Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is a five octave extended marimba.

And what it means by extended is that a normal marimba might

stop somewhere up in here, but this one

goes down to the bottom.

I collect marimbas and all kinds of tuned percussion.

This is one of the few things in my collection

that was made this last decade.

Most of my collection starts at about 1903

and goes through the--

what I call the golden days of tuned percussion,

would be the '20s to the '40s.

And I was lucky enough to get a fantastic access

to some great old instruments.

But the thing about--

[SOUND OF THE MARIMBA PLAYING]

The thing about me and marimbas, as much as I love them,

I use them only as a tool to experiment with rhythms.

I'm not a marimba player, not by a long shot.

So--

[SOUND OF THE MARIMBA PLAYING]

So the point is, when I'm playing on a marimba,

I'm doing simple stuff because my background in percussion

is on five tone instruments from the Gamelan,

five tone instruments from West Africa.

So even when I'm playing a full marimba,

I tend to play it as if I was playing that balafon.

[SOUND OF THE MARIMBA PLAYING]

But I love these instruments.

This has always been one of my passions.

One of my-- one of these days, maybe I'll

even learn how to play it like a real instrument.

But it's what I bang on at 2 o'clock in the morning,

and I just love the ability to make noise.

And I do work out ideas that I'll use in scores.

[SOUND OF THE MARIMBA PLAYING]

And I'll just work out things, get ideas.

Obviously, none of my playing on a marimba

are going to end up likely in a score.

Other things, yes, perhaps, but these instruments

are much, much better played by the fantastic percussionists

that I frequently work with.

[SOUND OF THE MARIMBA PLAYING]

I just bang on them.

That's all I do.

I make noise.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

What do I start with when I'm writing?

Instrumentally, orchestrationally,

what am I starting with?

I may want to just be working in a broad overall sense

and just be working literally on a piano,

even though the piano won't stay in the score.

And it may be that the first idea I'm hearing in my head

is some short ostinato on marcato strings,

and I'm really going to start with that.

And it may be the opposite.

It may be I'm really starting with long gentle strings,

and I'm looking for a sample that

will allow me to create something that there's

nice, slow string sound that I'm looking for,

that doesn't have any attack and doesn't

have any sudden release.

So it just depends.

Moment on moment, what I'm feeling in my head

is the first thing I want to listen to,

and it could be anything from a prepared piano

to a synthesizer to orchestral sounds to just a raw piano.

By prepared piano, for those of you

who don't know what that means, that's

where you take the strings and you

put metal or wood or different things between the strings.

So they're going-- instead of da da da da da da da da da,

they're going thud, clang, cling, ting, dah, ding, tink,

bong, ping, ting, like that.

And now, I've got all these tiny little sounds,

and I could be using that along with the real percussion--

tom-toms and snare drums and bass drums,

and those type of things.

To convey energy and movement, however, it's

almost certainly you're going to want

to have some kind of energy going in your sound.

Now, obviously, there's a million ways to do that--

having an ostinado.

Having something that's building from the orchestra

is a way that's been used many times very effectively

in many, many scores.

But you can also do that purely synthetically,

and synthesizers are actually great for that, too,

because you can start to build a rhythm in a sound.

You can just have a sound and start to work--

[MAKING RHYTHM NOISES]

And it's not-- you're not playing.

You're just holding one note.

But you're changing your filters,

and your filters are actually giving you a rhythm.

And this is something I love doing

when I'm working with synths, it's finding a rhythm in just

the filter, something in the sound, and letting that-- oh,

now I've got this rhythm.

I didn't-- I like that, so now, I'm laying other instruments

on top of that thing that I started with,

only with one held note, but working a fader and writing

a bit of a filter in.

So there's no clear way to do it.

Percussion can be great, but may not be percussion.

Samples can be really useful.

I've frequently used-- because I love prepared pianos and piano

harmonics, just the sound of a piano that

was being struck with metal and ringing,

but I take all the attack off.

So I'm just playing, yoom.

It's like-- there's no attack, but if I

played the entire sample, you'd hear gaaang.

But I'm just letting you hear, zhoom, zhoom, zhoom, zhoom,

and--

because I don't want it to start too strong.

I want it to build.

And there's just a million ways to do energy,

and that's actually part of the fun of it as well.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Using different instruments, using outside the orchestra

instrumentation--

I think, for myself, that's where I started.

And my roots were in percussion instruments,

was percussion ensembles, was things

made of wood and things made of metal.

So I just dealt to my own roots, and in that case,

it was stuff like you see behind me here.

And I used to always carry a little wooden mallet

behind my ear, and I'd wander into hardware stores

all the time.

And the reason I had that mallet is I would see little measuring

cups or this or that or odd shaped

bowls, and I'd go bing, bing, and I'd just

walk through stores--

tang, tang, tang-- oh, I like this.

And that must've kind of been an odd sight

to see-- somebody walking through, picking things up

off your shelves and pinging them, and then

looking very pleased and putting it in the shopping cart.

But-- oh, my god, there was a place called California Surplus

here in Los Angeles, which is a surplus-- army surplus store.

And they had tons of great old shit.

I mean, they had old miner's pans, and I loved miner's pans.

I learned that I could take them home and put

the center of the miner's pan in the middle part of a brake drum

that has a hole and bang out the middle, and before you know it,

you're making all kinds of tones for these kind

of weird gong-like instruments.

I had an instrument built of beer cans.

I called it my Schlitz Celeste, and it actually--

I used to go around and pick up beer cans everywhere I went.

And I'd ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping

because you can't tune a beer can.

You can only luck upon a note.

And so I came--

I eventually built about an octave and a half of beer cans,

and that was great.

Measuring cups-- I had a rack of tuned measuring cups.

I love that kind of stuff.

It's hard to play live in a score,

because the other problem I realized

is that, when you start bringing nontraditional instruments

into a room where there's an orchestra,

you find yourself losing incredibly costly time

that nobody wants to do.

And I said, all right, this isn't working,

so there's only two ways to do it.

One is you either pre-record your weird instruments--

everybody's got a little room somewhere in their studio,

and you lay down your click, and you have your demo.

And so I started pre-recording my own percussion.

I would lay tracks down and bring those into the orchestra,

so they're already recorded on tape.

The other way, of course, as we all know,

is you make your samples.

You sample your instruments, and now, you can kind of

play them any way you want.

You can also tweak the pitch one way or another if you want

and have a lot of fun with that.

I still prefer laying down the stuff live,

but they both work in different ways.

I mean, you could do things with samples

that you could never do with a room full of live instruments

and vise versa.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The digital realm versus the orchestral realm--

I just see them as two hands on the same body.

There are things digitally you can

do that's great that you just can't do with real instruments,

and I frequently love that.

And there's things an orchestra can

do that you can't do digitally.

We all know what film scores in the '80s

tended to often sound like when they

did what sounded like a regular orchestral score

on synthesizers.

It's crap.

It doesn't hold up.

But there's many great things we can do with digital music

that an orchestra could never do.

There's tonalities.

There's rhythms.

There's effects.

There's feels for things that can't

be expressed in any other way.

So you just have to look at--

there's digital.

There's percussion.

There's voices.

There's orchestra.

These all offer their own opportunities

that nothing else can do like them, and some of them

are live.

Some of them are the opposite of live.

Some of them are really down to just all night

long tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, tweaking knobs.

But it's the same thing.

It's all towards the same end.

They're just different sonic fields.

And sometimes, they happen at the same time

and come together, and sometimes, they're

all one or all the other.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In terms of sample libraries, I use many different sample

libraries.

Obviously, when I'm making my demos,

I've got lots of orchestral sample libraries

that I combine for strings, for woodwinds, for brass.

It's always my hope that every single orchestral sample

disappears by the end.

Occasionally, there are a few samples

that I'll hold and maintain because I may need

a little bit of it in the mix.

And particularly those are pizzicato, because I'll go,

I need a pizzicato sound, and I just

don't have the players to give up

to have a live pizzicato that's full enough for me.

And in my mind, the samples that work best--

orchestral samples that work best

would be short strings and pizzicato.

So sometimes, I've got a very aggressive ostinato happening

on the bottom, and I'll go, it's just not quite enough celli--

or cellis and basses to get what I want, and I'll

mix a little bit of the short marcato strings or spiccato

or staccato-- because different libraries,

it's going to be-- but it's all essentially the same thing.

It's a sharp attack on a short sound.

And those are, in the end, the best sounding samples

in terms of an overall mix.

The worst are long strings.

They sound like shit--

I don't care who does it--

because there's no vibrato, and there's no variation.

And the thing that makes long strings and brass work so well

is their overtones and variations.

And with strings in particular, you've got bits of vibrato--

same with woodwinds-- and they're not consistent

vibratos.

And no sample really covers that.

You can get a sample of a certain note covering

a certain held--

OK, the vibrato's lovely.

But that's just a note.

And besides, you start getting in

that-- you're losing the richness of it.

And there's a great argument to be

made for who gives a shit, because in the concept

of the score and the sound and the noise,

the richness is not what matters.

I personally disagree with that.

I believe that real instruments give a richness, which

can't be reproduced, so my samples

are divided into the throwaways and the keepers.

The keepers are going to be percussion.

I don't want to play live percussion with big drums

and with all kinds of exotic drums.

They just take up a lot of time, and they

tend to sound really crappy in a full room

with an orchestra, where you've got these big overhead mics.

So to use percussion, you either have enough time and budget

to get great live recording in a smaller room, more contained,

with-- you mic it totally differently,

and then it can be great if you have the time.

And if you don't, I'll go with samples of sounds

that I have from my room that I really like.

I've recorded them really well.

I'm happy with them.

But overall, I stick with synthetics stay.

My percussion samples stay.

My weird ass-- obviously, my prepared piano stuff,

which I could not do live.

Even if I wanted to, I'd be recording it, and manipulating

the sound, and putting it back in.

The things that I hope to lose at least 90% of, if not 100%,

is the orchestral-- the woodwinds,

the brass, the strings.