Basically, clients today have gotten used to a level of demonstration that goes a very close to final product. Meaning every director, every studio executive, every producer, today expects to hear the score before you record it, which means your ability to do mock-ups has to be pretty serious. Hans Zimmer started that about ten years ago. And it’s become pretty much standard right now.
The reason for this is also pretty obvious is that orchestral sessions are very expensive. So for them to really spend that kind of money, they would like to know before that they actually like the score. Otherwise, they’ll be wasting a lot of cash. So it is understandable, but it does complicate our process quite significantly because first we need to mock up the orchestral parts and then we got to retranslate that back into actual musician’s language so that an actual orchestra can play it. So it has made our process quite a little bit more complex.
On the upside, we also gain some control in this process in that we can manage the production of a score today in ways that were simply impossible ten years ago. And added computer power, added production power really breaks open the choice of elements, the choice of styles that you combine, how you can process those or alter those. So the studio has really, really moved inside the digital sphere. And it’s getting us options that we simply didn’t have before.
Oh, it was very basic. John Williams was famous for writing – and I believe he may still do that – write scores with a stopwatch and a piano. And he would play his themes on a piano for the director and say, “Okay, this is the main theme. It’s gonna sound great when an orchestra plays it.” And that’s the old way. And if you’re John Williams, you can still afford that. But if you’re a young composer starting out, you better have a good way to emulate orchestra because that’s what people are gonna expect. They want to hear final product.
The main problem is that every sample sounds good for a certain purpose. It will not be a musician. A musician, if it’s a good musician, you give him anything to play and he’ll play it. A sample, because it’s a snapshot, and the nature of snapshots is it’s just that one moment. It will only sound good for a couple of purposes. But it can’t play everything. So you have a choice here. Either you compose something that’s gonna sound bad and you’ll have to say to the director, “Well, it’s gonna sound great when the musician plays it,” or you’re gonna play what the sample sounds good in, which limits you to only a very small range of choices.
So this is the crux that exists. And I’ve heard both. I’ve heard people write great music, but it sounded horrible because the samples were not made for it. And I’ve heard very limited music, but it sounded great and it was the samples used the right way. I can tell you that in the end, what I feel what stands behind it though, is that, again, it comes down to good music and bad music and the fact that good music will find its way. It will find its way through limitations of samples as it finds its way through limitations of instruments. How many great songs were written on a six string guitar and how limited is that as an instrument compared to a piano?
And so again, every limitation leads to certain music forms. The fact that a lot of sample based musicians write bad music does not mean there’s something wrong with the samples. It basically just means they didn’t have a good day or they didn’t have a great idea. In the end, anything you work with can be used to make great music. It’s really more about catching the moment, I think.
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