Creative Cribs - Michael Price (Sherlock)

I'm here with the amazing composer Michael price we've written the music for Sherlock and forgotten and many many more welcome to it to my humble abode as they yes a beautiful here is really nice and bright well well well actually on the top floor of a Victorian bus works in North London so outside there's very glamorous DIY stores and various other things but I think when I was looking around for a place to to base myself and and the people that I work with then actually having some daylight is so rare we saw some beautiful Studios that were much more soundproof and much more technically accomplished but being able to look out the window and see the trees and and see the seasons change yeah I think it's lovely it's really nice yeah well shall we start on here I can hardly see yeah so so this side I mean some people might say this side is where all the actual work happens because there's spaces for for Nick who works worked with me for six or seven years I think now Katie who runs contemplative tasks are amongst other things would sit there there at lunch now if not like killed them they don't have bodies underneath obviously can see this is this is sort of mental world where we break things so I used to have a bunch of this stuff over over on my side but we set up a separate station like a processing station so when I finished a queue whoever gets the job of sitting here then can either print something through a cassette or through the Nara four different tape echoes there a couple of space that goes but and then the the copycat quarter range different spring reverb at the top there so really we're sort of trying to get a little bit of specialization really in if we're working on a particular project that's using lots of lots of tape techniques and textures then somebody can sit and do it full-time get into a routine print stuff with a bit of continuity but yeah so that's kind of that's how it works over on this side of the besides the wall I guess we see the other yeah all about the other bit oh wow lovely selection yes it's kind of like a keyboard graveyard this is where old since come to have a nice nice retirement it's one of those things I love I love watching everybody else's Spitfire cribs because I'm incredibly nosy and I like to see what everybody else has got in their rooms you don't need all this stuff to do really great scores and I kind of think when I first started way back when I had like a little general MIDI sound module little role in sound canvas and it was the only thing you had to add that and Cubase running on an Atari but I knew that I think so well and even though all the sounds a bit cheesy if you d tune them and one kit about with them you could get something really interesting out of it you know if I was a young writer I'd look at some of these cribs and kind of go oh you know you can't do anything cool unless you got a Model D of the C SAT something not so you can do super cool stuff just on the laptop however on the other hand there are great there's always fun and and I think it's it's mostly because trying to sort of trying to create an atmosphere where you can where you can play where you know where there's some joy and some experimentation so there's a there's a euro rack system here I have no idea how it works you know who just nobody does if they say they do they're lying because they don't really but on the other hand if I spend a couple of hours and building a patch just sort of trying lots of different bits and pieces there's there's a CV based keyboard here that's got a lovely sort of a lovely slider and wooden controls said that you can you can set up quite an organic way to either play if you're trying to do an on Martineau sort of sound or alternatively there's a couple of sequences in this system so that you can set up some quite chaotic generative patches which I actually did that on there's the middle episode of the last season of Sherlock has got modular weirdness in it if you're writing really fast there's no way that you're gonna sit like set up a new patch every time you're doing q but I'd spent an afternoon or two made some weird just recorded it as audio and then they're manipulated afterwards so I'm just curious how this says ring then respond in terms of CV outputs control voltage outputs then it's just another way depending on how you set up the the slider over here so that you can have continually variable pitch and then there's these little indentations to help guide you sort of where your finger goes so that rather than being tied into more sort of specific chromatic scale then then you can use sort of play and you can do vibrato all of which can you know this I think a bunch of different options of how you create some how you can find the sounds themselves just really sparks off those little bits of humanity and those happy accidents that that can lead you to something else so there's maybe like you know there's there's probably I think in that episode I did use this so there's two or three phrases that you'll hear that have got that kind of weird legato swoop to them and with a bunch of delay and a bunch of echo on them but but it was fun making them there's a whirly always awesome there is a cs-80 which is yes ridiculously brilliant I'm sort of looking after this for somebody at the moment but they're totally not allowed to have it back so I think you will have to stay but these there's there's just sort of it feels like everything has every instrument or every keyboardist has got a they've got a signature sound that there's something that's sort of specific about them yeah and a bit like with colors like this isn't the right color for everything by all means particularly cuz it's really distinctive but it's very very expressive because everything's got a variety of after touches and if you you can do you can do the weirdest things by changing what happens after you after you press the key so so rather than it being a sort of like a kind of like a more traditional keyboard where once you've hit it it's done its thing that they polyphonic aftertouch on this is is absolutely incredible or most people would recognize the little sub phatty a mono/poly korg mono/poly this is one of the the least favorite of the Moog since it's as I could be in a bottle but sometimes you want to be involved so that's fine do you know ten six not the 60 everybody else has got the 60 and it sounds awesome but this just sounds different it was the first synth that I fell in love with when I was a teenager when they first came out which dates me but there was there's something very reassuring I think about the the middle of it for pads it just has it kind of has its own thing this is one of the reissue model DS so this is the sort of new for old ones that came up last year I think and it was incredible because the packaging is all like brand-new but is the same design it was in the in the 70s or whenever they originally designed it so you sort of you have the full experience of being the first person who's bought who bought one and they sound awesome but also they've got MIDI and they're not broken and it's just it again it's just so there's something just very nothing else really sounds like that yeah it's a terrible idea for lots of different scores but when it's the right idea it's definitely idea there's a op1 in here it's a really sweet little sort of travelling synth really they're great even charged up the not only this is the one with the sequencer in the little tape like a four track soft tape emulation recorder but as well there's the sounds obviously sound a bit sorting out of their little speaker but they're quite unique and expressive if you play them on a track or I've started using this live particularly because it's about thousandth of the weight of this like it's a very convenient thing to take on a train whereas the cs-80 is not and if you patch this into either a guitar amp or or a PA then is surprisingly expressive with with the controllers that you've got and yeah again it's just a different sort of different way of thinking I think a different different set of sounds guitar pedals I think it's probably one of the first ways that some people get out of the box cause it's a really cheap way to do it is to if you've got an interface with a couple of ins and outs then you can buy a 20 quid guitar pedal from you know cash converters or or offer may and you could start to get that experience of actually kind of crunching something or don't know whether it's how you use it rather than what it sounds like whether you're just in a different headspace when you're not looking at a screen and when you you know just monkeying about but again you you get to interesting places I think hardware oh yes toys toys are various kind the little cog boxes these are cool what's fun with some of these is that it's because quite a few of them a battery operated and you then you can actually just sit on the sofa and fiddle about when you should be doing some profitable right and and these ones all linked together as well they got a bass one and the keys so you can just use the the little sink and hook them up and they'll all play along and then this was a fine piece of craftsmanship I built myself a little kit you can get there's all these sort of like build yourself a camera kit but you can build yourself a synth with a tiny little little circuit board in the battery but it's surprisingly I mean obviously is it's very specific but already I think that's cool but some record it with a mic from its little tinny speak it put some reverb on it and well you can guarantee it's not gonna sound quite like everything else yeah I mean it's just I mean littered looks like I didn't even bother gluing that okay shoddy craftsmanship paper do you know I'd I'm not gonna say that I spend you know if you're trying to write five or six minutes of Finnish music a day there's a limited amount of time that you can spend monkeying about with her me since but but when you do do you have a favorite one did you go to Dublin the double basses with model D so that you can kind of play when you play the past then you solve then you sort perform the filter just is a sort of timeless fattening out which just always works so sometimes if I'm doing unforgotten I might put the model D over just next to me so that I can just constantly be playing in all the time so that is obviously a legendary thing and then it's it's hard to sort of to be standing next to a serious safety without kind of going easily the best symbols have been made so there's kind of there's an expressiveness that some of the some of the sins have got and how you interact with them that I think is it's more than about the kind of the state that you go into when you're working with them and so it doesn't matter whether they cost like fifty grid or or more there's a sort of I don't know kind of a connection with you as their as the performer or as the composer that can start to kind of complete that that connection between what you are thinking and what the audience is is going to hear and what emotional message that's going to come through so there's a sort of some some instruments and and players will tell you the same the same thing where the risk it our violin or whatever that certain instruments just help that communication and when you find one you don't really you don't want to let it go really it's like no we can't of it back it's mine that is no like you like writing on paper mmm yeah but at the same time do you also enjoy the approach of if you just go here into your fun corner and just have that sense of surprise and the sounds because when you're right on paper you have to have a certain idea of or being able to imagine what its gonna sound like whereas coming in here it's sort of the opposite of that approach if the original idea is to communicate an emotion there are an almost infinite way amount of ways to do that musically different starting points I think seem to produce different results for me so if I come and monkey about for a couple of hours took some headphones on and make bleeping noises then it's a sort of like a almost a sonic discovery process which can the leaves you in one certain direction if you're sit down at the piano or even I mean my ears not that great but just about good enough to sit in a coffee shop with manuscript and not use the piano and just go straight into paper and there's a sort of that gives you a certain view of sound because you're having to rather than this where you try and where you're sort of experiencing the sound almost physically then paper particularly without checking it on a piano is like write the other end of spectrum because you're having to conceive the entire thing inside your head and then try and find a way to notate it and then there's all points in between so I'll frequently work with the piano work with the keyboard and paper to write tunes because there's something about the structure of like a really good melody as 8:16 bar 32 bar phrase that working that sort of finding the structure of it on paper seems to really really help and just improvising doesn't really always get there I like to sort of slow down and look at it in a different way also if if I'm trying to overcome my in abilities as a keyboard player then paper is a really good way to do it because I know if I improvise which I love doing I'll fall into the same patterns and the same voicings and the same same habits and so stepping away from that and I'm writing things down chord by chord gives me a sort of way into that that produces denser more interesting material and sometimes that's right and sometimes that's not right so if I'm doing some underscore and under some dialog then unusually I'll improvise that I'll certainly do a couple of passes because there's something about accompanying as effectively a singer so if I whenever I write it down I get much too clever and there's too many suspensions and it's all a bit fancy whereas if I'm just holding holding down a sound then you leave the space that you need for there for the dialogue for the story for the rest of it so let's have a look at your station over here Greg well this way having watched lots of these cribs of other much better composers to me it's always it's fascinating what's the what's the same and what's different in people's rooms cuz we're sort of we're all I mean you know there's brilliant demos we're also facing the same sort of challenges so there's lots of stuff that it's definitely the same I think in in my room so there's logic so writing logic and then there's Pro Tools over here and once I've finished a cue I'll bounce it down the template set to bouncing stems automatically but I'll bounce a stereo and then drop it across into Pro Tools and they'll build up the reel of a episode or and in this case it which is I'm just saying up for unforgotten season 3 so I've got all of season one and season two in there as well so that if I need to refer back or reuse a stem I just mean like that they can so you've got a raven here raven yes happily probably about a year now and I think have tried quite a few combinations of control services the avid mixed ones the there's an SSL one that's nice this one sort of stuck most because the macros and the keyboard shortcut programming had quite liked and and once in a while I will use it to join a line of expression is it faster than using the mouse I don't know it's just different I've got one of those single fader faderport boxes which I'll use for for doing rides because it's always a bit funny on there yeah on a touchscreen but I use a original iPad one this first generation iPad vintage iPad running touch ask and Nick who he's awesome at these things has programmed a bunch of pages for me this is a Spitfire one with a bunch of keyboard shortcuts dynamic expression vibrato some of the more complex ones like I use the sample modeling trumpet a lot and that's got like growl and flutter tongue and some weird other things and so to save me able to remember which parameter maps against which which thing then you can just swap to there to the appropriate page for the appropriate instrument so once it's set up I've always really liked that I don't know wine is still working so if it there's a good response when you play in and you yes somehow I mean we ended up making the area for for my finger my useless about fingers wider so that it kind of you don't need to be that accurate and also we could make them high like as high as the iPad so even though it's not a physical fader I've kind of got used to the response it's a specific app yeah think this is built-in touch ask touch osc but there's there's two or three of those different sort platforms that you can customize there's a bunch of outboard plugins are really great these days is it worthwhile spending what is not trivial amount of money on an outboard I guess it depends on for you whether the extra five percent difference is inspiring is it something where it kind of brings something to your sense of of the process and so there's a bunch of different Mike pre so there's a couple of Neve channels that have been racked up these focus right and producer packs are really good these are two channels from a student that being wrapped up so if I'm doing any recording in terms of I've usually got some mics that are up on stands somewhere then they can go through those or I can patch them in on the patch Bay so that I couldn't process stems operators has since out if I wanted these two are on the master buss the master stereo buss most of the time because this Rupert Neve master buss processor has got some special magic not quite sure what it's doing but it's great and this EQ is just very clean because we swap sessions all the time here then I've got plug-in equivalent or I've tried to get as close as I can with plugins to the sounds of these so that on Logic you can have an i/o plug-in that you can switch in a route which basically then routes out through the patch Bay so that I can either run the session in the box or with two or three clicks it'll go straight out through the hardware and I persuade myself I can always hear the difference but that might be confirmation bias because I've spent all the money so it's like that's got to be worth it that's worth every penny so I can see you've got a big template loaded here and is there something that is permanent or do you set up a new template for each project yeah I think I try and a new template for everything for each new show each film each new series of a project if it's something like and forgotten I sure like that's got into multiple series then I'll start from the same load up the same template blow the dust off it and develop with whatever's new the might be some new sounds that we've made that might be some new bits to kick them there have been purchased there's something about those first two or three days of kind of finding the sonic signature for a show that is kind of interesting this is a cue from unforgotten which is predominantly lots lots of piano is lots of sort of echoey pianos and as some strings and various sort of like some some pads of work to Eve there Matt Fowler and he did some some new sounds for me or new presets for omnisphere and zebra zebra again just trying to get a little character that isn't to preset II although you know aptly use a preset if it's the right right thing for the job and this templates already set up to to bounce down to stems at the bottom these stems match up with our final mix stems as well so on this show Joe rouble who records a mix it when he's mixed a cue I can drop it back from Pro Tools back into logic and the stems all come out at the same place so that means if I want to take the strings but not the sins I can use the root the live strings that we record and then play piano over the top of it or make any other changes I guess with this particular cue it's it's it's really the the live strings that are selling it but that's although they sound beautiful and it's beautifully played it's only actually 12 strings and with a little support from from samples but I usually write split out for seconds for your shells bases already so that they're kind of making it work from the voicing point of view I would do and then whoever's orchestrating or preparing that preparing the parts their job is is then more about making sure the articulation and dynamics are captured quickly enough so that when we play on the session it sounds it sounds like you should do there's also the wonderful Peter Gregson somewhere here in the box so this is the real Peter Gregson not this Spitfire sample Peter Gatien is a virtual person such a good night so you know in a way there's kind of I mean you can see the number of tracks there's kind of I don't know that's what 9 no there's there's not much going on and that's a weird sub thing that shouldn't be there so there's there's it's not calm for this this particular queue in this particular show is not calm complex in the number of actual self instruments playing but because even on a sort of on a UK budget show like this just try and get as many people playing it as as we can so it doesn't strings and then Peter blame beautiful solo cello over-the-top carries quite a lot of heart quite a lot of emotional punish have you used a space to record live instruments I have yes I have recorded Peter sitting over there in the corner once before but now there are too many sins to get everybody this there's no room I'm Phil the earthly junk shop man you've got some overtone yeah I don't think part of them that there's a big debate particularly TV is a big debate about intelligibility of dialogue and also from a music point of view what come what will work and and so if you're listening on full range monitors and it also has beautiful and you can hear down to 20 Hertz then it will guide you in a certain direction but if you switch to some form of smaller speaker what these ones are just quite convenient and and so lightly quite quite good obviously that you know you don't get the bottom end at all but there's certain things that you hear quite clearly you then really can check whether your idea is working and and what will happen when your mum hears it on her tiny telly in the corner and all the bottom end has dropped out so it's so I tend to I use those little having tones to either check if there's a specific thing in the bottom end that I want to see whether it's working or not but also when I'm balancing a quick time to send director otter the producers are usually balanced the dialogue and the and the music using those because it's a lot closer a lot I mean a lot of people are listening to what you send them on laptops and yes sort of if you're relying on the fact that that your sub is doing the work then then you will get a lot of notes stroke fired oh I see you also write music for yourself so you've got a bit of music released on erased tapes right sure so what's your approach to writing music for yourself rather than for film and TV it's such an important part of I think any any composer any artists work is is the work that you generate because you want to because there's a story that you want to tell and there's a a sound world that you want to create that is not necessarily the shape it is because of the shape of a story or the shape of a character and and I love film and TV scoring I there's I love the camaraderie I like being part of a team I love the storytelling I love the fact that you can often be part of a group endeavor that can reach millions and millions of people around the world it's a fabulous thing to do but there's something different about and more personal I think about effectively coming up with the story the story yourself and so for five or six years now I've worked with Robert rats erased tapes and we he put out an EP of four string quartets like done and I done them just with no intention in mind I got this drink water in for a pop session I was doing in the morning just decided to keep them there for the afternoon and wrote some quartets quickly that week and we recorded them just for fun but there was something there so there's no click tracks there's no picture we're not you don't need to shape it around anything else things could just breathe and and then that started a relationship and a process that led to an album called entanglement that recorded in Berlin now about three years ago and and a new project that was recording all through last year that is still a bit secret but they'll be coming out later in the year a it's nourishing and fascinating and fulfilling to do for myself but it's also interesting what you what you bring to a collaborative situation if you have found a way to to sort of express yourself musically that isn't depending on anything else that you're sort of creating these complete worlds then I think that's interesting for directors and producers as well because you're you've really sort of been on that journey yourself in a way that they have to be when they create a show or a film script from scratch and almost subconsciously you can connect with them in a way that's not necessarily true if if you feel a bit just more like kind of you know like a hired hand you can like hear just the last minute you've put some music on and then go away so I like to have those relationships with with collaborators that are based on mutual respect and where we're all trying to make something the most beautiful thing that we can or the most the funniest thing or the most exciting thing I think there's there's something that sort of expands your vision and your and your reach as a as a composer as a musician which is it is joyful it's joyful right a lot of it in here as well and does a set up work for you and that sometimes yeah I mean I kind of I think the reality is that there is there is the there's the perfect situation the ideal situation and then there is what needs to get what I try and do with this space is is have it sort of customizable enough so that if I just want to work quietly I just turn all the screens often the whole electronics off and and just just have a have a piano sound in it and a pencil and then you can kind of find that quiet space inside you if you if you need to if there's a recording tomorrow you can find anything it's just whatever you need to do that's really great thank you so much for your time you're welcome thank you very much for coming

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 29,612

Keywords: Michael Price, Sherlock, BBC, Unforgotten, Studio, Synthesisers

Id: 9Q4Ajt6MR2U

Length: 32min 10sec (1930 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2018