The Extinction of the Orchestral Player

If film musician employment follows the pattern of concert musicians at all, players might be fighting a losing battle. The national dialog regarding the importance of orchestral musicians is heating up in light of recent developments.

Casting Your Score

How to assemble the perfect “cast” of musicians to enhance your score.

More Bits, More People

Seems like there are a lot of ways to spend your money these days, often more money than may be coming in. What are the right choices to move your career forward? Here are a couple of contrasting ideas, both worth considering in their own context. More bits To start with, here I am wearing my “technical guru” hat. Let’s review some things about digital and computer audio; there’s a new technical trend and product you should be aware of. You probably know that digital audio, in the files we create and the way in the signals can flow from one piece of equipment to another, can be in a variety of different sample rates…

The Brightest Light In The Room

I’m sure you’ve had this experience: you go to a party, a meeting or seminar, or maybe just an informal gathering of people — friends, work colleagues, folks out in the world. Inevitably there is one person there who stands out, the center of attention, clearly the most confident, smartest, most successful. How did this person get to be that way? Blessed with talent, charisma, and brains, they go through life winning every game they play… it seems. If you are one of those people, congratulations. But what about the rest of us? How can we hope to compete and succeed in their world, maybe even become a bit like that someday? Let’s take a…

Personal Studio Acoustics

The first hint was not being sure what was up with my bottom end. Not the one in the chair, the one in the speakers. I know, I’ve been there. In the chair, in front of the speakers. Spent a good part of my life there. I should know. I’m a mixer. (Sorry, went into Dragnet mode there!) With keyboard, screen, mix controller in front of me, and speakers outside of and behind the computer screen in a nice equilateral triangle with my head and ears, the mix is coming together pretty nicely. Got the harps and guitars panned and strings nicely textured with a good convolution reverb. But now — what about the bass?…

Mixing: Technical Guidelines, Part 2

Recording and mixing music is a collection of skills that can take a lifetime to acquire. But almost every composer needs to do their own mixing sometimes, whether for a demo, low-budget project, or other reasons. The equipment keeps getting better and is widely available, especially with the computer software packages most composers work with. Let’s take a look at a few ideas and concepts about mixing music for the screen. Setting up your studio First of all you need an appropriate place to listen and work. A deep discussion of room acoustics is too much for this article, but for a fantastic resource check out “Acoustic Design For The Home Studio” by Mitch Gallagher….

Working with Others

I started out by scratching my head a bit, considering the topic of Collaboration. After all, there’s often only one engineer in the room, particularly in composer’s personal studio. But then, I figured, even in that case I’m certainly not working alone or in a vacuum. It’s almost impossible not to work with other people in this business, and who would want to? Here are some ways in which a score mixer collaborates with others. The Scoring Stage When called on to work in a commercial studio or scoring stage I almost always work as a member of a team. As an independent free-lancer, I am hired by the composer, and am the designated “team…

Live Recording Mixing

I got my start recording score music for episodic television a couple of decades ago, when the personal studio trend was just getting going in a big way. Among many others, I engineered music for the ABC series thirtysomething with composers Stewart Levin and Snuffy Walden, and then Northern Exposure with composer David Schwartz. Both started out in fairly modest home studio settings with simple gear, and as the shows and composers gained more success, their studios became more sophisticated. They wrote some of the coolest music I’ve had the pleasure of working on, and I still remember those experiences fondly. So, I am way familiar with the “standard” model of how most television scoring…