If I Had ONE Piece Of Advice...

for those of you who don't know me my name's christian henson i write music for well quaffered is that how you pronounce it belgian detectives misogynistic petrol heads hotty mouth teenagers and i'm currently writing the music for what i think is some of the best tv made in the uk today but i am biased moreover i co-founded spitfire audio and one of the most fantastic surprises and great honours that has come out of that has been meeting composers not hundreds of them but thousands and what this gives me is a consensus that i can share with fellow composers what i have found by meeting composers that range from people who have just left college people are struggling to find their kind of foothold on the career ladder or indeed composers who write music for christopher nolan films i also do lots of tutorials seminars and interviews both being the interviewee and being the interviewer and a question that's often asked is if you had one piece of advice what would that be and i'd say this one piece of advice is the thing you have to do but before we get on to that price is law derek j desola price is a mathematician who studied workplaces and came up with some fascinating empirical evidence his law states the square root of the number of people in any creatively productive domain do 50 percent of the work so when you have only 100 people in a domain 10 people will be doing 50 of the work this is not a theory it is a proven fact and it can be applied to literature to record sales but also composers only five composers account for fifty percent of all of the classical music performed today bach brahms beethoven tchaikovsky and kanye sorry mozart and only five percent of what they wrote is being played fifty percent of the time i estimate there's about a thousand media composers who are making a living out of writing music for film tv and computer games today so that means a 990 000 composers fighting over the other 50 of the pie it is a poor distribution of wealth how do you tip the balance so a lot of people will say well surely you have to be talented well i have met many many talented composers who've yet to find that kind of rung on the lads many people will say well you need to be determined and ambitious well i have seen people who are determined and ambitious to a fault this is after all a team game and if you're only out for yourself it's likely you might not get off the bench what about being well educated a good theoretician take someone like ben valfish who i've had the pleasure of working with is i would say one of the most theoretically gifted composers i've ever met but there are plenty of successful composers who don't have that kind of background irvine berlin couldn't read music what about being lucky well i don't know about you but i've squandered as many lucky opportunities as i have embraced them the spectra of self-sabotage is something that clouds our industry for some reason so these things can help being ambitious lucky well educated and talented but they themselves will not ensure success but psychologists say that there are some key indicators that are common amongst everyone who operate in this kind of 50 bracket of creativity a modicum of intelligence is required now psychologists suggest that intelligence isn't a marker of success it just enables someone to be able to deal with complex situations in an effective manner another empirical need of success is conscientiousness the drive to create work brilliantly whilst also being highly productive and i guess getting that balance right being productive whilst being conscientious is one of the kind of infernal battles that we face as composers i would say that these indicators are absolutely common amongst every successful composer i have met without exception and not two out of three three out of three every single time but they themselves i suspect are not guarantees of success so how do you tip the balance well there's a problem a problem with film music it all sounds sad once a director has heard his or her second show reel of orchestra music it simply blurs into a kind of vat of homogeneous singularity this woman is my mum she's had a hugely successful career from being the dairy box girl in the 1950s all the way to being charlotte holmes's landlady she started out as a chorus girl a member of a chorus line if ever there was price's law writ large within a proscenium arch a chorus line would be it 10 people dancing behind your star she got noticed by kicking her shoe off into the crowd and she also had a fairly unusual haircut why do i mention her well i think that she dared to be different and dare it is because i don't think as humans being different is something we're necessarily drawn to i think i inherited my mother's strain of this kind of wanting to be different which is why the people i went to school with used to go wait why are you being so extra and used to beat me up but being different i think is crucial to be one of the thousand working composers against the other 999 000 struggling ones is unusual so that's what you have to be unusual a unicorn or as oscar wilde put it be yourself everyone else is taken or something like that so the most important thing you need to do okay i'm going to sound like a stuck record here but the thing you have to do is find your own voice i know i've said this before and i know you've probably heard it before and it's not it's not like when you see someone being interviewed and being asked if there was one piece of advice and they answer just believe in yourself that is but finding your own voice is absolutely fundamental okay so it's all very well for me to say something as as airy as find your own voice something i've struggled with over the years but i'm going to give you 10 tips accompanied by 10 qs and i'm not going to tell you uh what the queues are from and it might be fun for you to have a guess put it in the comments down below okay i know this sounds silly coming from a sample developer but 10 don't rely on other people's sounds and if you do use them wrong [Music] [Applause] i believe hilda made this world out of playing factories literally using factories as musical instruments and it creates just a terrifying very alien world that i find utterly compelling nine don't copy other people but if you do make sure they're brilliant and unexpected i once spoke to a composer who said his route to originality was not copying one composer or two composers but copying and combining the influence of three write some music that sounds like it's written by bach jimi hendrix and dunno why did lamar go into my head [Music] so what i love about that score is it's a science fiction score and it it proved what i've always believed that recorders are cool says a long-suffering recorder player and that's what can be so frustrating about people who are original they're so original it's obvious i'm a recorder player and i listen to that score and go so it's just recorders i could have done that but the fact is i didn't eight lean into your uniqueness now this next composer i'm going to feature twice and for good reason but this score in my very humble opinion is the last great score of the 20th [Music] [Music] century for me whenever i meet composers who have an ability like gustavo does ie playing the guitar i'm always really despondent when i hear them making orchestral music here is a man at one with his instrument creating simplistic music that moves you to the core this film if you can work out what it's from is great to watch on headphones because you know when a queue is going to come in because you can hear the amp and the tremolo pedal turn up they say style is defined by your limitations my blind spots lead me down alleys that my more esteemed and well-educated colleagues wouldn't dream of treading my inability to create orchestral music that i feel is distinctive and original means i rely more on distortion and warping which is why these things are so important to me [Music] these small number of notes one an oscar an absolutely sublime score that helped tell the story so well i've just started a film score and i've dared to be as insanely simplistic as this score that you've just heard is i presented the the theme suite to the director and the director responded saying whatever you do do not make it any more complicated than this and my theme it is just three notes being belligerently if not almost arrogantly confident in the beauty of simplicity can be a very refreshing thing there is so much to compete with dialogue sound design the job of a film score is very much part of a bigger tapestry so don't take out all of your brushes and totally overwhelm the canvas this is a collaborative effort six embrace your heritage and when i talk of heritage it it's not the heritage of the land in which you grew up or or your parents traditions and all that are talking about your heritage your experience every single piece of music every single film you've watched every tv show you've seen throughout your life will inform your decisions your heritage is your own personal artistic dna embrace it [Music] so this score is the most important score of my life gustavo gathering folk instruments around him chirangos and i think a thing called a roco to create modern music with traditional instruments now the reason i say this is the most important score is this score featured these amazing guitars and i took the soundtrack to a folk music shop in london called hobgoblin music and they identified one of the guitars as durango i bought the charango i took it home it became immediately obvious that i couldn't play it so i sampled it and that was the kind of moment for me that is my half of how spitfire came to be five enrich your heritage or as john powell said don't listen to film music john powell's heritage is about as rich as it gets because he used to write jingles back in the day when people wrote jingles this meant that every day john was having to write and produce music from different idioms which is what makes his scores so brilliant probably one of the best score producers on the planet today this is an unexpected cue from a massive film which is so engaging in its beauty and draws from john's rich heritage four collaborate with extraordinary people hans is not only the most successful living composer in my humble opinion but also i think one of the greatest collaborators whether it be with engineers with his ever expanding family of musicians which is incredibly devoted to other composers or indeed directors this score i think is a testament to his celebration of the power of collaboration [Music] three restrict your options this is the sound of the steel band [Applause] [Music] okay so hold that sound in your head this next cue is from a science fiction film written by cliff martinez who does a lot of collaborations with steven soderbergh that in itself how that came to be is a story well worth checking out but anyway legend has it he has a rule that if he's going to buy a new musical instrument or a new piece of tech he has to use it in the next film school that he's going to work on and i think he heard some steel band music and being a percussionist former drummer of the red hop chili peppers he thought i'm going to learn how to make some calypso music and bought some steel drums then the phone went steven soderbergh on the other end went cliff we're doing a science fiction film at which point cliff looks at his steel drums and goes [Music] two experiment and go on adventures this next excerpt is by thomas newman who is one of those rare composers who you can usually guess within a bar of hearing his music i think he's possibly the greatest embodiment of these 10 tips someone who has embraced his influences and has merged them into a harmonic language of his own he creates small limited sound worlds but is also massively collaborative with musicians and with these musicians he appears to stoke adventure and exploration and an exoticness even when the subject matter doesn't require it this queue is from one of thomas newman's most listened to scores and really embraces him challenging the paradigm in a quietly revolutionary way one do it your way if i was to thank my uh beloved deceased father for one thing that was that we were good enough you don't have to aspire to be someone else and the way that you do things if it contributes to your conscientious approach to work and your productivity then your way is the right way is good enough this next one is by dario who i'm a massive fan of and also i'm very honored to say that i've worked with on a few projects and i've seen him work and it's fascinating very individual way of working digital performer and he's connected to it by a breath controller i've not asked him this directly but certainly listening to his scores he seems to avoid common time wherever possible [Music] do [Music] this is an oscar-winning score for dario marianelli where he takes the typewriter in the scene and turns it into a musical instrument and that's a light motif that returns throughout the score alongside other sound effects the bashing of an umbrella on a car bonnet features as a sonic light motif throughout this sensational score the one time i did this right in my career was with my brother joe and his business partner alexis smith we were asked to pitch against maybe 10 other composers for a computer game and we were given a sequence which was very kind of testosterone-led very dramatic very action and i said to joe and alexis i think we need to prove how creative we can be so what we did is we took some of steve reich's singers and created some minimalistic and very simplistic voices uh accompanied by some very simple string parts in a way that worked against the picture but to dramatic effect we won the pitch and that score was the score for the computer game alien isolation which we got nominated for a bafta for now did the score sound like our pitch no but the pitch itself stood out and i believe it made the developers understand that we would try anything and everything to create something truly special a unicorn score a unicorn piece of work to give it its own voice so if you want to get out of the chorus line i know it sounds all kind of hey man you've got to find your own voice this is what you have to do we've had a really tough year we've been locked up and i think there's a few more months just months to go but we'll be rolling our sleeves up soon an opportunity the end of 2020 to think about how you're going to approach 2021 here's your opportunity to become a unicorn thanks for watching to the end and again if you want to name the scores ten through to one that'd be brilliant be very interesting to see what you think they are some i think are very easy straightforward some maybe not so subscribe if you haven't done already ding that bell if you want to be notified the next time i'll put a video up and one of those always much appreciated see you next time

Channel: The Crow Hill Company

Views: 70,128

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques

Id: m1lhzja1WHQ

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020