Alan Silvestri Breaks Down the Composing Workflow Behind his Blockbuster Scores | Native Instruments

[Music] what i've come to realize after all these years is although i'm not an actor it's very much what i imagine it's like for an actor you have to perform as a film composer the entire film you have to perform every actor's role you have to perform every special effects tracking shot you internalize it you see it and it affects you in some way and then something comes out for me it's music that comes out it's conversational for me the movie says something it always goes first and then i say something back and that's really my experience of it it's never changed when i see a piece of film i have an idea and that's kind of how the experience is for me my name is alan silvestri i'm officially known as a film composer [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the notable films i've worked on the doberman gang was the first romancing the stone was the first real movie studio picture movie stars back to the future was the first movie i worked on where there was a level of financial success and then you look at a movie like forrest gump where my favorite or one of my favorite stories about forrest gump was that after the film came out we started to get these reports about you know there was a couple in indiana who hadn't been to a movie theater in 55 years but they went to see forrest gump when i started to come up composers were doing amazing things they were in the middle of this explosion of investigation with sound and how it could effectively help composing for film one of the places where the technology was really starting to shine was in the world of sound what we could do with a synthesizer it was interesting i kind of was in this little glory day before me studios had orchestras someone like alfred newman he had this orchestra and they were there every day if somebody wanted to hear something or he wanted to try something or whatever it was he could do this like we do with a daw only it was 75 of the greatest living musicians what started to happen as the technology started to advance this idea of a digital audio workstation started to appear all of a sudden we're going back that pendulum is swinging back now where well there is a way to let somebody hear something before we go to the sound stage and it actually turns out there's a way for them to hear a lot of what's going to happen [Music] what we've done is we have saved in cubase track archives and so what the track archive is i can import this track archive all of my mixer settings are preset all of the tracks are there colors are all there and the whole damage every one of the damage instruments is loaded right away so i'm going to go file import track archive here are all my track archives here's one that says damage open these are all 16 tracks of damage instruments all the different library entries right i go okay all the damaged tracks have come up i'm running this in vienna it's loaded up all the damage instruments everyone's in its own track all the outputs are pre-assigned here's the mixer everything is pre-assigned and done you saw how long it took me to do that it took no time and now every one of the damaged instruments is here every one of them all ready to go everyone and that takes like no time so this is now in contact right and this is these are all the damaged libraries but you can see all this is pre-assigned in the archive so i do this with everything here's action strikes so i want to use action strikes right you can see i've got all these instruments pre-built they're ensembles instruments ensembles hits all of that see action strikes has come up here all the instruments so now here's all of the stuff from action strikes in contact that are there for me all of the mixer presets that i want they're done and here's the instrument i want to see damage i go back i want to see action strikes and then if i move that over here here the action strikes instruments and they're all here immediately ready to put in to a sequence whatever i want all ready to go we have a 90 plus piece orchestra and we're doing we recorded over 200 minutes of music for end game in abbey road with that magnificent group of artists that doesn't mean that there isn't a place an active live place for all of that technology so a lot of the effecty sounds in that score are being generated by me right here in the room very often there'll be certain kinds of rhythmic patterns like very staccato strings the the uh the avengers theme is something that comes to mind where we're doing this i may have done a mock-up or some exploration with great staccato strings on the rig we send those along with all of our other resources when it comes time to mix and you may never know in any given place if there is any of that bled in or how much but all of this these are all music making assets and when you do have a big movie like that where you can use all of your assets everything happening here is a tremendous asset it can be effecty sounds almost things bordering on sound design that you can create envelopes for and have them playing with acoustic instruments i always keep everything in liquid form in the daw till the very end when we go to the recording stage i could have 35 tracks of electronic material that we bounce to acoustic files only because we can then offload those acoustic files into pro tools and have them live i do a two-track mix of all of that and it sits live on pro tools as we record and we're hearing that with the orchestra very often there'll be drastic edits to the picture after we even record and i'm able to then go back take the most recent cut of the picture reconform everything on the box and it's now still in midi in the midi world and then we will do a final acoustic offload of all of those tracks and that's what goes to our music editor and that's what goes to the stage and that's what goes to dennis sands when he's mixing because he might go hey you know i love that kind of distant piano that we had in you know on the stage and he'll take that track and he'll have that available to use and may add it to the piano on the stage or not or whatever but this is all part of our tool kit if you will and it's all important why is contact important for me i'm going to say for a couple reasons i don't have a lot of time in my job to make mistakes and i've been involved with computers and sound for probably 50 years and i've lived through [Music] something that used to be a rather common occurrence a company would come up with a great idea make a really cool product but next month the computer world would change an operating system or upgrade an operating system nothing would work i've never had that happen with native instruments it's been always rock solid and dependable i i don't know how many things i have that have chosen that platform but i'm going to guess i have darn near everything that has chosen the contact player because it's all great smart stuff and it's dependable and it works [Music]

Channel: Native Instruments

Views: 160,798

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Keywords: native instruments, film scoring, kontakt 6, kontakt native instruments, kontakt native instruments vst, kontakt film scoring, scoring synths kontakt, scoring piano kontakt, cinematic kontakt, cinematic vst, cinematic vst plugins, alan silvestri, alan silvestri interview, alan silvestri soundtrack, alan silvestri scores, alan silvestri scoring session, cinematic native instruments, scoring with native instruments, film scoring kontakt, komplete native instruments

Id: La6R97pahR8

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/madman_trombonist]

I’ve never heard Alan Silvestri speak before! Huh.