Hans Zimmer's use of computers and samples in orchestral music

[Music] you have to start off by by realizing that a computer is a musical instrument that needs just as much practice as when you practice piano or the violin or the cello or whatever you know you have to become fairly virtualistic at programming and i've been look i've been doing this for a very long time since literally sampling was invented so i was working on eight bed samplers and managed to get directors to feel the intention of the music behind the mock-up which is what it's all about right i mean you're supposed to go and let you know let them know what the piece of music is about um what the emotional intent is and you know and we went to 12-bit samples then we went to you know 16 24-bit samples then i had a stack of samplers with you know and i started to do my own in 94 we started to do our own samples but it wasn't about making the music sounds better or making it easier to get the job it was just for me because i didn't want to sit there all day long listening to sounds you know i wanted to spent all day listening to slightly better sounds and i wanted to listen to my favorite players well i mean one of the things i did uh back then was i uh because sampling was um seen by by orchestra as sort of the enemy and i went to all my favorite musicians in london i said look here's the experiment i'm going to try if you let me sample you i will make it so that directors will want more orchestral music and you will actually get more work out of it because i'm going to be able to present something where they go wow orchestra orchestra is cool right because there was actually a time where orchestra was thought of as not cool and it's pretty much actually it worked out better than that um because it meant that the you know people who started here's assistants you know carrick griggs and williams or ramin javedi or john powell etc um had access to the same tools that i had access to and could sound just as fabulous as or whatever as grand as my sample sounded and then get jobs and go to go and use real orchestras to record them with but yes i was i was always a good programmer i mean i started out as a programmer you know i'm a better programmer than i i'm definitely a better programmer than i am a player if you ask me honestly what my instrument is i will tell you it's the computer you need to protect the orchestras because if the orchestras go away you know it's going to be a huge cultural shift in a bad way and i think the first thing you need to do is you need to stop thinking of them in these catch phrases the orchestra for instance let's just talk about strings you need to think of the string section as individuals that come together and give you their everything and so you need to go and pick each individual player because each individual's player's technique the sound of the instrument i mean you know if you go to london or if you go to paris if you go to berlin you know they will have different quality instruments they will have different sounding instruments i mean guitarists go mad about pickups and strings and amps etc you know that's just one guitarist you should treat every member of the orchestra the same way and you should treat the orchestras the same way i will write very differently stylistically here in america because i have a different room to record and with different players with different instruments then i will write for somebody in london or somebody in paris or somebody in in vienna um because just like anything study who the individuals are that are actually going to make this performance they're constantly reasons why music shifts and part of it is just they're new interesting players they're new interesting orchestras they're new interesting spaces to record in and it's so at the end of the day it's not about the technology so much as opposed to they're constantly new young players that have an amazing tone that you want to capture that you want to work with um you know look there's like right now there's stuff coming out of berlin or out of iceland which sounds completely different to anything that's coming out of america out of london and that the sound is created by by the individuals and they're very different and when i write a cello line i know who i write it for and literally as i program as i write it i see that person in front of me so i am going to write something which is very much with them in mind the samples the other thing that usually happens at the beginning of a project once i have an idea of what i want to do then becomes this of safari of sampling you know it's like we're hunting down sounds we're making sounds um each movie has a load of custom sounds in it um you know yeah i work with the spitfire guys which which is very helpful because they can do things and there's a man in germany claudius bruiser who um really takes care of my samples and he can do things that other people can't quite seem to do i mean he manages to i mean phase align things and make sample you know make samples sound amazing and i'm not trying to be arrogant or show off but it's like our sampler still sounds better than other people's samples you know it's and i don't know why but it's it's you know just as i'm surrounded by talented musicians i have talented guys in technology who are absolutely our partners in making a piece of music i just found that the tools available at the time you know and of course they're a lot better now weren't sufficient to what i was hearing in my head or what i wanted to do so i had to get somebody in to help me build some of these things you know um i'll make my own samples it's it's okay you don't have to go out and sample a huge orchestra you know if you if you think that's what you need to do that's going to be really expensive but if you if you have a rubber band and a cardboard box and you can think of a really cool way of using that and sampling that and making a score out of that i don't understand why people don't do why people don't make sounds more themselves why people don't really learn how their computers work but people keep buying and i i'm guilty of that of of buying a library and like going ah it's a bit boring and never actually really exploring it that's why i'm not really going this is a good library or this is a bad library either it's always the guy who really knows these tools who can make amazing music with it you know so to answer your question what do you need to make great sounds you you need the thing that that suits you and that you really learned

Channel: Mix with the Masters

Views: 102,292

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Id: _LHyNYRtwR8

Length: 8min 18sec (498 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021