Scoring Star Trek: Discovery with Jeff Russo

hi I'm Jeff Russo and I write music for lots of different things television film video games many different things I think today we're going to look at stuff that I'm doing for Star Trek [Music] [Music] [Music] it's interesting so originally you know we were talking about how a lot of times you need original material that doesn't really exist anywhere so I had some sound ideas in my head that I thought would sound very cool and when I first started writing and I first went to start writing this I didn't really have these things available to me there were only in my head so how was I going to create that so I started with some pads and stuff that I could find that I could manipulate into into what I thought I was thinking of but in the end I realized what I really needed to do was I really needed to get in the studio with an orchestra and make some some custom sounds one of the things I thought about when when wanting to start this first queue for this episode of discovery was that it needed to be something very unique for the show because it was going to be the very first thing that anybody had heard from Star Trek in a decade especially because we were opening you know close-up on the eye of a Klingon which you don't know until we pull back and you see that it's the face of this Klingon so I thought it was sort of important so having something that was just the sound of our show start the entire thing out was really important to me I thought I don't have any of that material I don't really have anything that is specific like I there's many sample libraries there's all this stuff that has stuff that is out there and it sounds really cool and is really interesting but I needed to I needed to create I think some sounds just for track so I went into the I went into the studio with a smaller orchestra and started making some some sounds and and one of those things was sort of inspired by the sound of track and this sort of very sort of uniquely Airy string sounds and a lot of that may have been also inspired by some of the the spud the Spitfire stuff in tundra there's this one patch it's called ricochet that I play a lot [Music] that's so cool that that is the that's such an interesting sound and such an interesting thing for an evocative I should say it's very evocative but a lot of times it's it's played in a in a minor key and if it's minor and I need to write something in major I can't really use that so I needed to figure out how to do something that was kind of in the same world I ended up rework a straighting that kind of a thing and ended up with something like this so to me that had obviously a bit more of the Star Trek sound there was there's a pad in there and there is you know some high trims and some high flutes and all mixed together in this one instrument that I created that was sort of the the jumping-off point for this particular this particular cue which starts out by playing this part [Music] so one of the things we talked about when I when I first spotted the the show with the producers was to start it out feeling whimsical and wondrous and then to turn to a darker feeling once we realize what we're looking at which is this face of a Klingon who is basically saying we want to take over the universe that's how that that's how that all really started out was with sort of one idea one sort of sound and one vision of what the sound of the beginning could be and then I sort of had to work out from there it was really a question of what was I going to use to to - melodically embody the Klingons in this particular queue and I sort of went back and forth with different solo instruments woodwinds and and stuck and III landed I landed on Duke and that really that really made it sort of happened and the idea was like there are no real de Duke samples that sound so low - Duke samples that sound very convincing like you can get there you know there there are a couple of there are a couple of ones this one this one in particular [Music] that sample sounds pretty good but crisp left who is the local sort of ethnic flute guru I should say he came in and played something that was just unbelievable and I had written I had written this and you can you can hear what I'm you can hear what I'd written by [Music] that was that was the next line to be written before I really started to write the rest of the queue um that was that was the next piece of the puzzle for me and I sort of wrote it knowing that it was going to get a little more effective it was going to get a little more there's gonna be some more flourishes like I can play the finished one which then you can hear the difference so you [Music] can sort of hear it you can sort of hear the difference here [Music] you know there's a little more there's a little more person in it you know and it's difficult to put the person in it when you're when you're dealing with samples and sometimes you're stuck with dealing with samples and you do the best that you can and it sounded fine to me and then Chris started playing and I was like okay that's this is really great but so then the next thing on top of that was going to be all of the sort of more percussion and more sound design the aspect of this beginning part so as I as I started building this cue it started with this and then good to do and then the next thing was gonna be a lot of percussion stuff so I use a lot of the hans zimmer percussion library the spitfire percussion library and the spitfire percussion for timpz so what ended up where we ended up going with that [Music] so then you can feel here [Music] you'll hear all of this great percussion stuff this is great these are the sir dues from from the hans zimmer library which are great and the low hits from the hans zimmer library great and then one of the other things I did was timpz and i started building a lot sorry i start building a lot with percussion i started out as a drummer so I sort of always build cues and pieces of music from a from a rhythmic standpoint rather than a strictly melodic standpoint I I have melodic ideas that I want to try to get down before I start building a rhythm template for for a cue but then I'll sort of put the melody aside and start thinking what the rhythmic structure of the cue is gonna be once I do that I'll go back and then rework the the melody to work with the with the percussion so what I did with this was I started working on the percussion aspect of it to see like how it was going to build now one of the other things I did the same way I built some orchestral instruments I also built a bunch of percussion instruments so I had me and three other percussionists go into a studio and we just put out all of these big drums and we started playing a bunch of patterns that I had pre-written out for us and then I created these loops one of the loops we loop it just keeps playing and I then I'm able to quickly build percussion things right so I can build this percussion thing I'll build percussion I'll build percussion loops and I use a lot of I tend to use a lot of filters on percussion to sort of make the percussion a little more evocative I'll build a photo I'll build a filter pass into it to build tension until it's finally wide open and then you'll see the whole the whole piece opens up I tend to do that a lot with with progression in Star Trek and and maybe everything maybe that's a something I do all the time and maybe I shouldn't do that it's much anymore and and that was sort of the next that was sort of the next stop on the on this particular queue was sort of trying to build what the percussion was gonna end up being like which then ended up being like this [Music] so I would I would build percussion parts that I'm playing around the loop to make it sound [Music] and that then I started building all of the other parts around it so one of the other things I needed to do was then start building what the sound design aspect of the whole thing was and a lot of that sound design comes from these things that I would just create from various synthesizers various patches and various different places and just sort of really really mess really mess with things until they were feeling they were feeling like really what I wanted it to feel like you know a lot of times I'll sit here and just you know turn knobs and all of a sudden be like oh that sounds cool you know and a lot of this time is spent before I actually sit down and write cues because there when you're chasing an episode of television there's not a lot of time to twist knobs and and try and figure out what things sound like you just don't have that kind of time I've got to turn around an episode of Star Trek in five days to turn around an entire episode to the orchestrator so we can go and record the episode with the with the orchestra so there's not a lot of time to do that so I had to do a lot of pre-work on the show and I've done the same with season two which is I spent about a month coming up with new sounds and new things that we're gonna hopefully be used at some point during the new season um you know the orchestra plays all the strings I do strings winds and brass with the orchestra and everything else percussion was recorded and then looped and used utilized in a way that would make it easier for me to do because recording percussion with the orchestra makes orchestra recordings a lot more difficult because it's a lot more trying to fix things and from a mix perspective it's it's also it becomes very cumbersome and we don't have a lot of time to mix you know a 65 piece Orchestra so we try to in order to make it work I created all these loopable patches that I could use to build on top of but I would say it's about 70% Orchestra 30% not Orchestra you know I use some orchestral non-live material like harp I don't record so I use a spitfire harp that sounds totally believable it sounds totally great and it's and I usually effect it and put delays on it and make it sound kind of cool not that it doesn't already sound kind of cool but to make it sound sort of more interesting and different than just a straight-up just person with a harp in his hand or her hand and I'd yeah I'd say about thirty percent is sort of like made sounds and or other libraries like I I tend to use the low the low Tundra and the high Tundra stuff layered into everything that that I do you know that there's that one low Tundra patch which is in this queue as well the the no rosin patch which literally you can't get that you can't get that sound unless you do what you guys did which was record an enormous Orchestra playing at Triple P you know just as quiet as possible and that sound is basically ungettable you know it's just unbelievable you know you can't really get that sound with 36 string players which is what I normally so I tend to use that a lot that was the next thing that I that I ended up putting into this queue as a matter of fact now that we're talking about that so once we're here I end up adding the low tundra strings [Music] ya see that that layer of the the low tundra strings really fills in a lot of the bottom of the of the queue in a way that I couldn't do with with just a 36 piece string 36 strings because there's you know a hundred string players or whatever playing that and so I tend to layer that into everything I also tend to use just the straight-up string ensemble patch and also will end up layering that as well because there's something that's very there's something very evocative about those string pushes that is are hard to get with with just you know again 36 string players that it's great to get them to play those high lines you know but really wanting to fill out the bottom that a lot of layering of the strings in samples really helps really helps and then here you can hear what that sounds like too [Music] yeah a lot of those string pushes really do make it make it very meaningfully evocative and dark I started adding some other other string parts like this the big low bass low string ensembles [Music] [Music] so at this point now that I have some some base for the whole the whole queue I started thinking about this next melodic part and a lot of that came from I think it was this line a lot of it came from I really had the idea to do it in horns which was [Music] so that was the idea from a melodic standpoint and I built that in the horn part [Music] so the real question at that point was how do I build all that into the entire thing and then there there was me wanting to build all of this more rhythmic stuff which I tend to do with with strings and I built that like so how does that all work I ended up just just experimenting with what with what amount of horns versus what amount of strings can really work and then how does all that that that that that that work with all of the percussion stuff and in the end it all sort of came to and it all sort of came together to be more like this the idea was to make it sort of you don't really know what's happening until this reveal where we see the Klingons for the first time [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and then he has this big line we come in peace and that was really how that whole thing gets built you know from that from the beginning to the end I try to take it sort of piece by piece always thinking about what the melody is going to do from from the beginning of the cue to the end of the cue and you know it's really about keeping that being the most important part but then turning that off building the other part of it and then seeing how they work together and if they don't work then I start stripping stuff away and sort of it's it's it's really like kind of experimenting the whole way through that's how I end up writing cues like this you know it's it's kind of like just feeling my way around in the dark until I until something comes out you know I spent I spent a lot more time on writing this cue like a minute and a half long queue now that has this much orchestration i if I if I spend more than three hours on it it's too much because I don't have time to do the rest of it I mean I've been you trying to do the rest of it so it's about two and a half to three hours to do something like this this one I took about a day and a half to write because it was the first queue that anybody was ever gonna see and I wanted to so I wrote and then I redid and then I went back and I was like maybe that Melody's not as good as I would like it to be Dada Dada hmm okay let me see what else I can do there so I took a little longer but normally it would be like three hours when you think of Jerry Goldsmith and you think of James Horner and Alexander courage and all of these unbelievable composers I I think I don't know how I stand next to those guys and not feel like I have absolutely no idea what the hell I'm doing and then I sort of have to just put that aside and write a melody and write a thing and see see what see what happens so there's that moment where it's just it's absolutely terrifying there's absolute terror sitting down to write the first cue and this was it this was the one this was the first cue that I wrote for the show other than the main title which I had already written I started by writing the main title before I ever saw what the whole episode was gonna be like and they asked me to do that because they they had put together this promo and they were like you know maybe you could start sketching a main title and what ended up happening was I had this idea melodically and I had this other idea of how to sort of take what was the original theme and sort of bookended at the end of the at the end of the the piece and they were very into that they were very much into into that idea like how to sort of tie the old into the new which I thought that was the the original idea was how how do we make this something that is very Trek and yet still have a modern take on on modern film scores and modern television scores so it was it was all very daunting it was all extremely daunting like just sitting there looking at Star Trek it says Star Trek and I go oh man I can't it's hard it's hard - it was hard to imagine and and not to mention I was a huge Star Trek fan growing up so was one of those it was one of those like if I could go back and tell my my 12 or 13 year old self what I'd be doing 30 years later I would say off that's what I could say yeah I think about are you kidding you know Jerry Goldsmith was a genius at writing for for brass which is why he basically created the Star Trek sound like once Alexander courage obviously wrote that you know wrote the wrote the incredible and I just have to do it right now because it's so incredible [Music] jerry goldsmith was a genius at that do I have any advice I always sort of look to the masters and and see what they would do you know how do they do it harmonically because it's very easy for for brass to muddy stuff up very easy if you put too much in the brass and not enough in the strings or vice versa you know balance and orchestration is is is really important I think that the most important thing is when you have a melody that needs to be played make sure that that's being supported you don't need a lot of stuff to support that so if there's a lot of brass playing it maybe don't play a lot in the woodwinds or don't play a lot in the strings and sort of try to thin stuff out because brass takes up so much room you know it's I think it's also more difficult to do in this kind of context because we as composers end up writing to the ability of the sample libraries right it's it's very easy to be like okay so I have this thing you know but that's one articulation and there's like a thousand different ones and they're not all they're not all available at all times so you know are we always thinking about okay I'm doing it this way but I'm gonna need to make a note to the orchestrator like no these these notes need to be tied and this notes needs to be slurred because you don't do that like when you're when an Orchestrator is looking at your MIDI they don't see like these notes are supposed to be tired or this note is supposed to be slurred or this isn't play this played as a dotted eighth note and this played as a sixteenth note and they doesn't always appear that way so that can make it more difficult I'm not the greatest programmer so I tend to go very fast and then have a phone call with my Orchestrator to say okay here this is this this is that this is that or I'll make notes inside the session like you know I'll open up the I'll open up the comments and I'll make you know okay so I measure 13 this is a tied note to this or this is supposed to be played as dotted eighth notes or this entire section should tie every third note which you just can't do and then in the end the mock-ups don't sound exactly the same as what what we end up recording because if I were to try to make the mock-up sound like that I would spend two days programming and I don't have time to do the programming for something like this you know on a film I have a lot more time so I spend a little more time trying to program I would say if anybody else has any true advice on how to write for horns they could call me and give me that advice because I think we all we all could we all could use a little of it but I think you know listening to some of the masters and just seeing how they tend to write four horns is really important and and brass is a big part of the Star Trek sound so I've had to do a lot of listening and a lot of trying to figure out what the horn should do you know a lot of triplet shorts with the with the trumpets you know and a lot of you know melodies played on French horns which is also is very heroic sounding and when I do that don't do that on the strings don't do them at the same time because they tend to get muddied up and I started there and then I'm realized okay this is muddying this up let's let's have the strings play all the rhythm buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh and then have the have the horns play the melody the process with something like this for instance so I built this cue it ends up sounding 80% of the way there in my in my ears like you know I could probably make it sound a little better but then what I do is it gets this session gets prepped I print it and send it to the producers for four notes and they hear this version of it Alex Kurtzman who is the producer main producer on the show he listens with an ear knowing where it's going to end up he has a lot of experience with you know mock-ups versus Orchestra and what happens to a piece once you once you go to the orchestra so he listens with with that in mind his notes are can it be a little bigger here can we get it to be a little more melodic here we needed to warm up here needs to be more emotional here or you know I'm this this really needs we're not hitting this moment enough can we hit this moment more he is very very broad creative notes he he is less I think less interested in the minutiae and more interested in in the general feel of what what we're doing am I getting the point across there have been times when he's like this is not really hitting it for me what can we do and I go I will send you another cue well you know other than that it goes to him he makes those notes it comes back we make the adjustments go to the and then I send these these mock-ups these sequences to the orc to my Orchestrator her name is Amy she's amazing and she takes all this MIDI and notes and whatever and then puts it all on paper and then we go and record it with the orchestra and you know there's a lot of prep time involved because it is somewhat of a hybrid score 70% Orchestra 30% electronic especially in terms of the percussion and we do a lot of short strings so we normally when we record the orchestra split it all up we record the strings and the winds in the morning and we record the brass in the afternoon that way I have mix control and if anything needs to be edited and fixed like a lot of times you know short strings are about 20 seconds late compared to the pre lays so that'll have to be fixed in in the mix process so we we tended to like to split everything up and not record everything at the same time because we have a lot more control over things we work in a cerebral environment like all we do all days think and use our brains it's not my it can't be mindless because you have to have an idea as to where something is going and where something has been and you have so many things you have to keep in mind and that's just the music writing that's not even any of the managerial or administrative stuff that you have to deal with in terms of making a score and getting it from the starting line to the finish line having having moments to to clear your mind is really important or else it'll all just be mush there have been days when I'm like let's just mush scrap it and go for a walk and come back and and try to write something else but it's that's a difficult I think that's one of the more difficult parts I think of our job in general is that we we tend to work alone you know and I come from being in a band so this this working alone in a room is relatively new to me you know and it's only in the last nine nine years or so that I've been doing this eight years or so and before that I was just in a band playing music with three other guys and we were we would bounce ideas off of each other and like always something was going on creatively and there's something very meaningful to that so it's a completely different thing which is why I like to have a team you know I have I work with an engineer I work I have an assistant and I work with an Orchestrator and and other and other people who who are a part of the creative process because you know without that you end up writing something in a bubble and sometimes it's good but sometimes you have no basis for any sort of comparison I need to be able to bounce ideas off of something for it to come back and go oh you know I'll have my engineers sit and listen to something and he may agree disagree like it or not like it but whatever it is his response might elicit a new response in me and that's the thing that I long for as its instead of sitting in a room by myself in the dark which I do a lot it's it's difficult so getting out and talking to people and getting people to to give you feedback I think is a really important part of what we do

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 52,527

Rating: 4.9271197 out of 5

Keywords: Spitfire Audio, Jeff Russo, Star trek, Soundtrack, Composer

Id: DCdri_p2WkY

Length: 34min 58sec (2098 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 02 2018