In a movie, regular feature, non -animated kind of thing, the music and sound are the last things they do. So theoretically, a movie is finished when you get it. It hardly ever is anymore. There’s changes made and they’re recutting it, have to redo things where they cut the music.
But what you get is the picture and you get, before the technology allowed, you used to get timesheet telling you that, you know, at 1.37 seconds Robert Redford steps out of the dugout and at 3.9 seconds he takes his first step to the plate. And that’s how you’d do it. You didn’t have picture. And my uncle Alfred did two hundred pictures that way. And, like I say, those guys did better than we’re doing now.
Now you get it. You can lock in, if you choose, Johnny Williams still does it that way, it doesn’t get, he doesn’t look at picture while he’s doing it. But everyone else almost, you get the picture and you can lock it into where you’re starting and where you’re stopping. And maybe a play, improvise, some guys or you think about what you need to do and, I don’t really play it into a computer and then that’s it. I put it down on paper so I can see what, because you find things when you put it down on paper that you wouldn’t find just playing like that. I’m not like a great improviser particularly.
But I’ve gotten, I get things that way, you know. Johnny Williams would think it was cheating, I think. But you play a characteristic trumpet tune along with something that calls for trumpets and sometimes it works. So there you go.
In the case of everyone whose going to get into this field, they’re going to have to demo it. There’s a few of us left who don’t really always have to demo, but it’s going the way of the Dodo. You’re going to have to do a pretty good representative demo on synthesizer. Some directors can hear it on piano and they’d be, with me they’d be alright. But I have to do like a, I can only do like a half-assed one. I said, you know, I don’t have like good samples and stuff necessarily. But I mean, I’ll do it. And they say, oh, it’s what it sounds like. And sometimes they’ll come over here and sometimes they won’t.
If you work for, I’ve worked for John Laster a lot of times, so I mean, he trusts me to know what to do. But, you know, he’ll want changes too, which is fine. I mean, his instincts got better and better and better and he’s right more often than I am now about even musical things.
It’s on paper already, with me. And the demo represents some, as best I can, what’s on the paper. Not everything, but you know, something. But in, for the purposes of the people coming now into it, they’re going to have to have everything on the demo. And they’re going to have to have it, and they will have it.
Samples are very good now and everything’s good, and they’ll play it for the director. And then there are guys that are so good at that, that sometimes the directors like the demo they make better than what they like the orchestra doing and they’ll use it.
What I do and what all composers do, almost without exception, is write a sketch. I put everything I want in there, but you don’t have to. You can put two lines, three lines, four lines, and you have an orchestrator who puts it on big orchestra paper with every line, flute, oboe, clarinet. I’ll put, you know, like three flutes, clarinet and put it on seven lines. And then orchestrator gets it and may make little changes, maybe not. Always to my benefit nowadays. And then it’s given to copyists, who copy the music, the parts. You have the recording days, three or four days. You can maybe do ten minutes of music a day, maybe twelve. So if you got sixty minutes of music, maybe you record five days. That’s six hour sessions.
[End of Audio]
