How Hollywood Uses Guitar
Hey, guys, this is Josh. This week I had the opportunity to interview my good friend Charles Scott, head of the music department over at Bad Robot and all-around-brilliant guitarist. Charles dropped some knowledge about how he uses guitar to create movie and television soundscapes, and it’s pretty much a dream come true for music nerds and movie nerds alike.
It’s definitely a case where learning how the sausage gets made actually makes you enjoy the sausage even more, so let’s jump into the interview.
Can you introduce yourself?
I'm Charles Scott IV. I run the music department at Bad Robot here in Santa Monica, California. My job mostly relates to music for television and film on the projects that Bad Robot is working on. It may be handling music supervision for a TV series or a pilot. [It involves] both finding music [and composing]. We sometimes use existing recordings (we'll call them needle drops sometimes), and then often those may carry over into the soundtrack...And then the other side is more composing music and producing music, whether it's for a video game or a feature, maybe even working with an artist on original songs.
How does music affect the emotions, the feelings, the pace of a film?
It's always weird to mute the music track on something like a film or an episode of something that you think is working really well. [When] you mute the music, it’s just like putting the brakes on. Lots of people say that the best scores are ones that you don't even really notice, where it's not intentionally drawing your attention to it. If something important has happened between two characters, if someone has just said something, it's almost like [the soundtrack] can keep that thought in your mind long enough, until you get to the next thing that happens, you know? It can be a connective tissue. Like, in Return of the Jedi, Yoda is dying and there's so little dialogue that happens there. It's just that Yoda theme and that Luke theme.
The emotional side of that stuff is pretty obvious when it's working, having played in bands and [worked] on songs...A song is oftentimes about packing a whole bunch of stuff into this really short, concise thing. And obviously it's very rhythmic. You're trying to have a little beginning, middle and end [for the] story in three or four minutes. [Compared to that,] one piece of music in a score to the next could have a five minute long cue for a very slow or tense scene that maybe has one or two instruments that are just barely doing anything, but something like a chord change can be a momentous event in the middle of a cue, especially if you've established a mood. You’ll change chords four times in two bars in a pop song and there are score cues like that, but then there are also these things where it's like, “Okay, we're just doing this.” And there's some little ticking percussion thing, and then this other thing is slowly, slowly building over thirty-two bars...It's almost like zooming out on the timescale.
Can you explain the creative process for making music for film and TV?
I will try. One of the most fun things about my job here has been [having] proximity to some other really great film composers. J.J. [Abrams] has worked with Michael Giacchino on several films. I've seen John Williams on the Star Wars stuff. We worked most recently with Thomas Newman on our show Castle Rock. It seems like everyone on some level approaches it the same way. In the end they want to watch something and they want to react to it. Is there a tempo that this [scene] feels like to me? Do I see some action that implies a certain rhythm or a speed? Is this going to be a fast thing or a slow thing? Is this going to be a really minimal piece of music? You try to put some parameters on it from the beginning; you're hoping to narrow choices down as you go. So that's sort of the first [question] is like, “Where is there music?” You know, how much music do we have and then you often find that, “Oh, these three pieces [of music] that happen throughout...that's a theme.” A lot of people go to whatever instrument or whatever their pallet is so that they can quickly generate ideas.
[I like to] find a sound that [I] haven't heard or just the sound that's fun to play. I think, especially for composing, you have access to way too many sounds and way too little time to ever browse through them. But [you can] hit the shuffle button in Omnisphere to find a patch that you've never heard of before, and it's fun to stumble onto something new. Effects can be inspiring.
Josh here again. There were large chunks of this interview I wasn’t able to transition into words, where Charles jammed with his studio equipment and told some pretty epic stories through music. If you want to hear these jams for yourself, you can go back and watch the episode.
Huge shout out to Charles for guiding us into the soundscapes of film and TV! You’re the real MVP, bro.