Episode 02: Required Resources

This podcast is for amateur or hobbyist film score composers who work on independent or student projects. The main focus of this episode is on the required resources for film score projects. The type of score needed determines the necessary resources. For atmospheric and ambiguous music, all you need is an instrument, the ability to record and edit it. The example given uses a wooden recorder recorded on a cell phone, edited in Audacity. A knowledge base and aesthetic judgment are also necessary. Video software is needed for synchronization. Synthesizers with presets can expand possibilities. Accessible acoustic instruments like strings or wind instruments can also be used. Hello, this is Carl Irwin, and this is Spotting Cues, a podcast for the amateur or hobbyist film score composer. It's probably important to define what is that, what is the amateur or the hobbyist film score composer. This is a podcast that is for people that are kind of dabbling around with film score on the side, working on independent or student projects and scoring pictures that are essentially low pressure. This is not, you know, for the professional kind of studio environment. However, I think a lot of the things that we talk about do have application even in the professional world and will work in parallel and in tandem with the kinds of expectations that you might find for the practical, at least the practical side of film scoring even at the professional level. But again, this is for the hobbyist, for the amateur, for the person that has a skill set and is doing some film score composition on the side of maybe some other sort of day work or day job, whether it be in music or in some other kind of field. So today we're going to talk about required resources. What are the essentials? What are some of the required resources that you would need to work on film score projects to write music for a picture? And this is going to be a conversation that will have a number of different branches because ultimately the answer to this question is really driven by the type of score that is required. You could do a particular kind of music that is sought out for particular kinds of films that require that particular kind of music and your resources might be very specific. You might need to have a specific type of resources, a set of resources that is more extensive or you may be able to get by with very, very little and do a whole lot of work with that very little. So you have to understand that the answer to this question is driven by the type of score that is required and you have to start from there. So let's get into it. Assuming that a film needs an atmospheric sort of score or is driven by ambiguous sounds, more of a soundscape kind of music, it might be musical, it might have the conventions of music, but the musical conventions are ambiguous in terms of their instrumentation and sound and even in their harmonic development. There's not necessarily very functional harmony, but there is harmonic qualities nonetheless. Assuming that this is what is required and I have to say at the onset that this is a very common kind of request. This is very, very much in vogue today, this kind of music. Even at, you know, high end, high budget blockbuster movies are depending on this kind of film score considerably right now and have been for a while and I don't see it going away any time soon. This is a very, very common sort of request. So let's be honest that much of what is expected in film score really falls into this category and there's good news in that because if that is what is required, assuming that a film needs atmospheric and ambiguous sounds, all you need really is an instrument and the ability to record it and edit that sound. That's really all you need. You need some instrument, probably a tonal instrument at least so that you can get harmonic qualities and pitch collections and then the ability to record that and then edit that sound. I'm going to play an example for you. This is from some recent film score work that I've done and this was a request that the filmmaker wanted, wanted the music to sound like this. Now, I'll explain what is going on here. What's going on in this track, it's very much in line with contemporary film score. You will hear this not just in a period piece or something that has a geographic grounding but you really would hear this kind of music even in sci-fi, you know, film. You could hear this applied in a lot of different areas. So this will be depending on whether or not the filmmaker wants to have music that fits the time period and the geography of the film itself or whether or not they want a score that is more psychological and outside of that period kind of what would be typical to the period within the film. So if that is the case, that's the assumption, then this is the kind of thing that can work. Now this music that you're listening to is actually accomplished, what it's emulating actually what the filmmaker wanted was something that sounded like an Egyptian flute was a specific request and they wanted sort of this kind of music and that kind of music would have usually a fixed scale, usually some kind of exotic scale or a pentatonic scale in some configuration, five or six note scale, so limited tones. And then often with that kind of music, there's not really a progression of harmony. There is a drone that operates underneath it and very typical to films today. The way I accomplished this was with my kid had a wooden recorder. It actually came with a book. It was an Eric Carle book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. You'll know the book. And there was a little recorder that came along with a book that was painted like the caterpillar. It's a toy, right? I took the toy. I found a pitch collection on it that fit into kind of a pentatonic sort of scale, five note scale. And I played the root tone for an extended period and then I was able to loop that. I did this in Audacity, you know, just an open source audio recorder. And then I played out the piece on the pitch collection. Then because I recorded this in Audacity, I was able then to, and in fact, I'll actually correct that. I recorded this on my cell phone. I wasn't even at a workstation when I did this. So I just recorded the drone on the cell phone and then I recorded the tune on the cell phone. And then I put those together inside of Audacity and I edited them there. I was able to pitch shift it down. Now when you're pitch shifting down, you really don't lose a lot of information. The wavelength just starts to separate. Of course, there's limitations how far you can take this before it starts to sound synthesized. But you can always take a sound and go down. It's a lot more complicated to go up. When you go up and you start compressing waveforms, it starts to sound like, you know, chipmunk-y sort of sounds. But I could go down and I brought it down into the register that I needed for that type of sound. And then I added reverb and I, you know, panned it in different directions. I layered it upon itself in different ranges an octave apart and I increased the reverb on those. So I did a lot of sort of soundscape sort of techniques that I applied to this drone and this melody. And I came up with that. So all you need is an instrument, the ability to record and edit it. And on top of that, you're going to need a knowledge base and some aesthetic judgment. You need to understand the tools that you're using in terms of the audio editing. And you need to be able to know how to get to the end where you're headed. This could be any kind of instrument. It doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, a flute or something, but, you know, a flute or a recorder can get you a long way in today's sorts of film score needs. It could be a string instrument. It could be a guitar. It could be anything. And you can edit it in the audio editor by changing the equalization of the sound, by adding filters to it and reverb and panning it and changing registers and pitch shifting and all sorts of very interesting techniques, reversing the sound. Really you can have just any single instrument, the ability to record it and the knowledge base of that editing software. You can make a lot of really interesting current contemporary music without any other kind of software at all. You also probably will need video software for the capability to synchronize what you create with the video. And then you would want to, with that video software, you wanted the ability to export the audio separately and at a high clean fidelity. You want it to sound production ready upon export. So in this way you can create a reference video and you can also create the audio track that is synchronized properly. And this can be done, of course, recording to picture because you can always play directly to picture and then edit from there inside of the audio editor. So essentially if that assumption follows through that you need atmospheric and ambiguous kinds of music, very contemporary sort of sound based on a world music or a synthesized sort of expectation, you just need an instrument, the ability to record it and edit it and that's it. That's all you need. So a kid's wooden flute and or a metal flute, a tin whistle and audacity, that's sufficient and then of course the ability to sync it to picture. You could take this a step further though if you had a synthesizer with a diverse set of presets. So if you take a synthesizer, just a very low end synthesizer with a bunch of presets, the ability to record those synthesized sounds and play them on a keyboard and then you can bring that into your audio editor and then edit it further from there by adding filters and effects and pitch shifting and all these other kinds of things we've already discussed. You could do that with a synthesizer and now you've really blown everything wide open. I mean you have all kinds of capability to score from there. That's all you need. You just need the synthesizer, a diverse set of presets, you don't even need to be able to find specific sounds. You can layer sounds from presets that are just available and have really the sky's the limit in terms of what you can accomplish there and you can get very, very professional quality sounds from that. If you have an assortment of accessible acoustic instruments, maybe a string instrument of some kind, a pluck string instrument, a guitar or something like that, you don't even really have to have the capability to play it with proficiency but just the ability to get different sounds out of it and maybe a wind instrument like a recorder or maybe a variety of different kinds of tonal sort of instruments. But if you have an assortment of accessible acoustic instruments, now you can get into a place where you're performing ensemble, live ensemble sorts of music. You can do really a world music mock-up and now you're getting away from the soundscape area and away from synthesized music and you're getting more into ensemble music just by having an assortment of different acoustic instruments that you can edit inside of an audio editor and then multi-track record and edit together. So that's really what you need and you can go a long way with just those things without even a digital audio workstation at all or any kind of notation software. You don't even need that. You just need some ways to make sound and an audio editor, recorder and an editor to mix that together and then of course some kind of video editor to synchronize. And all of that can be done for free. You can use open source applications for all of that and found instruments, things that you can find or buy very cheaply at a toy store, honestly. Let's go up from there. Let's say that the assumption is that you need symphonic music. And again, this is very much out of style with many young filmmakers. Many young filmmakers don't want that. But let's say that you do. You need to do symphonic music, orchestra music. What do you need? Well, you'll probably need, actually before I address what you probably think you need, let me just give you a quick sidebar discussion on this idea of symphonic music. I observe that there are plenty of commercial and TV or streaming projects still out there. These are high-end commercial projects that still use synth orchestra sounds. That is to say that you could get a synthesizer that just has orchestra sounds on it that are obviously synthesized orchestra sounds or very low-end sampled sounds. And you could go back to the first category and just record all of those parts directly into Audacity or some other kind of multi-track recording where you go track by track and just record and that's it. And you can, you know, there's a, like I said, there's a lot of commercial projects, particularly with, in kids programming, children's programming. I mean, take something like Paw Patrol, right, a Nickelodeon high-end kids programming show, commercial show, uses a lot of synth orchestra. That is still going on. You don't necessarily have to have high-end sampled sound sets. So, depending on the circumstance, you can get away with a lot just with a synthesizer, okay? But now, let's assume you need to have high fidelity. You need to have a mock-up that is true to the orchestra. What do you need? You will either need a digital audio workstation of some kind or you'll need a notation program that has playback capability and can playback sampled sounds. You can playback your library. So you'll need a library. You'll need a library of virtual instruments and the playback engine to be able to do that. So you'll either need the DAW or you'll need a notation program that can playback like DAW or you'll need both so that you can transfer your notation into DAW and then use it from there or you'll be composing MIDI directly into your digital audio workstation. Of course, there's a lot of free options out there for that. You don't have to spend any money on it. You'll need a computer that can operate that sufficiently without any lag. But that's what you'll need and then a library of virtual instruments. There's a lot of virtual instrument libraries that are free that get you a long way as well. You can use a variety of free resources and then mix and match them together to create a more sophisticated palette. So if you have a small string patch and then you have maybe a less realistic sounding larger string patch, you can mix these together and get something that's quite realistic. You just have to be creative in that way. So you can get free and open source or free proprietary libraries and work from there. Synchronization is the next issue. Synchronization. How synchronized does your music need to be? Well, I have found that a lot of young filmmakers don't really put a lot of weight in synchronization. They want music written to picture, but they want really what they want is they want music that can then be kind of slid around and moved around in the edit aligned to picture. There's a lot less of a desire for hits, very, very precise hits in films today. There's a lot of very high end composition going on in high budget movies. I mean, you look at Christopher Nolan movies and the work of Hans Zimmer and some of the others that work under him or along with him and work for Nolan. A lot of that music is composed apart from the picture. They just write the track and then the track is brought into the project and then synchronized as able to that picture. There's not a lot of very specific hits that are happening. Usually something will happen and then the music will come in in response to what has happened and then will carry you through some kind of montage to the next major moment. And that is a very common attribute of contemporary film. So synchronization really is not a big issue today. Now if you're dealing with an animation where you need to score really to picture and you have a lot of sync points and a lot of hits and that sort of thing, well then what you'll need is you'll need a DAW that has the ability to play to video or synchronize to video or a notation program. All of the major DAWs, digital audio workstations and notation programs do have this capability to play to video. MuseScore is the one that I use. I use open source projects. MuseScore 3 had the ability through what's called the Jack Audio Server, which is a cross-platform open source audio server that does real time and low latency audio and MIDI. MuseScore 3 had the capability to do this and MuseScore 4 does not, however there is because it's an open source project, there is a branch that does provide this capability and that is the branch that I use. You're going to have to have a knowledge set to use that and find that branch and get it to work on your system, but I use Linux and I use that branch and it does sync to picture to outside applications. I use Blender for my video playback and my video editing, which is also an open source project and it can sync through that Jack Audio Server and then I use for my digital audio workstation, I use Ardour, which is another open source, very powerful open source digital audio workstation. So between these different pieces of software and the Jack Audio Server, that's how I do my synchronization. For you, you will do it through rewire capabilities on your DAW and your video players and again, a lot of digital audio workstations have video players already ingrained into them, so you'll be doing it from there and a lot of notation applications, notation software will have video playing as well, so you can synchronize. Now I want to talk a little bit about this synchronization issue apart from digital audio workstation. The other way to do this is through mathematical calculations. Who does this today? Hardly anybody. Hardly anybody actually does this anymore, but it can be done because that's how it used to be done. You can do mathematical calculations and figure how many beats per minute in the tempo that you're in and then do the math based on the meter that you're in, how many beats per measure and then do that calculation based on the time code from the picture that you're synchronizing to. How close do you have to be? How close do you have to be? You need to be within a quarter of a second. It's only two-tenths of a second, but within a quarter of a second, if you are within a quarter of a second to what is happening on the picture, what is being done in the sound will be associated with what has happened, especially if the sound comes after, it's within a quarter of a second after the visual. You really don't need to be much closer than that. It doesn't have to be more precise than that. That is a close enough association and for years and years and years and decades, that is how synchronization was done. You would have the math was done for the meter and the tempo. The orchestra would record that and the composer would watch picture and record that to the pictures they're watching it and you would get within that kind of two-tenths of a second sort of area and then you would shift it a little bit in some of the editing later on. But that's how it was done. It was not actually a terribly precise sort of procedure. You would get as close as you can get and then you would depend on that live recording session to be as close as you can get to what you mathematically determined. So there's a lot of tutorials going out there for digital audio workstations that talk about doing mathematical calculations to determine what tempo best fits the hits that you have within your picture. I find that this is completely unnecessary. I find that that is completely unnecessary. You really don't need to do any such thing. It seems sound, it seems like worthwhile, but really I think it's better and in my experience it's better to determine the tempo that you need based on the mood. What does the music say the tempo should be? Not what does the aggregate of the hits in the calculation determine what should your tempo be? Because really within a quarter of a second, almost any tempo, you're going to have hits within a quarter of a second after, two-tenths of a second after a major moment. There's really not a need to be more precise than that. And actually even further, syncopation, just the application of syncopation or meter changes. You can offset even by an eighth note or a subdivision at a point prior to the hit and you can get a very accurate hit. So I think that you should pick tempos that suit the music and the mood first and foremost and then from there work with meter, work with your meter fluctuations to arrive at the hits that you need and syncopations. You can even do, what I like to do is I like to sustain a tempo as best I can without changing tempo and then I will use hemiolas and offset in the syncopation to imply crescendo, or rather ritardandos and accelerandos at various places. So I can go from time to double time and I can apply some kind of metrical change outside of the meter by just changing the value of the notation for a short period of time to imply an accelerando into double time and by that, in doing so, I can achieve the velocity in change of speed without actually changing the tempo. So there's a lot of different tricks that you can use. Again, accuracy, it's two-tenths of a second. That's what you're looking for. Just under one-quarter of a second. That's how close. And it's better to be after, to be late. So let's say you have a very precise hit in a horror movie, there's a scare, a jump scare. Your sound can be within two-tenths of a second after that jump moment and it will be very associated with that moment as long as you're within that range. That tends to be the rule of thumb. So quick recap on this. What do you need? What are the required resources? Well, depending on what the music, what kind of music is needed. For most atmospheric and ambiguous sounding music, you need very little. You don't even need technology at all apart from the audio recording software and it can be done on a cell phone because the technology is so good there. And an editor, some kind of audio editor. That's really all you need. And then, of course, the ability to put it to picture so that the filmmaker knows what you're trying to achieve. That's really all you need. And if you extend this to a synthesizer and then an assortment of other acoustic instruments, you can really have only that and do a lot of film score work just from there. If you need to do some phonic music, remember that there's still plenty of commercial projects that use very synthesized orchestral sounds if you're working in that kind of venue. But if you need high fidelity and realism, obviously there are free options for everything that will get you all the way there and get you something that is very realistic. If you're willing to layer and edit your tracks, if you put the time in to do some editing and some layering, you can get extremely believable orchestral music with a DAW, an open source or free DAW, open source or free notation program, and open source or free library for sample sounds. Synchronization, you'll need a DAW that can synchronize to picture or a notation program that can do that or both. Or you'll need to do the math. You'll need to do mathematical calculations. You can actually do a lot of really good synchronization on the other kind of music if you're doing atmospheric music. You can do a lot of that just playing the video back, playing your sound in and then dropping it into place. So you can layer up various sounds and get very good synchronization even without DAW just by having multi-track video editor where you can play sounds where they need to be. And then of course, again, you need the ability to export that audio from the video editor as audio so that that can be transferred over to the filmmaker. So these are the things that you need, and I don't think you need to really shoot for the moon on high-end equipment. You just need to think what do you need and use what works for what you need. And you'll find yourself surprised, I think, that very little can do very much. You can get away with a lot with just stuff around the house can do quite a bit for you. So anyway, that's all I've got for you. Good luck with that, and happy composing.