ARNOLD

The main DAWs in use today are Apple’s Logic Pro, Cubase, Ableton Live, FL Studio and finally, but in some ways most importantly, Pro Tools. While some composers write in Pro Tools, almost all professional recording studios use it as the digital tape deck. So, it’s very important to become familiar with it, as you’ll save time when you are paying to record in other studios if you can prep your own sessions in Pro Tools.

I’ve personally used Logic, Cubase and Pro Tools to write in over the years, but I’m currently using Logic. I have a large template set up with various orchestral options and sections for most other instruments, plus a section for recording live into the session. We’ll look at setting up a template later, but you might consider the two ways to approach a new job. Firstly, to set up a template to save you time when you start out, or secondly you could just allow the template to emerge as you write, which may have the advantages of limiting choice paralysis, and maybe making you think more carefully and creatively about each element you add into the score.

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It’s a tool. Whatever works for you is totally valid.

Obviously if you’re writing to picture you need to think about that side of things but outside of that they’re very much of a muchness... don’t get hung up on the fact that you’re not using what everyone else is using.

– TY UNWIN

It’s certainly the case that, once you have the ‘band’ just about set for the score, deleting all the unused tracks from your template can speed up workflow. You simply use a clean version of the previous cue as the template for the next.

CHOOSING AN INTERFACE

There are some great interfaces available today. This was traditionally always the weakest part of the DAW sound journey – the AD (Analogue to Digital) and DA (Digital to Analogue) conversion or the capture and playback of your sound – but units by companies like Universal Audio (UA) and Apogee are exceptionally good, with others by SSL, Focusrite and many more providing perfectly good alternatives. The advantage of the UA interfaces is the UAD (Universal Audio Digital) plugin system that allows you to load many really high-quality plugin software versions of classic outboard hardware into your signal flow.

The main consideration will be how many inputs you need to be able to record in simultaneously, if you’re a drummer and need eight mics then that will be the defining factor. Similarly, if you use outboard in your process, you’ll need ins and outs to get those signals to and from the outboard gear. The cost can really go up though when you move away from 2–4 IO up into the 8–16–24 territory.

If you want to use Pro Tools, you’ll need to check the compatibility of the interface you are considering. There are a few ‘gotchas’ with the Pro Tools software, such as only having access to 32 IO when Equipment and delivery formats – a brief guide | 27

using third party interfaces and similar little things that might point you toward Avid hardware (Avid make the Pro Tools software).

SCREENS, KEYBOARDS, WORKSTATIONS, RSI AND ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE

Less is often more. The more screens and ‘stuff’ you have to accommodate means more compromises you have to make to find your perfect/natural body position.

– TY UNWIN

The setup of your computer keyboard, screen, mouse and musical keyboard is very important to your overall physical health. If you have a setup that requires repeated awkward and unnatural movements, you are opening Pandora’s Box and risking RSI (repetitive strain injury), back pain and all manner of other physical ailments. Many professional instrumentalists swear by the Alexander Technique, and it’s definitely worth looking into this to get some clear and valuable advice on how your body reacts to certain types of positioning and movement.

I’m not great at managing the physical aspect of sitting for extended periods at the computer. Honestly, having a dog helps me get out and on walks a few times a day. I also try (though often not successfully) to think of my work period as if I’m on the clock in a studio. So with that, I give myself short 5–15m breaks every hour or so just to force myself to get away from the computer. It’s always amazing to me how often I step away from a cue for just a few mins, and come back to listen to it with fresh ears and immediately feel clearer on the direction (or quite often feel like: what was I thinking?).

– KRIS BOWERS

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Make sure your chair is as good quality as you can manage and is fully adjustable so that you can raise and lower it to support your body when working. Many people love to stand while working and there are automated desks available that can switch between standing and seated work, which could be useful.

Consider switching out your mouse for some other form of input, eg touchpad, ergonomic vertical mouse, roller ball mouse, stylus and pad. If you find you are getting pain in your wrist from mouse use, this could be the onset of RSI so be careful. You don’t want your work to make you physically ill.

SAMPLE LIBRARIES

Sample libraries have come on in leaps and bounds since I started in the industry, when we used hardware samplers by Akai, Emu and Roland. My first sampler in 1993, the Akai S-01, had 1MB which equates to 15 seconds of memory at 32kHz sample rate. You couldn’t do a whole lot with that. Samplers became more powerful, and my Emu E4XT Ultra in 1999 had 128MB of ram, 128 voice polyphony and was quite a hardcore beast. But of course, Nemesys’ Gigasampler wholly changed the game. The ability of its ‘endless wave’ technology, refined in collaboration with Hans Zimmer, allowed for streaming the samples from hard drives, and so if you had the necessary computer firepower, you could really do amazing things.

I buy libraries at a ridiculous rate simply so that I’m never in a position where I want the sound of something but can’t achieve it… somehow. I’ve been doing just that for 30 years, so these days it’s the organisation and cataloguing that’s as important as anything else.

– TY UNWIN

As the technology advanced, sample developers became more adventurous and the complex multi-controller sample libraries of today gradually came into being. At Spitfire Audio, which at its Equipment and delivery formats – a brief guide | 29

birth in 2007 was just Christian Henson and me, we started by creating a bespoke Chamber Strings library for a small group of private club members, mainly A list film composers. We swiftly covered symphonic strings, brass and woodwinds, and then our first commercial library in 2010 was an orchestral percussion one recorded with Joby Burgess in the Hall at Air Lyndhurst. This was the first sample library to have multiple mic positions controllable from the UI (User Interface). In Figure 1, you can see the UI of the very first version of this library.

Figure 1: The original UI from the Spitfire Audio Percussion library4 Today, there are some fabulous sample libraries to choose from, including a huge choice of types of orchestral sound from our own Spitfire Audio collections. It’s more possible than ever before for you to really design your own sound as a composer around your personal taste in recording style and playing style. In Appendix F, I have listed a few of the most popular options.

MICS

It’s important to have at least one mic in your studio. I can’t emphasise enough how much your music will benefit from having live recordings on, even if it’s just you playing percussion and whatever pitched instruments you are capable of. Bear in mind you don’t even need to be very good on an instrument to create an interesting sound with it.

4 Source: used with permission by Spitfire Audio.

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Which mic should you choose? Well, even a Shure SM57 is a great starter mic. It’s dynamic, which means it doesn’t need power, but you will need to get it close to the sound source. It’s often used on guitar amp speaker cabinets, snare drum, woodwind and vocals.

It is also inexpensive, and you can find one for under £100. It has a cardioid pattern, so it rejects background noise from behind the mic very well.

The choice of mics available these days is quite mind boggling. However, only a relatively small selection get used by professionals on a day to day basis. There’s a role for three types – dynamics, condensers and ribbons. Dynamics can handle a lot of level and have good background noise rejection. They sound best very close to the source.

Condensers in all their iterations cost more but sound commensurately good. I would choose these 95% of the time. Ribbons are useful in certain applications as they soften transients nicely, restrain high frequencies but are generally figure of 8 (they hear front and back but not the sides).

– SIMON RHODES

Personally, I like to use a mic pre that is as transparent as possible. Low noise, low distortion, low colour. There are many opportunities to add a bit of something later but when capturing sound and something’s not quite right then at least we can rule out the mic pre. Some mics need virtually no gain (modern Sennheiser condensers, for example) but older passive ribbons can require up to 70dBs, which is a lot and as ribbons are inherently a bit noisy, you don’t want to add additional hiss from the mic pre.

– SIMON RHODES

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What do the different mic patterns mean?

Cardioid – this is the most common pattern you will come across.

Rejects sound from the rear well.

Has reduced pickup from the sides.

Figure 2

Supercardioid – has a tighter area of pickup at the front, less pickup from the sides but slightly more from the rear. A more directional version of the Cardioid.

Figure 3

Hypercardioid – again even tighter at the front, and less on the sides, but compromises with slightly more from the rear.

Figure 4

Omnidirectional – captures sound equally from all directions. These are great room mics with a very flat frequency response. This has the best bass response of any pattern.

Figure 5

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Figure of 8 – equal capture front and back. Ribbon mics commonly exhibit this pattern. It has the highest side rejection of any pattern and is often used for stereo techniques such as Mid/Side and Blumlein. This has the least bass response of any pattern.

Figure 6 If you would like to check out the audio from some budget mics that sound great, you can watch me test a few here: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgtKRoLROgc} Here are the four main mic types: • LDC (Large Diaphragm Condenser) – these tend to be either multipattern or Cardioid. Condenser mics are basically capacitors where one thin membrane plate is moving in response to sound, against a solid metal plate in very close proximity. This movement changes the capacitance of the system, producing a change in voltage, which can be amplified to create the signal. They need powering. LDCs are typically good at capturing midrange and bass sounds, and so they are great for vocals, guitar, bass, cello and so on. They typically add warmth and a lush sound to the lower frequencies. The sound seems somehow richer, and more intense and beautified. They also have a lower noise floor than any other mic type. Condensers generally have the widest frequency response and the fastest transient response of all mic types. As the current produced by the capacitor is so low, a circuit called an ‘impedance convertor’ is required to boost the signal current, and hence condensers need powering by so called ‘phantom power’ from the mic preamp. LDCs operating in cardioid tend to veer toward omni at lower frequencies and the address width of the Equipment and delivery formats – a brief guide | 33

pickup narrows quite considerably at higher frequencies.

This can be helpful for the lower frequencies making the mic less sensitive to movement by the source but needs consideration when recording a higher frequency source.

• SDC (Small Diaphragm Condenser) – these are generally cardioid or omni – and some systems like the Schoeps CMC6 have multiple interchangeable capsules so you can switch to the correct one for the application. SDCs look like pencil mics and are the most natural and pure representation of a sound of all the mic types. They have a very detailed sound image and excel at reproducing high and sparkly sound sources.

They are the most ‘realistic’ of all mic types. SDCs are fairly consistent in their polar pattern across the frequency range. They are great for recording piano, acoustic guitar, percussion, drum overheads, hi-hats and cymbals and other stringed instruments.

• Ribbon – these work by using a light corrugated metal ribbon suspended between the poles of a magnet. As the ribbon vibrates the voltage is induced in it from the ribbon moving within the magnetic field. Ribbons have a wonderfully rich and vibrant low end, and a rolled off high end, which makes them very similar to human hearing, and will flatter most sound sources. The softer high end makes them great for mellowing over bright signals like metal percussion and brass. However, they exhibit the strongest proximity effect where the bass increases with proximity to the mic, so care is needed here. Famous ribbons include the legendary BBC presenter mic, the Coles 4038. So called because it was invented by Colin and Les. They sound classic and vintage.

Also, sE Electronics make a superb low-cost ribbon called the VR2. They are very fragile as the ribbon can be damaged very easily by wind or by dropping the mic. They produce a very low output, so they need low noise preamps with plenty of gain.

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• Dynamic – these mics work like speakers in reverse. As opposed to the Condenser’s capacitor, in the Dynamic mic there is a coil that is glued to a membrane, with a magnet surrounding the coil. When this membrane is vibrated by sound waves the movement of the coil within the magnet creates a voltage. Dynamic mics do not need powering as the transformer in the mic can produce enough output to use. Dynamic mics can take a huge signal so are very useful for live work, guitar amp cabinets, vocals, snare drum etc.

The sensitivity drops off rapidly with distance, so they need to be relatively close to the source, but this is again helpful in limiting feedback in a live situation.

OUTBOARD

I should start by saying that outboard is a luxury not a necessity.

However, you can pick up second hand or inexpensive outboard gear and use it to great effect. So, what is outboard?

Anything that your sound source goes through, either on the way into your recording system, or once recorded, being passed out of the system and back in. This could be individual tracks that you want to change the sound colour of, or it could be your master mix that you are sending out to a ‘master buss chain’ to add the finishing touches to.

Much of this outboard has been modelled in software plug-in form, but there is undeniably something a little bit special added to the sound by good outboard equipment.

EQs (Equalisers) – these can change the frequency response or makeup of a signal. They do this by using filters to isolate different ranges of frequencies to either boost or cut in relative volume.

Within an EQ you will probably have combinations of the following.

High pass/low pass filters – these are the simplest forms of EQ, being cut-offs above/below which the signal is allowed to pass.

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The frequencies being held back are gradually attenuated as you move away from the frequency set on the filter, as Figure 7 shows. It’s a fairly smooth line but the steepness of the curve can be changed in some EQs according to the strength of the filter circuit, measured in dB/octave (where octave is a doubling in frequency).

Figure 7: An example of a high pass filter5 High/low shelf filters – these operate in a similar way to high and low pass filters, but with the key difference that rather than giving a progressively bigger gain change as you move away from the frequency selected, they apply a constant gain change to all frequencies above/below the selected frequency accordingly as you can see in Figure 8. There is still a slight curve around the point at which you set the frequency, and this is a benefit, as the alteration to the frequency response sounds more musical than a sudden drastic change.

5

Source: used with permission by FabFilter, Netherlands.

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Figure 8: An example of a low shelf filter6 Peaking or Bell filters – these can be either fixed frequency or variable frequency and allow the boosting or cutting of a specific frequency as you can see in Figure 9. Again, the area around the selected frequency is affected somewhat, and the steepness of the sides of this curve is also controllable in many EQ circuits, and is referred to as either Q, resonance or bandwidth. (Q is defined as the ratio of the centre frequency to the bandwidth at the half power point.) The narrower the bandwidth, the higher the resonance or Q of the change, and the more ‘surgical’ the operation is on your audio. This is great for dealing with problem resonances or hum/ sibilance etc. However, these can sound a bit odd if you are using them to just shape the sound of your audio, and in this case a wider bandwidth can sound more musical and less obvious. A fully variable circuit is referred to as a ‘parametric EQ’.

6 Source: used with permission by FabFilter, Netherlands.

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Figure 9: An example of a ‘Peaking’ or ‘Bell’ filter7 All filters produce some element of phase shift in the output signal.

In analogue gear this is due to parts of the audio passing through capacitors and being slightly shifted in time, and in digital plugins (excepting so called ‘Linear Phase EQ’) the delay is caused by FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) processing. This processing splits the audio into individual spectral components and thereby provides frequency information about the signal. However, in my experience I have rarely if ever had to worry about this, and in fact the effect is possibly something that adds to the magic and musicality of great outboard EQ. A common beginner mistake with EQ is overusing it to try and ‘fix’ issues that are barely there or trying to get each element when listened to in isolation to have some specific predestined sound that the composer believes that instrument ‘should’ sound like. If you have a well recorded source in a decent room, you should mess with it as little as possible until you are sure that there’s a problem there once your whole composition and mix is almost complete. Otherwise, you risk hacking away at every instrument as 7 Source: used with permission by FabFilter, Netherlands.

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you go and ending up with a rather terrible Frankenstein’s monster of a mix which is all out of proportion and ugly sounding.

Where EQ excels is in the creation of a ‘special effect’ instrument – a simple example would be a bamboo flute where you want to exaggerate the sound of the breath and air, and so you dial in EQ to boost that character in the sound.

Compression – compressors are used to reduce the dynamic range of a signal. This can be useful to bring down any peaks in a signal, which in turn can allow you to increase the volume of that signal. Compression started in the early days of broadcast radio, with the aim of getting signals to the listened that did not distort and had a relatively level volume. As people noticed the sound of these units imparted a characterful effect to the signal, and the studio compressor was (gradually) born.

Compressors have a variety of controls, below are the most common, which can be seen in the example in Figure 10.

Figure 10: An example of a software compressor8

8 Source: used with permission by FabFilter, Netherlands.

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Threshold – the level at which the unit starts to affect the input signal. Any signal past the threshold is compressed, at the ratio set.

Ratio – the level of compression that is applied. So, a 2:1 ratio means that for every 2dB above the threshold, the signal is attenuated to 1dB above. For a signal 8dB above the threshold, it is attenuated down to 4dB above. So, a ratio of 4:1 would mean that a signal 4dB above the threshold is attenuated down to 1dB above, and so on. The SSL buss compressor has a 4:1 setting that is commonly used on many hit records and is a part of the signature SSL sound. Above 8:1 is considered strong compression and limiting is effectively infinity:1.

Knee – this describes how the action of compression is onset in the system. For a gradual onset which starts before the threshold and gently increases to a point above the threshold where it hits the ratio set, this is described as ‘Soft Knee’. Conversely, when the compression kicks in very tightly at the Threshold, this is ‘Hard Knee’. The Knee is adjustable on some systems, and some just switch between hard and soft.

Attack time – the time it takes for the signal to be fully compressed according to the ratio set after the signal has exceeded the threshold. Faster times are measured in the 10s or 100s of microseconds (µs), slower times in the 10–100 milliseconds (ms) range. Faster attack times will clamp down on transients in the signal, while slower attacks will allow some transient through before the compression kicks in.

Release time – the time taken for the signal to go from the compressed state back to the normal state. Usually longer than attack times, generally varying from 40ms–50ms up to 1–5 seconds. Fast release times will allow the signal to rise back up before the next transient kicks the compression back in, although too fast and you may end up with a ‘pumping’ effect (although that might be what you are after) – but too slow release times will lead to the signal being held down beyond the next incoming transient 40 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

peak, which can sound odd – leading to a loud ‘starting’ transient and then a quieter following series of them.

Make-up gain – in Figure 10 this is labelled ‘auto gain’ and is the amount that the output is boosted by, to counteract the reduction in the peak of the signal that occurs as a result of the compression.

This can be automated in some compressors, or you can set it manually. It will make the apparent volume of the signal higher, as you have reduced the overall ‘dynamic range’ of the signal (the range between the loudest and softest part). In the Fabfilter compressor in the figure you simply click on the word ‘auto’ to switch between manual and automatic gain control.

I have made a video about how to set a compressor here which you may find useful: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8apJyG4Bgc} There are different types of compression: VCA (Voltage Controlled Amplifier) – the most common form of compressor. The classic SSL buss compressor. These use a VCA to detect the level and apply the compression. A VCA uses a control voltage signal to adjust amplitude. The input signal is split into a detector path and an output path. They have a very precise and highly predictable behaviour and can be set in a very repeatable fashion. This type of compressor is commonly used on a mix buss.

As an interesting aside, the word ‘buss’ refers to a grouping of audio signals into a unified signal with its own controls. Often used in computing architecture to refer to the communication system that transfers data between components, the word derives from the Latin ‘Omnibus’ which is the dative form of the word ‘Omnis’ which means everything, or all. So, Omnibus means ‘for all’.

Optical – also referred to as ‘Opto-compressor’ – these use a light source that’s brightness is driven by the incoming signal. This is a transducer (converting from electrical energy in the audio signal into electro-magnetic energy of light) and may be an LED, an electroluminescent device, or an incandescent bulb (like an oldEquipment and delivery formats – a brief guide | 41

fashioned light bulb) and transducers are generally non-linear, which we can interpret as colour in the signal and behaviour.

Then an optical photocell or light-dependent resistor detects the brightness of the lamp. The brighter it is, the lower the resistance, and the more current can flow through the circuit. The way that the light is produced will also be affected by the input frequency of the audio source to some extent. Most people consider the optical compressor to be the most ‘characterful’ of all the compressor types. It is slower to react than other forms as the system with light source and light detector are inherently slower than other forms of compressor circuit. The LA2A is maybe the most famous of these.

FET (Field Effect Transistor) compressors – where the tubes of older designs have been replaced with smaller transistors. They react very fast and can sound fantastically stompy and aggressive.

They have character from their harmonic distortion and with the fast attack and release times are great on anything that needs to pop out of a mix, like drums, guitar, vocals, etc. A classic is the well-loved UREI 1176, slightly noisier due to a higher output gain needed (see Chapter 7 for more information on UREI and the ‘UREI click’). They don’t have true ratio controls due to the way the circuit operates, and so the effective ratio increases as the signal increases above the threshold until it reaches infinity:1. They also tend not to have threshold controls, so you need to game the threshold by combining your input level and your ratio selection!

Delta-Mu (also called Variable-Mu, trademarked by Manley) – these multi-tube compressors don’t have a ratio control at all, and the ratio increases as the signal gets louder. Highly non-linear, with Soft Knee by default, and quite slow attack. The actual gain reduction is being performed by a tube. Very smooth and lush sound, commonly referred to as ‘creamy’ or ‘gluey’ – these are great for the mix buss as they are very musical in operation. Of course, the most famous example is the Fairchild, but the modern Manley Vari-Mu is a superb compressor.

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Preamps – these amplify low level mic and instrument signals up to line level, which is the normal operating level of audio in your recording gear/DAW etc. Mics can need up to 50–60dB of gain, and for Ribbon mics sometimes even more. Instruments like guitar and bass tend to need 20–30dB of gain. Home and semi-pro audio devices always used to operate at -10dBV and pro devices at +4dBu, but now most devices are at +4dBu. You might find older synths that are -10dBV. Many audio interfaces have built in preamps. Some, like the Universal Audio Apollo interfaces have excellent sounding preamps. But you might find that if you have a lower cost interface then you might want the better quality audio that you get from a dedicated unit. They might have a lower noise floor, which really helps when using quieter mics such as Ribbons. But mostly people choose preamps because they want a specific sound colour. There is a certain sound to a Neve or an API. With the 500 series where you get a ‘lunchbox’ unit and then slot individual component units in, there are a huge number of boutique companies making interesting outboard for the system.

Reverb – external reverb units used to be one of the big differences where you could hear the quality or lack of in a mix. No doubt that ‘character’ reverbs like the Yamaha SPX90 and the Lexicon LXP1 or even the Alesis Midiverbs or Quadraverbs were useful and had their place, but you knew you were in business when the studio had a Lexicon 480L. The lush soundscape that this could create was extraordinarily expensive. But now with plugin equivalents of even the 960L, and new reverb plugins such as Cinematic Rooms, the sound that you can get from ‘in the box’ reverb is really very good indeed. And it has the advantage that you can have a reverb for each stem in your DAW session – we’ll talk more about stemming and reverb in Chapters 8 and 11.

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Plug-in reverbs have really come of age in the last few years. Convolution can be interesting but hybrid and digital ones are a bit more tweakable and don’t sound like a loudspeaker at the back of a lovely church.

– SIMON RHODES

Time-based FX – such as chorus, flangers and delays, these again tend to be good in plugin form. However, you might find some great results can be had from making a little collection of guitar FX pedals, and then using them either as outboard sending from your session and going back in, or just on the way in to record in your DAW as finished sound. They are also great for making interesting samples!

Chorus and flanging are two modulation effects that use delay in interesting ways. The main difference is that chorus will tend to use longer delay times, which are then also modulated. The effect of this is to mimic the sound of two or more instruments playing together but very slightly detuned and out of time with each other.

Hence the name ‘chorus’ in reference to the idea of a single voice vs a chorus of voices. Flanging uses much shorter delay times, which give rise to a ‘comb filtering’ effect. This is so called because the frequency response has the visual appearance of a comb, as some frequencies are in phase and thus boosted, whereas others are out of phase and cancel out. The delay between the signals to produce this effect is typically between 1ms and 25ms. Flangers also use delay feedback or regeneration. The delay time can be modulated using a LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) to sweep the comb effect up and down the frequency range and this is very characteristic. The more feedback is applied, the more resonant the effect becomes, provided the delayed signal has the same polarity as the source signal.

Summing mixers – these are designed to reproduce the effect you get from summing signals in a large format console. While some 44 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

people swear by these and describe the larger more 3D soundstage you can achieve using them, some equally say they are snake oil and make very little difference. It’s certainly lower down on the list of things you really need to get a good sound in my opinion. Of the units out there, Dangerous Audio gets a very good reception, and the Neve 8816 unit has a great sound and some additional features such as width control, comprehensive monitoring and cue mix functionality, and people rave about the sound.

In summary, outboard is a great and fun way to get your hands dirty and maybe inspire some additional creativity. However, it’s important to note again, that it is most definitely a luxury and not a necessity.

CABLING

This is one of those age-old conundrums and something you are bound to keep returning to and tweaking over the years as your studio evolves. You will only really need to worry about this if you have outboard that you need to keep patching in and out of your DAW. Once you get to the stage of having to repeatedly yank cables out and search for the right leads, you’ll be interested in getting some form of patchbay to work with.

Simply put, a patchbay enables you to define what signal goes where from a default starting point and gives you the option to override that with a new signal flow when necessary. Patchbay design is an art in itself. There are many options for the optimum layout of pieces of equipment and the interconnections between them. A skilled patchbay designer will have experience of different ways of working and can help you to find the most streamlined system for your workflow. I’ve had three bespoke patchbays over the years, and the money I’ve spent on them has definitely paid for itself in saved time and additional creative speed while working.

I’m going to show you two designs I’ve built with the assistance of Justin Spier from Studio Creations and talk you briefly through the thinking behind them.

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These patchbays are TT bantam bays, which are the small jack plugs, ‘TT’ standing for Tiny Telephone. The advantage of these is that you can fit a lot more connections into the width of a rack slot, but you can equally use standard size Jack socket patchbays as well, which I did earlier in my career. These are commonly less expensive, and you can easily set them up yourself, to the rear are simply jack sockets as well, so no soldering required. Many have switchable normalling also (this is how you set the patchbay to behave when different combinations of plugs are inserted).

Normalling Full normal – the top and bottom rear panel connections are linked, but the link is broken when you insert a plug into the front panel.

Half normal – the top and bottom rear panel connections are linked, but when you plug into the top front panel the link is not broken, whereas a plug into the bottom front does break the link.

(This in more detail means the top is ‘half thru’ and the bottom ‘half break’.)

Isolated – these are not connected and are simply routed directly from the rear to the front panel connections.

Here are two examples of patchbay design: in Figure 11 you can see my patchbay from 2011, which is a relatively simple design with a small amount of outboard audio hardware, most of which was used through the same inputs and outputs consistently.

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Figure 11: My patchbay in 2011 In Figure 12, the layout is now considerably more complex, allowing for multiple use cases for different pieces of equipment, in a more flexible design.

Figure 12: My current patchbay I talk about patchbay setup in a YouTube video that can be found using the following link: {https://youtu.be/AvYffKYyNIQ?t=875} You will want to have a think about how your studio is set up and your usual work process to design the patchbay correctly for Equipment and delivery formats – a brief guide | 47

your own workflow. In my case, as in Figure 12, you can see a few things that are wired to certain paths. Let’s look at them in more detail now.

Bays A-B By default, the outputs of my preamps go into the first audio interface’s inputs. I have some guitar FX outputs running into the second audio interface, alongside the stereo out of the Neve 8816 summing mixer, and then the synths all go into the inputs of the third audio interface. At the end of the row, you can see that I have a patch panel on the wall next to the synth area that comes up here so I can plug extra gear in on the fly and have it appear on the patchbay. This is enormously useful and at least one of these should be planned for in every studio!

Bays C-D Here are the outputs from the three audio interfaces: the first 16 go to the inputs of the summing mixer. This is set up so that I can easily switch in the summing mixer to a session in my DAW and I don’t have to put 16 patch cords in. The next two interfaces are not directly sending to anything apart from the Boss that is the controller and audio switcher for my guitar pedals. This is an alternate send that I can use from the DAW quickly and easily. At the right-hand end of these rows, you can see in Figure 12 a few control room elements. The UA interfaces control room out going to the m905 monitor controller main analogue input, the summing mixer into the second so I can easily have a quick listen to that with a simple button switch on the monitor controller, and then some summing inserts.

Bays E-F Multed (duplicated) outputs from my main synths go into the Boss synth switcher unit here, which then feeds into the guitar pedal one, for quick and easy slinging one or more synths through some pedals, then the guitar FX outs go into the FX Boss unit (these 48 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

are simply alternate ways to use the same pieces of equipment) followed by some Boss outs feeding into the guitar FX ins (so these can be switched from the Boss unit itself) and finally a few stragglers, the M7 reverb ins and outs, and the Kemper and Helix guitar FX. The S conv is a system to get signals from -10dBv level to +4dBu level or vice versa. The ones I use are Samson S-Convert units.

Bays G-H My three other panels around the room come up so I can plug mics into those and have them appear here. I can then select from various preamp inputs, from the lunchbox APIs and Neves, to a variety of other options. I don’t normal these through, as I will often want to switch these according to what I’m recording. The Studer A800 also comes up here – again this is not normalled to anything and appears here on its own, as it’s not in regular enough use on a specific task, so I just patch it in when I want to use it.

Bays I-J Finally, we have all of my other outboard equipment, again this is all isolated, as I just patch it around whatever I want to use it on as I go. At the right-hand end of these rows, we have the utility section – some phase reversals and some parallels – when you can duplicate (or ‘mult’) signals manually if needed.

I hope that gives you a few ideas on how to set up your own patchbay. Everyone’s specific workflow will be slightly different, so it’s worth giving this some serious thought before taking the plunge.

MEDIA AND BACKUP

You’ll need some system for storing and backing up your data.

We’ll look in more detail at backup strategies in Chapter 3, but for now just consider if you need a system with removable drives, so that you can swap drives in and out of the system easily, or if you Equipment and delivery formats – a brief guide | 49

want to have one big drive with a RAID system to keep everything in one place, whether you prefer drives in the DAW itself or always external. Have a system worked out so that you can be organised from the start of a job, and easily find data you need without having to search through piles of either unmarked, or badly named drives. Be aware that all drives are fragile as well, so if you use bare drives, you’ll need some decent cases to put them in to keep your work safe.

You can guarantee that the ONE project you don’t backup or archive is the one series that unexpectedly returns for series two and they want it all over again… but different.

JUST in case… archive everything.

– TY UNWIN

Many people use SSDs for the super-fast access times, but if your budget can stretch to a few, they are only really essential for use as sample drives and for audio streaming. You can backup to nonSSDs as they are a lot cheaper. And for years we all ran sample libraries off SATA drives, although that is becoming trickier as they become more complex and require more simultaneous voices to be streamed.

I’ve found some portable SSDs to be less reliable due to the connectors failing, however the OWC portable SSDs have been fantastic, and you can even get an 8TB model.

DELIVERY FORMATS

When you deliver your score it’s important that you give it in the correct format and make it very easy for the picture editor or dubbing mixer to place it in the correct timecode position.

A quick conversation with the dubbing mix engineer ahead of your music mix is always a good idea – the most common format I’ve been asked for with TV score is 48kHz 24bit stereo WAV files.

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If you export these from Pro Tools they will be bWAV (Broadcast WAV) which contain the timecode position in the file metadata, however I never ever trust this. I will always name the file with the timecode in the filename. For example: TIC_3m07_v2_10163203 Here you have the three-letter project title code, the episode and cue number, versioning if applicable (you will probably need to remix at least a few of the cues over a project so it’s always worth doing this even if most of the cues stay as v1) and then the SMPTE timecode of the file start time in the format hh:mm:ss:ff (hours, minutes, seconds and frames).

Now, the dub suite can easily check that your WAV starts where it is supposed to.

Note that the timecode reference here is the mix file start time – not the cue start time. Your mix file will have a few seconds of silence before the music comes in. The dubbing engineers have plenty to keep them busy without having to try and locate the exact start of your cue and then line that up to a frame reference.

So, the timecode you include in the filename is the place that the WAV file should be located.

When delivering for film, the same conventions apply but you may well be delivering surround files. You are also much more likely to be asked to deliver stems. In this case you will have an extra field in the filename _BRASS_ or _STRINGSHIGH_ and so on.

The point of delivering stems is that if there is a problem in your cue against some dialogue or sound design element in the dub, they can pull down just the problem sound rather than having to duck your entire mix.

Of course, this means that you won’t be able to apply overall mix buss mastering to your cue mix, as the mix will not reconstruct properly when broken out into stems. It will sound different. In my experience though, the music will end up louder in the dub if you have left it with some dynamic range and depth rather than going Equipment and delivery formats – a brief guide | 51

for a ‘radio ready’ slamming mix! That will tend to interfere with the dialogue and sound design and will inevitably get turned down.

There will be exceptions to this, but it’s far safer to assume that the dubbing room will want to be the boss of the overall mix and that includes your music.

When stemming, consider giving enough flexibility without being overwhelming. Around ten stems is usually as many as I would hand over. You might have: • Low drums • Untuned percussion • Strings • Brass • Woodwind • Tuned percussion • Guitars • Bass • Keys • Sound design But, of course, every project will have its own requirements. Make sure that the reverb and any FX on the stem are just the reverb and FX for that instrument group – no brass hall reverb on the woodwind stem thank you!

You can set up your template in such a way that stemming is fast and easy. You can find out more about how I set my template up in this YouTube video: {https://youtu.be/WTyqCxH3vmw}

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CHAPTER 3:

ORGANISATION In this section we’ll look at how to keep yourself organised while working on a project. This is an essential area to plan out and work on, as you will quickly end up in a right old mess if you don’t have some systems in place.

DATABASES AND JOB MANAGEMENT

There are a number of reasons that you might look into creating a database to keep track of your jobs. Having an easily searchable and comprehensive record of everything you have done is really helpful: from a responsibility point of view, if for example a client comes back to you three years after the job was finished and asks if they can re-run a commercial campaign, or re-license a track from one film for an unconnected TV show. You need to have all the information at your fingertips to ensure you can safely process this new job request without risking getting something wrong and exposing yourself to liability unnecessarily.

Or say you need to do a second series of a TV show a year after the first series has run. Do you want to have to reconstruct all of the budgets you made initially, or search through a virtual mountain of emails? Wouldn’t it be easier to just pull up a record in a database?

You should also be keeping track of the individual elements of the job – in a TV show, film or game, this will be the individual cues. For below the line work, it might be installations, films, event cues and so on. Whatever the project, you should have all of the

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data needed to keep track of everything in a simple format that lets you zoom out for a bird’s eye view. This used to be done using bespoke database programming, using Microsoft Access or Apple’s Filemaker Pro. But recently the ubiquitous Google Docs has taken pole position for speed, accessibility and ease of use.

You can be as detailed as you like at this point. I’ve even used a spreadsheet that has a timecode calculator in it, so I could keep track of the individual cue lengths and the overall amount of music in each episode, to the frame. However, you may find that by the time you’re eight episodes deep, the spreadsheet takes a while to recalculate and can become a little unreliable on the timings.

Nevertheless, all the information you need to keep a record of, can be stored on a decent spreadsheet. Here is some of the info you might consider recording, alongside Figure 13 which is a screenshot of one of my job spreadsheets.

Figure 13: One of my job spreadsheets Cue number/ID – this needs to be individual enough not to get confused with a job you do in eleven years’ time. I usually use three letters, followed by the reel if it’s a film, or the episode number of a TV show. So, for example on the show The Fades I’d have: FDS3m04 Or on the movie Half of a Yellow Sun, reel 5, I’d have:

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HYS5m34 Now the convention is that on a TV series you will start each episode with a cue m01 (or sometimes if it’s a ‘previously on’ that can be referred to as m00) – whereas with a film the cues don’t restart numerically on each reel. So, if reel 1 ended with 1m11, the first cue in reel 2 will be 2m12.

Cue name – next up is the cue name, or at least a working title that helps you quickly identify which track is which. Eg ‘Title sequence’, ‘Previously’, ‘Emma runs past the barn’, ‘Mike tells Cynthia’ and so on. Don’t waste too much time making each one a masterpiece of titling worthy of a headline writer. This whole spreadsheet thing is a perfect hiding place for procrastination. Beware!

TC start and TC end – the timecode (TC) start and end of the cue that you’ve worked out in the spotting session. This may change as you work. Timecode has many flavours depending on what you’re working on. TV might be 25fps (frames per second) if you’re in the UK, so you get hh:mm:ss:ff (hours, minutes, seconds, frames) where the hh often starts at 10, and the frames count from :00 up to :24 before resetting to :00 at the start of the next second. So, an example might be 10:05:24:11 – tenth hour (or the first hour of the episode!) 5 mins, 24 seconds and 11 frames in.

In the USA, TV is often 30fps which can also mean 29fps ‘drop’ or ‘non-drop’. Film is often 24fps. It’s essential to get the frame rate correct, otherwise you might drift out of sync over the duration of a TV episode or film, and you might be making things harder for the editor and dubbing mixer when they are lining up your cues in the show.

TC duration – as I mentioned, you could auto calculate this, or you could just note approximate mins/secs so that you have an idea of how long the cue is.

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When a music project is in progress it is always in a gaseous state, and will expand to fill every minute of the time allotted to it. So while it’s prudent to keep track of the time spent and develop good time-management skills, I try not to get overly panicked about a deadline, since I’m always right up against it anyway.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

Now at this stage, it’s all up for grabs, so I’m going to guide you by using a layout I designed for a BBC drama called The Interceptor.

On this show I needed to get demos online for the director to watch – directors often have a million tasks to accomplish at the stage that you are scoring, and after some initial face to face meetings to get going, it’s unlikely they will be coming to the studio every couple of days to see you and hear the latest cues. So, it’s a good idea to use a system like Dropbox to get cues up online quickly and easily for approval or notes.

Demo uploaded – for the next few columns I use a simple system, Y, N or N/A (not applicable). This one is clear, I pre-populate with all N (and use the handy functionality of Google Sheets to automatically fill the background colour of the cell to red for N, and green for Y, grey for N/A).

Dir notes – has the director given you notes?

Rev uploaded – have you uploaded a revised version?

Dir approved – has the director approved this cue?

Exec approved – has the producer or any other key exec also approved? This isn’t relevant for some projects or maybe an ‘episode 1’ thing that then drops away, but it’s a good idea to have this column even if only to assure the exec that you are listening to them as well and want them to be happy.

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Sent to orch – if you’re using a live orchestra, you’ll probably have an orchestrator working on the project. This is not because you can’t orchestrate yourself, it’s about the time needed to go from the mockup demo to the carefully formatted conductor score with all the necessary markings and instructions to enable the players to do a great first take. Sometimes, the first take is the only take you have time for, so you really need your parts to be idiot proof, leave as few questions unanswered as possible, and be super easy to sight read.

Instrumental columns – these are for individual sessions, so these could be your strings session, brass session, guitarist session in your own studio, and so on. You may even have multiple strings or choir sessions, so you can plan here which cue requires which session. When you get to the point of having 20–30 cues in each episode, this level of preparation saves a lot of time, mistakes and grief. In these columns I would typically use ‘TBR’ (To Be Recorded), ‘N/A’ and then ‘REC’ once the session has happened.

Stemmed – stemming can describe two different workflows. In this case it is the practice of pre-mixing your tracks prior to sending them to the mix engineer. The purpose of this is so that your mix engineer has enough control to be able to produce a great mix from your stems but won’t have to recreate every single effect/ delay that you’ve put on (that 10 sec reverb on the flute chiff) and won’t have to sort through 50 High String channels and sort them into groups. The second possible meaning of stemming is post-mix, for your mix engineer to send elements to the dub stage so that the dubbing mixer has more control and can pull down the woodwinds if they are interfering with the dialogue without having to pull your whole cue mix down. I’ll go into more detail on stemming in Chapter 7.

In Tools – as I’m composing in Logic, this column is to keep track of my session prep for the mix engineer.

Mixed – this means the mix has come back from the mix engineer.

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PT checked – to keep track of whether there are mix notes for a second pass, or if I’m happy with the mix.

Delivered – this records that I’ve sent the cue into the dub stage.

For more on delivery requirements and best practice see Chapter 7.

Various – the last few columns in Figure 13 includes some information that I find useful to be able to scan down. This includes cue tempo, additional notes (eg need alt version), sometimes a quick one or two word descriptor (eg love scene/low brooding), and I have used a timecode running total in the past, although this can make the sheet a bit slow to update as it’s fairly intensive on the calculations.

KEEPING TRACK OF WORK IN PROGRESS

So, all of this is very well – you’ve got your database to keep track of opportunities, jobs in progress, invoicing etc, and your Google Sheets to keep track of the cues, composing, sessions and delivery. But really, how do you keep track of where you are on a project mentally so that you can be sure you are on target?

Keeping on target is a conundrum that all composers struggle with from time to time. It’s very, very common at the start of a job to spend quite a bit of time procrastinating to avoid the dreaded ‘blank page syndrome’ – the fear of an empty session file and blank screen in your DAW, or a blank page of manuscript paper staring balefully back at you.

This period can be incredibly useful and productive, either by experimenting with different sounds, instruments, and coming up with the ‘Band’ that will play the score. Alternatively, you could as I do, make a new sample library of the sounds you think could be useful for the job. More on this in Chapter 9.

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However, at some point you will need to, as Lady Macbeth said, ‘Screw your courage to the sticking place’9 and just get started with the business of pushing keys and adding sounds to the silence of the empty session file. You’ll find that once you’ve got going it’s a lot easier to tweak something that is there than it was to get the first ideas down. Remember all you should be aiming for is ‘making the best of what you’ve got’. Don’t expect it to immediately sound like a finished film score – especially when your points of comparison are Hans Zimmer’s latest or John Williams’ classics. It’s very possible to get stuck and keep binning ideas before you’ve let them have a chance to grow into something.

The only mentor I’ve ever had, instilled in me three important rules for working in the scoring world: Never take credit for someone else’s work. Never make excuses; and Never, ever, be late.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

So, bearing all this in mind, how do you keep track of your progress?

You could simply work out how long you’ve got to write and divide the number of total minutes by the number of days to work out how many minutes a day you need to be producing. This is a fairly blunt measure though of course, as a three-minute beat down car chase with many sync points (moments where the music has to hit certain cuts in the picture) will take considerably longer to create than a three-minute ambient chill out yoga cue.

There’s a huge psychological advantage in starting with a tricky cue, whether it’s a chase or action sequence, or one with a complex emotional arc. This also gives you material with which to work on other cues that are related story wise. Another way to get started is to work on themes and even a ‘theme suite’ – this might be useful as you can get your themes pre-approved and be off to a 9

Source: W. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7.

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running start but beware that you may then find that some of these ideas, while great in isolation, don’t work so well once they are up against the picture. More on all of this in Chapter 9 when we talk about creativity.

You need to space the work out and ensure that you are completing cues as early as possible in the process so that you don’t end up with an insurmountable bulk of work to try and get through at the tail end of your writing time. Easier said than done, but some discipline will help you here. The composer and music professor William Mathias once said ‘I sit at my desk every day, I start at 9am and I finish at 5pm. Some days I manage just a few bars, and some days it comes more easily.’ The point is that composing is 95% perspiration and 5% inspiration. You simply cannot wait for inspiration, or you will never get anything written. The key thing is to be sat working – trying to get those bars completed. The act of doing this day in, day out will strengthen your craft and give you a greater ability to compose. It’s like a muscle that needs training daily.

BACKING UP AND STORAGE OF SESSIONS

Having a good backup strategy is essential if you don’t want to discover halfway through the job that you have a hard drive failure and have lost weeks of work. My own strategy is to automate a daily backup onto a mirror RAID so that I effectively have three copies day to day. I then intermittently backup to an offsite server which could be Amazon S3 or an alternative cloud-based solution.

This does require a fast internet connection, but an alternative is to backup to a removable drive that you take away with you to store in a separate location in case of fire, theft etc.

Think about backups on two levels – one is to save you the irritation of having to redo yesterday’s cue again in the event of a crash and corruption of a file or some similar event: the second level is disaster recovery. This must be robust and backed up to at least two physical locations.

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Again, the better your filing and organisation is, the better you are protected against all manner of disaster. For example, if you had a medical emergency, and needed to bring in an assistant or second composer to complete the job, would they be able to take your materials and pick up the threads relatively quickly? Or would they find the equivalent of a teenager’s bedroom?

For DAW session files that are mainly MIDI, Dropbox or a similar system is a great extra level of security. Removable drives are incredibly useful, whether they are in a rack system such as the Black Magic Docks for SSDs, or simply external hard drives in their own cases that you connect using USB. Remember that while NAS systems (Network Attached Storage) are great for backups, they are not the best solution for storing media that you need fast access speeds for, such as sample libraries. Also bear in mind that as ‘bullet proof’ as they claim to be, I’ve personally had two that have failed over the years in such a way that the data could not be accessed – even with RAID levels that should have allowed a simple recovery! So even with these systems, a standalone backup of the system itself is still an essential.

How do you store the sessions once you’ve completed the job?

It’s a good idea to go through and trim any fat from the files while the job is fresh in your head. It’s a distinct possibility that you might have ended up with multiple versions of video files, DAW session files, and so on, during the progress of the job. For example, you will have prepped for the orchestral sessions. Then you’ll have a drive with the sessions as backed up by the studio. You may have then taken those and made some changes for your own mix prep.

That’s potentially three versions of the entire project right there.

Once you’ve sorted this last filing task and got the definitive folder for the job organised, back it up to your usual system with a subtitle ARCHIVE_date so that you can clearly see what it is and when you filed it, and then back that up to a cloud system as well. Hard Organisation | 61

drives don’t last forever, and you can depend on some of your drives failing at some point. The cloud provides a good failsafe system, while nothing will ever be 100% safe, covering yourself with these multiple options will give you the best shot at security.

PROACTIVITY AND CLIENT COMMUNICATION

The last part of our discussion on organisation might appear to be unconnected but it is not. To make the project a joy for your client and make them want to work with you again in the future, you should ensure that your communication with them is proactive, clear, regular and predictable.

Be easy to work with. Be accommodating. You’re just part of a huge team providing a service. So don’t be a selfcentred idiot.

– TY UNWIN

Your client has a thousand problems all in flux at every stage of the project. Directors will be juggling edits, visual FX, ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement), sound design and foley, dubbing premixes, reshoots, notes from the execs, and many other things – if that weren’t enough to be going on with.

So, you don’t want them to feel like they need to bottle feed you through your work, but equally you don’t want them to be nervous that you won’t deliver in time – by which I of course mean in time for them to give you notes and have their changes actioned and approved well before the dub.

You should ensure that you are making it as easy as possible for all the stakeholders to see your work in progress in good time, and at their own convenience. This may be at 3am while they are waiting for a setup during a night shoot. Have a simple and clear system that helps them quickly locate the files they need to watch – and if you are sending Quicktimes, make sure they don’t require 62 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

an industrial strength internet connection to view them! Export them with a relatively small and low-quality picture. They know the edit intimately and probably see it projected onto the back of their eyelids when they are trying to sleep. They don’t need you to send them full 4K quality picture. Dropbox is again a really good solution for this. Folder up the demos for each episode clearly in their own folders, so they can easily jump back if they want to and look at that cue you wrote for 2m17 to remind themselves. Make it as simple for them as possible, they will be grateful that you are making the process of review easy.

Notes are inevitable, as this is a collaborative process, so make that process simple also. Ensure they can clearly see what the latest revision of a particular cue is.

For your own organisation, composer Charlie Clouser has the following very useful system. He will folder up cues according to their story purpose. You will tend to use similar musical material for example when the protagonists are out hunting down a lead. So, if you create a folder structure that reflects the main ‘scenarios’ at its head, and then further nested folders that similarly subdivide according to more specific use cases, you will create for yourself a quick way to locate an appropriate cue for a specific moment.

As you get further into a project, you will find that you can reuse musical material, and so finding an older cue and adapting it will become part of the workflow sometimes. If you also give the picture editor access to this folder structure, they will also look for cues that can work and help them in the edit process. If you get them to output what is called an ‘EDL’ (Edit Decision List) then you can see what cues they have used and go back to your source material to save time.

While this may initially sound like taking short cuts, in fact it is the usual practice. Not only does it help you successfully create the huge amount of high-quality music needed under tight deadlines, Organisation | 63

but it helps the audience to understand and follow the story, when the score becomes familiar enough for it to signpost important information to them. You then have more time to spend crafting the important cues that must be written bespoke for each episode.

Be proactive in your communication with your clients and collaborators, but don’t drown them in unnecessary emails.

This is part of your responsibility as a department head – they have delegated the music creation to you, and so you manage everything from you down, and again the key takeaway from this whole section – be reliable. The worst possible thing you can do is fail to deliver on time. Make sure that your systems eliminate the possibility of failing in this way.

Finally, let’s reflect on some great advice from John Powell: ‘10% of my time is spent writing the music and 90% of my time is spent keeping everybody calm. Including myself.’

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CHAPTER 4:

BUDGETING This section will firstly look at how you manage your budget when working on TV commercials (TVC) before moving on to TV and film.

Why commercials? A lot of what is below will also be applicable in other areas. A TVC is often like a microcosm of a film or high budget TV show. I’ve visited the set of a commercial I was scoring that had a crew of 78 people and was being shot in a set which almost exactly mimicked the interior of a Boeing 747, but with the interior bedecked with satin and one sole seat in the centre from which a man watched a ballet. On another TV ad I scored, the director shot two million feet of film all around the world. That’s approximately 370 hours of footage. So, we’re not talking small potatoes here. We’ll go on to extend and look at typical TV and film score budgets after we’ve mastered the ad world.

DEMO FEE

Typical demo fees from London advertising agencies can range from £250 to £750. Some very popular music production companies go for (and often get) a demo fee of £1,200. Most reasonable agency producers will allow at least two demo fees of £500 per job.

Agencies will generally expect two good quality demos for that fee.

They will however often brief out the job to other music production companies on a purely speculative basis. You may be approached quite often with the tale that ‘there’s no budget’ and ‘everyone’s demoing for nothing because the film is so good’ and so on. It is Budgeting | 65

down to personal choice about whether to take on a pitch for no fee, but things to consider are the cost of running the studio and paying your bills, the number of other competitors for the pitch, your relationship with the producer or director involved etc.

Bear in mind that if you wish to use live players on your pitch, you will then have to bear the cost yourself, and consider if it is reasonable to be making charitable donations to multi-million pound agencies in order to work! Having said that, I have on occasion pitched without demo fee, but it has to be exceptional circumstances or a long-standing relationship where I know that there genuinely is very little budget for whatever reason, and where I have worked for someone before on properly paying gigs.

COMPOSITION FEE

Again, composition fees vary; however, set this fee carefully, as it will determine the license costs to your client for the use of the music in different territories and media. As a guide, composition fees in London vary from about £1,200 to £2,000, with some very successful companies charging up to £2,500 (although this will regularly lead to discounting the licenses as worldwide fees based on this composition fee can be unrealistic).

This fee is essentially the creative fee for writing the music, so when setting it you need to account for your experience, past success in the field, living expenses and all the other intangibles that you might consider.

PRODUCTION FEE

This is the fee for making the master recording of the composition.

It can commonly be the same as the composition fee but may increase to account for additional expenses such as equipment hire, studio hire, orchestration and so on. You need to ensure that this will cover any costs you incur and provide you with a fee for spending the time on the production.

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It is common to compose and produce simultaneously these days, but imagine if you composed a piece to manuscript, and then got trapped on a remote Scottish island: how much would you need to pay a third party to produce and record your composition, covering their fee and all the costs? This gives you an idea of the value you should attach to the production fee.

PRODUCTION COSTS – MUSICIANS, STUDIO TIME, EQUIPMENT HIRE

Within the production fee, you can add in specific costs, or you can arrange with the agency that they are invoiced as separate items. For example, if you need to record with a ten-piece string section at a studio in central London, you need to get a quote for the players’ session fees (at the correct usage rate) from a contractor – the contractor will ensure you have accounted for things like porterage (costs for transporting instruments) and doubling (if a musician plays two instruments during the session).

See appendices for useful contacts. You will need a quote for the studio time, which will include ‘tape costs’ or Pro Tools rig and engineer/assistant. Then you may have orchestration or copying costs, and you can either account for that within your production fee, or (better) add these costs onto the quote separately with a small markup (10%) to cover unforeseen extras. This can be its own line item and can be called ‘contingency’.

If you need to hire specific equipment to make the track better, then you should list this on your quote also. Examples might include instrument hire (eg not many people have a Celeste or a set of timpani) or outboard (if that Pultec or Fairchild would make all the difference, or maybe a high-quality outboard reverb like a TC 6000) or maybe you really need the authentic sound of tape compression and getting a two track in for a day’s hire would really nail the sound. You may also need to hire equipment to satisfy the delivery requirements (I wonder if anyone can remember the timecode DAT machine).

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This is the opportunity to take your demo to the next level, so don’t be afraid to add some items onto the quote here – your client will be pleased to see that you are planning to deliver to them a level of quality in the master recording that you are unable to provide at demo stage – it looks more professional and shows that you are serious about the quality of your product. Here is an example budget: QUOTE BREAKDOWN

COST

Compose and produce 30” demo

£750

Composition fee for master

£2,200

Production fee for master

£2,200

Conductor fee

£750

Parts copying

£1,100

54 musicians and porterage (TV only) 1 hour

£7,328

4 hours studio time

£1,250

Consumables (drives backup etc)

£500

Pro Tools hire

£295

Outboard hire (Manley MP EQ)

£75

Recording engineer

£650

Pro Tools operator

£200

Mastering

£450

Total

£17,748 Table 1

LICENSING FEES

Licensing fees in the UK tend to follow a fairly predictable set of rules, that have arisen by convention and then been codified by an organisation called ‘PCAM’ (Producers and Composers of Applied Music) which, those with a longer memory of Soho, London, will recall was originally called ‘SPAM’ (Society for Producers of Applied Music) 68 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

until it was decided the combination of associations with the meat product and the reality of unwanted email was too much to bear.

The license for a particular usage in a territory is expressed as a percentage of the composition fee – hence the vital importance of setting your composition fee appropriately. Here is a very simple example of a license fee for a typical usage.

FEE BREAKDOWN

COST

Compose and produce 30” demo

£750

Composition fee for master

£2,200

Production fee for master

£2,200

1 year license for Austria Network and Satellite TV @50%

£1,100

1 year license for Belgium Network and Satellite TV @50%

£1,100

1 year license for Germany Network and Satellite TV @200%

£4,400

Total

£11,750 Table 2

If you intend to work regularly in commercials, then joining PCAM can be very much worth the membership fee. You’ll also have resources to use when budgeting your work, and the backup and assistance of an organisation and group of people who will have seen almost every possible unusual combination of circumstances.

See Appendix B for more information.

REUSE FOR MASTER TRACK AND MUSICIANS

When you hire the musicians via the contractor to play on your master track, there will be a usage built into the quote. In the UK there are a few different agreements under which players can be hired. The most common are the ‘IPA/MU agreement’ (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) and the ‘PACT/MU’ agreement (Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television). The IPA agreement covers the fee per musician in relation to the media being licensed Budgeting | 69

– eg single medium only, radio/TV, TV and cinema. It also covers Ancillary Use and Branded Communications.

PACT is a trade body set up in 1991 that represents independent production and distribution companies. Under the PACT/MU agreement you can pay for ‘limited use’ or ‘combined use’ and again these refer to either use in a single show or the combined use of a single show plus further episodes. For example, with the use and therefore the fee per musician scaling according to the number of episodes, the additional uses etc.

These are also subject to one of four ‘scales’ according to the overall number of musician hours booked on the project, from Scale 1 (2 to 36 hours), through Scale 2 (37 to 350 hours) and Scale 3 (351 to 800 hours) all the way up to Scale 4 (801 hours or over).

Ensuring you have the correct usage that will cover your client’s plans for your music is essential and fairly complicated – so this is where the contractor really earns their fee and can help you find the right fee scale for the musicians.

It’s always less expensive to clear the usages in one go ahead of the sessions, but if you do find that you need to clear an additional further usage after the initial job, this is also covered under the agreement and your contractor will be able to calculate this.

Make sure that your agreement with the client is clear regarding what usages are required so that you don’t find yourself being asked to cover the cost of a further usage in the event of a change.

Of course, if your client comes back after a successful usage, and asks for a further usage or extension, your master recording will need to be licensed again for this.

Sometimes, especially on TV commercials, these re-license or usage fees can become a substantial income stream for your business. A successful campaign may be rolled out over many countries all over the world.

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SOUNDALIKES

This is one of the hairiest areas of all of music production, but what do we mean here? This can mean either coming up with a track that is very reminiscent of a popular and well known work, or it can mean re-recording a work either so that the agency can change the lyrics, or re-arrange the track, or indeed simply avoid some of the pitfalls of using the original recording, which can attract all kinds of problems such as requiring PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited) licenses, having performers who don’t want their performance being used, and so on.

If the brief is to come up with an original work that reminds the listener of something else that was too expensive for the agency to clear, beware. This is a legal minefield. In many territories it is simply enough to prove the ‘intent to copy’ to bring a successful lawsuit against the agency and therefore the composer, which could be as simple as an email saying, ‘Hey we love Edward Scissorhands, can you do something like that?’

Don’t believe the oft repeated myth that you can change a few notes or a chord and be safe. You will also potentially have made two enemies – the publisher of the work, and the record company or film company that own the recording.

If the job is to re-record an existing track where the agency has cleared the publishing element and have permission, that is a lot simpler. But also, be aware that if there is no really good reason for re-recording, then you may be falling foul of depriving the owner of the recording of income by infringing the rights in the master recording. This is much simpler when the same company owns both the publishing and the recording.

Usually under the ‘most favoured nations’ principle, the license fee payable for the recording would be the same as the license fee payable for the publishing, so for example the agency may agree to pay £100,000 to use the publishing rights and then hope

Budgeting | 71

to get a music production company to reproduce the recording for £15,000 thus saving them £85,000 in further license fees.

Of course, if there’s a reasonable case for re-recording either to change the lyric, re-arrange the song to fit the commercial, and so on, then it’s acceptable to re-record and you should be fine.

Bear in mind that all this advice is from personal experience and is not intended to be legal advice.

TV BUDGETING

So how do we adapt this knowledge to the world of TV? Well, even though most TV deals these days are ‘package deals’ in which you will be offered a fee to deliver the final score, it’s worth having your own way of budgeting your skills and time. This is so that you’re neither working for below minimum wage nor bankrupting yourself with an unexpected session fee usage bill. I’ve often said you should budget as if you might be hit by a bus at any moment, and your agent be forced to hire the people necessary to complete the job.

Here are some of the things you need to consider – the jobs that will be done on the way to having a completed score.

Composer – you’ll need to think of a way to bill your work in the writing of the material. This is commonly done on a per minute basis. If you consider an episode creative fee to be in the region of £4,000–£6,000 and say that has on average 30 minutes of score per episode, then you will be paid between £133–£200 per minute of music that you write. Now in the UK, the National Living Wage (a tiny bit above the minimum wage) is currently £8.91. So, an eighthour day on the Living Wage would net you £71.28 – now think carefully about how long it will take you to complete each minute of score – thinking about also the following costs.

• Recording producer/engineer • Midi mockup 72 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

• Orchestrator • Conductor • Studio hire • Equipment hire • Musicians • Mix engineer Now we’ve reached the musicians’ part. At this stage, on a reasonable non-low budget job, the commissioner will have some budget for musicians and studio hire. So, as long as you are not working on a package deal, you can negotiate that separately from your creative and production fee. But on a package, it’s vital that if you are going to fund musician sessions from your fee, you get the best advice from a contractor to ensure that you understand the cost of delivering to the production fully cleared performances.

Franglen’s Golden Budget Rule: ‘We’ll make it up to you next time’ – they won’t.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

But what about those other jobs up there? And that’s not even a comprehensive list – you may need a conductor, or all manner of other personnel. When we look at a typical film budget in the next section of this chapter, we will examine this comprehensively. But for now, it’s enough to think carefully about how much you would pay a third party to do these jobs for you, and then consider that if you are going to do multiple jobs yourself.

The usual situation I have been in is package deals, with the musician fees added on by production. They are usually happy to see you spending money on players as this raises the production value, and so they will often be prepared to negotiate adding on fees for musicians. I have usually had to cover orchestration,

Budgeting | 73

studio costs and mix costs myself. But no two jobs are the same.

It’s all negotiable.

Be aware when you are calculating your time/cost that you will have rewrites. I say again – it’s part of the gig. You don’t charge for rewrites. If you get it wrong the first-time round, why would your client feel good about having to pay you to have another go? Of course, everything is within reason, and being asked to write 17 versions of a theme tune might be stretching things beyond what is reasonable, if you end up in a nightmare situation where you are being asked to cover for chronic indecision or a fight among the producers, you might want to sit back and you or your agent put some boundaries in place and a consider a new fee structure.

Reasonable clients understand you can’t support a terrible addiction to buying instruments and studio equipment on fresh air.

Here are a couple of TV composer budget examples.

ITEM

COST

Composition fee

UNITS

TOTAL

$40,600

1

$40,600

$55

15

$825

$750

1

$750

$35,400

1

$35,400

$500

8

$4,000

$4,610

1

$4,610

Session A engineer

$450

1

$450

Session B engineer

$450

1

$450

Studio hire A

$1,583

1

$1,583

Studio hire B

$1,760

1

$1,760

3 x 500GB drives

$200

3

$600

Mix per episode

$750

8

$6,000

Orchestration Copyist Musicians 8 days recording at composer’s studio Instrument hire

Table 3 74 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

The sessions might plan out like the following: • Composition and electronic realisation of 280 minutes of music • Musicians (multi-use fees to be used as per musician line up enclosed and detailed below): $35,400 (inc fixer fee) • 24 musicians x 1 x 3hr session + leader and conductor • 10 musicians x 1 x 3hr session + leader and conductor • 5 musicians x 1 x 3hr session • 3 musicians x 2 x 3hr sessions • 9 musicians x 1 x 3hr session • 2 musicians x 6 x 3hr sessions • 3 musicians x 3 x 3hr sessions • MD x 6 x 3hr sessions • 5 musicians x 1 x 3hr session • 5 musicians x 1 x 3hr session • 4 musicians x 6 x 3hr sessions • 2 musicians x 3 x 3hr sessions The fee structure might look like: FEE STRUCTURE

COST

On signature

$8,000

On completion episodes 1–4

$22,000

On final delivery

$28,190

Composition/realisation

$40,600

Recording/mixing

$12,980

Musicians

$35,400

Instrument hire

$4,610

Total

$151,780 Table 4 Budgeting | 75

So, production in this case pay the musicians directly, and some of the studio/mix costs (detailed within ‘recording/mixing’) and hire are covered in the final delivery payment, totalling the composition fee of $40,600 plus $17,590 for the other costs (recording/mixing and instrument hire).

Agreeing a fee structure that production is happy with (as it gives them security if you disappear before the job is finished) but that also allows you to meet payment dates that may arise earlier than you complete, is key here. Studios will usually want to be paid promptly after the sessions are completed, and not wait for months for the job to finish. In the UK, the Musicians’ Union states for some sessions that the musicians need to be paid in advance: most productions will be familiar with this but be aware of it if you are financing that cost from a package deal. See Appendix A for a list of Musicians’ Unions in different countries along with their corresponding websites.

Here is another example in Table 5. In this case, we are approaching the job from a different angle, where production is still paying the musicians so that is outside of your budget, but you need a rough idea of what you will be earning as a creative fee to work within a notional budget that has been proposed (in this case £39,000).

Note that you have decided to record a small ‘bible’ at the end of the sessions with the musicians, to be able to use this material for cues later in the series, and on this occasion, production can’t cover that, so you are covering the uplift from your fee. This exercise is useful to play around with the figures and see what you can afford and where you want to allocate your budget.

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TV show budget example ITEM

UNIT COST

Composition fee per episode Tracklaying Orchestration (per 20 minutes) Copyist (per 20 minutes)

UNITS

TOTAL

£3,000

6

£18,000

£200

6

£1,200

£1,400

2

£2,800

£270

2

£540

SESSIONS Studio time (lovely big studio/day) Engineer (lovely big studio/day)

£4,000

1

£4,000

£900

1

£900

MUSICIAN SUPPLEMENTS Multi-episodic uprate per player/session

£20

55

£1,100

POST-PRODUCTION Mixing costs (studio inc engineer)

£750

6

£4,500

Total budgeted production costs

£33,040

Add in agent’s commission @ 15%

£37,996

Table 5 FILM BUDGETING

Film budgeting has a few ‘line items’ that you will need to think about that tend not to arise in TV generally (although the rise of series like The Crown on Netflix with episodic budgets not far off features may change this!). Let’s have a look at an example of a film score budget.

Budgeting | 77

DESCRIPTION

QUANTITY

UNITS

X

1

Fee

1

RATE SUB TOTAL

COMPOSER J Smith

£20,000

Sub total

£20,000 £20,000

COPYING Allowance

1

Allow

30

£15

Sub total

£450 £450

ORCHESTRATIONS B Jones (per # of pages)

4

Allow

30

£20

£2,400

MIDI file transfer

30

Pages

1

£50

£1,500

Sub total

£3,900

MUSICIANS/ORCHESTRA Conductor Setup

1

Sessions

1

£171

£171

Score (3x3 hr sessions per day)

3

Sessions

1

£342

£1,026

Scale

1

Sessions

39

£171

£6,669

1.35x Scale

1

Sessions

1

£230

£230

2x Scale

1

Sessions

0

£342

£0

Principal Chair

1

Sessions

1

£230

£230

Contractor

1

Sessions

1

£762

£762

Orchestrator: booth

1

Sessions

1

£171

£171

1st Double

1

Sessions

0

£100

£0

2nd Double

1

Sessions

0

£100

£0

2

Sessions

20

£171

£6,840

40 musicians

22 musicians Scale

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DESCRIPTION

QUANTITY

UNITS

X

RATE SUB TOTAL

1.5x Scale

2

Sessions

1

£230

£460

2x Scale

2

Sessions

0

£342

£0

Principal Chair

2

Sessions

1

£230

£460

Contractor

2

Sessions

1

£762

£1,524

Orchestrator: booth

2

Sessions

1

£508

£1,016

1st Double

2

Sessions

1

£238

£476

2nd Double

2

Sessions

1

£152

£304

0.5

Sessions

22

£133

£1,463

OT CONTINGENCY Sub total

£21,802

MUSIC EDITORS Music Editor Post (Temp 1 editor and Post 2 editors)

3

Weeks

1

Saturdays worked

2

Days

Sundays worked

0

Saturday travel days allow

£2,500

£7,500

1.5

£500

£1,500

Days

2

£500

£0

2

Days

1.5

£500

£1,500

Assistant

0

Weeks

1

£1,750

£0

Saturdays worked

0

Days

1.5

£350

£0

Sub total

£10,500

COMPOSER ELECTRONIC PACKAGE Composer Electronic Package

1

Allow

1

£5,000

£5,000

(inc contribution to flights)

1

Allow

1

£1,000

£1,000

Sub total

£6,000

Budgeting | 79

DESCRIPTION

QUANTITY

UNITS

X

RATE SUB TOTAL

Setup day/choir day

1

Day

1

£500

£500

Score

1

Days

1

£750

£750

Mix down

2

Days

1

£500

£1,000

Setup day/choir day

1

Day

1

£400

£400

Score

1

Days

1

£400

£400

Mix down

2

Days

1

£400

£800

Monitors

2

Days

1

£300

£600

ENGINEER Engineer Flat daily rate (12 hrs)

EQUIPMENT

Sub total

£4,450

SINGERS 24 piece choir Scale

1

Session

24

£171

£4,104

Choir leader

1

Session

1

£342

£342

Sub total

£4,446

Travel – n/a INSTRUMENT CARTAGE Musicians’ cartage allowance

2

Sessions

1

£150

Sub total

£300 £300

SCORING STAGE SETUP Score in London Setup

0

Day

1

£2,800

£0

Scoring stage

1

Days

1

£2,800

£2,800

Mixing stage

1

Days

1

£1,900

£1,900

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DESCRIPTION

QUANTITY

UNITS

X

RATE SUB TOTAL

1

Days

1

£750

(inc equip & piano tuning) Converter costs Sub total

£750 £5,450

AURICLE Auricle engineer (50/hr in UK, 1.5x after 8) Setup

0

Day

1

£500

£0

Score

1

Days

1

£500

£500

Setup

0

Day

1

£400

£0

Score

1

Days

1

£400

£400

Auricle rental

Sub total

£900

INSTRUMENT RENTALS Scoring days

1

Days

1

£750

Sub total

£750 £750

MUSIC EDITOR EQUIP/ROOM Pro Tools kit

3

Weeks

1

£500

£1,500

Asst Pro Tools rental

0

Weeks

1

£250

£0

Sound room rental

3

Weeks

1

£400

£1,200

Other inc cartage

0

Allow

1

£2,500

£0

Sub total

£2,700

STOCK AND TAPE Allowance

2

Drives

Sub total

1

£500

£1,000 £1,000

TOTAL FOR MUSIC DEPT

£82,648 Table 6

Budgeting | 81

Now this is not fully comprehensive, but it introduces a few important concepts and elements that you should consider.

Copying and orchestration – these are self-evident, and even if you do your own orchestration in Sibelius, getting a copyist to create the parts for you can save a huge amount of time in the sessions, as they will be formatted in a way that the musicians can read easily and are familiar with. One easy and clear point to begin with (of many!) is that the staff size needs to be large enough for the musician to read at a distance (music stands often set back a bit) and in dim light. There are many similar considerations that music prep professionals are well acquainted with. An orchestrator isn’t necessarily just to ‘create’ an orchestration from your block chords (although that’s fine if necessary) – you may have huge detail in your demos, but another pair of eyes can spot problems that may arise and add a wealth of experience to just make some fine tweaks here and there that will make your music even better sounding.

MIDI file transfer – this is so that the orchestrator can work more quickly: often in MIDI files there will be unquantized tracks, as they may make the demo sound better, or even parts played in slightly ahead of the beat, and all manner of other oddities and detritus like key switches, controller info and so on. Having the sessions prepped for score writing software can save a huge amount of time for the orchestrator and consequently can save on your budget.

Contingency – it’s always worth putting this in. I’ve done a lot of sessions where a unit of overtime is just what the score doctor ordered to get something completed, or a take perfect.

Music editor – these are your friends and first line of defence.

At the point where you are cranking out the final few cues they will be re-conforming your score to the new cut, and the new cut after that. You did realise there will be new cuts? Sometimes daily!

The music editor will also help you manage the spotting and the process of delivery and will often create the temp (temporary score 82 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

used to edit the pictures). They are your representative in the edit team. Music editors can also work with your stems (submixes of instrument groups) and can be incredibly creative in solving problems that may arise at the last minute, even creating new cues for you from your materials.

Composer Electronic Package – in many situations the production will expect to budget for a contribution to cover your use of your equipment. At first you may think this a bizarre notion, but it’s very common to consider this element – mix engineers may have specialised equipment that they bring to sessions, and that would have had to be hired, so the engineer charges for it – similarly many music editors have their own equipment, on lower budget projects a lot of camera ops bring their own lenses or camera bodies, and so on.

Auricle – this is a system that can run the click track and visual conducting aids such as streamers and pops for conducting free (without click) – the advantage being that time signature changes or meter changes are very quick and easy, and these sometimes take longer to set up in Pro Tools. You can quickly generate a couple of ‘free bars’ count in for example, to drop into a cue halfway through where there is a tempo change. A useful system, mostly found on medium to large budget scores.

My friend, and the Auricle specialist on nearly 200 films, Chris Cozens, has this to tell us about the system and its benefits.10

Any DAW will produce a click and Pro Tools is often used to perform this function as well as recording the score. As an added bonus, the bar counter from PT can be fed to the conductor and/or the musicians on a separate screen from the picture.

As well as producing clicks, Auricle can also produce an on screen bar counter, the name of the start bar, the number of free clicks in, a time code reference, punches and flutters (which mimic the holes 10 Source: email to author.

Budgeting | 83

that used to be punched into film) as well as coloured streamers, all of which can be laid over the picture so the conductor and/ or musicians have a single screen to reference for picture and streamers. Having this confirmatory information available reduces incidents of mishearing or misunderstanding of start points.

The streamers follow a general colour convention (although it’s by no means compulsory to follow). Yellow – warning, green – start, red – stop, white – internal eg new phrase or section, violet – big tempo change, blue – clicks out (muted). Brown and orange are also available.

While streamers, punches and flutters can be produced by a DAW sending midi events, as visual events need to be offset so they appear in the correct place, this can lead to confusion and errors when having to edit a cue in the high-pressured environment of the scoring stage. Auricle provides this offset automatically.

Other benefits include: 1 Occasionally issues only reveal themselves on the session so the ability to quickly adapt, amend and edit the click pattern is vital.

Eg subdivide the click pattern at the request of the musicians to provide quaver (eighth note) clicks in specific bars (measures) – especially useful for rits and ralls; change the click pattern of irregular time signatures such as 7/8 or 5/8 to any combination that works best. (7/8 to crotchet/crotchet/quaver/quaver/quaver (quarter/quarter/eighth/eighth/eighth)).

2 Provide streamers instead of clicks, especially useful in rubato pieces.

3 Provide warning clicks/punches/streamers into a new tempo – especially useful for a complicated tempo change in the middle of a cue.

4 Provide warning streamers for click start, cue start and end as well as strategic points within the cue.

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5

Provide warning clicks into the cue, and for any pick-ups mid cue, at the correct incoming tempo.

6 Rehearsal rate. Slow down the clicks by a percentage for rehearsal of complicated passages.

7 Drop the clicks out, streamer a section then put the clicks back in, with warning clicks at the correct tempo if required.

8 Work in multiple formats – click rate, real time, SMPTE timecode, at the same time all in the same file.

9 With the clicks separate from the recording rig, you can rehearse the musicians while the control room discusses a playback.

10 Read and generate MIDI files that can then be provided to

others, eg Pro Tools to import.

11 Auricle has uses beyond the scoring stage, eg using the Hitter to

find the tempo required to make your picture hits. The ability to provide visual aids as well as audio for inexperienced musicians and singers (for example). Auricle is also useful in dialogue replacement sessions.

Clicks are a necessary evil in the process of fitting music to picture so musicians welcome anything that can mitigate that musical straight jacket, which can only benefit the process. Time is money, so the ability to provide what is required quickly and with minimal fuss is paramount, especially mid-session.

Budgeting | 85

CHAPTER 5:

SHOWREELS AND MARKETING BRANDING

Totally non-essential, but fun to do. Even if you’re just setting up a basic website such as Squarespace, or making some headed paper, you are running a business and should think about your composing as a business. This can be very useful to help you protect yourself against exploitation. However, knock on effects like coming up with a look and design, a way to brand yourself, are also worthwhile.

It doesn’t have to be expensive or outsourced, just take some inspiration from things around you that inspire you. Good industrial design can be a great starting place. You can always tweak it as you go along, don’t allow yourself to go into a dead end of indecision that stops you getting on with more valuable endeavours!

FOCUSING A REEL

The first thing that a potential new client gets to make a judgment about whether you are the right person to score their project. You obviously want to put the best foot forward, so here are some things to consider when compiling a reel.

• Make it relevant. The most obvious and yet still something we composers struggle with. We always want to put the stuff we’re most excited about on the reel, like that fantastic big band arrangement you did, or the spectacular mix on the hybrid action cue. However, the client is directing a children’s Showreels and marketing | 87

film about unicorns and wants soft orchestral twinkles. It’s great to show some variety but not too far from the brief.

• Make it snappy. An hour-long demo reel won’t be ideal for a client who has to listen through a pile of reels. Yes, you can flip on to the next track, but maybe it’s good to leave them impressed and wanting to hear more. Then if you get requested to provide more material you can stretch out a bit.

• Don’t shorten tracks by fading in and out of them. Or even worse than this, making a compilation of a load of 20 second snippets of different styles. It’s very hard as a prospective client to get an idea of how a composer can pace and build a track from a bunch of short clips. If they aren’t feeling a track, they can always skip to the next one.

• Open with a banger. Make the first track the one you think is the absolute most appropriate for the gig. Make sure it sounds amazing as well. I know some composers who have even gone to the lengths of hiring an orchestra to record a piece specifically for a showreel. Make sure the mix sounds at a commercial level. Money spent on a mix engineer to get a track sounding its best is money well spent.

• Keep interest through variety. Get some light and shade in as you progress through the reel. No one wants to hear three 160bpm action sequences in a row!

VISUAL OR AUDIO?

This is another of those conundrums. You want the director to be focusing on your music, but maybe the best sequence in the show that you want to have on your reel was dubbed a little quiet, or there’s an awkward cut halfway through, or the acting is a bit stilted in that scene. You need to ask yourself if you’re putting something up that the director will be listening to, or will they be analysing what they do and don’t like about the pictures and the acting.

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We often veer toward visual reels because we want to prove to the potential client that we’ve done this before and the show aired, the film is on iTunes. It’s real! We can be trusted not to screw up your movie. However, the fact that you have the credits is enough.

Allow the director to focus solely on your music.

But (I hear you cry) how do you show that you have the right sensitivity to score to picture well, if you don’t hand over a visual reel? Well, I can’t really argue with that. I’ve already warned you about the potential downsides. The other aspect of a visual reel is that half the work is yours, the other half is the director’s. It takes two not only to tango, but also to create a score. You are not an auteur in an ivory tower, you are part of a team, and your closest collaborator is the director. Score the same scene with two different directors and you’ll have two different end results.

I’m always keen to give an audio reel, but then just have a few of my favourite scenes up on my website so any potential client curious enough to want to check out more material to picture can easily go there and have a quick look.

The likelihood of you having music that demonstrates what the client is looking for in the new gig, scored to picture, is slim. What you want to demonstrate is that you are versatile, talented and have good taste. Everything else is the tango.

LAYOUT

Make it look appealing. We talked a little above about branding, but think about the packaging of your reel, even if it’s an online reel that you are sending a link for. Make it look as good as you can.

First impressions count, it’s human nature; research has shown that people form impressions in less than a second, and they are hard to shift.

You want the person checking out your work to feel like they have been sent something that has had care and thought put into it, not

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that you dashed it off five minutes before you went to bed. If you can’t be bothered to take the time to present your work properly, why should they take their time to listen to it?

Make it clear what they are listening to. A bunch of tracks called things like UUE_3m21_v7_revmix4_10312703.wav is not very user friendly or appealing (unless it’s a music editor or dubbing mixer).

Consider naming your cues in a way that explains the intention behind the musical ideas. Then the client can immediately get an idea of how you communicate different emotions, situations and ideas. We are storytellers, working with storytellers.

PACKAGING

You won’t often be sending physical reels, but on the few occasions you are, make it a joy to open. Think about how you feel when you buy something, and it comes in a lovely bit of packaging. I’m not saying you need to present a DVD reel in an Apple box but think about the person’s experience opening the package.

BIOGRAPHIES AND CLIENT LISTS

Your biography is really useful background information that can help tell your story. What makes you different from the next person?

Things we put in our biographies reveal hidden secrets about ourselves. What is important to us? Where did we come from? What is our story? Think about this like you would an elevator pitch.

My biography starts when I was a kid, and then basically moves through my musical life in chronological order. That’s not necessary, but it worked for my story. Don’t be too verbose. You want to leave the reader asking a few questions, rather than trying to speed read through because you’re not getting to the point.

What kind of information is useful here? I think the key things are the turning points in your musical life. What has shaped you into the creative person you are right now. This isn’t always straightforward so set aside some time to really have a good think about this and 90 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

draft something for friends and family to have a read through (or agent if you have one).

Should you put lists of your previous clients? I would focus this as well, so for the version of your biography that is going to an art house film director you probably won’t need to list the fact that you wrote jingles for Pepto-Bismol and Screwfix. But you might want to focus more on some interesting award-winning short films that you’ve scored. Conversely, the team needing a five second sung jingle for ‘7–Eleven’ won’t really be interested in the art installation you did for an exhibition of stills from low budget horror films of the 1920s.

WEBSITES

A website is a good calling card but non-essential. There are a few places where you can network online, such as LinkedIn, but personally I mostly make that a network of people I know in real life.

It’s possible that a client may stumble across your website but that’s the exception to the rule. Most of the valuable effort that you put into creating opportunities will be from social networking in what is picturesquely described as ‘meat space’ rather than ‘cyber space’.

But if you are going to put up a website, include some information that makes it personal and personable – let the viewer have a little look behind the curtain at your workspace. Everyone is fascinated with studios (or so we tell ourselves) and there’s definitely something good about sharing your passions, whether that’s for racks of vintage digital reverbs, or unusual looking percussion instruments.

You should put up some audio, and I choose to have a video reel as well, so that if that client does stumble across your site, they can hear your work while they are interested. Include a biography of course – and an appealing visual representation of the work you’ve done that you are most proud of.

Finally, don’t forget a contact; some way for them to get hold of you.

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COLD CALLING AND MANAGING MEETINGS VS GENERAL MAILOUTS

Mailing out showreels cold is very 1995. At least, it was for me! It’s a low success rate strategy. Of course, as you will now be sending links to online reels rather than a physical package most of the time, you will not have the opportunity to wow the prospective client with some really luxury packaging.

Equally, cold calling is low on the chances of success ladder. One area where you might have some traction here is with Ad Agency TV assistant producers. Having a full Rolodex of ‘talent’ is part of the gig, so you’ll often be able to set up a meeting to introduce yourself.

At that meeting resist the temptation to play your entire reel for them. Time is money. Choose two or three pieces maximum that demonstrate that you’re talented, experienced and versatile. Leave with a view to a follow up but don’t be too pushy. I’ve actually left one of these cold meets with a U-matic (check out the museum of vintage video formats to find out what that is) for a commercial to pitch on. But don’t expect that to happen too often.

WORD OF MOUTH

It’s always hard to work out the best strategy for getting in new jobs. Word of mouth is the most powerful thing here. Once you have done a great job for one client, they will tend to recommend you to other colleagues who are looking for music. It can’t be overstated how important your ability to be a ‘safe pair of hands’ is. Failing to deliver on time, or delivering technically sub-par files, is the greatest sin of all. The greatest fear of a commissioner is that you will not deliver. Most other problems can be worked around, and everyone on productions is used to dealing with problems, so don’t be afraid to speak up if there’s something you are concerned about, and you need some help. If a production runs behind and the schedule all goes to chaos, and you desperately need 92 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

a few days of a music editor to keep you on track for delivery, then ask for it. You can bet that the other departments will be dispassionately fighting their corner to ensure they can deliver a good end result too.

If you have had a really great experience on a gig, then it’s not rude to ask your director and producers if they can recommend you to their friends. Most people – especially in the USA – love to help others along the way. Being a good connector of people is seen to be a massive plus. You may also be in the position to return the favour at some stage, and this is how great people find each other and do great work.

FOLLOWING UP PAST RELATIONSHIPS

Make sure that you spend some time and energy keeping your contacts live. Don’t be a pain obviously but check in from time to time to see how they are and remind them that you are there. Of course, it’s great if you become friends with your clients because it’s great to have a good friendship group in the same industry.

But there will also be a large number of people that you know professionally that you don’t tend to socialise with, and that’s fine.

I’ve often checked in on someone for them to say, ‘Oh it’s great that you called, actually I’ve got a thing coming up.’

A way to plan for success in this area is to make it systemic in your weekly routine. Plan out a rota of contacting people every few months to check in. It’s hard to keep this up unless you systematise it, and then it’s incredibly easy.

Another page for your database that I know you are thinking about creating!

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CHAPTER 6:

DEMOS AND PRESENTATION TIMING AND PLANNING

So, what we’re aiming at is you spending most of your time writing music. A fair amount of that might be pitching or creating demo tracks for jobs. For commercials, this will probably be two demo ideas, but for film, TV or games work this may be a theme suite, a collection of ideas linked in style that show the kind of thing you will do on the project. Doing this on spec is a fairly large investment of time, so make sure you think it’s worth it.

As we’re in the business half of the book, and not the creative half, let’s stick to workflow here. How are you going to plan all of this out?

Only you know how fast you can write and produce a high-quality pitch. It’s not worth pitching if you are not going to have time to do the job justice. Better to say to a prospective client that you are too busy, but you’d love to be considered on the next one. People won’t go away for ever, so don’t get into that typical composer panic where you feel like you have to take on every job offered to you in case one day no-one calls anymore! It’s actually attractive to have to turn someone down because you are too busy to do a good job on the pitch. They will respect you for being principled and not trying to slam something together that isn’t up to scratch.

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The demo doesn’t need to be perfect, but your intention must always be clear. Don’t expect a non-musician to care about exquisite layers of orchestration or overlays of synths if the main idea is submerged.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

Then make sure you are well organised, allocate your time carefully and stick to the schedule. Remember: deliver on time. I will probably say this a few more times before this is all over.

Consider splitting the time up into 1/3 creative ideas, 1/3 execution and 1/3 final production and mix. Again, it’s no use having a great idea and a terrible amateur sounding mix. If you think the gig is worth a punt, you could get a mix engineer to do you a quick pass.

I know several great engineers that have studios at home and are always happy to do a demo mix, where you can buy a few hours of their time to just get your mix happening and sounding great, without having to go all out on a large format Neve console.

USING LIVE PLAYERS

Live players on your tracks will always, always, always make them sound much better. This is a mantra of mine that I’ve been sharing for many years. If you are at college and you can call in a favour in return for dinner out, that’s a great barter. If you are making a living, then a session fee or two to make a track sound much better is a good investment in your own career. Don’t bankrupt yourself to do this, but where you are able, go for it. I promise you it will be worth it in the long run. If a track doesn’t get picked up, you have that in your library for another potential usage. One of my highest earning library tracks is a piece I wrote for a workshop, and then re-recorded with a scratch orchestra. I knew it was a great track, so I just did what I had to in order to get a recording I could use.

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I do have Pro Tools and an attitude. Start by using yourself as the player and when you can afford to, hire pros to come and contribute.

DELIVERING DEMOS

You will often be delivering your pitch electronically, so delivering this should be straightforward but may still require a bit of thought.

When you output the movie file, make sure you output in a format that is reasonably good quality image but great quality audio (the client is already familiar with the picture) and doesn’t require hours of broadband to download. Picking the wrong compression algorithm can leave you with a file size in the GB. Ensure that the algorithm you pick is easily and widely read on PC and Mac. You don’t want them not to be able to watch it. You might also look at systems like Dropbox, Box, Disco and other hosting services. Some of these transcode your media to make it really streaming friendly, and of course a weblink is easier than a file for the client to handle.

You’ll often have to rewrite and start again. If your career path is that you want to win an Oscar and have everyone say how wonderful your music is, this may not be for you.

If you’re not mainly happy on your own fiddling around, I don’t know how you can do the gig. The stress, awful comments, unpleasantness and difficult experiences, all the things that make you want to give up, that doesn’t add up to any award I’ve ever got! The balance has to come with the fun of playing, creating.

– JOHN POWELL

A piece of advice from someone who has been there and done that; don’t explain in the email why it’s not quite right or that you could have made it better. Don’t tell them your pitch is bad before they’ve even watched it. This is a common form of nerves, and it leads you to a wholly exaggerated and inaccurate view of the work you have done. I once heard a composer say that playing music Demos and presentation | 97

for someone else for the first time is almost like taking all your clothes off in front of them. You can feel psychologically ‘naked’, and this can make you behave in all kinds of weird ways.

Just sending off music always feels like a bit of a ‘Hail Mary’ to me. The director may be listening to your cue on their headphones during a visual FX meeting.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

If you have to say something more than just ‘Hi, here’s my pitch.

Enjoy!’ then explain how you had great fun working on it and leave it at that.

Having said that, if they don’t like it, you can’t persuade them to like it: it’s best to focus on the detail of what isn’t working for them and take it from there. More on this in Chapter 9.

PRESENTING DEMOS AT THE STUDIO

Directors often fall in love with their temp score. The first time they hear your music is often a shock to the system.

Don’t expect an instant transformation to loving your cues.

Whenever you can, get them to listen to your new music several times before giving feedback.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

This used to be the way we all did it, but sadly it’s all the more rare these days. However, if you do end up in this situation, prepare the space so that it is comfortable, professional looking and uncluttered, and give the client the best seat in the house.

Suggest that you will play it twice for them in succession, and then you’ll turn the lights back up and you can have a chat about it.

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what an oboe is. Remember the other important rule: don’t tell them it’s rubbish before you have played it to them.

It’s never my choice to send music over the internet.

You don’t know what environment they will be listening in. Have them come to your studio and you can prepare everything to be exactly as you want it, to the most advantage to your music. Where will the director sit?

Where will they put their coffee cup down? It’s no good putting a stool in the middle of the room and giving them a coffee and there’s no table to put it down on, it’s awkward.

Pre-record all the demos. Don’t play things live from the sequencer. Premix and automate the levels as if it was a dub. I know exactly how it is going to sound. Further down the line when you don’t have the luxury of having the director present, there are plenty of chances for miscommunication. So make the most of this. The edit room they are sitting in later on may have a faulty left speaker. Then read their body language.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

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CHAPTER 7:

FROM DEMO TO MASTER RECORDING EXPECTATIONS AND REALITY

So, on reading this heading you might wonder, does this refer to the expectations of you or your client? Well, mostly you. Whilst I’m always saying how much live players and a mix add to your music, you do need to have a balanced view of how far you need to get to on the demo, and to what extent recording ‘for real’ will change the sound of the track.

Starting with your demo, you’ll need to check the arrangement is good and that the sounds you are using are balanced and mixed well. Don’t try to rely on adding musicians to save you from a terrible sounding demo, as you probably won’t get commissioned and get far enough into the gig to get the session.

If you’re pitching cues on a score that you are already confirmed on, again don’t just smash through it and trust that when you get a few players on it and a mix engineer they will make your sow’s ear into a silk purse.

You should always aim for your demo being as close to master quality as possible, which allows you to reach for the stars when you start adding professional players, and getting the mix done.

However, there are some things that you’ll have to accept just won’t sound good enough until they are replaced. Some instruments are incredibly hard to sample or program on synths, such as the saxophone. This instrument is similar to the human voice in the From demo to master recording | 101

huge variety of sound it is capable of, and a sampled version is always going to be a compromise. Similarly, with the cello, while you can make a reasonable stab at it with a good sample set like Spitfire Audio’s Solo Strings and Abbey Road Two collections, the real thing is just light years ahead in emotion and communication with the listener.

A musician contractor is a Really Good Idea, even when you are only recording with a few players. We take away the stress of organising the recording, the paperwork, and we are there to replace the player who phones up sick on the morning of the session without you even knowing about it.

We know lots of amazing players, so will be able to find you someone brilliant with whom you will enjoy working.

– HILARY SKEWES

You must also consider that when you have a player replacing a ‘virtual instrument’ or synth part on your session you’re not just getting the notes replayed by a better sound source. You are engaging that player’s decades of experience and skill, musicality and ability to interpret and communicate, and more than this – their vibe and heart. This will almost always have a drastic effect on your music. The difference is hard to believe until you have experienced this yourself. It’s almost like some kind of strange alchemy.

For this reason, if I’m pitching an idea that contains an important instrument, like a soloist or something very heavily featured or isolated, I will often elect to pay a professional to come in and play on the pitch for me. The difference can be startling and can be the thing you need to win the job. I know of composers who have gone one step further than this and done sessions with a full orchestra to win a job. You need to be confident that your music is right of course! But nothing says ‘I have this’ like actually engaging musicians to perform on your pitches. Of course, if you don’t win

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the pitch, you have a great sounding track to use for something else in the future, so it’s not wasted energy and resource.

REPLACING PARTS

When you get to the stage of producing the master of your demo, you’ll want to replace some elements of the production, either with live players, or with better sounds, or maybe just a better part that now you have the luxury of a little more time, you’ve been able to come up with.

Once you are recording with real live musicians, the most important tool you have is communication! If you have solos, or need a player to play something unusual, make sure you sort it out with the musician (through the contractor if you are using one) before the sessions take place. Don’t just hope it will be all right on the day.

– HILARY SKEWES

Be aware of the impact of this on your client. They are now used to your demo and have bought into the sound and feel, it’s ‘their’ music now as well. So, keep clear communication on your plans with them so you don’t blindside them. Often a client will require a slight reverse ferret and get you to ‘put back the demo bass flute please’ as it just had something they fell in love with and on the replacement didn’t feel the same to them. Don’t forget that music is highly subjective, so this isn’t an insult to you or the player (who may even be the same on the samples as on the live part) – it’s just one of those mysteries of life.

Sometimes a drastic shift can pay dividends though – on one score I altered the theme, by removing live drums and heavy guitars and replacing them with an electronic beat and distorted bass synth playing a different pattern, but with the orchestra over that remaining the same. The director loved it, and the theme went on to win the RTS award for best theme that year.

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So, there’s a balance to be struck between demo love and continuing to work on the music to make it better for the master.

When you have listened to something enough times it starts to just sound ‘right’ due to the familiarity and so it becomes hard for you to hear around that and see what else might be possible. Some strategies I use in this situation include getting someone unfamiliar with the music to come in and listen to it. They don’t have to have anything to do with the job, anyone will do, a willing friend, partner or one of your kids if you are a parent. You will suddenly be thrown out of your cosy comfort zone and will hear the music through their ears without them even needing to say anything. Some mix engineers play the track back while standing outside the room to hear problems.

You should listen to your demo (and master if you are mixing that) on different playback systems to double check it. You’ll often hear on smaller playback systems, or through TV speakers, that an instrument might be too loud, or that the bass is distorting the sound when you hear through a smaller cone. Maybe the high percussion is too piercing. A lot of these things might not show up when you’re listening on your own speakers, either because it all sounds super pumpy and HiFi, or maybe your room has a bass cut and so you’re pushing the low end up to make up for that!

RECORDING WITH LARGE ENSEMBLES

We’ll look at the practicalities below, but one of the key things is to have realistic expectations of what you can achieve in your session time. If you are recording a super-hot session band in a London or LA stage that is used to turning over Hollywood blockbuster sessions without breaking sweat, then you can assume that they’ll just burn through just about anything you present to them, and the first take will be usable if not perfect. However, if you are using a band that is not used to this level of sight reading, or a studio that is more used to leisurely album sessions that run on

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daily rates rather than hourly rates, then you must adjust your expectations accordingly.

Musicians respond really well to praise! Even if you are concentrating on the next cue, or the director, or trying to work out if a note sounds right, remember to let the players know if they’ve just played one of your cues well. A relaxed and happy musician plays better than a stressed or anxious one.

– HILARY SKEWES

Wherever you are though, don’t assume that you can press record five seconds into your session and hit stop two seconds before the dot of the three-hour mark, and be recording full tilt all the way through. There will be questions from the musicians, maybe from the booth, the conductor, and the band will want to do a few run throughs in order to get the best performance possible.

This means you should carefully consider how much you can realistically get done in the session time and plan out your running order according to importance. Don’t leave the most vital cue until 20 minutes before the end of the session.

Opinion is divided on whether it’s best to start with a humdinger of an action cue or something that is a simpler read, to get the band warmed up. I definitely lean toward giving them something that is interesting and fun to play first rather than one of the ‘football’ cues (cues with long lines of semibreves or whole notes are thus called) – because as important as that is at some points in scores, it’s not a great start for the band who may be secretly thinking ‘Oh boy this session is going to be really tedious’.

Should you employ the services of a conductor? If you are not skilled at conducting yourself, then this should be a carefully made decision. Can the leader (the first violins are generally the first line of communications between the booth and the players) handle the direction of the orchestra? If they are playing to a click this is a From demo to master recording | 105

possibility. However, with no click you absolutely need a conductor to keep time. It’s very hard for the leader to simultaneously drive the band, sightread the score, and perform brilliantly. Besides, if your cue is scored to picture how are you going to ensure it hits all the important moments? This is generally done with a visual system known as ‘streamers’ and ‘pops’ and conducting free like this is a very difficult skill to master.

On Spy Game, which was a monumental task for me at that time, with 80–90 minutes of music and only a couple of films into the journey with Tony Scott, so I didn’t know him that well, he signed off everything, I flew off to London to record, and then came back, mixed it, and on the first day of the final dub he called me and said ‘What the f*** is this?’ I said ‘What do you mean Tone?’ He said ‘It’s like milk chocolate Harry. Where are my edges? Exactly as you had it?’ So I had to remix the whole score, and he was happy with it.

What I learned from that is that when he had a left-hand turn in the music, like a change of pace or tempo, or a smash cut to action in the film, I might have had for example a reverse sound going into that moment. In my demos, the sound was quite raw, it would hit with a boom, probably no reverb or delay on it. In the final mixed score that we had delivered, the engineer had put that into the surrounds which made it sound different, and then put a nice reverb on it so it didn’t just cut off. He didn’t want that at all.

When it comes to orchestra, it will usually only sound better than the samples. But Tony would sit shockingly close to the speakers to listen to demos loud, and when he heard the finals they would be on the dub stage, so there may be some loss of impact – with 80 players it will obviously move and wobble in a different way to the samples, but we know that’s what brings it to life. But with the synths you don’t want to get too clever in the mix, 106 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

especially with a director like Tony Scott, who wanted to hear the ‘edges’ as he put it. I do ‘produce’ the final mixes more than I have the demos, but I am always mindful of not ignoring what it is about the demos that the film makers liked and ultimately signed off on.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

If your track is more of an atmospheric one, where the start and end can be fairly loose, and you have a smaller chamber group, then the leader could definitely drive that kind of session.

There are some practical things to bear in mind. Wind players need to be able to take a breath, harpists need parts that are actually playable. You can’t and won’t be expected to know all the techniques of every instrument but if you treat the players with respect they will always endeavour to find what you’re looking for. I almost always conduct. I may not be technically perfect but I like being on the spot to answer questions and shape the performances. It’s also fun and a way of getting to know the individual musicians.

– ANNE DUDLEY

However, let’s assume you want a conductor. The benefits can be considerable: faster interaction with the players, and answering of questions and problems, an extra level of session discipline, a great pair of ears and creative opinion in the room. All of these lead to greater efficiency in the session and a better end result.

SESSION PREP FOR OVERDUBS AND LARGE ENSEMBLES

I generally do overdubs in my own studio. I prefer to overdub into Pro Tools even if I’m going to pull the parts back into Logic after.

This is partly due to my speed on Tools, and partly because the workflow at lowest possible latency is much easier. So, my prep for this is as follows. In the session I’ll have these tracks: From demo to master recording | 107

• Click (using the UREI click not a cowbell or tonal plop) • Full demo mix • Demo mix minus elements to be replaced • Element 1 • Element 2 (etc) • Live 1 – take 1 • Live 1 – take 2 • Live 1 – take 3 • Live 1 – take 4 • Live 1 – take 5 • Live 2 – take 1 • Live 2 – take 2 (etc) Each of these will be colour coded, so that Element 1 and all of the Live 1 tracks are one colour, all of the Element 2 and Live 2 tracks are another colour and so on. It makes things a lot easier under the pressure of recording if you can easily see what goes with what.

All the Live tracks are prepped with the correct inputs assigned, whichever mic or line inputs are going to be used for those parts.

I’ll also group them and then disable the groups, so that I can easily switch it back on if I need to during the session to change them all at once, whether that’s an input assignment (different mic!) or muting them all if I’m recording two or three players in succession.

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Your time in studio is by far the most expensive time of your score record. Make sure absolutely everything is organised before you turn up. Everything: click tracks, prerecords, scores and parts, recording order, any instrument doubles... And then check it again one more time. Sleep is secondary to organisation!

– HILARY SKEWES

I’ll set up reverbs and any other important FX so that the player can have a bit of that in the cans if they want it – some players like this to get in the mood and some just want a fairly loud very dry signal so they can be sure their take is perfect.

I’ll mark off the count so that I’m being consistent with every cue, so the player doesn’t have to remember from one cue to the next how many clicks ‘free’ (ahead of the score’s first bar) – and that is usually two bars. I’ll have imported the midi map from the Logic session as well and have double checked that any tempo changes and meter changes are lined up correctly (it’s easy to get things out by a bar or two when moving DAWs). I’ll generally bounce the click to audio as it’s safer and useful to be able to see it visually.

(See below for more detail on the ‘UREI click’.)

Musicians’ Union rules on sessions can seem quite strict when you are unused to them. But they are really positive tools for everyone: a clearly designated three-hour session with a break in the middle means the musicians concentrate incredibly intensely for that time, and work at the top of their focus. It’s good for everyone involved in recording – and therefore for your score – to have a really clear structure to their day.

– HILARY SKEWES

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I’ll make sure that the headphone mix is sounding good. In simpler systems and sessions, you can just use a mult (or identical audio feed) of your own monitor mix, and if you’re recording in your control room as I do, then you’ll be hearing on your headphones what the player is doing and can quickly fix any problems. But be aware that you won’t be able to hear the new take ‘in context’ as the player will want their track louder in the cans, and so you will have to put up with that too. But if you are recording in a booth, make sure you have a pair of headphones with the headphone mix going through them to hand so that you can quickly check what the player is hearing. Having a bad balance in the player’s headphones can cause all kind of problems from struggling with dynamics to intonation problems. This is particularly acute for singers so it’s vital to spend plenty of time at the start of the session getting this right so that the performer is comfortable. Many instrumentalists will want to wear one sided headphones or pull one ear off, so that they can blend the sound of their instrument live in the room with the sound they are hearing from the mic.

Many reading this may not be familiar with the ‘UREI click’. UREI (United Recording Electronics Industries) was the sister company of Universal Audio established by Bill Putnam. Described by Bruce Swedien as the ‘father of recording’, Bill Putnam invented many of the methodologies and equipment we use in the studio every day: if you don’t know much about him, I would recommend reading about his legacy and work. The UREI 900 series of studio metronomes were designed by Bill Putnam to solve the problem of having a clear click that could cut through music but minimised the click bleed out of the headphones into the mics, especially when recording string orchestras.

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Figure 14: The UREI 96411

Figure 15: The UREI 96212

Session prep on larger ensembles is basically the same process, although you would be well served to lay down stems, so that if you need to pull a section out of the headphones for any reason (say the brass samples or the drums are making it harder for the strings or woodwinds to nail their part) then that becomes very easy.

Beyond that it goes without saying that you should triple check everything, as finding problems with your ‘prelays’ (prepared stemmed audio) on a large scoring stage with a large ensemble of musicians waiting can be a costly error.

RECORDING EXTRA PARTS AT ANOTHER STUDIO

All the session prep you have undertaken so far will serve you well when moving to another studio to capture any parts. You may even be doing a remote record, in which you are listening in via a link like the ‘Audio Movers’ system, while watching and communicating with the booth over video chat. In any case, you’ll want to be sure that the elements that the studio need have been delivered and checked in advance, and that you have provided the Pro Tools operator with well organised and laid out sessions that are consistent from cue to cue, so that there isn’t a huge delay every time they switch cues. You want the assistant to be worrying only about whether all the mics are still live and not crackling or dropping out, and that the players haven’t accidentally moved anything, not whether your percussion backing prelay is still coming out of 7–8 or whether you changed the order for this cue 11 Source: used with permission by Techno Empire.

12 Source: used with permission by Techno Empire.

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and it’s now unexpectedly coming out of the brass sample prelay channels on the desk (which have been muted for this session).

Demo Love: Mixers should ignore composer’s demos at their peril. Demo Love is a very real thing. Composers have given birth, agonised over, honed and adored their creations until they are perfect. They’ve then gone through the trauma of having the director tear their masterpieces apart, sent away to rewrite them, often several times until they’re approved.

The mere act of realising these with real instruments and then mixing them should make them even better but woe betide if it sounds different from the bloody demo!

– SIMON RHODES

The assistant on the session will have gone through your session files and imported their mic channels and set up into each of your cue sessions, so that you have a good consistent layout as well when you get the session data back.

Try to plan for success and make the session run as smoothly as possible, as there are always plenty of little gremlins that pop up during any session.

STEMMING

Stemming is one of those grey areas where there are not really hard and fast rules, but there are some conventions that you should follow.

The principal reason for stemming your mixes is to give the dubbing stage control over the music in the event that there is a conflict between the music and the dialogue or sound effects.

We discussed some general principles earlier, but in our current focus of getting to the master recording, your key concentration should be on ensuring that the stems are accurate, that you don’t have any stray signals going into the wrong stem, and that your mix reconstructs – you need to change your mind set at this 112 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

point from a ‘my stereo mix buss’ to ‘my stems’. The stereo mix is completely irrelevant at this stage (apart from for your showreel) because anyone who watches the show or movie from this stage on is listening to your stems.

This becomes a different way of thinking about creating a mix.

But if you plan this way from the beginning there’s no reason why it should be complicated. If you set up your DAW session so that everything is being stemmed automatically from the word go, then the only thing you are doing that is different is that you’re not putting EQ and compression on the master buss.

In fact, this way of mixing can give some significant benefits, as espoused by Michael Brauer. His system of ‘Brauerizing’ was designed to enable a method of ‘multi-buss compression’ – in which he would have four busses, each with a different flavour of compressor (such as Neve 33609, Distressors, Fairchild, SSL G-Series). He would lean on different compressors for their different sound profiles and reaction to transients. But he might send the drums to more than one buss at once. So, obviously with our need to keep the stems clean and self-contained, we can’t do that, but we can adopt the idea that we can put our ‘vibe’ treatment on the individual stem buss and get the colour and attitude from that rather than trying to get it from the mix buss.

The advantage of this method of mixing is that you can prevent the bass kicking in from ducking the strings, and all kind of other effects that may or may not be useful. But with multi-buss mixing you can get a pumping cinematic drums track without having your strings heaving up and down as a consequence. It’s a different way of thinking. You can even (I do this) Brauerize within your stem, by sending things within the stem to sub-mix busses that then sum to the stem output. It sounds like a lot of work and until you’ve tried it you might think ‘I don’t really believe that’s going to do anything significant’, but I have to say, you can get some incredibly great sounding mixes using this method.

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It only requires a small mental shift if you are using a template with instruments going into sub-mixes and then stems – for example on strings we might have four sub-mixes before we hit the stem output. They could be longs, shorts, trills/tremolandos and FX. So for example, you might have your four sub-mixes for the percussion effectively being like the Brauerize technique, with different compressors, or you might have a few extra things on there, maybe you’ve got your Distressors set to crunch so that the B channel is to add grit to the sound, and then you send one of your drums to A to get a Neve slam, and a bit to B to add in a little crunch. We’ll touch on this again in Chapter 11.

SESSION PREP FOR MIXING

If you are getting a mix engineer on board to do the final mixes, you should aim to prep your sessions so that they can get up and running very quickly from one cue to the next. This is actually very similar to prepping for recording. All the same rules apply for keeping consistent layouts, so that your mix engineer can set up their master mix layout on the first cue, and then import each subsequent cue by using Pro Tools’ track match functionality. This is where the import will match using the track name, so you simply import the new individual tracks onto the existing tracks with all the FX, sends and so on, intact.

However, you will save a lot of the mix engineer’s time (and therefore your budget) by prepping the tracks effectively so that all of the audio from any live takes are topped and tailed (remove the silence at the start and end, and create a short fade in/out) and you’ve edited any drop-ins correctly and put fades on them so there are no pops and clicks that the mix engineer will have to hunt down, and comps of different takes together and so on. The mixer should not have to operate on any audio in the edit window.

There should be no remedial work to be done on the actual audio.

Let the mixer concentrate all their effort and firepower on getting the best sound.

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MIXING AND MASTERING AT ANOTHER STUDIO

If you opt to do this, whether that’s going to a big studio to get a mix done through a large format console with a ton of outboard, or in a mix engineer’s private studio with their own gear, you need to leave the session with stems – in the sense of stems that we might send to the dub stage. Of course, this might already be a requirement, due to your deliverables, but even if not, and you are only delivering a stereo mix, you will want the stems so that if there is a problem, or you want to change something in the mix, you can operate on the mixed stems and save a great deal of heartache.

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CHAPTER 8:

REGISTRATIONS AND ROYALTIES VT NUMBERS AND CUE SHEETS

Most collection societies have slightly different mechanisms for identifying which music has been used in which production. Two of the most commonly used methods are VT numbers for commercials, and cue sheets for TV shows and films. When you have completed a job, you should check that all of the registrations and paperwork are correctly done. It is much easier to deal with it while the production still has staff working on tying up the loose ends rather than a year later when everyone is working on something else.

You’ll need the VT number for the commercial to register this with your collection agency. You don’t have to have it, but you are far more likely to get all the income paid out successfully if the VT number is registered, as that is how the channels report the uses.

Similarly, if the cue sheet is missing, incomplete, or wrong, you won’t get paid correctly, if at all. And to make matters worse you may not know, as often the royalties for a series are reported in a single title entry on your statement, and this can make tracking any omissions very difficult.

The best practice for cue sheets (beyond offering to help the production staff fill them in) is to get the copies from production as early as possible and check them immediately to ensure they are error free. All the music used in the show, from your titles, cues, any

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sync tracks (songs etc) all the way through to someone on camera singing or whistling, should be listed in the cue sheet. There will be entries for the composer(s) of the works, titles if applicable (often just reported as ‘Paul Thomson Score/Incidentals’), durations, and often you will be able to append your CAE number (the number the collection society uses to identify you) either as a separate column, or with your name.

If you find an error, you need to ask production to correct it as it is very hard (sometimes impossible) to change it down the line once it has been reported by them into the PRS. Then you should locate the cue sheet in the PRS database and download it and check it has been uploaded correctly. You may, if this process has happened after the first broadcast, find that one or more ‘ghost’ cue sheets have been automatically generated – and this can also cause complications. All in, it is much better to get all of this sorted in advance of broadcast if you can.

COLLECTION SOCIETIES

The PRS is a royalty collection society in the UK. It also contains the formerly named ‘MCPS’ (Mechanical Copyright Protection Society) which deals with mechanicals. In the USA, the equivalents would be ASCAP – founded in 1914 and now with over 850,000 members, BMI – founded in 1939 by broadcasters and now with over 1.2 million members, or SESAC – originally founded in 1930 to represent European writers in the USA which now has over 30,000 members. The mechanical element (the UK’s former MCPS) equivalent would be the Harry Fox Agency in the USA, founded in 1927. In Canada the society is SOCAN. In France, it’s SACEM, founded in 1851 and the world’s oldest collection society.

Germany has GEMA, founded in 1933 by the composer Richard Strauss. Many countries have a collection society, and most of them have reciprocal arrangements so that they can collect royalties on behalf of foreign composers and remit them to their own countries’ societies. See Appendix D for website links.

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While there are some unusual usages and I could probably fill an entire book with the more arcane corners of the royalty world, I’ll try and outline in the most basic terms how each part of the royalty pie works.

Performance royalties are generated when a work is publicly performed. This could be in a live concert, on the radio, on TV, or indeed in a cinema. Also, when music is streamed or downloaded, this generates a performance royalty. Mechanical royalties are generated when music is copied as part of physical products (such as DVDs, CDs, toys), streamed or downloaded (this is where it gets a bit complicated!) or used in TV, film or on the radio.

This is a complex area and some of the above may appear contradictory. For example, for some channels when the music is ‘physically attached to a production’ or you might consider it to be ‘played into the production’ then a mechanical copy has taken place – but confusingly, this only applies to the first broadcast.

Also streaming income and download income is split between performance and mechanical royalty – currently, for permanent downloads this is 75% mechanical, 25% performance, for ondemand streaming this is 50% mechanical and 50% performance, and for webcasting 25% mechanical, 75% performance. Ringtones are 66.67% mechanical and 33.33% performance.

You might be wondering why these splits are significant, and the answer is that your contract will often split the performance and mechanical income shares differently. Commonly for film and TV work, the mechanical shares are weighed in favour of the publisher, and often the composer will receive only a small portion (if any) of the mechanical income. I have a friend who is a successful TV composer who made a fortune from DVD mechanical royalties on a show he composed the music for, so if you’re able to get this in your contract it can be worthwhile.

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REGISTERING A WORK ONLINE

If you have a publisher for the works (most film and TV commissions will be published by an associated publisher that is either part of the commissioner or has a business relationship with them to administer rights) then the publisher will register the works for you, and you should then just check online to ensure that they are registered correctly and that the shares reflect what you have in your contract. It’s really simple for mistakes to creep in at this stage.

If the works are going to be self-published, then you should register them yourself using your society’s online registration portal. An important note at this stage is that in the USA, the splits of the performance shares are considered to be 100% available to composers/writers and 100% available to publishers, of a total of 200%. This is clearly slightly unorthodox, so it bears a little exploration. US publishers will refer to the ‘composers’ share’ and the ‘publishers’ share’. These shares individually total 100%.

So, if you are offered ‘50% publishers’ share’ in addition to your composers share of 100%, you are being offered effectively an extra 25% of the total royalty paid out for the work usage, so you would end up with 75% and the publisher 25%.

It’s also important to note that if a work is unpublished, the publishers’ share is not paid out in the USA. So, in this instance, it is vital that you establish your own publishing entity to collect these royalties, or that half of the royalty income stream will be lost. In the UK that is not the case, the composer of a work can collect 100% of the total performance royalty (equivalent to the above 200% in the USA).

This really is quite a complex subject, with differing treatments in different countries, so forming an alliance with a friendly subpublisher can be very useful. The role of a sub-publisher is to locally administer the works of the original publisher, usually in a different territory. A good sub-publisher will often be capable of collecting more income than you can yourself. Chasing missing 120 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

royalty income can also be a very time intensive job, so you should consider if your time is better spent composing, and therefore sharing the income stream with a sub-publisher in payment for their services in looking after your catalogue.

HOW ROYALTIES ARE PAID

Most collection societies pay out on a quarterly basis. Mechanical royalties are sometimes paid out on a slightly different calendar, with different income streams being calculated in offset months to ease the processing burden. It goes without saying that running the distribution calculations of these income streams is enormously complex. It is not quite as straightforward, as some people claim, as reporting banking transactions. With banking data, you have a fixed payment at the heart of the system. But with royalty income, you need to split the negotiated block of income for a date range from a broadcaster among all the music used in that period – by that broadcaster, by length, and sometimes by priority (certain times of day may attract a premium) – and with some societies, by music usage type. The US societies distinguish between theme tunes, foreground, background, vocal foreground, vocal background, idents, commercials and so on. These are then weighted in different ways. All this compounds the complexity.

The period being paid out usually lags by at least three months.

So, for example, January–June might be paid out in October. If you find that some usages are missing, you will have a set amount of time to ask the society to go back and investigate, this is commonly three years. Sometimes in exceptional circumstances this may be extended, but not by much.

It is worth keeping an eye on the income streams for different types of usage, so that you have some idea of expected back-end income for a job you are taking on. If you are writing the theme for a daily broadcast show on a massive US network, then your potential royalty income stream is huge, and so you might feel that you could spend a bit of your fee increasing the production values Registrations and royalties | 121

of the final mix, safe in the knowledge that you will be looked after by the royalties. (I do say this with some caution, as my core belief is that production costs should really fall outside of the composer’s fee, and be paid by the production, but in a world of package deals we must be realistic and armed with as much knowledge as possible.)

CHASING DOMESTIC UNPAID ROYALTIES

Chasing up on missing domestic royalties is the simplest of the chasing tasks. You will be in the same country as your society, speaking the same language, and able to respond quickly.

Your society will have an interest in prioritising the needs of its own members.

At the PRS for example, the website has a useful search facility by which you can often find the missing royalties – maybe a lastminute change was made to a commercial, generating a new VT number, and you weren’t made aware of this, so your registration and the reported usages don’t automatically link up. Maybe a cue sheet is missing or incorrectly filled out. Sometimes a composer’s name being spelt incorrectly can cause issues.

Sometimes your royalties are incorrectly paid out to another composer – this can be for almost inexplicable reasons, or indeed human error. I once found that my income from a commercial had been paid erroneously to a world-famous artist, who was extremely unlikely to notice the extra income. I had no idea of how many times the commercial had been played, just thinking it odd that I hadn’t received anything at all for it. It turned out to be one of the most played commercials I have ever done, so the amount I was missing was well into the five-figure territory, and I could easily have simply never noticed or chased it up and lost that income for good. So, it is very important to either keep a close eye on your statements yourself or have a reliable and diligent person working on this for you.

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CHASING FOREIGN UNPAID ROYALTIES

This is exceptionally difficult, and so you have two routes. You can either engage your own society to contact the foreign society on your behalf, which is long winded and very bureaucratic, or you can engage the services of a good sub-publisher. I have had very good experiences and sub-publishers have undoubtedly found significantly more missing income for me than I would ever have managed to myself. Establishing a good relationship with a good sub-publisher can be very worthwhile.

A NOTE ABOUT PUBLISHING

When you consider assigning your publishing, be aware of the potential value of this share of income and ask yourself what you are getting in return. Hopefully, and in the best cases, this is a decent advance, plus a solid ability to track and ensure royalty income. Often on films and TV shows, the publishing assignation will be required as a part of the job. In the USA sometimes there may even be an expectation that the composer signs away not only the publishing share, but also the composer’s share as well, which is clearly highly unusual and should be viewed with the utmost caution.

In some cases, if you are being offered a staggeringly huge fee, you might consider this. But most of the time it smells slightly unpleasant and exploitative. Note that in the USA, much work is ‘work for hire’ – so in this case the contract must grant you back your composer’s share, as the law states that the work product is the property of the commissioner. You should get a specialist lawyer to look over your contracts in any event. Work for hire in this sense is not common in the UK. For the UK, in the case of literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works, the author or creator of the work is usually the first owner of any copyright in it. For sound recordings it is the record producer

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(as the person who made the arrangements for the recordings to take place); for a published edition, is it the publisher.

When you commission another person or organisation to create a copyright work for you, the first legal owner of the copyright is the person or organisation that created it, not you. This applies after 1988 due to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

If a person is working creating a work for an employer under a ‘contract of service’ as opposed to a freelance ‘contract for services’, then under some circumstances the copyright may belong to the employer.

It is a complex area, and you should always get legal advice.

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PART B:

CREATIVITY

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CHAPTER 9:

CREATIVITY IN COMPOSITION INTERPRETATION OF THE BRIEF

This is the crucial nutshell of the whole enterprise. How you interpret the client brief may result in the difference between success and failure. You should be trying to guide your client to brief in as abstract terms as possible – and as far from music as possible (although this may of course be difficult, especially if your client is in love with a piece of temp score – the music that they are using to edit to).

As a composer, bringing the director into the score as a collaborator is the single most important skill to learn. There will be something that musically turns your director on. It might be bass, it might be ethnic colours, it might be a big string line. Look for that key element, it can unlock the score.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

You need to develop the skillset of being able to see inside the brief and getting to the essence of what you need to communicate as the composer. You have the ability to mainline emotion into the brains of the viewers, which can be an exceptionally powerful position to be in. So, you need to ensure you are communicating the correct message, or you can send things off in a very different direction to the one the director intends!

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The ability to discuss creative ideas in non-musical terms, and with people who aren’t musicians, is one of the most crucial skills to develop. Having the vocabulary and communication skills to describe how music will create or enhance the emotional threads in a film are some of the most powerful tools in your kit.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

So how do you interpret the brief? Good starting points are trying to separate out any emotional information contained within the brief – as a baseline and primary mission. What do I mean by emotional information? This is the most important function of your music – to communicate emotion to the viewer. What are the characters feeling? Is there a subtext that you can expose? How does the filmmaker want the audience to feel in any particular scene? If you can establish this, you are significantly ahead of the game.

Always ask questions. If you think it – say it. The more information you can extract the better. Play them existing songs you think could be close to what they’re looking for.

Get a sense of their taste.

– GARY BARLOW

A large part of why you will be employed to compose music for a show is the singularity of your voice. There is no right or wrong way to write music for media... but you need to know the reason why you’ve chosen the notes, the approach and the sound that you have. ‘Because you like it’ isn’t a good enough reason for a director who may not understand what you’re doing, although you liking it is also important. Know why you’ve made the choices you’ve made and be able to articulate those reasons... because somebody will ask.

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Next up is the stylistic and colour consideration. How are you going to deliver the brief in terms of the instrumentation, playing styles, overall atmosphere, mix and so on. Try to establish a clear idea of this in your imagination before you start writing. The better and clearer your mental picture is, the more likely you are to be able to achieve that, without getting distracted or waylaid while writing. It is very easy to veer off target once you have started putting notes and chords down.

Listen before you say anything. I lost a film once because I got nervous and just talked and kept on coming up with lots of ideas: then ten minutes later I listened, and realised I’d just lost the gig because I’d gone in completely the wrong direction.

– JOHN POWELL

Try to work out if your client is looking for a safe approach or a more experimental and edgy style. It is sometimes useful to make a playlist of commercial tracks that show stylistic elements and creative approaches, to see what your client likes and doesn’t like. It is important that this is separate from any temp tracks that they have been using, as these may have become, in their minds, indelibly connected to the film, and as such they will be carrying emotional baggage for the team that is not useful for you when trying to investigate potential stylistic directions. Not to say that you should simply ignore the temp, but more to just be aware of its importance in the minds of the team once they have been listening to it over and over again as they work through the cut.

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What do you want people to feel at the end of the movie?

It tells you something important whether the director says they want the audience to feel devastated at the end of the film, or whether they use much more careful language.

The words used in answering this question can be quite revealing about how to pitch your music.

– JOHN POWELL

Don’t forget the classic Jerry Goldsmith story of the director he was excited to work for, who had mentioned among other examples, the Alban Berg opera Wozzeck as a guide to the kind of score the film needed. Jerry was impressed by the director’s evidently distinguished taste and advanced knowledge of music. When Jerry invited the director for dinner a few nights later, the director gradually became more and more irritated, finally bursting out ‘What’s that sh*t you’re playing?’ in reference to Jerry’s choice of vinyl to accompany the aperitifs. ‘That sh*t,’ replied Jerry stoically, ‘is Wozzeck’.

Once you’ve got the gig, you have to put the onus on them to really inspire you. By what the intent is of the film. They need to bring you up to the level that they are at with the film. Get them to talk about the story, about the emotional elements, as much as possible. This is how they will get the best from you.

– JOHN POWELL

SPOTTING AND THE TEMP SCORE

The process of watching the film through with the director and deciding where the music should go is called ‘spotting’. This is the moment that you have to really interrogate what the music should be doing each time it enters. The spotting session for the composer is the second part of this process overall, as the director 130 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

will have sat with the music editor and sometimes also the picture editor trying out pieces of music in different places creating what is referred to as a ‘temp’ (temporary) score.

As mentioned above, this can be both a blessing and a curse. You can sometimes intuit a lot from the decisions that have been taken in the creation of the temp score, but the danger is that the film makers may have watched the picture accompanied by this music so many times that it has become welded to the film. However, it can also give you a clear idea of what kind of feeling the director wants the music to achieve in a certain scene.

In days gone by, the spotting session would happen after the film had been ‘locked’ – the edit finalised. In the current age of digital editing technology, a locked cut is a thing of the past. You will almost always find that the cut changes, but hopefully most of the scenes you have spotted music cues for will still exist in some form, so the time spent with the director making decisions about tone and style of music will not have been wasted.

I will watch the film first with no temp score. Then I’ll watch it with the temp. As we’re going through spotting the music I’ll go through an interrogation process for each scene: Why is this scene in the film? What is the purpose of this scene?

– JOHN POWELL

It is valuable to try and watch the film without the temp score first so that you can have a ‘clean’ emotional reaction to the film before you are influenced by the temp score, but this is not always possible. Very brave directors will remove the temp score before the composer is given the film, to ensure they are not influenced in this way. Sometimes the composer is just given the film with the temp and left to work from that without a spotting session. I’ve also had occasions on episodic TV shows where a musical tone Creativity in composition | 131

and style has been well established, where I have been left to decide where the music should go, with no spotting session and no temp score.

It is your time to work out what the music needs to be saying in the scene. When the music starts and finishes is also important: the entry or exit of a cue can add significance to that moment in the film. You should be aware of dialogue and ensure that you are not entering at a moment that will render a line unintelligible.

Sometimes the absence of music is in itself a musical decision that can have a profound effect on the scene. Camera moves can be a great place to start a cue. Often a significantly emotional moment is marked visually with a ‘track in’ where the camera moves slowly toward the character, and this can be a powerful place to introduce music also.

It is probably important to ask ‘How close to the temp do you want it?’ – or maybe ‘What is the temp doing for you and why?’ That is a very useful thing to hear. I’ve also discovered that even great film makers will say ‘Ignore the temp’ and then describe to you in minute detail exactly what they want – and you realise they’ve just described the temp.

Part of the reason for this is it is very hard to describe music. You don’t want them to try to instruct you. You’re not there to be instructed – you’re there to be inspired.

They should inspire you as much as they have inspired the actors. As much as the book has inspired the screenplay and the screenplay has inspired the director. Not instructed! If the temp is the right size and weight, great – now you can give it poetry and its own meaning.

– JOHN POWELL

You may find the director leaning on you to ‘save’ a scene where some element of the visual has not worked as well as they hoped

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– maybe a lacklustre performance, a dodgy visual effect shot, an awkward cut and so on. You can often help out here. Obviously, the music can help to heighten emotion where it is lacking, but also can be used to misdirect the audience immediately before an awkward cut. A loud musical gesture immediately before the cut overwhelms the processing of the senses and distracts the viewer.

Alternatively, creating a musical moment that leads inevitably to the cut can make that cut more motivated. Sometimes the opposite is true, and you should play through the cut as if it is not there, carrying the viewer past the moment. You may need to try a few different options to find the best way to help your director at any given moment.

You may sometimes have the music editor taking notes during the spotting process, but if not, you must make as detailed a set of notes as you are able. You will be referring back to this all the way through the process, and as a record of the director’s vision for what each cue needs to accomplish, it is the most important document in your hands to help you deliver a successful score.

GETTING STARTED

The order of importance in film sound: Dialogue, then FX, then Music waaay in the back. Don’t ever forget that.

Stomp on a line of dialogue at your peril.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

I like to have ‘thinking time’ – time to ponder. Sometimes ideas may come in the middle of a walk or whatever.

That said, I’m also a busker – literally improvising to what’s on screen to see if anything hits the spot.

– ANNE DUDLEY

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Do your homework. If there’s a temp listen to it. Go down every avenue of potential danger before you sit to have a crack at writing it.

– GARY BARLOW

Do your research. Know who everybody on the film is, know as much about the background and the story as possible – before you start – even before you have the first meeting. Then you need to dig, and find out what the story is doing, so you are all making the same film.

– JOHN POWELL

I usually start by watching the scene a number of times without music and I begin to put markers in my DAW for important moments in the scene. Where are the shifts in tone? Are there any important pieces of dialogue? Or important looks/body language things to hit? Edit points?…

Once I’ve done that, it becomes clear to me that there’s a point in the scene that is really clear for me emotionally.

Quite often that’s not at the beginning of the cue. But I find that starting with the point that needs to ‘land,’ and then working backwards from there is really helpful.

In my mind, I think about it in the same way I do with songwriting at times. Sometimes it’s great to start with building the chorus, because once you have that, it might become clearer what wants to come before or after that. I also think of it in the same way I think of improvisation in a jazz setting. If I take a moment to listen, there’s inevitably something that’s going to spark inspiration.

– KRIS BOWERS

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Because I’m most comfortable at the piano, I’ll start there.

It’s definitely not the same as sitting at my workstation, even though it’s in the same room. I have manuscript paper and pencils ready, and a small tape recorder. Also, my piano is a Disklavier. So, I’ll try and find my way into the movie either with a melodic hook, or a harmonic progression, even if it’s just two or three chords, that feels right. Then I’ll listen back to that, nothing synchronised to the picture at this point, in search of the musical statement that I feel is the most important thing to find. I wouldn’t necessarily hook that to a character or place, or instance in the film, more how the movie speaks to me, and how that comes out to me in music. I’m not playing a string patch, being at the piano feels more unlimited to me. I’m not trying to solve the whole jigsaw at once.

Each day I’ll come back and keep moving forward in that journey, either by expanding on those ideas I had the day before or continuing some musical extension. I’m not trying to find the beginning middle and end of the theme, or the exact chord progression, I’m searching for something meaningful that wants to be expressed. Only when I have more than fragments beginning to take shape will I shift across to the composing station at Cubase and start to decide on the instrumentation.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

Write as many tunes as you can muster so you can throw a bunch away. I certainly write more than I need. Some work better than others in different places.

– JOHN POWELL

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What does the film want? As composers we can really clarify the storytelling, with themes, or motifs. But there are no rules. Some films could just be through-composed.

Some films just have songs. If there’s something useful you can do by adding clarity using themes, riffs, motifs, colours – then why not!

– JOHN POWELL

JERRY GOLDSMITH’S ‘RULE OF 3’

If you look at the way that Jerry Goldsmith’s music is constructed, there will rarely be more than three ‘elements’ at any one time.

If you listen to Jerry’s action scores like Total Recall or The Mummy you can hear this clearly in practice there. The lesson to take away from this is to aim for clarity in your compositions. Too many simultaneous ideas going on at once can confuse the ear. This becomes an issue in score writing as you need to communicate as clearly and quickly as possible to the viewer. Keeping things clear also helps if you are using leitmotif (themes for specific characters or storytelling devices). I’m not suggesting that your orchestration should be made up of only three components, but rather that you should consider how many concurrent ‘ideas’ you have going at any one time, to ensure you are communicating cleanly and efficiently. When faced with a large page of orchestral score paper, or a 700 track DAW template, the temptation is to fill in all the blanks.

MANUSCRIPT VS DAW

This brings us to an interesting question: should you write to manuscript or to the DAW? Before we consider the pros and cons of both approaches, I’m aware some readers may be able to read music, and some may not. While I am hugely anti-elitist and believe that orchestral music should be open and available to all, I do want to encourage anyone who has not learnt to read 136 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

music yet to dig into this. It is quite straightforward to pick up the basics. Then when you just keep looking at it and working on it, you’ll find it will lock in quite quickly. As it has become the medium of written communication of music, it will hugely benefit you if you can become acquainted with it.

So, why would we write straight to manuscript paper? I find this beneficial sometimes when I want to free myself from certain sounds or mannerisms that I continually reach for with the DAW, whether that’s because my fingers naturally make certain shapes or whether it’s the way certain sounds encourage you to play in a certain style.

You can hybrid this approach by writing to manuscript but at the piano, so if your inner ear hears a great chord change but you are not familiar enough with translating the sound of each change quickly into the chords, you can double check against the piano what you are hearing. John Barry told the story once that he set himself the task of becoming familiar with every possible change so that he would be able to hear something in his head and immediately know that he was hearing a major triad up a minor third to a minor triad, or conversely, that he could plan the accompanying chords to a melody he was creating by knowing what an E minor down to a B major would sound like. I’ve done some work on this myself but still have some more to do before I can reach John’s level of mastery! It’s not too complicated to adjust this once you know the basic triads, to start adding in extensions like the 13th or 9th into the mix.

A great exercise is to write a melody in your mind’s ear and then transcribe that down onto score paper and see if you got it all right.

This is a great exercise to make part of your weekly work routine.

It’s very useful to have a routine, as it reduces stress and can also help you to keep to a regular pattern of learning and improving your skills.

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Sometimes I just play with Logic in record, either with or without the film, fiddling around without a care, and then I go back and listen through it, and listen for things that I like.

When I hear something I like, I chop just before it and just after it, and colour that clip in red. So there might be two hours of rubbish, and seven little spots of red. Then the next day I come back to it fresh and see if any of it is worth keeping. It seems disheartening, as a methodology, but actually it works.

– JOHN POWELL

I like to improvise to the picture and I record my improvisations sometimes. There’s a wonderful key command on Logic by the way (Shift + R) that captures last take even if you weren’t in record. I use it all the time. I write by hand – in a sketchy, messy way. Recently I’ve been working on the iPad ‘StaffPad’ app which is brilliant. My messy sketches may include notes about orchestration ideas as well.

– ANNE DUDLEY

Now the other way to write is to write straight into the DAW. Under certain circumstances this may become inevitable, and that might be because the style of the music dictates that. Or it may be, like James Newton Howard working on King Kong, that you simply don’t have the luxury of time and you must simply work through, as he said ‘one bar at a time’13 filling in the DAW session until the score appeared and each cue could be flung at high velocity over to the orchestrators to get it onto the scoring stage the next day.

Or maybe you’re writing a so called ‘hybrid’ track that really needs the pumping rhythm track forming first, and then the orchestra laying on top of that.

13 Source: http://www.kongisking.net/kong2005/proddiary/ 138 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

You can mix and match these two types of writing, which I regularly do. I have a writing desk immediately opposite my DAW desk so I can simply turn away from the DAW and be at a desk with score paper, and I find this being able to switch and change between the two ways of writing to be the ideal balance between what you might call ‘pure creativity’ on paper and forming the orchestration by ear in the DAW. CASTING THE BAND

Don’t try to compete with sound effects, you’ll always lose.

Win with clarity and simplicity. I was working with John Barry on the soundtrack to Dances with Wolves. I asked him about why he had Vln 1/2/Violas/Cellos all playing the theme in unison. ‘You can’t fight a thousand buffalo’.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

One great way to ameliorate the stress of blank page syndrome is to spend time organising the band that you are going to use to create the score. Limiting yourself at this stage will help you to be creative, as there’s no greater immobiliser than the paradox of choice. While we might presume that being presented with many options makes it easier to choose the one that we want, in reality this requires that much more effort to make the decision and can even lead to cognitive overload and so called ‘choice paralysis’ in which you are rendered unable to make a decision.

Often something as simple as an interesting or unusual sound will conjure up an entire set of emotions that suit a scene, even before the notes and chords have been written, and being open to leaning more heavily on the sonics can free one up to create music that’s minimal but effective.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

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You will already have an idea of what you want to use to write the score, from your instinctive response to the picture and your discussions with the director, so now is probably the time to set up your template with just these players, and not every single sound and sample library you own. Limiting your choice will force you to work harder to achieve what you are aiming at rather than allowing you to cover up something that isn’t quite working with a different new sound, compromising on your original vision.

I allow myself time to muck around. This could be sounds – I start with just getting a palette together – or it could be tunes. This is usually about a third of the time allocated.

Then I’ll start trying things out to picture to get a sense of how things might work.

– JOHN POWELL

The concept of the score is very important, and the band that you create to perform the music is the most significant element of the concept. It is the medium through which you deliver the music to the viewer. The same material played on a cathedral organ versus a recorder ensemble will have a very different emotional meaning, despite them both being air blown through very similar tubes.

I am always trying to find a ‘sound’ that fits the picture.

The melody, harmony, rhythm and orchestration are ways to get to that sound. They all have to work together. That’s one of the reasons why, in the vast majority of cases, I orchestrate my own scores. The sound is inseparable from the notes.

– ANNE DUDLEY

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Sometimes it can be clear: when I was scoring Mulan I knew that there would be a mixture of Chinese instrumentation alongside orchestra and choir. With a film like The Last Duel, set in 14th century France, right there is a palette of sounds that I knew I wanted to take advantage of, so while I don’t want to imply it is pre-set, often the sonic world that a score should be in is apparent to me.

Sometimes though it is a process of discovery, on the Tony Scott films that I did, and similar films I continue to do, there is always some process of discovery during the process, for example even a small reversed sound. Tony might leap out of his seat and say ‘H, I love that’ and maybe I’d only used that in one cue. That sound I would develop, mine it, and find other ways of using it in other places. Phone Booth was never going to be an orchestral and choir score, more like the outdoor sounds that might be coming from a club or a grocery store. I’ll find sounds, tweak them until they feel right, and then they can be added to the sonic palette of the score.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

While you are doing this, try to also shape the sound of the template so that it most closely matches the sound you want to end up with in the score. Many sample libraries have mic controls like the Spitfire Audio libraries, which allow for an enormously wide range of sound characteristics. Many users don’t go beyond just leaving the patch as it loads up, which in Spitfire Audio’s case would either be the Decca Tree mics or a standard mix. But if the sound you are aiming for is a close, intimate sound, then the sound difference between the Tree or a mix and the close mics is drastic. It’s vital to get the sound as close as possible to the sound in your head before you start writing, as the sound will influence what you do and lead you in certain directions that may not be right.

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CREATING BESPOKE SAMPLE LIBRARIES

Many composers will curate sound and organise their style around sound that has meaning to them and that helps them communicate their vision effectively. But some composers make sounds. These are definitely the rarer breed, but I want to encourage everyone reading this to try out being a composer who makes sounds.

That old chestnut about it being important to ‘find your own sound’ is more true now than ever before, and it can be something as simple as using guitar feedback against orchestral sounds, for instance. Any approach that presents a new sonic footprint can help to make your work more memorable and effective.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

Every project I do, I will create a bespoke sample library for it. This has many functions. The most obvious and primary one is that it will be useful to create the score and give the sound of the score an element of individuality and uniqueness that will help it stand out from other scores. Anything you can do in this regard will help the audience become immersed in the experience, as it becomes a more unique aural landscape.

Make noises, they don’t have to be perfect samples, and then find the most interesting ones and map them to the keyboard. Any interesting sound that seems to say something is music to me.

– JOHN POWELL

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what could you substitute for one of those parts that might make the overall sound more interesting and compelling?

Examples might be replacing a traditional tuned percussion instrument like the glockenspiel with an instrument you have made from wine glasses or a mixing bowl, taking out some safer drum sounds like the bass drum and creating a sample set of you hitting the wall with your hand, or your fist against the body of the piano or a guitar, tuned down. I could go on, but you get the idea – the only limit is your imagination.

BLIND ALLEYS

You will almost always go down some blind alleys. This is completely normal and nothing to start panicking about. The process of exploration I like to compare it to is a sculptor gradually chipping away at the marble. It’s not a perfect comparison, but I want you to feel that every step you take, even if down a blind alley, is a step closer to finding the voice of the score.

I think it’s crucial to be able to throw away a piece of music without a second thought if it isn’t giving the director and producers what they need. No matter how hard you’ve worked on a piece, or how much you love it, as soon as someone isn’t feeling it or it isn’t serving the story, you need to be able to drag it to the trash and not look back.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

If you think about the process of creating a temp score, the director and editor will often sit for hours trying different pieces of music against scenes to see what works and what doesn’t. And that is without even having to dream up the music and then execute it.

So never feel bad about chipping away and wandering the alleys – they are essential stepping-stones en route to the solution.

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I sometimes do sacrificial cues. I will do a piece of music that I don’t think is right, because I need to see their reaction to it. A few times it has surprisingly turned out to be what they do want! But it helps you find where the limits are. This only works once they are confident in you, once you’ve nailed a few things. Otherwise you could end up with them saying things that are defensive, and then ego comes into play on both sides, and it stops you from understanding what is going on. There is also a risk that you leave them thinking ‘The composer doesn’t seem to know what they are doing! We need them to have a clear idea!’

– JOHN POWELL

If you create something great but that doesn’t work to the picture – file that away for later exploration and maybe to use on another project. Back to our database and filing system – being able to find these pieces when you need them is important.

THEME SUITES

You will have heard of the ‘theme suite’. This is an exploration of your ideas of what will work for this project, written standalone without worrying about fitting things to the picture. They can take many forms, from the more traditional suite of cues aimed at specific thematic uses – such as the ‘love theme’, ‘Harry’s theme’, ‘travelling theme’ and so on. However, they can also be more experimental in nature.

Hans Zimmer prepared a long Pro Tools session filled with ideas for the sound of the Joker for The Dark Knight. Chris Nolan described a nine-hour flight to Japan during which he listened to these hours of sonic explorations of madness: ‘It was a pretty unpleasant experience to listen to all of it quite frankly.’14 As Hans said of this 14 Source: Chris Nolan – The Dark Knight Making Of, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/ x35bnui 144 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

Pro Tools timeline: ‘Wherever you go… there’s mayhem.’15 The theme suite can take many forms.

In its most advanced form, it would be let’s say 20 minutes of music fully developed and produced to a high standard, which leaves as little to the imagination as possible, so that the director and producers can listen to it and start to imagine parts of it against different scenes in the show.

Doing this has many pros. It relieves a huge amount of psychological pressure from you if you can agree in advance a certain amount of the thematic material for the project. It gives the production team confidence that not only will you deliver the score, but you already have given them a ream of incredible sounding music designed to work with their project. You also give the editors material to work with which will mean less temp score, and therefore fewer templove problems down the road. (Temp-love is when everyone gets so used to the way that the temp works to picture that they keep pushing the composer to ‘just get a bit closer to the temp’.) You might even find that the director plays some of the music on set.

The music could influence the way the director shoots a scene, either stylistically or even by leaving space for certain musical elements to live.

The timeline of making films has definitely shifted with the adoption of non-linear editing and the speed at which it is possible to drastically alter the cut. It is more common than ever before that composers begin writing music before the shoot has even started.

In some ways this is a wonderful benefit that accentuates the collaborative nature of film making, as opposed to the old way of the director sitting the composer down to watch the finished cut, and then finally discussing music. Now, we have the opportunity to be right in the thick of it from the earliest stages, influencing the style and mood of the film from the very beginning.

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Working with the director before they have started shooting is also valuable because they are fresh and filled with the original concept.

They have not yet had to fight their way through production, making compromises, running out of money, firefighting on a daily basis to keep the show on the road. It is at the very beginning that you get the most refined sense of the aspiration and ambition for the project.

I’ve never had much success writing in advance. I’ve written things based on screenplays and then I’ve seen the film and it’s just completely different. Maybe I’ve just not been inspired to write the right thing, I need to see the movement of the camera, the acting, the pace, to know more.

– JOHN POWELL

How do you go about creating the theme suite? I would work on this as if it is an elaborate showreel. Try to pace it with light and shade, get some musicians in to play on it to take the production value up a notch, get a great mix on it, and then present it with the care and attention that it deserves, having taken a fair amount of time to put together. You will have discussed tone and emotion with the director, and maybe even art – paintings, literature, philosophy. Anything that can help you place yourself into the world and mood of the project. Draw from as many wells as possible for your inspiration.

If even 50% of the material in the theme suite is a go, you are significantly ahead of the game. It’s a great way to get going on a project as it detaches you from the worry of writing to picture momentarily, and allows you to concentrate on mood, pacing and musical ideas solely. Of course, it goes without saying that this should be inspired by the project as a whole. You are part of a team making the project rather than a composer in a garret writing a symphony.

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MELODY VS RHYTHM

This might be summarised quite succinctly by comparison of Danny Elfman’s Batman theme with Hans Zimmer’s The Dark Knight theme. Both are incredibly effective music to huge smash hit films. The first film encouraged a very melodic and almost romantic era score, and the second a much more rhythmic and minimalist treatment. When we consider the roles of melody and rhythm in our music, we should be doing this in reference to the project as a whole, and what is appropriate.

Be aware of the style of the project you are scoring. You can’t ignore the form and approach to the material and write what you want. If the material is demanding an austere and slightly cool and detached score, and you write a romantic epic golden age swashbuckler, you’ll get fired. Always remember that your job is to collaborate, and to write to the best of your ability within the parameters set by the director (and producers) – as this is their creative vision that has driven the project to this point of success where you are getting hired to work on it.

Avoid the sin of de-lamination, when the score and the film separate from each other. This most often happens when you’ve overpowered the images.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

Just pitting melody against rhythm is of course over simplifying things. And not only because a decent tune needs both. But your approach might be defined as having its roots in either a rhythmic approach, or a melodic approach. The rhythmic approach doesn’t necessarily mean getting a load of cinematic percussion beds going. It can mean a ‘cell composition’ approach to writing which involves minimalism, for example Herrmann’s score to Psycho which has many cues built from musical ‘cells’. These ‘cells’ might be simple four note fragments that repeat to build tension.

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You could be writing rhythmically, and the result is slow ambient repetition of long notes which all weave together in a multi-layered and multi-metered fabric.

The question is whether you need leitmotif, strong melody to direct the audience and communicate the emotion, or whether that is not appropriate and textural rhythmic approach is correct.

There is no right answer ultimately, it’s down to the artistic vision for the project.

Listen to the frequencies and textures in the FX and DX tracks, and avoid them. If there’s a load of low end, go high, if there’s machinery and guns, go smooth.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

SYNC POINTS AND WRITING TO PICTURE

Writing to picture used to mean dense textbooks full of numerical charts of bars and beats, feet and inches of film and relatively mind bending mental mathematical gymnastics. Now you can simply type SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) frame references in and get the DAW to work out the tempo for you. Or can you?

You should start by watching the scene a few times and finding the internal rhythm of the edit. All good editors are musically minded and will have a finely tuned sense of pace and rhythm. Your job is primarily to lock into that before you even take a step toward the DAW.

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I try not to be too specific initially when writing to picture.

Firstly, because it might limit the progress I can make because I’m trying to be too detailed to the picture.

Secondly, at the beginning of a project, I’m almost certainly not working to anything like a fine cut. So, it’s pointless really trying to hit this cut and that cut! So, it’s more of a feeling and a mood that has come out of me from watching this film – how that makes me feel and how the music can supplement the emotions of what is happening on screen.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

Once you have a feel for the tempo, use some form of tap device to get as close to that as you can (most phones will have an app that you can tap tempo into, and many DAWs also) and get your sequence lined up with that tempo. Set the start point more accurately with where you want the tempo to take you through the cuts in the visuals. There may be places you want to hit a specific cut or visual ‘happening’ – you can either move the start time by the odd frame or tweak the tempo to fit.

There is no 11 in film mixing levels. Stay out of the way if you want to be heard. If you hit that explosion frame accurately with your enormous orchestral hit, watch the dubbing mixer turn the music down, because they can’t go One Louder.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

You don’t have to hit on the first beat of the bar. A visual sync point can happen at any subdivision of the bar, and often this is really good and far less clunky that hitting the one. If there’s a point that you want to have a tempo change you should consider whether a ramp to the new tempo or a straight cut to it is better. Both are manageable with relative ease in most DAWs. If you do want the hit to happen on the bar line, you may find that to avoid changing the base tempo of the cue too much to enable a certain hit at a Creativity in composition | 149

certain moment, you can slip in one or more differently metered bars within the cue so that you land on the one. You’ll probably want to do this artfully, somewhere musically logical in the body of the cue rather than leaving it until the last moment, where it may sound clunky.

Yes, you WILL end up with bars of 11/16 and writing things that are musically bonkers… the art is making it all sound totally natural and that it was always MEANT to be that way!

– TY UNWIN

Remember that the edit will probably change many times as you get closer to completion of the score, so any cues that are very tightly synchronised to picture cuts may require significantly more work once you think they are complete. You may be able to lean on a great music editor at this stage, whose skill set includes musically changing cues to picture and even creating new cues from the composer’s stems. Tightly sync’d music is of course part of the language of film music, so I don’t want to discourage you from using this technique, but just be aware of the potential complications down the line and plan for that.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION WITH MUSICIANS

Many musicians enjoy collaborating with composers to explore new textures and sounds that can be made with their instruments.

Some may feature as soloists, like cellist Martin Tillman who has appeared on and contributed to many scores. Some ensembles like the London Contemporary Orchestra have a passion for exploring and promoting new music, and have performed on many scores and albums, often workshopping music with the composer in advance, finding new and unusual approaches and textures together.

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Layering has always been a key part of my electronic sound. Film sound is four dimensional, composers often forget about time. Live musicians providing random microchanges that keep even a single note interesting. Use that same technique elsewhere. Whether it’s a shaker or a pad, building several elements into a sound brings subtle shifts of timbre that give life and depth.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

If you want to feature any elements of improvisation on a score, this would usually be outside of the remit of a session player.

Approaches to this that I have heard of in the past can range from paying triple rate on the sessions, all the way up to co-writing credit for significant contributions.

Music is just organised sound. That’s why Cage’s 4m33 works so well. You can be the organiser, and we work in the relation of the organised sound to film.

– JOHN POWELL

Working with percussionists Joby Burgess, Paul Clarvis and Frank Ricotti on a score, I was thrilled to hear some really crazy stuff after throwing down the gauntlet – ‘What have you got that sounds rusty, dark and evil?’ – and they turned up with all manner of things to bow, drag and scrape.

This is just one of the many benefits that you get by inviting great musicians to play on your music. It really is one of the simplest decisions you can make that will take your work to the next level.

REVIEW – INTERPRETING THE DIRECTOR

Reviews of work in progress are always nerve wracking for a composer. At the risk of repeating myself, here are my three top tips.

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1.

Don’t tell the director your music is bad before you even play it to them. For some reason we composers and musicians (especially the British among us) have a perverse habit of constantly minimising our work and talent in a self-deprecating manner. While this may be a preferable character flaw to the opposite end of the spectrum of big headedness, it is not a character trait you should exhibit when presenting your work.

2. Keep still and watch with the director. It’s not good to nervously pace about behind them and/or light a cigarette, blow your nose, fiddle with a clicky thing etc.

3. Always tell the director you’d like to play it twice in succession for them before you start discussing it. Empathetically speaking, it is enormously difficult to have a nuanced point of view on something you have seen and heard once. Plus hearing it twice will allow the director to become slightly more familiar with it on the second playing, where the first time through may be a bit of a shock (not necessarily in a bad way).

It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to please everyone, the producers, the film company executives, the editors. Make sure the director’s vision is always your primary concern.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

Now, as you start talking through the cue with the director, is your moment to be a collaborator and part of the post-production team.

If the director doesn’t like it – remember the sage advice of Hans Zimmer: ‘I can’t explain to you why you should like this piece of music, it either resonates or it doesn’t.’16 If they don’t like it, don’t waste energy and good will trying to tell them why they are wrong. It is their vision that you are trying to execute. Find out why they don’t like it in non-musical terms; talk about emotions, colours, art etc.

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Tony and Ridley Scott for example were very different to how they reacted to music. Ridley might pose questions like ‘Do you think this is a little bit too fast?’ meaning ‘It’s too fast! Slow it down!’ So you need to remember those questions, and then address them in a meaningful way.

Tony would always react with ‘H, that’s great! It’s gonna be great.’ Always immediately a positive reaction, which was nice as made one feel comfortable. Then he’d say, ‘Let’s get into it,’ and then we’d start tweaking.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

Of course, you may find, as I once did, that simply removing the oboe is all that is needed, so don’t discount a simple solution. You’re going to have to try to figure out if the issue is an arrangement fix or something similar, or if it’s a start again fix.

Producers and directors want to employ people that bring something to the party. They don’t want a creative person to ask what it is you want them to do. They want you to have thought about the project... form an opinion of the work you’ve seen, understood the questions the show is asking of you musically... and have devised an original take on it that you can articulate easily. ‘I see this show as...’ rather than ‘How do you see this show?’

– DAVID ARNOLD

Rewriting cues is part of the gig. Don’t be shocked that you will need to rewrite a whole bunch of cues! Sometimes more than once. Just look at it as an opportunity to create something even better second time round.

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I always say, ‘What does the movie want?’ Then we can all talk about what is ‘sticking’ to the movie and what doesn’t seem to. This is also a useful way to avoid talking about what ‘you want’ or what ‘I want’ – and removes some of the ego from the process.

– JOHN POWELL

The most common reason for a cue being rejected in my experience is having misread what the story is you need to be telling for the scene. Maybe the character is looking and speaking in a very stoic way, but the story calls for an undercurrent of panic.

If you just score what’s on the screen, you have failed at the first hurdle. The composer’s job is to score the story, the emotion, not simply reinforce the visuals. You are the emotional channel of the story, the most direct way that a director can influence the audience’s mood.

On Penguins, for an important playback of the March theme, the director said, ‘Harry I love this music – it has a sense of fun but you are going to have to provide all the colour.’ What they meant was that my arrangement needed to be more colourful, so while they were there, I swapped the violins playing the tune and pulled up a whistling patch: I swapped the French horns that were tutting away, onto saxophones. I could see from the way the director reacted, that this was absolutely the right direction now.

These things are not possible if you are sending music.

You might end up with pages of notes as the director doesn’t really know how to tell you to change things.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

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team. Every time the director asks the lighting camera person for a fill light in a certain position, they don’t immediately start arguing about why they prefer not to have a fill light there. I’m not saying be a total blank that has no opinions. If you have a point of view that doesn’t line up with the director’s then discuss that and explore it – collaboration is two way – but many composers fall foul of the belief that whatever they did first is the only way that this cue should be written. And that is not collaborating.

THE CRITICAL ‘OFF BRIEF’ DEMO

The ‘off brief’ demo is more aimed at either your exploratory first tries at finding the voice of the piece, whether it’s a theme suite for a film, a title sequence for a TV show, a character theme for a game or a commercial.

You have a brief from the client and that is obviously your first point of reference and the first direction you should explore. However, you should also keep your mind open to your inner voice, and just throw a few crazy ideas at it as well. You might find something interesting as an approach that no-one would have ever thought to brief.

I call this the ‘off brief’ demo, and I’ve also rather extravagantly characterised it as ‘critical’. Why is this?

It’s an unspoken truth among composers who write TV themes and commercials for a living that off brief demos win jobs surprisingly often. It can be even as simple as a track standing out from all the others by its audaciousness. Once a client has looked at a load of variations on their brief, something startlingly different but great has a huge advantage.

For your own benefit, this is a good habit to get into, partly because it forces you to stretch your creative muscles, and to be able to reinterpret the same footage or concept in different ways

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on demand, but also because it demonstrates to your clients that you are artistically flexible.

For fallow periods, a great exercise would be to spend a day writing a different take on either an existing piece, say the love theme from a film that you like, or an imaginary brief on a job, say a TVC where the client wants ‘happy optimistic positive mandolin and whistling’ – the beauty of it is that you can just go wild. See if you can achieve the same end result from something really unexpected.

Composer Nathan Johnson created an incredible action score using a lot of ‘found sound’ that he recorded with a small portable field recorder. You don’t have to accept the paradigm for the situation of brief that you are working to. See how you can bend or break the rules and achieve a more interesting result.

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CHAPTER 10:

CREATIVITY IN RECORDING PRESET SOUNDS

When should we use presets? I will often start with a preset when quickly designing the sound of an EQ or compressor plugin. I’ll happily load up a preset on a synth but I will make it mine by tweaking it until it sounds different and better in context. No one wants to write a score and then have another score with exactly the same preset sounds featured in it. Consider this the first challenge of being creatively different, if not unique, no presets are allowed unaltered. This may mean that you need to learn how synths work. I’ve inserted a link to a video I made about the Odyssey – many of the principles here apply across a wide range of synths, and once you’ve got your head around how LFOs work, you have mastered the most difficult bit to grasp. {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqxUFR5l8zU} When I was at college doing my music MA in 1993, I had a Proteus 2 to work on along with a piece of software called Sound Diver – which was a universal patch editor that could edit virtually anything. It had an incredible feature called ‘randomise’ that would generate 100 random patches and then load them into memory so you could flick through them. Usually 97 of them were terrible, but three would be great, and you could then save those patches to use in a user bank.

Chance has a really important role in music. We often uncover unexpected melodies and chord progressions by chance, and if

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you are a fan of making sounds like I am, then you’ll know some of the best sounds happen totally by chance. It might be a mechanical click that happens in Air Lyndhurst Hall after the take you were recording is over, that you hone in on and chop into the most incredible ticking sound, or maybe you were sampling a guitar and as you plugged the lead in you got the most extraordinary sound through the reverb – that you can then pitch down and becomes the opening of the entrance to the underworld.

There’s nothing more depressing than hearing a signature sound you’ve just used in a serious drama turn up in an advert for fish fingers. Think of presets as starting points sound-wise. Dig into them, edit them, process them... don’t use a sound 4,000 other composers can just as easily (and do) use, as it’s easier than making your own.

– DAVID ARNOLD

The same applies for any gear that has randomise on it: keep hitting that button and see what comes out. I once worked with a composer who upon getting a new piece of gear in his studio would immediately twist as many knobs and hit as many buttons as possible in a random jumble before even listening to it. I think he was probably trying to express his desire to ‘show the machine who is in charge’ – but actually this level of healthy disrespect for stasis has something to recommend it. We must be fearless audio-nauts going boldly where no-one has gone before. Invite serendipity into the room as often as you can.

TEMPLATES VS CREATIVITY

I ask you not to decide one way or the other on this, merely to present to you two options that will both be useful at different times.

The question we often consider is: ‘Should I make a template or just start with a blank session?’

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The benefit to a full template, with all the options you have available ready to go, is that you can produce a full orchestration incredibly quickly without having to search through and load up each sound individually. In my template I have not only the full orchestra, in several different styles, but I also have a wide collection of synths (virtual and outboard), drum sounds from EDM to rock and lots of weird stuff I’ve made myself. This includes pianos, pads and drones, percussion instruments and unusual effects. There are also live inputs ready to play things in using the mics set up around the studio.

Building good organisational skills and having a system, whether categorising your sound and music libraries or building ready-to-mix templates for different situations, will always reduce your panic level in the heat of battle.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

I have options for the orchestral sounds, so that I can switch from one flute to another if the sound of the second works better for the track. I try to give myself as much choice and variety as possible in my main big template. I have made a YouTube video about my template here: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTyqCxH3vmw} For certain jobs it’s an absolute no brainer to start with this template. As Logic Pro enables me to have all this stuff there ready to go, but not using any system resources until I select the track, it really doesn’t matter how many tracks I use (I’m up to about 1,000 presently) – it’s all about having the speed of use.

So, what is the alternative? You can start with a blank template – or maybe a ‘pseudo-blank’ one, that has some reverbs set up and a few delays and so on. Why would you do this? I sometimes do this when I want a fresh outlook on exactly what I’m going to use for a job, usually this is not a standard orchestral or hybrid score, it might be a smaller ‘band’, in which every element has Creativity in recording | 159

been sound designed. Maybe I have a really odd treatment on some pizzicato strings to make them hyper compressed and EQ’d to sound muffled, maybe I’ve got a slapback delay on them. When faced with this kind of score, of course it’s possible to do this in my template, but somehow my process can be easier if I start with an empty page and build out what I need. It is a different mindset and maybe encourages some reflection with each new sound you introduce, reducing the temptation to go for the tried and trusty favourites.

ARRANGEMENT AND ORCHESTRATION

Think about how your arrangement interacts with your recording method. These will be linked to produce the sound that you are trying to achieve. To give two very clear examples: a 60-piece string section in a large hall, recorded with the Decca Tree and ambient mics, to get a lush, fairly distant and classic sound. Contrast with a quartet recorded with super close mics and clip on mics to give a hugely ‘in your face’ immediate sound that almost sounds like it is coming from inside your head.

You can almost invent the sound that you want when you are preparing for the recording session – whether this is a big studio recording with a lot of musicians, or an overdub session in your own room. Try different things, using mics that you wouldn’t usually use, and see what gives you the most interesting and characterful sound. You can always double up if you are concerned that your experiment might go wrong, so that you have a safer fallback option. But remember, fortune favours the brave!

When you have a clear idea of the sound that you will record, you will probably find that this influences your writing in some way. Try to find the closest match you can in your sample collection, but don’t allow yourself to be diverted away from your path by the sound you are hearing when you are writing and assembling the session in your DAW.

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This is of course another time when a live player can help you get your idea over the line, even if you were to use a session as a ‘proof of concept’; this can be an especially powerful tool to persuade the director and producers that you have a great idea.

And don’t forget that it’s not that long ago that composers would sit at the piano and that would be how the director heard the score until the orchestral sessions.

USING MICS AND ROOMS

We just touched on the idea of allowing the mics and room to become part of your compositional process. In a way, you already do this when you load up a sample library that gives you the option to change the mic mix. I do know that most users don’t experiment with the mic options as they feel slightly overwhelmed by choice, or unqualified to start fiddling. Nothing could be further from the truth! It is our responsibility to fiddle with every possible control to locate the right sound for the cue.

I strongly encourage you to experiment with this. For example, write a short five-part string piece, using each section (V1, V2, VA, VC, CB) and then experiment with changing the mic settings and seeing how that affects what you are hearing. If you have a midi controller, you can assign this to the mic sliders (they are all pre-assigned in Spitfire Audio libraries, usually starting at CC22 for the first slider) and if you put all five tracks in record, you can change the mic balance on all the tracks simultaneously between each playback.

You will be amazed if this is the first time you have done this, with the drastic change in not only the sound of the instruments, but the psychological effect of the sound. You can travel from intimate to imperial with exactly the same notes and performances, just by altering the mic balance. Become familiar with how each mic combines with the others to affect the sound. Try unusual combinations, like close and ambient, with no tree, and see what

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effect that produces. This will become an important part of your armoury for approaching the creation of your music.

We have all heard and read accounts of recording engineers discussing how they move the mics around to get the right sound from the guitar cab, or the bass drum. Now with the orchestra, you are dealing with the same principle but on an epic scale. I can’t emphasis enough how important this is. It is absolutely part of composing music now.

USING COMPRESSION AND EQ

Similarly, your use of compression and EQ can have a profound effect on the feel and emotion of the instrument you are recording.

Again, I’ll give a clear example. Imagine a grand piano. You record a performance, firstly with ‘stage mics’ – a spaced pair about 4–5 feet away from the open lid. You are recording a balanced blend of the indirect sound of the strings and soundboard as reflected from the lid of the piano, plus the ambient sound bouncing around the room from all directions. If you like, we have a blend of fairly indirect, and very indirect – made up of early reflections from the walls, floor and ceiling, and the tail reverberation of the room.

These will probably be in some relatively similar balance.

Now consider placing a spaced pair of SDCs about six inches above the strings, with a high shelf EQ dropping the brightest frequencies, and a compressor set to really dig into the attack of each strike and pull up the tail. The sound you get now is immediate, wide, soft and intimate – almost like your head is inside the piano.

The difference is extraordinary. But it’s the same piano.

This can and probably will affect the music you write for the instrument, so it is vital that you get as close to the sound with your DAW as possible, or if you are able, set up those mics on the piano and record it for real as you go.

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What about non ‘feature effect’ forms of EQ and compression? I rarely EQ instruments as I am writing music unless I want a specific effect from them. The orchestra in all the Spitfire Audio orchestral libraries has been recorded seated in place and you’ll find that the natural sound out of the box is balanced and sounds great in context. Be very wary of slapping the EQ on everything as you’ll quickly undo the natural cohesion of the orchestral sound chasing a sound that you think you remember in your head. Many mix engineers suggest EQing in context and believe that EQing sounds in isolation is totally pointless as the only thing that matters is what the instrument sounds like in the mix.

I think there is probably a place for both approaches, but certainly unless you are clear about what you are trying to achieve, for example just brightening up or compressing the flute a little to help it sing over the mix, you can end up in all kinds of trouble.

Whatever you do, don’t high pass filter all of the instruments like some mix ‘tutorials’ advise. This is the quickest way to get an empty sounding and soulless mix.

So, once you have your mix up and you want to start digging in, I would do two things. If you haven’t been working into a set up master buss (more on that in a sec) then put an EQ followed by a compressor on the master, set the EQ initially to a gentle smiley face (low shelf and high shelf at about +2dB) and my general starting point for the compressor is with about 4:1 ratio, 1ms attack and 0.1s release, and then adjust the threshold so that it’s just catching the peaks.

Now you’ll have a little bit of mastering going on and you can start to listen to places where your arrangement is lacking. If the problem is not an arrangement one, in other words check that you are voicing the instruments correctly, and then reach for a little channel EQ or compression to start to shape the sound. I’m obviously talking generally here and referring to times when you are after a mostly naturalistic orchestral sound.

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Always EQ the instrument with the full mix running so that you can hear the effect in context. If you are losing bits of a solo or important part, and you don’t want to adjust the velocities because you are happy with the playback dynamics, then you can adjust the overall dynamic of the track by adding some gentle compression and bringing the level up. If you can tame the peaks by 2–3dB this gives you 2–3dB that you can push the level up overall, which might fix the issue.

Beware that if you start making drastic moves you will travel away from the naturalistic sound of the orchestra as a whole. That’s not a bad thing per se, of course sometimes that is exactly what the doctor ordered. However, it will start to disassemble the orchestral ensemble.

I mentioned earlier about working into a master buss that is already set up with EQ and compression. Personally, I do this almost all the time. I like to have the sound as I am working sound as close to a master as possible, as I find that inspiring and motivating, and I tend to play better parts. You just need to check in with the overall levels every so often to make sure you aren’t overloading the master buss as you add more and more parts, but that’s really simple. If your balance is good, you can just select all of the mixer channels for the parts you have played in and pull them all down together by a few dB. You may see some people advising against this, who believe it is sacrilege and that you should only put the EQ and compression on the master buss at the very end of the mixing process. This makes no sense to me, as adding those things at that stage will change the internal perceived balance of your whole mix. My advice is to get it sounding like a mix as early as possible, and tweak as you go. Then when you get to the end it will almost be mixed already and you will only have small adjustments to make.

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OUTBOARD VS INBOARD

In relation to our overall subject of being creative while recording, what is the relevance of whether you use outboard or do things in the box?

There is one obvious benefit to outboard, which is that it doesn’t introduce any latency into your session. You may find as you go along and add more plugins to a session, that the overall latency increases to a point where it’s quite hard to play along to, and you’ll need to keep switching into low latency mode (Logic Pro) or whatever the equivalent to this is in your DAW. In Pro Tools the latency is much lower overall, but you can also elect not to switch latency compensation on, with the benefit that you’ll hear yourself as you play in very low latency, but that some parts may be playing back slightly late if you have a load of plugins on them that introduce significant latency.

It’s all a bit of a shuffle and compromise, but different systems are constantly trying to deal with this issue in a variety of ways so it’s always worth keeping up with the latest on this from your chosen system. For example, the newer UA interfaces and system have a mode that simulates the plugin effect but not at full quality, and this is super low latency just for when you are playing in parts. Then when you are finished tracking, you switch into the full quality mode.

What about the sound difference then? Well on some units this is noticeable, and on other things not so much. Bear in mind that some analogue outboard, especially if it is older, has a nonlinearity in the way it behaves that may be unpredictable in a great way.

There is still something different about moving audio out of the box and through some outboard, even if the main difference is the way you interact with it. This is not some minor thing that we can shrug off – it may end up changing the whole way you design the sound, or even the way you play, if you are putting yourself through some outboard ‘on the way in’ to the box. Many, many engineers like to EQ and compress things as they are recorded.

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I like to think of myself as a chef (hopefully a good one). Would a chef leave all the seasoning until the end once the meal is cooked – just in case they overdo an element? Of course not! They season elements as they go, sometimes they’ve left something in a load of seasoning overnight before using it. Don’t be fearful of committing a great sound you’ve prepped and seasoned to your cooking pot (DAW) without giving yourself a way to get back to the bland unseasoned version.

DESTRUCTIVE VS NON-DESTRUCTIVE

This leads us on to consider the ways that you can keep pushing yourself forwards so that you get to the end of the cue. The DAW encourages endless depths of non-destructive workflow. I try to think destructively. It is to a certain extent railing against the technology, but I miss the days when I worked on a 24 track and committed everything to tape as I went along. If something wasn’t working, I recorded it again, over the previous take. There was no undo button. While this can be a total pain, if you accidentally drop in on the wrong track for example, the one huge benefit it has is that it forces you to make a decision.

Decisiveness is a characteristic you must acquire and nurture if you want to be a media composer. You simply won’t have time on most jobs to faff about and be indecisive. If you are working with musicians, the one characteristic they love is decisiveness.

There’s nothing worse than ‘headless chicken’ syndrome where the composer isn’t really sure what they want. (Of course, this does not apply in a workshopping session where the whole point is to explore!)

In a high-pressure session environment, with a full orchestra sitting burning through your budget by the second, the musicians want to do a great job and get through everything you need as brilliantly as possible. When they have questions, you need to be decisive.

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Even when you are sitting in your own studio writing, be decisive.

Keep going until you reach the natural conclusion of the idea you have. Don’t abandon ideas half formed, you don’t know how good they might be unless you take them to conclusion.

EXPERIMENTATION AND TIME MANAGEMENT

Give yourself plenty of time (if possible) at the start of the job to experiment. This will help you make more original and creative work. The period at the start of any job with the blank page staring back at you is always that time when composers ‘procrastinate’.

I put that in inverted commas, as I don’t really see this as procrastination. It is creative playtime – and remember we ‘play’ music we don’t ‘work’ music.

I try to take the less well-trodden paths, and find ways to do music that doesn’t sound like what I’ve heard before, and although it’s led me into the weeds sometimes, in the long run it’s been well worth it. If I get a sense that any other composers are absolutely killing it in a certain style, then I prefer to avoid following their path too closely, hoping to find a sound that’s fresh instead of just being a different or better version of what’s already out there.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

Allow yourself to become distracted with ideas and explore little byways and alleys off the main route of your workflow. These are often the fertile grounds that bring forth new musical inspiration.

It’s hard to really advise on what kind of experimentation you should consider, as that really needs to come from the circumstances, your instincts etc. But it can be helpful to have a few suggestions to kick off ideas.

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• Try playing an instrument you’re not familiar with. Even if you play it badly, you may make some interesting noises that are useful.

• Do something totally new – interpret that as you wish.

• Play a melodic instrument as if it is a rhythmic instrument (play drums on the piano body).

• Play a rhythmic instrument melodically (eg bow a cymbal or a glockenspiel).

• Experiment writing in a key you never use.

• Create a sound you have never heard before.

• Make a simple sample instrument from a strange noise.

Always assign a few days at the start of a project to set up a template, find a sound world or palette and set limitations.

Then experiment, mess around and try not to self-censor.

– TY UNWIN

We’ve discussed time management in relation to the overall project timeline, but you should also consider the session time – whatever combination of working in your studio and recording and mixing at other studios – and ensure you have sufficient time to work on stems post-mix if necessary, from any final notes. Many projects run at a snail’s pace initially and then gather momentum through post-production until the schedule has been pushed back several times (but often not the delivery dates) and at that stage you are in ‘hell for leather’ mode. Having even a day post-mix to fix any last little issues will be a lifesaver.

MUSICIANS AND NON-STANDARD PLAYING TECHNIQUES

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instruments? Why don’t you book a musician for an experimentation session? You could do this by booking a sample session, or a multiepisodic session for a TV series. Then just keep the metaphorical tape running! Players love trying to interpret emotions using nonstandard playing techniques: different ways of bowing, playing the strings in odd ways, singing down a wind instrument to produce overtones and multiphonics.

I’ve found, especially with the really great players of the world, an acceptance if not enthusiasm for trying new things.

As long as they are intentional by the composer, even with unknown results (which is half the fun) I’d encourage you to make a little time to experiment.

– TREVOR MORRIS

There are many ways you can investigate this. Take one playing technique and apply it to something it would never be used for: for example, a romantic melody played with the lightest fast flautando bowing that you can imagine. It will definitely sound different.

Extend this outward to anything you can imagine.

RECORDING YOURSELF AND TRYING NEW THINGS

This can be part of the experimentation process, or it might come up later in the process when you are searching for something to make a good cue great. Get a mic set up and start trying to add some odd things that you might never usually do.

Working in my comfort zone, and doing music that I already ‘know how to do’, is less interesting than trying something out of character. Like a Sherpa who’s climbed Everest a hundred times and knows every route to the summit, it’s more fun to climb a new mountain when the opportunity arises.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

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Get a cello and play a rhythm track along to the cue. See if you can find a pedal tone that you can bow on a marimba. Imagine a sound that might go well with the cue you’ve written, get outside the studio with a field recorder, and locate the nearest thing to that sound you can. Maybe it’s a metal pipe, maybe it’s the microwave, a car door slam etc. Then get back in the studio and try to find a way to incorporate that sound into the cue.

It’s important to allow the weirdnesses of your own playing, on whatever instrument, to get outside of where you normally are. The development of the melodic or harmonic language is incredibly important, and that could be writing things on guitars rather than the keyboard, or you could remap the keyboard, into scales or modes, to prevent you finding your usual shapes.

– JOHN POWELL

Find a quiet sound, noise reduce it using something like iZotope RX, and then play it really, really loud. Make it the loudest thing in your mix. You’ll be surprised at how the timbre changes when you hit something softly.

The huge earth-shattering drum sound from The Dark Knight series of films is actually a drum played really quietly. As Hans Zimmer has noted, when you hit a drum hard it tightens up and becomes a higher pitched sound. But if you hit it softly, you get a rich thick boom that has all of the frequency range in it – and then you can turn that up, and that’s the sound that shakes the cinema and makes your chest vibrate.

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I must admit it’s not my comfort zone, but lately I properly mic’d up my piano as well as a floater mic on rollers, so I can start to bang on things more. It’s instant originality. I bought every kind of drum stick I could find, it’s amazing what fine metal jazz brushes sound like on the side of my synth rack.

– TREVOR MORRIS

Get those guitar pedals all wired up and start putting sounds through them. This is like the manual version of the randomise thing I mentioned earlier in this chapter, but of course it’s not really random, although it probably feels like it while you’re experimenting!

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CHAPTER 11:

CREATIVITY IN MIXING TEAR DOWN OR ADAPT?

This section is designed to help you work through performing your own mixes, which we all have to do, even if it’s just on the work in progress before it gets to the mix stage.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m a proponent of mixing as you go.

Give a little attention to trying to get a great sound while you are writing so that you get that extra burst of excitement and inspiration.

But there will sometimes be occasions when you get into a mess, and you are faced with a stark choice… do you tear down the mix and start again?

‘Tear down’ is an expression from large format console days, when it might mean anything from just pulling down all the faders and trying to rebalance, through to unplugging all the outboard from the patchbay and zeroing out everything before starting again. In fact, tearing down also refers to resetting a studio at the end of a session and resetting for the next session.

In the DAW it doesn’t really have the same resonance, but the question is still the same, what is the best route forward when you are struggling? I always try to analyse this by considering two possible routes forward and see which feels instinctively like the most promising to help me move forward.

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always straightforward. If I can discern where the problem lies, maybe it’s a bass sound that isn’t sitting in the mix properly and that is messing up the low end of the orchestra. I have to decide if there are some factors that are linked, and I can make some adaptations to get the mix closer to where it needs to be.

But if too many elements are sounding lumpy and not locking together, it may be time to just switch all the EQs/compressors etc off, pull all the levels down 10–15dB and see if I can rebuild things from the ground up. This is the DAW equivalent of the old ‘tear down’. I’ve often had a situation where I had some drastic EQ on a part to try and get it to sit right, but once I sorted another problem with the mix, the EQ really was unnecessary. But unless I turn all the EQ off, I won’t have the opportunity, or insight, to realise that.

This does raise the question, is there something wrong with your actual arrangement? If you find you are drastically EQing things to try and make them sit, ask yourself – is the part in the wrong register of the instrument? Is this getting buried in the mix because there are too many parts all fighting for the same space in the frequency spectrum?

STARTING A NEW MIX – SET UP THE DAW

Are there any preparations you can make in your DAW to help you perform a mix? I think there are a variety of options here, from the simple to the complex, depending on your style and preferences.

On the simple end, you could set up a few auxiliary channels to use for sending to from combinations of your tracks. Examples might include a variety of delay options. Common choices might include: • Stereo bounce delay, maybe 1/4 one side and 1/8 the other, with cross channel feedback • Same but longer, ¼, ½ • Slapback of 10–20ms 174 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

• Timed delay set to ¼ • Timed delay set to 3/8 Among these you might have mono delays, panned to the sides or centrally, or stereo delays; it’s really about setting up a palette of sound to feed in to.

You might set up a few reverbs: • Short bright plate or room for percussion • Longer medium plate • General purpose orchestral hall (2.5 secs) • Super long very smooth superhall for atmospheric solos If you are feeling more adventurous you could try setting up a few auxes that you will send into for distortion, or phase timebased effects. Think of these as colours that you are adding to the texture of the parts that you send into them, rather than as ‘distorting the part’.

The complex end of the spectrum (although it’s not that hard once you’ve got your head around it) is the multi-buss system we briefly discussed earlier when talking compression. With this you don’t just have one main mix buss, you have several, that you send parts through in order to treat different elements of the mix independently of each other. For example, you could have some serious heavy compression and pumping on the drums without affecting the bass, or the vocals. We’ll look at this in detail shortly.

EQ AND SPACE

There are three ways to craft an impression of space around an instrument: Reverb, Delay and EQ. Think about how a sound changes as it is moved away from you. How does distance affect high and low frequencies? Low frequencies are not absorbed as well in the atmosphere, so they will travel further. Higher Creativity in mixing | 175

frequencies are attenuated more with distance. With reverb, you should consider the difference between distant and near sounds with a sound you are familiar with in, say, a hall. If you hear a flute playing right next to you in a hall, the balance is skewed toward direct sound from the flute, with a little reflected sound (combined from ‘early reflections’ from the walls, floor and ceiling and the more diffuse ongoing sound bouncing around, commonly called the ‘tail’). If the flute is a long way away from you, you will hear much more of the reverberation of the room compared to the drier ‘direct’ sound. So, you should alter the balance between the dry signal and the reverb accordingly. Generally, 50% is considered the maximum of dry/wet for a realistic standard response. (You wouldn’t get the wet or reflected sound being louder than the direct sound in reality – physics would discourage this!)

Finally let us consider the use of delay. There are two things you can play with. One is the reverb pre-delay. Remember that this signals to the brain how far the source is from the furthest wall of the room. This is because you are telling your brain that if the source and the reflected sound arrive within a very short time, they are both at around the same distance. But if the source arrives ahead of the reflected sound, it must be closer to you.

Sound travels at 330m/s in normal air conditions, so in 1ms it would have travelled 33cm, which is also approximately 1ft for the nonmetric among us. You can consider this when setting your delay or pre-delay times.

The ‘Deutsche Grammophon’ engineers would reportedly ‘timealign’ mics in order to achieve a higher degree of clarity in the recordings. This would mean bringing the tracks from the more distant mics forward in time to line up with the closest mics. While discussion rages about whether this causes other unpleasant phase issues, or lower headroom overall, it is certainly an interesting thing to experiment with. But how would that affect our efforts to place a source within a space? Well as we are relying on delay in some 176 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

form to help with our positioning, I would suggest that it wouldn’t really help at all, and in fact would collapse the stage from front to back into a system that would be difficult to work out exactly how far away the source is at all. But it can be a cool effect that you can play with on a source that has been recorded multi mic (as many sample libraries are – certainly almost all Spitfire Audio libraries are) to get a different kind of sound, where you are telescoping the sound inwards. It reminds me a little of the ‘tracking zoom’ shot beloved of Hitchcock (see the film Vertigo for examples of this).

PANNING

There are a couple of different theories of panning. Firstly, let’s note the different types of pan available in DAWs. In Logic Pro for example the default is what is effectively a ‘balance pan’ where the sound is simply directed to the left or right outputs according to position. This is fine for a mono source. However, for a stereo source, you will simply be losing data from the side you are panning away from. If you pan fully left, you’ll hear the left channel of the source, but nothing from the right channel.

If you right click on the pan control in Logic you get three options: Stereo Pan, Balance and Binaural. If you change to use the Stereo Pan you get control over the direction of the signal plus the stereo width of that directed signal. This is similar to having the two (left and right source) balance pans in Pro Tools that any users of that will be familiar with but bundled into a single control.

You might think, well what then is the point of the Balance version of pan? This is simply as the name suggests, a balance controller to alter the volume of the Left and Right source channels relative to each other. Maybe your source signal is a little left heavy, but you don’t want to change the ‘direction’ of the sound. You can use the Balance pan to reduce the level of the left channel by moving it to the right until the levels are equal.

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Logic can also take mono or stereo source signals and convert them into positioned Binaural signals, which effectively synthesises three things that happen when you hear through your ears, ‘head masking’, filtering and delay. It can make a headphone mix sound extraordinary and 3D. So, now we’ve set the scene, what should you do with the pan controls? Assuming you are not trying to reposition an orchestral sample library recorded in situ, let’s assume you’re using a synth, or mic’d up instrument that you want to position in your artificially created ‘space’ of your mix. I could fill an entire book on this topic, but let’s look at a few basics to get us started.

LCR – some rock engineers started mixing in LCR again. In the 1960s, we hear many recordings mixed using desks before the pan control was created, in which you had three options, left, right or both (centre). We are familiar with original Beatles mixes, or Jimi Hendrix, where things are hard panned to the sides. But then came the pan pot, and we were free of LCR. So, why do some engineers go back to it now?

Andrew Scheps has said that his reasoning for using LCR was straightforward: he had a great Neve console that had buttons which could send to the Left and/or Right outputs, but that to use pan to position the signal anywhere inbetween, you had to engage a pan circuit, and he didn’t like the sound of it. Other engineers have said that they dislike the ‘phantom image’ you get when using pan to move sounds between the three ‘default’ positions.

Quite a few records have been mixed in the LCR format – search online for more information on this. So, this is a valid choice, if a slightly more unusual one.

More common is to create a phantom stereo field, where you place things at some point in between extreme left and extreme right.

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our ears work when standing in front of a band playing, things will be coming from different directions. Of course when mixing the drumkit we tend to stretch this to its limit. Doing things like panning the toms in such a way that we get a super wide impression of what the kit might sound like if we were sat behind it on the drum stool. Or the so-called ‘audience perspective’ in which the hi-hat is on the right not the left, so as if we were standing facing the drummer on the other side of the kit.

This is my preference, and I work hard at making sure I’m getting as much clarity and space into the mix as possible, while keeping it balanced and exciting sounding. Every situation will be slightly different, and you will find situations where you are ‘tracking’ or ‘double tracking’ parts, and you have to decide if you place them in the same place in the mix, or you hard pan them, or gradually space them across the field. Be aware that the frequency spectrum of the sound you are panning will affect how it is perceived in the mix. Very bright sounds that are panned to an extreme position will sound very extremely panned – and this might be a combination of the fact that we perceive the location of high frequency sounds more easily than low frequency sounds, or maybe that we would expect more ‘reflected sound’ from a high frequency source to bounce around the virtual room or space of our mix, and when that is absent, it sounds quite distinctive (I say that rather than ‘odd’ – as it is an artistic choice).

REVERB AND DEPTH

We touched earlier in this chapter on the ability of reverb to help us position a source in space. The consequence of this is that you get a concept of ‘distance’ that becomes something that you can control and define in your mix. This gives you a useful extra dimension to the standard panning field across from Left to Right.

So, what do we do with this?

There are some situations where the depth of a sound suggests itself naturally to you. For example, you may have a closely recorded Creativity in mixing | 179

trumpet solo that you wish to ‘push back’ in the mix to position it to sit in your orchestra recording. This is very common on film, TV and games sessions, which are commonly recorded in several different locations with very different spaces. We are certainly familiar with multi-location recordings all blended together – it’s the most common form of score!

Don’t get hung up on it... some of the best mixes I’ve done have had one reverb across everything… and even then, it was whatever the setting was for the LAST piece I used it on! If it sounds good, it sounds good.

– TY UNWIN

But beyond this clear choice, you will be in the situation of creatively using depth to shape your mix. Before you just ‘whack a bit of splosh on it’ (reverb) you should consider what you are trying to achieve. Just a few moments thought on this will pay huge dividends when you are getting towards the end of your mix, as you will have a logic to where things sit in the mix and fewer anomalies of sounds that are very reverberant but also right up in your face. (Although of course, that might be exactly what you want on occasion.)

Consider where you want each sound to exist in the front to back plane, and therefore what reverb you use on it and how you balance that. It’s perfectly possible to do this with the usual ‘send and return’ buss method – you don’t have to place the reverb on the source channel – but of course you’ll be set with a pre-delay that is common to all the sounds you are sending to it. But I would contend that you probably want a relatively short pre-delay on most sounds, just pulling the sound forward of the far wall by a little. Having a very reverberant sound that is close to you is more often a special effect (or a featured sound like a vocal reverb).

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The way that you then adjust the distance front to back – within the ‘room’ of the reverb – is the balance of the dry source sound (your instrument volume fader level) to the amount sent to the reverb via the buss send (the buss send fader or rotary knob level). I like to think of this as me sitting in the audience position, and the ‘band’ all on a stage at the end of the hall, but at different positions on that stage.

If you want to play more with depth, like our Hitchcockian track and zoom, then you could set up three of the same reverbs but with progressively larger pre-delay, and then experiment with sending different instruments to one of these three to make a more exaggerated positioning.

TRACK COMPRESSION

We’ve discussed compression types but forging ahead into how you might use compression creatively in your mix – beyond just controlling a few peaks – we can consider what you are trying to achieve. Compressors do amazing things to sound.

Tube based compressors become less linear in response as you increase the input. But what happens then is a non-symmetrical rounding of the input waveforms, a kind of soft clipping distortion.

This introduces strong 2nd harmonic content initially, and with increased input, stronger 2nd and 4th harmonic content and some 3rd and 5th harmonic content but at lower levels. The 2nd harmonic is the octave above the fundamental, which is extremely pleasing to the ear. The 2nd harmonic is present at increasing levels before you even enter the non-linear operating area of the unit.

By comparison, Solid State based compressors will tend more towards square wave type distortion as you drive them harder, as they reach the op-amp’s maximum output level. This kind of waveform has mostly the fundamental frequency and the odd harmonics (3rd, 5th, 7th etc), and so sounds much less pleasing to

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the ear. Also, the 2nd harmonic that we have in the tube-based unit at normal operating levels is not present here.

It’s important to take from this, that if you just run your signal through a tube-based unit, like a compressor, you will add some beneficial harmonic distortion that will add weight and presence to the signal.

What about the actual compression then? Well compression can add to the excitement of a part. It can bring more energy to the recording that may not even have been obvious in the original performance. These considerations are part of the decision about whether to use compression creatively on a particular instrument track. See also the video I made about how to use a compressor here: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8apJyG4Bgc} One simple way to think about it might be to start with the slowest attack and fastest release, start to increase the attack until you don’t like what it is doing to the transients of the sound, and then back it off until you are happy again. Then you can experiment with increasing the release time, until you feel like the instrument’s subsequent transients are being limited by the previous one, and then again back it off. I tend to prefer a fast release on most things (apart from the mix buss).

One great idea for using a compressor creatively is to parallel compress your signal. There are a few ways to do this, but the most common is to send the signal to a buss, put the compressor over the buss and then blend that compressed signal back in with your source signal. A typical use for this is to really compress a drum sound (or the whole kit, such as the overhead mics) hard – really over the top pumping sound, and then just blend that back in according to taste. You usually wouldn’t want that to become the main part of the sound necessarily, but it does add in a whole lot of excitement when you bring it in under the main drum sound.

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You can refer back to Chapter 2 regarding different compressor types and behaviours, but also compressors affect the sound harmonically, to shape the kind of sound you are adding when you parallel compress.

MIX OR STEM DYNAMICS AND COMPRESSION

One creative decision to make is whether you are going to use either stem compression or mix buss compression, or both. As we have mentioned, one disadvantage of using mix buss compression is that you will lose that effect from the overall sound of your cue if you are providing stems to the dub stage. At that point it’s much better to go for stem compression. However, another consideration is that this limits your creativity in compressing different instrument groups together, such as bass and drums etc – as in the Michael Brauer methodology previously discussed in Chapter 7.

It’s a compromise, but there is still a lot of interesting scope for experimentation and sound shaping that can be done within an instrument group. So, when you know all of those instruments that are destined for a specific stem, group them visually in your DAW and then you can think about two different types of treatment: one is using the sub-busses to send into – either as literal sub-busses that then feed into the stem buss, or as parallel sends that you feed into the stem buss in addition to the signal from the source tracks. The second is actually operating on that stem buss itself and getting some dynamic treatment on that as the final stage for the stem.

Of course, you can combine these and get some great sounds happening that can be extremely exciting and add hugely to the sound character of your final stemmed track. You may find that if you start this experimentation process while you are still writing that you start to struggle with latency in the session. It is that old conundrum, especially if, like me, you want to get as exciting a sound up as possible while you are still writing, to keep you creatively juiced.

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As with so many things in life, compromise is good, and I tend to do some of the sound shaping while writing but leave the really gnarly stuff (making these sub-busses really sing and using parallel sub-busses for adding colour and flavour) to the final part of the process.

And of course, if there is something that you want to play on the track and you don’t want to quantise if it is a midi performance, or you are playing something live – well at that stage I’d just bounce out a quick mix and play along to that in a new session or in Pro Tools, and just pull the audio back into my mix session afterwards. There’s always a way around things if you think about it for long enough.

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CHAPTER 12:

MAKE THE MOST OF WHAT YOU’VE GOT EMERGENCY STRATEGIES

There are always those times when we feel desperate – the well has run dry and the muse has fled to the hills. How do you get to the end and deliver?

I have a number of strategies. If the problem is that I still have five minutes of music to write, I’ll just start sketching in to picture with an ensemble patch. I am telling myself that I’m not going to use any of this, it’s just temp. I find two things will start to happen.

One is that with the release of pressure, partly from the knowledge that what you actually play doesn’t matter, and also that you are starting to cover the blank canvas, you will end up with little bits that actually work quite well, and then you can start with the craft, and make them better. The second is that once you’ve covered up some of the missing music – even with temp – the remaining gaps will be easier to fill.

Another strategy is to turn around physically away from the DAW and get some manuscript paper out. I’ll have a rough idea of what I’m trying to do, even if it’s just ‘2 mins 30 of love theme’. I’ll try and write something out and work it out without the pressure of the computer staring at me.

Sometimes I go over to the piano and turn on my phone’s voice notes to record, and just start noodling. This does have a very

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different feel from being sat at the computer noodling and sometimes the resonance of a real instrument makes you think of new things.

Sometimes the most effective music comes quickly, and the pieces that are less important to the story take more time than it seems like they should. There’s often not a direct correlation between the importance of a piece and the amount of time and labour that goes into it.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

Finally – and sometimes most easily – I’ll use a piece of material I’ve already written and adapt it to the new scene. In some ways, this is the pure craft of score writing. You create your suite of themes and gestures, and then you use them to construct the score. This is where you’ll be glad you practiced adapting thematic material to different situations and trying to create different emotions by using different chords or movement under the melodic material.

When you are up against the crunch, your craft is the thing you fall back on to help you make it to the finish line.

FOCUS AND REFINEMENT

What if you have a reasonably good idea but it just doesn’t seem to be working and you just want to bin it and start again? I would go back to the fact that you have to allow the idea to reach its conclusion before you judge it. Give it the best shot at success.

Embrace the wrong. An out of tune note, a jarring sound, a risky mix choice are the differences between library music and film score.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

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manner. Maybe your melody is just a bit too flowery, and you can simplify it for a greater emotional impact.

For me, the process of editing is almost more important than the process of creation. I’ll often take something interesting but that’s a bit of a mess and I’ll get very microscopic on it, and before you know it you’ve turned something that you felt was interesting into something that is.

– JOHN POWELL

How can you refine your work? Think about yourself as a sculptor, chipping away the marble until the Venus appears. You can’t stop halfway through and expect Venus to be there can you? Keep going until the job is done. Having made a few album projects for artists as the producer, I can attest to the fact that a lot of what makes many albums special is the refinement and continual, careful focusing of the material over days and weeks. All the ‘ear candy’ doesn’t just appear overnight. You have to go down some blind alleys and dead ends before you find just the right way to present the material and all of the best little tricks to make the ear happy and interested.

How do you know when to stop fiddling with something, whether you are making it better or starting to make it worse? I don’t know the answer when I am fiddling with it, I won’t know until the next day or even the next week. Then I may realise, it’s fiddled out of existence, but I can undo it. But also, there have been things that I’ve fiddled and fiddled and fiddled and they never work and get thrown.

It’s important to remember, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve spent on something, it doesn’t mean it’s right.

– JOHN POWELL

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You could just play the tune on the flute and then whack a string pad underneath with the chords voiced as triads. But that’s not going to be very interesting to listen to. Work your material, like clay. Shape and refine. We want to create something beautiful – give yourself permission to work hard at it and give it the time and respect it deserves.

CONFIDENCE AND PRESENTATION

When you are ready to play the cue to the client (or sometimes before unfortunately, as deadlines get the better of us) you should remember everything you love about it and not flip into the danger zone that composers often veer into, of being apologetic about your track.

Never make excuses for a cue. If you have to, it’s not ready for presentation.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

There is something quite unsettling about playing your creation for another person, this is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. However, you might want to reduce the anxiety this induces by playing it to someone else before your client. This will lessen the nerves. Remember to be silent while it’s playing back, and also if possible, remember the advice in Chapter 9 to play the cue through twice before anyone speaks. This will help the client to form an opinion – it’s very difficult to have a considered opinion on something you’ve heard once.

When you’ve completely run of out of ideas, done 50 mixes, your eyes can’t stay open, you’ve heard it on every speaker known to man, in the car, on your iPhone, then it’s time to go to sleep: wake up and do it all again – and only then send it.

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Make sure the room is comfortable, and that your client is sitting in the sweet spot between the speakers. Don’t have it turned up painfully loud but have it loud enough that they can hear your music clearly.

Be aware that this is equally unnerving for your client to be listening to your work for the first time and having to sit in judgment on it, a little empathy goes a long way in both directions. Remember that you are both part of a team, the post-production team, aiming at a common goal.

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CHAPTER 13:

UNDERSTANDING YOUR CLIENT COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

Every director is different, and so when communicating with them I tend to take cues from them on how to talk about process/approach. For example, some directors I work with love to dive deep into details about how I’m interpreting the characters/narrative and translating that into my musical/ sonic approach. Others prefer to go from their instinctual, visceral response to a cue and not talk much about the details. Additionally, I’ve had some directors that want to talk about the emotion that’s happening in a scene and/or with a character, and unpack that feeling so we can best understand how to approach that musically, while other directors prefer to dive into the sonic approach for something (eg contemplative, nostalgic, angry vs strings, piano, metallic, loud, soft, etc).

For me, the magic of this job, is the alchemic result of combining music with picture, and I’m first and foremost an accompanist. So whichever way is best to get to that end result, I’m open for. I never want to be locked into an approach on how I feel it’s ‘best’ to communicate. I often find inspiration from the unique ways a director decides to communicate with me.

– KRIS BOWERS

Unless your client is a composer, it is unlikely that they will be able to communicate particularly usefully in musical terms. And even if Understanding your client | 191

they are, composers will usually talk in non-musical frameworks unless there is something technically wrong (‘the clarinets playing ‘fff’ in the top register is obliterating the oboe melody line’). So, it is best to encourage your client to talk to you in terms of emotion, colour, story, anything that allows you to interpret what they are trying to achieve using your personal musical voice.

By the time the director comes to the composer, they’ve run out of money, they’ve run out of time and maybe they’ve run out of ideas. They’re looking to the composer to fix all the problems that post-production can’t. That scene no longer works the way they hoped, that explosion now looks cheap, the takes of the actor are all terrible.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

There are two types of projects. One is repeat business, which is fun and you build up an idea over time for how you communicate. But being plucked out to work with a director you’ve never worked with before is different. I remember working with Catherine Hardwicke on Miss You Already when I asked her to send me a playlist of what she thought Drew Barrymore’s character would have on her iPod. From that I could establish the style she liked and the type of music she gravitated towards. Beyond that, being one-on-one with a director is key.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

Try to ensure that you have had at least one face to face meeting with your client. If it is possible to present your ideas in person that is the ideal, however that is rare these days. Treasure the face time you get with the client as this is when you become real people to each other rather than just names on a sheet, or cogs in a machine.

Always try to remember that you are part of a team telling a story.

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to each scene, to help the audience understand what is going on and how they should be feeling. On occasion, you might be needed to misdirect the audience – and that can be part of telling the story as well. Ultimately though, you are in service of a greater good – the film – and the demands of the story must win over all other considerations.

When you are communicating with the director this can be your guide – to always be searching for what the story needs. Don’t be afraid if that is just a drone. Make it the best drone you’ve ever created. Make the audience react viscerally with your drone. Every scene doesn’t need a fantasia.

Relationships – so so important in this business. And the person getting coffee for the director will one day be the director so be nice to EVERYONE!!!!

You really need just a small handful of relationships to give you a long and busy career.

Watch their previous works. Who they’ve used in the past.

Knowledge is power.

– GARY BARLOW

Communicating with a director can often require a certain amount of psychology. We are all human beings with all the faults that this entails. Compassion and empathy are the key to long lasting and successful relationships and working in a team of film makers is no exception. The better you can develop your communication skills the more enjoyable and longer lasting your career will be.

You want to engender as open a dialogue as possible. This, while moderately fear-inducing for a composer, is the route to the best collaborations. Try to be ego-less and not to treat your cues as if they are your children.

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I’m one of those crazy people where usually as they’re telling me what they want I can hear it in my head. I was on a short call with David Heyman about Paddington and I heard the spelling line: I asked to be excused from the call, promising I’d be sending something in 30 mins. I went off and got it all down – sent it and the rest was history.

Be inspired about what they’re asking you to do. Usually, the person telling you is LIVING this project. Feel their passion and use that to go and do the best work you’ve ever done.

– GARY BARLOW

REACTING TO FEEDBACK

Don’t be defensive. Remember that you were hired, so they like your music. Imagine if you were a lighting camera person, and the director asked you to move a light. Would you have a hissy fit and feel a terrible personal injury bordering on betrayal? Of course not. What we do is make films/shows/games etc. We are part of a team. We are the part that creates music. Yes, music does come from the soul, and you have yourself invested in the music you write – hopefully most of the time – but also, you can write another piece of music. That piece you aren’t going to use now because it doesn’t communicate the story in the way the director wants, is not reducing your life force and placing you in mortal danger.

Every day you don’t get fired is a good day.

– SIMON FRANGLEN

Always be prepared to rip stuff up and start again. Remember what James Newton Howard said – ‘rewriting is part of the gig’.

You could legitimately be offended if the director had no comment or notes on anything you had written, as it would indicate that they don’t care about the music, anything will do.

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However ‘good’ you are, it’s unlikely you will score a perfect 100% hit rate on a project. Unless you are also the director of course.

And even then, you might not.

Consider this – have you ever rewritten a piece of music that you are writing for yourself, not to brief? If the answer is yes (and of course it is) then to expect no notes from a client is wholly hypocritical and indicates either an obstinate refusal to be part of the team, or just sheer laziness that you can’t be bothered to rework a cue.

Negative feedback is always tough no matter how long you are in the game. I think it’s a psychological state of understanding that a lot of times feedback makes your music better, and being open to it. Also, I find that in that exact moment, in the room I mentally position myself as more the music producer, as if I was producing the score for someone else. It works for me and allows me to stay objective. Either way it is an essential part of the ‘craft’ of being a composer for hire.

– TREVOR MORRIS

This may all sound a little harsh, but it is a necessary mindset to go into a review session with. Your over-riding instinct will be to defend what you have done and try to fight back when you get notes.

Don’t think of this as you were ‘wrong’. The director is telling you how to do it ‘right’. This is a collaboration and you’re both working toward the same goal – realising the director’s vision. You may think ‘Well what does the director know about music? Surely my opinion should carry more weight as I’m the expert’. Remember, you can’t make a good product with 100 different visions. The director is responsible to deliver their vision of the film and it is your job to craft the music to achieve that goal.

It is incredibly useful to understand the whole film making process from nose to tail. If you don’t understand what the director is going through, you won’t be able to collaborate with a sense of true

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empathy. James Horner famously used to wait until precisely the right moment to play something important to James Cameron. He understood and empathised with the huge, crushing pressures that the director was under, and knew that Cameron’s ability to make a value judgment on the thing he wanted to present was indelibly linked to the degree of pressure he was under at that moment.

If you’ve written something that you feel is dead right and you get a negative reaction from a director it can be devastating. I used to throw everything out and start again. But I have found that it may be only one detail that’s bugging someone. They’re just not good at describing what their problem is. If you change the tempo, the instrumentation etc all may not be lost.

Non-musicians are not always good at expressing themselves regarding music and may give you the wrong steer.

– ANNE DUDLEY

Understanding as much as you can about the process of film making will only strengthen your ability to succeed in the field.

Make it your business to learn as much as you can about different ways of film making. Understand how and why different lenses are used, how lighting affects mood and emotion, how camera movements are used to communicate with the viewer. How are stories told through the visual medium?

When you understand this, you are ready to collaborate with a team of visual artists. If you go into the job without this background knowledge, you can probably still have a decent go at making a score, and it may be successful. But you will have robbed yourself of the ability to really do something special and deeply collaborative, that addresses the primary job of any composer working in the film medium – that of part of a team of storytellers.

We are primarily in the service of the story, and it is vital never to forget this. It is the primary consideration at all times. If you are not serving the story, then you are failing.

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CHAPTER 14:

SELF-STARTING PROJECTS DISCIPLINE AND WORKFLOW

We’ve talked about the various strategies you can employ when you are struggling to keep going while under a deadline. But what about when you are trying to get your own project going, and you don’t have a client breathing down your neck?

For me, from the start of my career and even more so now, having discipline is a key factor in getting this already hard job done. Progress not perfection for sure, but I tend to not mess around in the studio like I used to. For me the core of this is my studio’s workflow. My template is crazy deep and detailed, so that when it’s time to create it’s easy. In a funny kind of way it’s super in depth so that it just flows quickly when needed. That’s my definition of tuned workflow.

– TREVOR MORRIS

These are in some ways the most difficult projects of all. I have huge respect for artists who write their own material and who can keep up the workflow and produce album after album entirely under their own steam.

In this section we’ll discuss how to go about getting the project underway and keeping moving through to the finish line. It goes without saying that you will need to find reserves of self-discipline.

But you can plan this. Anything that you can systematise will help you move quickly through tasks.

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I hear some of you say, ‘But we are artistes creating art! How can we systemise the creation of great art?’ Let me, if I haven’t comprehensively already, disabuse you of that notion right now.

The composition and production of music is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Dwayne Johnson said ‘Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.’

Many of your favourite works of musical art that you revere and hold up as inspirational masterpieces were simply created under deadlines or to order. They were not agonised over with fevered brow being mopped by a muse.

Discipline is the precursor to creation, and workflow is your strategy to get you over the finish line.

BEGINNING STRATEGIES

So how do you get started? This is often one of the hardest things to accomplish but could be one of the easiest to master if you can adapt to the correct workflow. Christian Henson has a process he calls the ‘Charcoal Sketch’. At the end of a day (and especially a productive day) take five minutes to quickly and very roughly sketch out the first thing you will start with on your next writing session (which hopefully is the next day, right?) – it doesn’t matter how ropey it is, how riddled with mistakes. It is something to get you started. It is way easier starting when there’s something there to improve, than when there’s nothing there at all.

What if this is day one though, and you haven’t got a charcoal sketch to get you up and running? Now we are into the ‘craft’ territory for sure. At this stage the trick is to get over the natural inertia that is a combination of fear, paranoia and a sudden lack of confidence that you can write music at all. John Powell said that one of the times when he will listen to his old scores is to give himself the confidence that he can write music despite his temporary ‘blank page syndrome’.

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I have several ‘Day one’ strategies I can share with you.

• Hum it – I often use my iPhone’s voice memo function to record myself singing or humming an idea. Sometimes it is a combination of rhythmic and melodic ideas, I might even ‘explain’ to myself what I’m hearing in my head, splitting parts out and sounding out rhythmic elements.

• Piano – getting sat at the actual piano, and not the DAW, is an exercise in context switching. If you have an idea in your head, you can work it out at the piano without the pressure of the DAW expecting note entry. If you are concerned you’ll forget what you’re doing, you can always (as I do sometimes) set up your camera phone over the keyboard so you can record a video of you playing your idea in case part of it slips away.

• Paper – sometimes writing the idea in your head onto some manuscript paper is a relatively quick way to get it down in hard copy. If you are using your relative pitch skills to help you transcribe what you are hearing mentally then you are also brushing up those skills as well. And you can hybrid this by sitting at the piano, writing and then double checking what you’ve written afterwards by playing it.

• Unfamiliar – try writing on an instrument you don’t know how to play properly. It worked for Jimmy Page; he wrote The Battle of Evermore in one sitting the first time he had ever picked up a mandolin. The reason this can work is that you can’t reach for familiar shapes, and so you introduce the element of chance and serendipity into the compositional process. You might even find that the sound you are making on the instrument is not the traditional expected sound, in a good way.

The first three of these have one thing in common, the idea that you write something in your head, at least in part, and then the job is to try to capture that elusive wraith before it dissolves completely.

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We are at our most free when we write in our mind’s ear. The trick is getting better at transcribing that creativity into reality.

The last is an example of just introducing chance into the process, and I’m also a fan of this from time to time. I have a box of Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards, and they can be surprisingly useful when you need some inspiration. One I just picked at random said ‘Feed the recording back out of the medium’. The idea of these is just to get you doing something that switches your brain from one pathway to another. This is often all we need to get over a creative hump in the road.

INVOLVING OTHER MUSICIANS

There’s nothing more fun than writing music with someone else, and yet we rarely do this (unless you actually are a writing team!)

– composing is often a lonely endeavour. The huge advantage of getting together with someone else is that you can tag team with your brain power, when one of you loses the thread of inspiration the other can jump in, and often you’ll inspire each other along interesting new lines of thought that you may not have discovered alone.

You can also get refreshed inspiration from a creative session with a musician, where maybe you’ll ask them to try some different ideas out for making new and unusual sounds with the instrument.

Someone who has spent countless hours with a cello over the span of their life will have all kinds of interesting and unusual ways of making noises that they will have experimented with when they are supposed to be practising. It’s not just we composers who procrastinate.

Go to town. Fully go down that rabbit hole. This is what you’ve been waiting for. To make it. Play it to people. Get other people involved. Musicians always bring something extra.

– GARY BARLOW

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Of course, it could also be as simple as sending some work in progress to a friend and asking their opinion on the bit that you are stuck with. Being on the outside of the process can give a useful perspective. It’s probably worth managing this process with your more enthusiastic friends by asking them something like ‘What’s the one thing you’d change here – first instinct?’ so that you don’t get a page of notes that crumbles your fragile confidence!

There’s also what I like to refer to as ‘offline assistance’ – and this can be filed under ‘chance/serendipity’ – I might grab a score at random, open it, look at the first thing that catches my eye, and try to incorporate that into the piece. Now I don’t mean literally key in the exact material, but for example you might see a soaring horn melody, an interesting figure on the flutes or violins, so I slam the book shut, and try to devise a new element that carries the vibe and inspiration of the source but is new and relevant to my piece.

This can be useful as it breaks you out of the pathway and gives you some new fresh options to start exploring.

Finally, one of the most prosaic reasons to book a musician to work on one of your projects is that it gives you a clear deadline to have something prepared for them to play over. You will instinctively want it to be good enough for them to hear so you don’t get embarrassed!

GETTING OBJECTIVE OPINIONS

It can be helpful to get some third-party opinions on your work in progress. I do want to issue a note of caution though. Sometimes you run the risk of killing a nascent idea before it has had a chance to bloom, if you seek opinion on something that is not really in a sufficiently developed state to be understood. It takes a great leap of imagination to ‘fill in the blanks’ when listening to music, a fact liberally demonstrated by the many horror stories of directors hearing cues for the first time (beyond a piano demonstration) ‘on Self-starting projects | 201

the stage’ with the orchestra on the clock, and not liking what they are hearing.

One of the huge benefits of the current time is that with the easy availability of world class recording and sample technology, you can very closely model what the music will sound like when it is recorded. In fact, with the very best orchestral sample libraries (like the ones that Spitfire Audio make) you can get incredibly close to the final orchestral recording sound. In fact, many composers like to blend in all or some of the sample tracks with the live recording, to enable an enhanced sound, sometimes referred to as ‘hybrid’, and originally pioneered by Hans Zimmer. This is an interesting creative possibility – and there’s also the ability to create music that would be impossible to play in real life, which can be a very interesting area to investigate.

Before you expose your work for feedback, bear in mind the following. Unless you are playing to someone with a discerning ear who has an ability to hear through the work in progress to what it might become (a fellow composer), any feedback must obviously be only an assessment of where you have got to rather than where you are aiming at. But it can still be useful, as long as you can be thick skinned enough to take the valuable nuggets of thought from the critique, and discard things you understand are just a result of listening to an unfinished work in progress.

WORKING THROUGH BLOCKS

It is very common to run into a block while writing, but especially on your own projects when you don’t have a deadline hanging over you. Even when you are fired with inspiration and motoring through, sooner or later something will bring you to a halt.

So, you need to have a grab bag of strategies to get yourself moving again.

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Studying is always a go-to for me. I’ll often brainstorm all of the different ways I might be able to approach something: What might this character be listening to in their life?

What’s the prevailing music of the time period? Are there interesting sounds in this world? etc. Those different points of entry often lead me to something I can study on a deeper level. And once I’ve spent a bit of time listening to my own references based on that brainstorming, something usually comes up. Often, I’ll then take that nugget of inspiration and improvise on it until something starts to feel sticky.

Buying new gear always helps too. It never ceases to amaze me how buying a new instrument, a new sample library or spending time making sounds will instantly inspire new melodies, themes, approaches, etc.

– KRIS BOWERS

Here are a few things that have worked for me over the years.

• Retrograde – a musical term that describes reversing either just the melody line or both the melody and its associated rhythm. This is very simple to do practically (I show how you do this in both Sibelius and Logic in this video: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKd4UyhPG9s}).

When you retrograde a piece of musical material this means reversing either just the melodic or both melodic and rhythmic elements to create a new musical element. You can then use this – or just a fragment of it, as new thematic material – and of course you can always alter the harmony or chords underneath it, but you’ll always feel a link back to the original theme. A great way to overcome a block, or even just as a matter of course to explore what extra you can squeeze from your themes.

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I’ve always understood that to write you have to live. So time walking, eating, seeing friends etc is as important as the time you sit down and write.

– GARY BARLOW

• Inversion – this means turning your musical material upside down. Now this is slightly more complicated than retrograde, but not hugely, due to a variety of options you can employ.

You can either simply reflect around the axis defined by the starting note, so if your second note is up a minor 3rd, then in the inverted version you go down a minor 3rd, and so on.

You have an option here, which is either to be exact, or you can use the equivalent diatonic scale note. So, for example if your melody starts C – E – F then the exact inversion would be C – A – G whereas you may prefer C – A – G in order to remain in the diatonic scale of C major. These options are referred to as Chromatic or Diatonic inversion. The next option is that your inverted melody need not start on the same note as the original. So, if your original starts on C, your inverted version could start on G or F. This can be achieved either by using a different pitch axis than the starting note, so the above example inverted around the axis of A would give either a chromatic inversion of F# – D – C# or a diatonic inversion of F – D – C. When you start investigating these chromatic inversions you can even start to set your own new rules. I’m a fan of mathematical transformations (as a reformed engineering student) so I love the fact that when you invert around an axis you can not only change the key, but also there is a modal shift. This modal shift takes you from a darker tonality to a lighter one, or vice versa. I go into this in detail in the following YouTube video; the possibilities are truly endless! {https://youtu.be/UYGShwbJqa8}

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I live next to a park. When it has become clear that I’m hitting a road bump and any amount of tenacity on my part seems not to be able to budge it, I’ll go out and take a run.

And actually whilst I’m doing that, rather than abandon the project, I’ll take with me in my mind’s eye the positives that I can think of that I have got, and not the negatives, not the root of the problem which might be ‘How do I get from this cue to this cue smoothly?’ or perhaps that the melody is just not landing at the moment. Try to think about the positives of what you have already achieved.

– HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS

• Timbral confusion – this is simply taking a musical part and using the most timbrally different instrument you can think of to shake up your mind map of how the track is going.

Sometimes this way of jarring your perception is the thing you need to fire you up again.

• Mind music map – here I step away from the DAW or the manuscript and sketch out the music in some kind of graphical form. This can give you an interesting overview of not only where you have got to in the work, but also can help you plan the rest of the piece in an overview format.

Go for a walk.

– ANNE DUDLEY

• Harmonic/rhythmic transform – take an element that is either harmonic or rhythmic and find a way to convert it to the other for a section. You could use all kinds of mangling devices here, such as vocoders being driven by drum tracks, the key thing is to find a way to perform the conversion.

• Back to Grade 1 – pick up an instrument you can’t play and try to add a part using it. You’ll probably come up with something Self-starting projects | 205

quite unusual, as your innate musicality won’t allow you to play like a Grade 1 student, you’ll find a way to make a part that you can perform ‘properly’ but that doesn’t sound like a pro playing the instrument. Some really interesting stuff can appear from this one!

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CHAPTER 15:

DOWN TIME AND HOW TO USE IT EFFECTIVELY STUDIO MAINTENANCE

If you know you will have a few days blank in your schedule, and you need a break from writing (or even, something to split the day up) then maintaining your studio is a great way to usefully fill a few hours here and there. There will always be things physically going wrong that need seeing to – crackly leads, blown valves and so on.

It might not even be fixing broken things, it could be rewiring your pedal board, or running some new cable routes for mics.

Change the strings on your guitar. Vacuum the dust up. You’ll find that even simple ‘freshen ups’ in your workspace can clear your mind and refresh you to tackle a job with renewed vigour.

I find that it’s useful to keep a small notebook that you write in when you find something that needs fixing or maintaining but that you don’t have the time for right then and there. Then you have a useful reminder for when you have a few hours to tackle these tasks, but also you benefit from the dopamine hit that comes from crossing a task off a list. This not only makes you feel good in the moment but also trains your brain to want to do it again, helping you to keep on top of your tasks. I have read research that also indicates that a physical list that you cross things off with a pencil or pen, as opposed to a ‘to do app’ on your phone, gives the greatest boost to brain chemistry. Make of that what you will!

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UPDATING SOFTWARE

This is a moderately terrifying and thankless task. It’s easy to brick your system by installing a bad update. That doesn’t mean you should remove your machine from the internet and put it in a leadlined case. You should however be meticulous about your backups (yes, of your system drive!) so that if something goes pear-shaped you can easily roll back to the previous state.

However, I am an adherent to the process of keeping my system modern and current. I understand that occasionally I’ll lose a plugin or app that has become abandonware, but I just adapt my workflow and find an alternative. For me the benefit of access to new exciting tools is worth the pain of the occasional loss.

Between gigs I spend a lot of time ‘sharpening the knives’; aka organising sound libraries and building templates, so that when the heat is on I can be a quick-draw artist instead of rummaging around in the drawers looking for the right tools.

– CHARLIE CLOUSER

Besides that, you want to ensure you have the benefit of bug fixes and code refinements. Despite the internet lore, it’s rare for a software company to release an update that makes an app or plugin work less well than it did before – yes occasionally this happens but then you should have the backup to roll back to.

Be aware that just loading up your DAW and making sure that the plugins all scan OK is not a test to make sure your system is working. You need to write a quick track with the updates all in place. Do this before you start a new job. Don’t find out on day one of a new intensive writing gig that you need to restore last week’s system drive and roll back a load of updates. That is no way to a zen like state of peace.

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RADICAL RETHINKS

This is in some ways the most exciting thing you can do with your studio and workflow. Shake the whole thing up in a truly radical way to force you into a new path of creativity. You won’t forget how to write music – which seems to be the irrational fear that we have about change in this area. You could open up a really fruitful new seam of inspiration.

Human nature means that you will soon get bored of something if you do it too often or spend too much time in a particular environment. Rethinking your compositional style or studio set up can both serve you well every now and again… but not every other week… and also, make sure you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater!

– TY UNWIN

What do I mean by radical? You could start at the baby steps end, by re-arranging your physical workspace. Change the things that are in easy reach, bring out a few of the dustier items and see if you can force a different path to your process. If the MPC is over on a rack 15 feet away and requires three minutes of rewiring to use, you’ll always play your drums on the master keyboard that is sat in front of you. But is that giving you the best drum tracks?

Be intentional about the new workflow. I don’t just mean randomly move stuff around and hope for the best. Think about what you could improve in your work and consider what the best possible workflow would be for just that element. Then see how you can adapt your surroundings to help you get as close to that workflow as possible without compromising the rest of your process.

Next level up might be rewiring your patchbay so that your equipment is more easily usable without major reaching round the back of racks to switch cables and so forth. The easier you can make it to engage a piece of equipment on the fly, the more likely Down time and how to use it effectively | 209

you are to use it. In using it you introduce that extra bit of goodness to your workflow and it increases your creative flow.

Everything you are doing here is with the intention of allowing you to stay in the ‘flow state’ as long as possible. We call this being ‘in the zone’. Focused, fully immersed and enjoying the process. The right brain is the more creative side. The left brain is the analytical and methodical side. If you need to fix an engineering problem, you are switching the focus of engagement of your brain from right to left, and this is interrupting your creative artistic flow.

When you first start to think about these considerations, you’ll probably be inclined to suppose that the difference it will make is not that great. For some reason we’re deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of what we’ve historically (and disparagingly) called ‘new age’ thinking. But I just think this is the same as the highly researched areas of sport science that help footballers reach extraordinary levels of performance. Allow yourself to believe and see what can happen!

What else could you do? We’ve talked so far about input devices, gear arrangement and wiring. You can extend outwards from this position to think about your comfort zone and how you might step outside.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching the extraordinarily gifted Jacob Collier pick up the harpejji and learn to play it. It has made me so excited to get one and try to introduce it into my workflow. It’s a significant investment so I’m waiting until I have a specific idea or time when I know I’m ready for it.

This brings me to another important idea to consider in this area: don’t become a gear hoarder. There is no point stocking your studio up with things that gather dust and never get used. I have a process where I will try to rotate the gear in my studio when I find I’m not using it relatively regularly. If a piece is not earning its keep (not financially, creatively) then I’ll sell or trade it out. This is also 210 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

helpful for keeping a clear workspace and helping to enable your creativity by not feeling overwhelmed by options or unused gear.

I often find inspiration from places outside of music. I’ve found inspiration in how the tech world approaches workflow, or how a visual artist might approach making something that then inspires me to think a bit differently. Often times, trying to create a parallel with a craft that is very different from composing music allows me to think outside the box.

– KRIS BOWERS

A radical rethink might be setting up a new master template that takes you a full week of solid work to achieve. This might include stemming layouts, having many inputs ready to go from mics open in the studio, many options for different sounding and feeling sample libraries (from super dry experimental strings like London Contemporary Orchestra through to huge epic sounds like the Hans Zimmer Strings) or external synths patched in ready to go with midi and audio all set up.

Remember to prioritise the flow state. How can you shorten the time needed to reach for a piece of equipment in your studio and be recording with it?

Don’t forget that once you’ve written the first major cue with your gigantic template, you can woodshed down the excess fat and ‘set the band’ for future cues. But you won’t have had to search for that lovely cello sul ponticello sound you loved and can’t quite remember which library it was in – because you’ll have it preloaded in your template ready to go.

Maybe you’re not Steve Vai, so how do you write a guitar-led score?

Why not reconfigure your workspace to prioritise making it easy to bring all your guitar pedals into the DAW. Are they physically easy to tweak and play with? Do you have a quick and simple way to fling the current track out to your amp, through the cabinet, Down time and how to use it effectively | 211

and back into your session? Is the mic set up ready? Do you have a room mic open just in case that sounds incredibly cool and inspiring? Radical rethinks don’t mean forever. Just because you try something doesn’t mean you’re never allowed to switch back!

PROMOTIONAL WORK

In some ways this should really be part of your weekly, if not daily routine. Many of us are not great at blowing our own trumpets, so to speak. But it’s no good being the next John Williams if no one has ever heard of you. If you have an agent, they will be helping here by suggesting you for potential gigs and sending out your work. However, you also need to play your part. Simply having an agent is not sufficient to get a career off the ground, or to keep a career in motion. You need to think of ways to promote yourself, and here’s the important part, without alienating potential clients by being annoying.

There are many ways you could go about this. In the good old days, as we heard earlier, it was all about the showreel, whether that was a cassette, U-matic, DAT tape, CD, DVD and so on. Now it might be a combination of media, including social, such as Instagram, YouTube and website. Maybe you are active in a local band, orchestra or dramatic society. Develop these ‘extracurricular’ interests, they not only will make you a more rounded composer, but they make you more interesting to potential clients as well.

So, if you find yourself with a few days of downtime, this could be a really useful period to develop your promotional activities. Have a think about how you might start up a promotional project, whether that be revisiting your old works and refreshing them, with a view to unearthing them to a new audience, or maybe writing an article for your website on a musical or business idea that you are passionate about. Sharing knowledge is beneficial both to your readers, as they can educate themselves – and to you – as it shows potential clients the depth of your understanding of your field.

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One good way to do some promotion is simply to go through the various ways that you present yourself to the world and update them all. Put your latest and best new work on your various showreels. It is amazing how often we neglect this, despite knowing that it may be the basis on which you get a gig. Check that your agent also has this work for any reels they are putting together. Update your biography – whether online or your template that you send out when you are promoting yourself. Do you have a recent picture on your website? Does that need updating? When selecting a picture, how does it best represent your style and the types of clients you want to work with? Are you desperately hoping to land a gritty crime procedural or indie gore-fest, while your online biography picture has you standing smiling broadly with a red velvet jacket and piano tie, holding a baton and the score to Mozart’s 40th Symphony?

This consideration really should follow through all your communications with the outside world, whether it be the style and design of your website, the pieces you select for your reel, maybe even the way you write your biography. If this is all the information a potential client has to make their initial impression of you, what do you want them to come away with? We know scientifically how significant first impressions are. There is a thing called the ‘primacy effect’ which is a cognitive bias, and this refers to the way that an individual can better recall the first piece of information from a collection than any of the subsequent pieces.

In one experiment, individuals described as ‘fun, witty and vicious’ were typically rated more favourably than those described as ‘vicious, witty and fun’ despite the semantic equivalence of these statements. While this may not be the deciding factor on whether you get a gig or not, it is worth thinking about.

Something else that is rarely talked about, but is very significant, is that people like to work with agreeable people. The values that we appreciate in each other are also significant in our working lives. Empathy, kindness, generosity, teamwork. While we should all strive to be the best people we can be in our lives, showing Down time and how to use it effectively | 213

your best values is not only a way to communicate that you will be a good collaborator, but there is a significant body of evidence that has shown that how you behave affects how you feel, and the person that you grow to become. We are the sum of our actions, to a certain extent. We’ve all heard sayings such as ‘You are what you eat’ and ‘Surround yourself with positive people’.

When you see your peers succeed, be happy for them, congratulate them, share each other’s good news. Be a positive person and you will create a happier life for yourself as well. You can easily decide to be one of those positive people that others wish, as in the quote above, to surround themselves with.

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CONCLUSION I regard everything in this text as a starting place or source of ideas and inspiration to help you move forward on your musical journey. Finding your individual voice is not only incredibly useful as a way to distinguish yourself from other composers but is also the fastest way to feel true satisfaction with your work. This often isn’t as hard as you might think – we grow with the sum of our creative influences – and so inevitably the music you love and listen to the most will influence the way you compose and produce without you even thinking about it.

Always continue to learn. I am still studying today. Until I’m a more skilled and knowledgeable composer than Messiaen I will continue to work at my study. It’s a safe bet that I’ll be studying until the day I keel over then! I analyse pieces that I like, to work out how they have been constructed. I watch videos with incredible producers like Greg Wells to see how they achieve certain sounds and what their workflow is to get to their end results. I love learning about music. In 2007 when Christian Henson and I started Spitfire Audio and recorded the original ‘bespoke’ private orchestra library, I sat entranced watching London’s best players at work section by section, soloist by soloist, and I learned all kinds of useful things about every instrument in the orchestra. I have joked that this was the most expensive private orchestration lesson of all time!

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John Powell once said: ‘For goodness’ sake don’t listen to film music, listen to the original source’,17 and while I would agree with that to a large extent, one reason that listening to film music is incredibly useful and inspirational is in the execution of the musical material. As Hans Zimmer has said, Hollywood, despite all of the terrible things you hear about it (all of which are true), is one of the last remaining commissioners of orchestral music on a large scale.18 In addition to this the production values are of the highest level. Listening to well recorded and produced scores can be a wellspring of inspiration for you – not for which chords or notes to use, but in how to create engaging and compelling recordings of your work.

If there is one final thought that I would wish to leave you with, it is the value of tenacity. Simply keep going, keep striving. Remember that 99% of people fall away as things get tougher, and if you can be in the 1% that keep pushing forward, you will stand a significantly higher chance of success. Be brave and bold. Leap, and the net will appear.

Thank you for spending your time reading this book. I truly appreciate the support, and I hope that you have found this useful and inspiring. Keep an eye on my YouTube channel as I regularly upload educational content there which I hope you will enjoy. {https://www.youtube.com/c/PaulThomsonMusic/featured}

Paul Thomson, February 2022

17 Source: conversation with the author.

18 Source: conversation with the author.

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APPENDIX A:

MUSICIANS’ UNIONS These can be tricky to locate for some countries. Here are the ones that have a web presence: I’ve listed the three largest first, and then the rest in alphabetical order.

UK: {https://musiciansunion.org.uk/} USA: {https://www.afm.org/} Canada: {https://cfmusicians.afm.org/} Argentina: {https://sadem.org.ar/} Australia: {https://www.meaa.org/} Austria: {https://www.younion.at/} Belgium: {https://www.acodcultuur.be/} Brazil: {https://www.sindmusi.org.br/site/} Costa Rica: {https://utm.cr/} Denmark: {https://dmf.dk/} Finland: {https://www.muusikkojenliitto.fi/} France: {https://www.snam-cgt.org/} Germany: {https://www.dov.org/en} Hungary: {http://www.mztsz.hu/web/guest/hirek} Iceland: {https://stef.is/eng/} Appendix A: Musicians’ Unions | 217

Ireland: {https://mui.ie/} Italy: {https://www.slc-cgil.it/} Kenya: {https://www.facebook.com/musicianskemu/} Netherlands: {https://www.fnv.nl/cao-sector/media-cultuur} Norway: {https://creokultur.no/} Poland: {http://zzpamo.pl/} Spain: {https://www.spme.es/} Sweden: {https://www.symf.se/} Switzerland: {https://smv.ch/en/smv-usdam/the-smv-usdam/}

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APPENDIX B:

USEFUL CONTACTS, UK Incorporated Society of Musicians (UK): {https://www.ism.org/} Producers and Composers of Applied Music: {https://www.pcam.co.uk/} UK MUSICIAN CONTRACTORS

Hilary Skewes: {https://hilaryskewes.com/} Isobel Griffiths: {https://www.isobelgriffiths.co.uk/} UK RECORDING STUDIOS

London Abbey Road Studios: {https://www.abbeyroad.com/} Air-Edel Studios: {https://www.air-edel.co.uk/recording-studios/} Air Lyndhurst Studios: {https://www.airstudios.com/} British Grove Studios: {https://www.britishgrovestudios.com/} The Church Studios: {https://www.thechurchstudios.com/} Metropolis Studios: {https://www.thisismetropolis.com/} Miloco Studios: {https://milocostudios.com/studios/londonrecording-studios/}

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Bath/Bristol Real World Studios: {http://realworldstudios.com/} Edinburgh Castlesound Studios: {http://www.castlesound.co.uk/} Glasgow Clockwork Sound: {https://clockworksessions.com/} Gorbals Sound: {http://www.gorbalssound.co.uk/}

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APPENDIX C:

USEFUL CONTACTS, USA USA COPYING SERVICES – PREPARATION OF SCORES FOR RECORDING SESSIONS

JoAnn Kane Music Services: {https://www.joannkanemusic.com/} USA MUSICIAN CONTRACTORS

Peter Rotter and Jasper Randall: {http://www.encompassmusicpartners.com/} USA RECORDING STUDIOS

Los Angeles Fox Newman Scoring Stage: {https://www.foxstudiolot.com/scoring} Henson Recording Studios: {http://www.hensonrecording.com/} Miloco: {https://milocostudios.com/studios/los-angeles-recordingstudios/} Paramount Studios: {http://paramountrecording.com/} Sony Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage: {https://www.sonypicturesstudios.com/scoring.php} Sunset Sound: {https://www.sunsetsound.com/} The Village Studios: {https://www.villagestudios.com/}

Appendix C: Useful contacts, USA | 221

Warner Bros Eastwood Scoring Stage: {https://www.wbppcs.com/ facilities/scoring/} Westlake Recording Studios: {https://www.westlakestudios.com/} New York City Battery Studios: {https://www.batterystudios.com/} Electric Lady Studios: {https://electricladystudios.com/} Platinum Sound Studios: {http://platinumsoundny.com/} Power Station at Berklee NYC: {https://powerstation.nyc/} Premier Studios: {https://www.premierstudiosny.com/} Quad Recording Studios: {http://quadnyc.com/} Sterling Sound: {https://sterling-sound.com/} Threshold Studios: {https://thresholdstudios.com/} San Francisco Skywalker Sound: {https://www.skysound.com/}

222 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

APPENDIX D:

ROYALTY COLLECTION AGENCIES, WORLDWIDE Albania: Albautor {https://albautor.net/} Argentina: SADAIC {https://www.sadaic.org.ar/} Armenia: ArmAuthor {https://www.armauthor.am/} Australia: APRA AMCOS {https://www.apraamcos.com.au/} Austria: AKM {http://www.akm.at/} Barbados: COSCAP {http://coscap.org/} Belarus: NCIP {https://www.ncip.by/en/} Belgium: SABAM {http://www.sabam.be/} Brazil: UBC {http://www.ubc.org.br/} Bulgaria: Musicautor {http://www.musicautor.org/} Canada: SOCAN {http://www.socan.ca/} Chile: SCD {http://www.scd.cl/www/} China: MCSC {http://www.mcsc.com.cn/} Colombia: SAYCO {http://www.sayco.org/} Costa Rica: ACAM {http://www.acam.cr/} Croatia: HDS-ZAMP {http://www.hds.hr/}

Appendix D: Royalty Collection Agencies, worldwide | 223

Czechia: OSA {http://www.osa.cz/} Denmark: KODA {http://www.koda.dk/} Ecuador: SAYCE {http://www.sayce.com.ec/} El Salvador: SACIM {http://www.sacim.org/} Estonia: EAÜ {http://www.eau.org/} Finland: TEOSTO {http://www.teosto.fi/} France: SACEM {http://www.sacem.fr/} Georgia: GCA {http://www.gca.ge/} Germany: GEMA {https://www.gema.de/} Greece: AUTODIA {https://www.autodia.gr/} Guatemala: AEI {http://www.aeiguatemala.org/} Honduras: AACIMH {http://www.aacimh.org/} Hong Kong: CASH {http://www.cash.org.hk/} Hungary: ARTISJUS {http://www.artisjus.hu/} Iceland: STEF {https://www.stef.is/eng/} India: IPRS {https://www.iprs.org/} Indonesia: WAMI {https://www.wami.id/} Ireland: IMRO {http://www.imro.ie/} Israel: ACUM {http://www.acum.org.il/} Italy: SIAE {http://www.siae.it/} Jamaica: JACAP {http://www.jacapjamaica.com/} Japan: JASRAC {http://www.jasrac.or.jp/ejhp/} Kazakhstan: KazAK {http://www.kazak.kz/?lang=eng} 224 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

Kenya: MCSK {http://www.mcsk.or.ke/} Latvia: AKKA/LAA {http://www.akka-laa.lv/} Lithuania: LATGA-A {http://www.latga.lt/} Macau: MACA {http://www.maca.org.mo/en/} Macedonia: ZAMP {http://www.zamp.com.mk/} Malaysia: MACP {http://www.macp.com.my/} Mauritius: MASA {http://masa.intnet.mu/} Mexico: SACM {http://www.sacm.org.mx/} Mongolia: MOSCAP {http://moscapeng.weebly.com/} Montenegro: PAM-CG {http://en.pam.org.me/} Netherlands: Buma/Stemra {http://www.bumastemra.nl/} New Zealand: APRA AMCOS {https://www.apraamcos.co.nz/} Nigeria: COSON {http://www.mcsnnigeria.org/} Norway: TONO {https://www.tono.no/} Panama: SPAC {http://www.spac.org.pa/} Paraguay: APA {http://www.apa.org.py/} Peru: APDAYC {http://www.apdayc.org.pe/} Philippines: FILSCAP {https://filscap.org/} Poland: ZAIKS {http://www.zaiks.org.pl/} Portugal: SPA {http://www.spautores.pt/} Romania: UCMR-ADA {http://www.ucmr-ada.ro/} Russia: RAO {http://rao.ru/} Singapore: COMPASS {http://www.compass.org.sg/} Appendix D: Royalty Collection Agencies, worldwide | 225 APPENDIX

Slovakia: SOZA {http://www.soza.sk/} Slovenia: SAZAS {http://www.sazas.org/} South Africa: SAMRO {http://www.samro.org.za/} South Korea: KOMCA {https://www.komca.or.kr/CTLJSP} Spain: SGAE {http://www.sgae.es/} St Lucia and Eastern Caribbean: ECCO {http://www.eccorights.org/} Sweden: STIM {http://www.stim.se/} Switzerland: SUISA {https://www.suisa.ch/en/home.html} Taiwan: MUST {http://www.must.org.tw/} Thailand: MCT {http://www.mct.in.th/} Trinidad and Tobago: COTT {http://www.cott.org.tt/} Turkey: MESAM {http://www.mesam.org.tr/} UK: PRS {https://www.prsformusic.com} Ukraine: UACRR {http://uacrr.org.ua/?lang=en} Uruguay: AGADU {http://www.agadu.com.uy/} USA: ASCAP {https://www.ascap.com/} USA: BMI {https://www.bmi.com/} USA: SESAC {https://www.sesac.com/} Venezuela: SACVEN {http://www.sacven.org/} Vietnam: VCPMC {http://www.vcpmc.org/vcpmc/} Zimbabwe: Zimura {https://www.zimura.co.zw}

226 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

APPENDIX E:

RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING The following books will all have useful tips that you can extract, things to inspire. I have split them into two headings, in a similar way to the way this book is presented, the first section dealing with solid practicalities and the second section more with the creative side of orchestration and arranging your music. Treat none of them as the Bible, indeed there are some questionable statements in most of these books. This is certainly due to the rapid change in both the style of professional composition but also in the taste of the viewing audience and the film makers of today.

When it comes to orchestration, again use these books as a guide and inspiration but definitely not as a bible: indeed, Adler instructs us in his text ‘The contrabass trombone is much too taxing on the performer, and one is advised not to write for it anymore’.19 Anyone who has attended the screening of a few films in the last ten years has almost certainly heard the contrabass trombone! It is part of the staple of modern brass scoring. Nevertheless, there is much useful information in the Adler text as well. Take everything with a pinch of salt. My physics teacher told me to ‘believe nothing, until you have demonstrated it empirically yourself’.

Where there are multiple editions, you may consult any edition for the purposes of this further reading, however you may find later editions to be more complete and up to date.

19 S. Adler, Orchestration, p. 319.

Appendix E: Recommended further reading | 227

TECHNIQUE AND BUSINESS

Bellis, R., The Emerging Film Composer: An Introduction to the People, Problems and Psychology of the Film Music Business (Richard R. Bellis, 2011) Bernstein, E., Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974–1978 (Film Music Society, 2004) Burt, G., The Art of Film Music (Northeastern University Press, 1995) Cope, D., Techniques of the Contemporary Composer (Schirmer, 1997) Dudley Andrew, J., The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (USA: Oxford University Press, 1976) Hagen, E., Advanced Techniques for Film Scoring: A Complete Text (Alfred Publishing Company Inc, 1990) Haigh, C., J. Dunkerley and M. Rogers, Classical Recording: A Practical Guide in the Decca Tradition (Focal Press, 2020) Karlin, F., and R. Wright, On the Track: A Guide to Contemporary Film Scoring (Routledge, 2004) Kompanek, S., From Score to Screen: Sequencers, Scores & Second Thoughts (Schirmer Trade Books, 2011) Lehman, F., Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2018) Marks, A., The Complete Guide to Game Audio: For Composers, Musicians, Sound Designers, and Game Developers (A.K. Peters/ CRC Press, 2017) Prendergast, R.M., Film Music: A Neglected Art (W.W. Norton & Company, 1992) Schelle, M., The Score: Interviews with Film Composers (SilmanJames Press, 1998) 228 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

ORCHESTRATION

Adler, S., Orchestration (W.W. Norton, 2022) Berlioz, H., and R. Strauss, Treatise on Instrumentation (Edwin F. Kalmus, English edition, 1948) Brant, H., Textures and Timbres: An Orchestrator’s Handbook (Carl Fischer, 2009) Forsyth, C., Orchestration (Dover, 1982) Jacob, G., Orchestral Technique (Oxford University Press, 1970) Kennan, K. and D. Grantham, The Technique of Orchestration (Pearson, 2014) Piston, W., Orchestration (Victor Gollancz, 1990) Russo, W., Composing for the Jazz Orchestra (University of Chicago Press, 1973) Shir-Cliff, J., S. Jay and D.J. Rauscher, Chromatic Harmony (Macmillan Publishing, 1965) Solomon, S.Z., How to Write for Percussion (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Appendix E: Recommended further reading | 229 APPENDIX

APPENDIX F:

SPITFIRE AUDIO When I first embarked on the writing of this book, I had no idea that one day I would look back as the co-founder of a music technology company that has produced such a large catalogue of soundware.

One of the most important things we provide for composers is choice. How a composer expresses their creativity is to a large extent tied up in the sound world they create for the work. By providing a wide and varied palette of sound we believe that the composer can curate their own style in the sounds they choose.

We have recorded wonderful talented musicians at some truly legendary studios such as Air Lyndhurst, Abbey Road and British Grove among others. We are extremely proud to have led the industry by paying all the musicians who play on our sessions royalties on sales, as of the time of writing totalling over £12 million.

We are also proud of our 1% initiative, whereby we donate 1% of our turnover to community projects including Safer London, Magic Breakfast, Saffron as well as grants and bursaries to schemes like Tileyard Education and the Abram Wilson Foundation. Indeed, at the time of writing, I just learned that since 2016 our donations to Magic Breakfast alone have provided 565,765 healthy, nutritious breakfasts for hungry children in the UK. More information can be found here: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/supporting-musicians/} Some of our products also support charities directly through sales, including my own Originals Media Toolkit, for which 100% of the purchase price is donated to Blueprint For All, a charity providing programmes with opportunities for disadvantaged Appendix F: Spitfire Audio | 231

communities and young people. This product can be found here: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/originals/#media-toolkit} Some of our well known and popular libraries are: Abbey Road ONE Orchestral Foundations: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/abbey-road-oneorchestral-foundations/} Albion ONE: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/albion-one/} BBC Symphony Orchestra: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/bbc-symphonyorchestra-core/} Hans Zimmer Strings: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/hans-zimmer-strings/} Eric Whitacre Choir: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/eric-whitacre-choir/} Ólafur Arnalds Composer Toolkit: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/olafur-arnalds-composertoolkit/} London Contemporary Orchestra Strings: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/artists/lco/londoncontemporary-orchestra-strings/} BT Phobos: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/bt-phobos/}

232 | THE PROFESSIONAL COMPOSER’S GUIDE

There is also a wonderful collection of libraries made by the artists who appear on our record label SA recordings: {https://www.spitfireaudio.com/all-sa-recordings/} But there are many different styles of library to be found on our website. You are sure to find your own curated sound within!

Appendix F: Spitfire Audio | 233

APPENDIX G:

TRADE MARK ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book refers to many companies’ products throughout. All trade marks, service marks and company names are the property of their respective owners.

Appendix G: Trade mark acknowledgements | 235

‘Paul has written a book SO complete, that were I starting out in this business, I would immediately choose another profession for fear I could never possibly learn all this stuff!’

John Powell, Composer, How to Train Your Dragon, Bourne, Solo: A Star Wars Story and A Prussian Requiem

MUSIC BRINGS SUCH JOY TO LIFE. The Professional Composer’s Guide looks at both the business and creativity of making music. This engaging and informative book is split into two sections, the first half explores elements of the business whilst the second covers creativity including strategies to develop the craft of composing and producing music.

Written by renowned composer Paul Thomson, this comprehensive book is for anyone who is interested in becoming a professional composer, or anyone who would like to refine or develop their technical and creative skills when writing music.

Paul Thomson is an award-winning composer who has written for film, television and games. He cofounded the British technology company Spitfire Audio. Spitfire Audio originally provided exclusive composing tools for A list film composers and has now grown to being the market leader in soundware with a global community. His mission with Spitfire Audio is to inspire a generation of composers.

www.spitfireaudio.com