JOHN PAESANO - How important is a template

the toughest thing about writing music for film and television is it has to be done in a certain amount of time so the evolution of the template has just grown exponentially every choice that I make with my template and with my writing process is always based on trying to gain back little chunks of spoon my orchestra and my template is always on standby it's always loaded it's always ready to go you know when I first got into this business it was all about notes and music and harmony and counterpoint and it was all about the music and then you know kind of as you come into this business and you realize how technical film scoring is and and how much of it is geared on time you know you need you need to be able to the toughest thing about writing music for film and television is it has to be done in a certain amount of time you know when when Beethoven wrote a symphony he wasn't under time constraints to finish that symphony in a certain amount of time but when we write film scores there's there's a there's a time limit that were given to do it and and most of them and as the history of film scoring has gone on that time limit has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk because of technology so after I was done learning about all them you're never really fully done but after I was done studying counterpoint and harmony and and all the things that I needed to learn when I was younger and in music school I came out to LA and started working in film scoring and realized that I would pretty much only learned 10% of what I hated to learn and then it all became about this it all became about this the technology the sequencer and basically how to utilize all this when I was coming into film scoring it was this stuff was just starting to come on the scene we were getting away from acoustic instruments and starting to do you know the mock-up was becoming an integral part of the of the job and with that became a whole new style of writing music we got away from paper and pencil and we started this became our paper and pencil and this is kind of the world that we started writing in and as that happened the the the evolution of the process was changing from year D from actually from month to month to year to year because the software was developing so fast the the technique for using it was constantly always changing and and over the years that I that I've been doing this I have refined and refined and have refined the way that I use samples in the wind and it brings me now to talking about the template and and how important the template has become to film scoring there's a couple different philosophies when I first started off in this business I really wanted to set on my template so it mimicked what an orchestra looked like on paper as the sample layer libraries have became more and more involved and and in depth with the amount of articulations that they were covering and when we first started off it was you know violins long and violin shorts violas long viola shorts French horn long French horn shorts that was it you know you had shorts and lungs every now and then they would have a little one shot of a run or an orca factor or something of that nature but we're from from where we started and where we are today I mean you know this is an example let me just show you all these tracks right here in yellow are my brass and you can see it's just here's the first horn you know first horn alone maybe there's you know 12 13 15 articulations just for the first horn second horn same amount of articulations so probably within these first two horn patches I probably have as many samples as when I started when I first started them this for the whole entire Orchestra so the evolution of the template has just grown exponentially in size I mean it's huge you know if I scrolled all the way from the top you know these these instruments right here in the gray or my woodwinds some of these instruments up top here are different effects and since kind of go-to since that I always go to you but my orchestra in my template is always on standby it's always loaded it's always ready to go starting and I still the way that I organized it I still organized it in the orchestral order like it wasn't a score you know I start off with with my you know my woodwind top with you know flutes you know and in this template right here I have three fleets plus a piccolo go to my oboes then I go to my clarinets then I go to my bassoons but you can see how many articulations it's just everything here in gray our woodwinds and I'm scrolling and scrolling so it's you know you're looking at five six hundred tracks just to cover the orchestra and to cover the articulations now in order to load that many articulations there's a couple systems you know I used to use a system that was based on a bunch of slave computers and everything every choice that I make with my template and with my writing process is always based on trying to gain back little chunks of speed the slave system was fantastic I ran a I ran a program by VSL called VN ensemble Pro and it and actually if I go back even further I used to use a program called gigas studio and you could load you know I forgot what the amount of ram well you know you could load I think it was like sixty fours it was all it was all sample dependant it's actually been so long since I've used Giga studio that I can't even I don't even think gigas T was not even being developed anymore and it's been out of business for a while but it was it was it was you know it was a way to basically offload samples onto slave computers it was it was one of the first systems before that we had Hardware samplers but when I was coming into this business the hardware samplers we're kind of going you know distinct and software sampling was becoming was coming on the scene and Giga studio really was the the father of kind of software sampling and and brought it into this world but as we as as kind of times going on that was the initial idea I would have a bunch of other computers I think I used to organize it I would have a computer for woodwinds I'd have a computer for brass I'd have a computer for Strings and then I would have usually a computer for percussion and then everything else I would try to handle in the box so I had these four other computers that were off in the machine room working away and loading all these samples the problem with it was one computer would go down and my woodwinds wouldn't be working anymore so then I would have to get up go to the control room restart the computer shut down my sequencer reboot up the computer again and load in you know 200 you know a bunch of different samples on the computers and it would eat away time now my day it would slow down my writing process and slow down my creative process so at first it was it would the only choice I had was to be able to use those slave computers because a single computer wasn't that we weren't able to have as much RAM you needed in one single computer and during that time to load in a template of this size and every year the temple would grow and then you would have to buy more slave computers and it just became this ongoing thing luckily the technology moves faster than the you know the process of sample development just by nature the technology computer technology seems to move faster than anything and in a good way we're kind of playing catch-up with it so as time went on and as these computers became stronger and stronger and stronger the processors became stronger and stronger processors could handle more ram and therefore we're finally at a point where I could use a computer and load as much RAM as I needed into it to cover the complete load of my template so what that made it was so what became possible then and this is just very recently a HP is a great computer company I realized that they had a line of computers called the Z series and I was able to load up to 2 terabytes of RAM into a computer not that I would ever need that much and I don't think when HP made these computers they weren't necessarily thinking of them you know they needed obviously it was obviously a computer being built to be able to calculate a really high floating-point data and they needed to have very strong and robust processes their workstation class computers they aren't you know home computers there they're very powerful machine so when I first started when I was in this search to try to find these computers to be able to load all this RAM and so I could get rid of the slave computers they were the first company that I kind of researched and up with the computer there where I could load more than you know 128 gigs of ram into him I could load up to like I said up to 2 terabytes at a price the RAM ended up costing three times more than the computer did but I was able to do it and what that allowed me to do now was to have one computer with all of my tracks into it all loaded into Ram all ready to go at a moment's notice therefore what happened was I was able to get rid of all the slave computers and now I just have one computer and it has everything loaded into it that I need to have loaded into it so basically what that allowing me to do now was to take this whole entire template that used to be spread out across a bunch of different computers and I was able to load them in to my sequence with an amusing which is Cubase and I was able to have all of these tracks loaded internally into the system so now I have my whole entire template loaded into my system and it's all ready to go kind of in a moment's notice the other thing that that allowed me to do that I never was able to do before it was I was allowed to be able to treat each one of these tracks as a separate track so instead of grouping all of these tracks into a high string track or to a violin bus and have all my shorts and my lungs and everything going into a bus now I have complete control and if I wanted to put a huge reverb on my high string harmonics to give it a very dreamy sound I could just do that only on the high string harmonics now and I it's not going to affect my violin Long's it's not going to affect any of my shorts it's just gonna affect literally that one high string harmonic that violin harmonic track so it gives me a ton of flexibility when it comes to manipulation of different sounds you know I'm looking here oh you know I have a children's choir legato I want to put them into a giant Cathedral but then I have some men short look you know choir that I want to have very little reverb on them because I want them to really you know punch and have them be present in the mix it allows me to use different EQ zone things I could never do that before when I was running slave computers because I would need so many inputs if I wanted to do that I would need up you know four or five hundred input systems try to get the separation and all those tracks so by being internal like that it starting to give me a lot of flexibility to be able to manipulate the different tracks and with film scoring where we are now with film scoring the the orchestra there's there's obviously some projects that I do where it's just very organic and a very orchestral sound but where we are today with movies and with films and with shows and video games the orchestra has just become you know one color in a score it's not the color of a score it's it's it's I almost look at the orchestra as just another instrument in the soundtrack even if it is 90 instruments I still think of it as kind of one tool to use when I'm when I'm creating a score and that tool now can be manipulated in a lot of different ways because I'm also of the mindset where I don't throw on my samples at the end of a project it's not like I you know get all my samples you know I take it I don't just take my mock-up and replace it and just get rid of it if the mock-up is good and I really enjoy the way that it sounds and it has a specific color to it I will keep it in the recording and use it with the live stuff I think there's a there's a I think it's important to the the sample development has has gotten so good with the recordings and with and I can bring in a lot of directors to attest to that - I mean there's a lot of directors that fall in love with the way the sample sound it's a it's it's becoming a sound just like the sound of the orchestra just like the sound of you know analog sense or you know digital sense just it's it's becoming another colour and that's why the mock-up becomes extremely important and that's why you have to take such good care of you know the template and how we control it and use it so I really do like having a huge tempo like this and I do love the fact that it's all internal because of the time that it saves the other great thing that I like to do though and this is there's this is the other philosophy of it the other so that's that's kind of one one way to think of the template is you have every single instrument in your template it's all there ready to go and I love it I mean it's always I talk about speed and I talk about how important it is to be you know quick and to be able to gain back as much as that time as you can because like I said we have a certain amount of time to write a film score and as an example I make it up really quickly right that can frame this you know this is a this is an example this isn't the score that I wrote for Maze Runner but you can see how how much musics required to write a film score I mean it's a it's a giant chunk of music I mean if you took you know a symphony and you compared it to it you know it in mighty it's probably shorter than this I mean it's just a huge amount of music this score had to be written and you know for maybe four three months you know it's just a giant amount of music so in order to accomplish that amount of music you have a lot of people that are helping you and you know as far as orchestrators and conductor and you know there's a lot of support staff but you need to be able to have the organization in order to accomplish something in that amount of time so when you really when you put it on paper and you see how much music it is it really is you know staggering how much of that has to be done there we're in a real short amount of time so gaining that speed I'll keep talking about it over and over and over again like a broken record but you need to be able to produce a lot of music in a quick fashion and have it be decent so having everything kind of in one template is really important the one problem and then this is a different philosophy so I do like having that on my fingertips though the problem with a big template that I would always run into is that when it came to inspiration when you have a big temple like that it's really easy to go oh I'm just gonna click on my long strings and start you know playing something and you would come up with something and you're kind of there oh great you know you get it and then I would just you know click on another instrument you know start playing and it's oh you know that's great there and then I start building but it's really quick it's really easy just to kind of go to some track in your template and just start playing something until you get inspired against picture and go that route and some people say oh well you know that's that's great that you can do that but the thing that I found about it though is it it forced me in a weird way I wouldn't think through what I wanted to do when I look at a playing template and I look at picture it forces me to go well what before I even put my hands on the keyboard I can visually look at the picture and go what am I gonna do here and then I would I would have to think about what instrument I would go to and start writing with but I would think about it in my head first I would make a conscious decision of what I was going for and what I wanted to do sequencers are great now because they allow us to be able to kind of have a big huge template but also have the same concept of not seeing anything you know it's a bit still this is a blank page to me right now I'm not influenced by looking at a certain patch that I like the way it plays or feels and if it forces me to make some conscious decisions on where I want to start my cue you know with Cubase it's nice because they have this search system so if I'm sitting here and I'm looking at you know picture here and I go okay you know I'm in the middle of a you know action sequence and I'm inspired by this frame or something I can go oh you know like I hear strings here you know and I can type in you know strings so I can type in you know violins so let's say okay great you know this section right here I hear you know it could be something aggressive so much open up my met you know you know metropolis strings low lows picados and so now I can start building my template without looking at 600 tracks as I'm as I'm moving along so even though my whole templates there it's still ready to go and then I say okay cool I got my low strings and then I'm gonna start building my ensemble then I'm gonna look at some options here say okay cool let's do you know the horn met nine staccato and then I started slowly building my ensemble as I would on a piece of manuscript er if I was sitting at a piano and I always have a piano loaded because that's the place kind of I always go to to start sketching things out but I have this giant monstrous template even though it doesn't look like there's anything loaded right here but if I showed every single one of my tracks again we're back to the 600 800 tracks whatever it was it keeps growing as we keep going talking here but it but this allows me to control the size of that ensemble so I literally can just keep you know building okay here's my flute Logano's and I don't have to and I can kind of I'm making conscious decisions of how I want the cue to sound in my head before I'm actually just scrolling up and down through things picking random instruments and dragging regions up and down I'm thinking more like a composer and less as a programmer when I'm in the writing when I'm in the initial writing phase but as I go through the writing phase and the piece starts to come to life the fantastic thing about this concept is now I can go into like an Orchestrator phase and I can start opening up you know the template and it's full you know glory here and okay let's say here's my you know my flutes and let's say I had like a bunch of regions here with different information and now I can say okay well here's my flutes and I want okay I want you know two flutes on this line so I'll drag them down I use a lot of the orchestral tools predominantly for my orchestral stuff the greatest thing about their stuff is you're able they've done such a great job with the with capsule and and with the articulations and they've taken you know a lot of time and effort making sure it's balanced recorded in the right spots all the CC information is fluent through all the different instruments I mean you know CC one controls the same data as it does in all the instruments so if I moved flute one down to the oboe one it's gonna translate exactly on the balance is going to be right and so when you get into that orchestration phase now and as I start opening on more of these tracks and I start to really drill down into building the track and like for instance if I have a you know a melody line here in the flutes that I wanted to double with the horns you know I want to double the flutes with nine horns if I drag them down like that it's it's gonna play and I might have to come in here and adjust some levels but you know it's really nice to be able to kind of have that big template mentality but at the same time to also feel like you're starting with a blank page and forcing yourself to think like a composer of you know 30 40 years ago when you sat in a piano was a paper in pencil at least for me I mean I always it was really pretty easy for me to kind of get into a phase of writing where it just became so mundane like having this giant template and I would get to this point where I wouldn't I wouldn't think about what I was writing and I was just trying to cruise along as fast as I could and I kind of got away from from the inspiration of why I got into this in the first place but I but you know you have to you really do have to be conscious though of how fast you're moving and how and how you know how many minutes of music you're getting done a day it's just it's just on an unavoidable part of the business we just we have to be conscious of that timeline the other great thing now with Cubase I can mean you know after I get all my let's say I build my tracks I can kind of go into this phase now where I can you know go up to these they have these I can't remember what they call them I think they're called operators or something where I can say okay I just want to see tracks just with data and now it shrinks down everything and I can just see now the tracks that just have regions on them so again it allows me to kind of go from you know big huge template to a very concise template and workflow and and that's kind of the you know where we've ended up you know with with the sequencer and with the template and and again we're just we're literally just talking about just the orchestral side of it right now but it's the same thing holds true with with all the you know the hybrid elements you know whether it's you know electric percussion which is up here and then I have and I and I organize everything I think it's important the color coding and the organization of all these tracks just starts to become really important too because you know we're dealing with 600 tracks you know and so when they're colored all a certain way if I have a bunch of different tracks if I have a bunch of different tracks open it allows me to kind of quickly scroll up and down and you know see where time do I know I automatically know you know all the brown tracks are some sort of family of strings where the yellow tracks or some family of brass so this just allows me to you know quickly the organization of the sequence also becomes extremely important because there's a whole nother side to the writing process after we're done writing the cue after the cues getting you know it gets approved by the producers in the studio now I got to print the cue and when you're have to print a cue that has I don't know 150 to 200 different elements in it you need to know what you're printing so when you give it to the mixer he's not spending his whole day organizing the track so he can mix it again like I said I don't throw away the mock-up I give it to my mixer he takes these 150 tracks and he takes the 100 tracks he has from the orchestra and then he takes you know the other couple tracks that he may have from some pre-recorded with a guitar player a specialist a soloist whatever it may be and he's kind of mix all that stuff so the organization of that set the labeling of it it all has to be very thought through and there has to be kind of a system in place for this organization so you know when we have all these tracks you know they're all labeled there's a labeling scheme to them the articulation is labeled the library is labeled let's say you know and this this happens a lot to you you never think about this when you're writing but there's been time like you know Maze Runner is a great example Maze Runner was a trilogy there's three films the director said oh you know what was that queue that she used and you know I love the queue that she won m5 and Maze Runner one I want to I want to reuse that I want to resurrect it for this one scene and and you know the third major installment to death cure and I say okay cool and I open up that sequence if that sequence is a mess if I try to resurrect that queue because let's face it that movie was done in 2009 Ramona the 15 or something we're 2018 right now my computer's changed my sample libraries have changed my you know my template has completely radically changed my studio has changed but I stopped to resurrect this queue from 15 or from you know three four years ago if my labeling system isn't correct I have no idea what streams that was using I have no idea what reverb out is using I have no idea what sent that Pat you know if I just label the cyntha pad I don't know what library that was from and how the director is going I want that cue again and you know but we have to manipulate the cue it's like we can just grab the old stems from the old queue and throw them in there I want to be able to open that sequence look at everything even if all the instruments don't load I want to be able to know what library was what articulation it was what the name of the pad was you know and and that becomes extremely important when it comes to writing music for media there's this recall that you need to be able to you know get to it close as possible as you possibly can sometimes you aren't able to get every single you know aspect of the you know whether it's you have some crazy automation owners that you know you might lose something but you need to be able to have a system in place that allows you to recall as much as you it's something that you need to think about when I first started off with all this stuff I would just kind of write in a sequence and then over time I found myself in these situations where I needed to recall an old cue or you know I started off and you know or you're doing you know a bunch of different versions of the queue and if you don't have organization it's quickly gonna start to unravel on you so I'm when it comes to the organization of the template to not just the concept of it but when it comes to the organization that labeling how you're busting things you know different folder structures you know and my thing I have you know I all have a the main folder called brass and then within that folder I have different libraries nested in it metropolis one breast metropolis two breast and then in these library in these folders I have the articulations for that library so it's very I organize everything of mine based on sample libraries so if a sample library comes out I don't just lay I don't still put all the horns in the horn folder I actually drill down even further than that I do it and because everything is so organized by sample libraries it kind of looked like when I noted when I go to Metropolis one brass I know that there's a CERN control structure with capsule for instance that CC one controls this you know you know CC eleven controls this and orchestral tool stuff but if I want to use a patch from Spitfire for instance I know if I drag that metropolis one brass section down and do a Spitfire library I know that I'm gonna have to manipulate it a little bit because they have a different set of articulation so by organizing everything by sample library as well within the template it immediately lets me know how much work it's gonna take in order for me to translate that line from the metropolis stuff into for instance a Spitfire library so I like to organize because all these libraries have their own strengths so I like to I like to organize my stuff in that type of structure where it's it's really dependent on the on the sample library as well so again all this stuff has been tried and tested throughout the last you know 15 16 years for me so it's been a kind of you know I've tested it a lot and there's no really one way to do it I mean this way works really well for me but for another composer maybe they just don't like having a template all template at all some guys even have more elaborate setups than this I always feel like I never stopped working my template it's like and I always say to people the sequencer is my musical instrument this is what I play people I have friends who play in bands and they're always like oh you should you know come and play with us one night and I'm always like if you have a sequencer there I'll be more than happy to be there and play with you guys but but this is my instrument now over some people it's piano some people it's a violin for me it's it's the sequencer and I never really stopped trying to figure out ways that I can manipulate it to you know help me get through things as quick as I can with scoring because it's the way that I write film music it's the way that I'm inspired by things it truly is the center of my universe when it comes to writing music for film and TV

Channel: Orchestral Tools

Views: 7,765

Rating: 4.9386973 out of 5

Keywords: Orchestral tools, Composer, The topic Interview, Film composer, Composing, Video game composer, Sound design, Orchestration, Score, Scoring, Cubase, Logic, Protools, Digital performer, Sampler, Sampling, Virtual instruments, Talk, Tutorial, Workshop, john peasano, template, hp z series

Id: oaOph1Pp_Xw

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019