(Dylan at Ginsburg’s typewriter)
A few days ago I got an email confirming that something I suggested to someone a few months ago had resulted in a cool thing. Nothing scandalous, but it made a fun story.
Something. Someone. Thing. Nothing. No, this is not an exercise in bad (i.e., purposely vague) writing. Please read on.
So I thought -why not blog about it? I asked the source of the email and they said, “No! Under no circumstances! You can’t write about it!” As I value my relationship with this person, I agreed. So I can’t tell you who or what or when or anything.
“You can’t write.” Not the first time I’ve heard that.
Right about now if you, the reader, are anything like me, or anything like anybody else, you’re getting irritated. Tell me! Come on, just a hint. Promise, I won’t tell anyone. (Sure you won’t.) But my word is good. I ain’t tellin.
Here’s the thing. You’re not the only one feeling frustrated here. There’s nothing quite like being a writer and stumbling on a good story, only to have someone tell you you can’t tell it. It’s almost physically painful.
You Can’t Write About Me is the title of my first novel. It begins with a guy who’s writing a memoir and calls up an old girlfriend. She’s happy to hear from him until she finds out what he’s doing. She commands, “You can’t write about me,” and hangs up.
He sits there skewered on the horns of a terrible dilemma. Yeah, when they were together it was her life, and she deserves her privacy. But that time was also a piece of his life, and he deserves to write about it. Being a fictional writer, with no lawyers or burly husbands or actual propriety to worry about, he writes about her. Then he writes about other people who don’t want him to. Before you know it he’s wishing he hadn’t. (No spoilers, but suffice it to say he has more than his guilt and a pissed off ex after him.)
Janet Malcolm of the New Yorker once wrote, “Writers are vampires.” She was talking about Joe McGinniss’s book about Jeffery MacDonald, the “green beret killer,” how the writer had befriended the killer, then betrayed him by writing a scathing (and bestselling) expose of him.
We’re all vampires, all of us writers. I’m not proud of it, but I’ll admit to honing my long incisors before venturing out in public. Never know when you’ll get hungry.
Nobody’s safe. An old, old friend got in touch after 40 years. It was great to talk to him. It was great seeing the PBS piece he sent celebrating a long illustrious career fighting injustice. But by the time I was done watching I’d ripped off his beard, hair and high school sport and grafted them onto a character in my latest book.
Nobody who eats in the same restaurant with me is safe. Don’t talk too loud or I’ll mine you for dialog. And don’t even think of fighting. I love that stuff! Your hipster fedora, your girlfriend’s vocal creak, the exact microbrew you’re right now quaffing are all slotted away awaiting reincarnation in a scene I’ll write.
I spent a long time working on a memoir about my father and me and the 1960s. My deepest motivation was a desire to tell the truth. I’d never had the courage to tell my father the truth when he was alive, nor he the courage to tell me his. All the members of my family, including me, had our lips somehow magically sealed so that we could never tell each other what we wanted, what we felt. We all shoved everything that mattered into a great closet filled with clattering skeletons, whispered desires and unspoken sorrows.
I found that telling my truth in a memoir was much harder than I thought it would be. There were living people whose secrets I could not betray. And there were things even the dead did not want revealed. Hardest was finding a way to craft my truth into words that someone would want to read. My biggest problem was that I was too close to the material. I couldn’t achieve the essential quality of narrative distance. And without it I couldn’t tell what was good story, and what was just stuff that carried a potent emotion charge for me, but would just bore a reader. After seven drafts, and seven years –like something in a fairy tale – I let it rest.
And started writing fiction. I didn’t do it because I’d always dreamed of being a novelist. On the contrary, I consider novelists an impoverished, whiny, catty, miserable lot, somewhere in the nether ranks of society between musicians and psychokillers.
It was not ambition that brought me to fiction, but the solution to the problem of “You can’t write about me.” No, I can’t write about you, but I can write about my fictional character Ray, and everyone he knows.
Writing fiction also solved the thorny problem of getting the right narrative distance. I was surprised to discover that my made up stories (which the reader might suspect had quite a bit of real life woven in) were actually truer than my memoir. Yes, the “facts” were made up. But the emotional truth was there. Working at the canvas of a novel I found it easy to step back, see what my brushstrokes had evoked, see the whole, because it was not my life. Not my life, but my truth.
So I’m very sorry, for you, and for me, that I can’t tell you this neat story I heard this week. But if you hang around my work, I will tell it in one form or another. I promise.
My father’s last book is about to be published:
FINAL BOOK OF CHURCHILL TRILOGY COMING THIS FALL
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer – 4 days ago NEW YORK (AP) —
The third and final volume of the late William Manchester’s beloved series on Winston Churchill is coming out this fall, nearly 25 years since the previous book. In November, Little, Brown and Company will publish “The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965.” The new work was started by Manchester and completed by Paul Reid, a former writer for Cox Newspapers. Manchester, who began the Churchill series in the 1980s, was in poor health during his latter years and asked Reid to take over the project. Little, Brown spokeswoman Nicole Dewey said Sunday that the first two biographies had sold hundreds of thousands of copies and that the publisher still receives frequent inquiries about the third book. Manchester died in 2004 at age 82. Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Coincident with this news I have just launched a new website: http://johnkmanchester.com/
It’s devoted to my father’s work and my own, including fragments of one tie that still binds us, 8 years after his death: my memoir, Escaping the Giant. It contains rare family photos, samples of my music, my father’s biliography and links, plus a hand picked page of 60s Counterculture resources.
Please stop by, comment if you want, and if you like the site, like it on Facebook! (Even though I think Facebook is the work of the devil.)
NOTE: Due to time constraints, in the future I will only be posting here on the topic of production music. I will still blog on all kinds of subjects, at: http://open.salon.com/blog/luminousmuse
In fact, I’ve been doing so for the last few months. So if you’ve been following me here, that’s now my place, along with johnkmanchester.com.
Thanks for reading here!
In researching his alternate history of JFK’s assassination, 11/22/63, Stephen King did his homework – reading “a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am.” In researching his non-fiction work on the same subject, Death of a President, my father conducted over 1000 interviews, many made possible by Jackie Kennedy’s approval of the project. The only person who refused to talk to him was Oswald’s widow, Marina. My father told me that she sued him for 10 million dollars – a lot of scratch back in the 60s.
My father and King came to the same conclusion: that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed Kennedy in Dallas. It’s an unpopular conclusion. A majority of Americans believe otherwise. My father sympathized with people’s need to pin this monumental historic event on something greater than a lone and little man. King mentions my father saying this, but I think it’s best in his own words:
Those who desperately want to believe that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy have my sympathy. I share their yearning. To employ what may seem an odd metaphor, there is an esthetic principle here. If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime — the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern state — you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals.
But if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.
A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one. (New York Times, February 5, 1992)
So where do I stand on the assassination? Truth is, I’ve never paid it much attention. Perhaps that’s because it’s too painful. It’s an event that came close to tearing my family apart. I haven’t studied the volumes of evidence, and supposed evidence supporting one theory or another. So I don’t have much grounds for an informed opinion.
And in venturing one, I’m sticking my neck out. For all the reasonable people who believe in conspiracy theories – and with that many believers, there must be some – there is a wide fringe that is less than reasonable. Their very obsession with the subject suggests that it might be a lot more about them personally than whatever happened in Dallas so long ago. Some of them are plain nuts, and hounded my father to the day he died.
So I should just leave it there. And yet… There are a couple of things that cause me to tend to agree with my dad and Stephen King.
Back in the seventies I went to a party of fellow Wesleyan Alums at an apartment in Cambridge. It was the home of the AIB –Assassination Inquiry Bureau. A center for the kind of fevered discussion I witnessed that evening – Did you hear the latest on Jack Ruby? The Grassy Knoll? The missing bullet? Those little green men?
An acquaintance came up to me and said, “So, is it true, what Paul Krassner wrote?” Krassner had written a satirical (?) piece in his magazine, The Realist, about the parts my father supposedly left out of his account of the assassination. They include a scene of Lyndon Johnson on the plane back to Washington from Texas copulating with the wound in JFK’s neck.
I said, ‘No!” frankly, a little pissed off – on behalf of my dad. He never understood counterculture humor (not sure I understood this bit of it either) and had been very upset by Krassner’s piece.
Now the guy from Wesleyan gave me a long look. “Tell me the truth. Was your father in on it too?” Of the conspiracy. Which part? The CIA, Castro, the green men? The assumption being that he’d been bought off to whitewash the truth.
I mumbled something, then left the party. I thought of all the acid those guys at the AIB had imbibed back at Wesleyan – hey, I ran with the same crowd, took some of the same acid. It’s a drug which certainly lends itself to conspiracy theories. I thought about them sitting in that apartment, dreaming up stuff. I wondered if they’d even been to Dallas.
I was certain they hadn’t conducted 1000 interviews, some of them with people who would speak to no one else about the assassination. They hadn’t worked 15 hours a day for 2 ½ years studying that dark day in Texas.
I knew my father well enough to know that his honor would have made it impossible for him to be bought off as part of any conspiracy. Given the choice on this between trusting him and a bunch of acidheads, I’m going with him and Stephen King.
I was reading Stephen King’s latest – 11/2/63, an alternate history of JFK’s assassination – when I ran into my father. I was using the Kindle app on my iPad, so I can’t say which page it was on, only that it was location 1071, 8% through the book. My father would have been horrified that the book didn’t have page numbers, horrified by the whole concept of eBooks. He was lucky not to live to see them.
I have recounted in a previous post – Brain in a Jar– how when I was young my father loved to tell me gruesome tales, and how they combined with my seeing a real brain in a jar to produce the worst nightmare of my young life.
That dream should have put me off dark stories. It didn’t. Maybe I developed a fondness for them because they took up much of the rare time I got to spend with my busy father, who in the years before his fame worked by day and wrote by night. Or maybe I was just born with a taste for the macabre. At some point my appetite grew beyond my father’s stories. I found myself devouring Poe and the midnight side of Ray Bradbury.
Just as I reached adolescence my father became too busy to tell me stories. He was busy – 15 hours a days, 7 days a week – telling the very real dark story that King’s fictional work is based on– the assassination of Kennedy. He started by conducting 1000 interviews. By fall of 1965 he was writing, and reached a roadblock when it came to describing the moment the side of Kennedy’s head was blown off. It was particularly tough because he’d called Kennedy a friend.
By spooky coincidence, during those same weeks that he struggled I was meeting one of the hardest challenges of my young life – battling a psychopathic roommate at the boarding school my parents had shuffled me off to. Months after I escaped him I was still haunted by the memory of that terrible experience. My parents were too embroiled in my father’s epic battle with Jackie Kennedy to hear about my trouble. So I turned to the thing I’d learned at my father’s knee – storytelling. I wove my own dark story from my trails, and told my friends. They found it entertaining, and I found myself unburdened of some of the weight of an unpleasant memory.
In college someone turned me on to H. P. Lovecraft. Crappy and impenetrable as I find this overly-adjectived author today, discovering him felt like finding a long lost friend – those stories of my dad.
Out of college, on the road with my band, I picked up Ed Sanders’ The Family – the story of Charlie Manson and his skeleton crew. But other than that I forgot about dark tales.
It wasn’t until my mid twenties that the strange seed my father had planted fully bloomed –like that plant Aubrey, in The Little Shop of Horrors -into a literary obsession.
My obsession started on a dark and, yes, stormy night. I was driving home to my crummy apartment in Allston from a recording session I was producing at a studio far out in the sticks. My car broke down on a back road. For the sake of this story I’d like to report that I was picked up by a tall, dark stranger, who grinned at me, revealing feline incisors and a tongue thick with the blood of his previous victim.
But no, it was just my boss who picked me up – a short, eccentric fellow I knew all too well. He was kind enough to drop me at the train station in white bread Lincoln, about as unlikely a venue for a creepy tale as one can imagine.
Yet as I entered the train station I did experience a fright. My train was on the platform. I ran out only to watch it leave without me. I fretted -when was the next one? It was getting late.
Not for an hour and a half. Shit. I was hungry and tired. No longer afraid, but annoyed. And soon bored. I spied a rack of paperbacks. I spun it around. Nothing here for me.
Wait. A teenaged girl, standing, drenched in blood. Might be my kind of book. Carrie, by some guy I’d never heard of -Stephen King.
I stood at the rack, and started reading to see if it was worth the couple of bucks they were charging. By the time the next train came I was still reading, and almost missed it. I ran over, paid for the book, hopped on the train and finished reading before I got home.
It was King’s first book. I liked his second, Salem’s Lot, too. I proceeded to read every subsequent book of his, plus just about anything else I could get my hands on involving vampires, evil forces, ancient curses, you name it. Many of the books were terrible.
King was more or less reliable. He was (and still is) terribly prolific, and uneven. But for every turkey like Cujo (which King himself admits he wrote in a chemically-induced haze) there were always at least a couple of fine tales like The Stand and The Shining.
Back to my father. He was a very difficult man to buy presents for at Christmas. Writing consumed about 95% of his time and energy. He had all the pens and typewriter ribbons he needed.
When he wasn’t writing he was reading. He liked stuff by guys like John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain, and John LeCarre. I was always afraid to get him one of those, in case he already had the latest. I hate getting presents I already have, and assumed he felt the same way.
Socks, sweaters…one Christmas I had a new idea. What about those stories he’d once told me? I gave him King’s Misery. When I called him later he said, “I liked that book. He tells a good story.” Real praise coming from my father.
It became a yearly ritual. And the prolific King was obliging. We hit a snag the Christmas after my mother died, when I unthinkingly bought my father Bag of Bones, the tale of a man who’s recently lost his wife. My father scolded me, though only halfheartedly – his marriage had been no picnic, unless you’re talking about that one at Hanging Rock…
My father didn’t just like King’s writing. He identified with him, too. They both came from blue-collar families, both sold a lot of books while suffering the scorn of academic elites. The New York Review of Books trashed my father’s work, and he never made it into the New Yorker, except for a truly horrifying picture of him in old age that Richard Avedon took. King has come up in the world, not only making the New Yorker, but having the New York Times list 11/22/63 as one of the ten notable books of 2011.
They both loved the Red Sox, though my father would die the spring before their long awaited World Series triumph in 2004. King would go on to write a book about it.
King and my father had one other thing in common. They agreed on who killed John Kennedy.
I’ll leave that story for Part 2.
At a speaker’s lunch at the Casual Connect convention I sat down next to a fellow who shook my hand, “Charles Cox, Microsoft.” He saw my company name tag, “You guys do music? Great, I need some.” A moment later he had his phone out and was showing me his game. I thought – Things move fast these days, then the momentary fear – He expects me to get my phone out and write the music, right now! Perhaps he caught my look, for he laughed, “Oh, I’m not quite ready for music yet.” As I watched him play I had to suppress my impulse to wrestle his phone from him – the game looked like fun.
I’m usually a blabbermouth in situations like that lunch, but had the sense to hold my tongue as Charles and Shane Neville of Ninja Robot Dinosaur from Vancouver, another big time game veteran, began the most energetic and informative half hour of lunch conversation I’ve ever heard. I left knowing a lot more about everything from games to world finance.
A few months later he was ready for music. He had a piece of temp music he liked. I liked it too. It avoided the obvious choice of a techno track for a chilled out, slightly mysterious feel. I explained to him that at Manchester Music we don’t do Knock-offs. Not just because of the risk of getting hit with a breach of copyright lawsuit, but because after 30 years as a composer and publisher I think it’s plain wrong to take someone else’s work, change a few chords around and call it your own. We could achieve a similar style and feel without stealing.
I called Krishna Venkatesh, our electronic music wizard, a veteran of countless nationally broadcast commercials and of independent films. This was his first game, but I knew he could nail it.
Krishna’s first stab at the track caught the right vibe and energy level, but I thought it was a little too jazzy. Charles felt the same way. Truth is that for all its merits Jazz Fusion just doesn’t work well in games.
Krishna came up with a progression made of simple triads characterisitic of rock and pop rather than denser jazz chords. It worked.
Charles wanted to save space by using MP3’s. That posed a problem – MP3’s don’t loop without glitches. Krishna solved it by making loops that ramp up and down to silence – covering the glitch.
We were almost home. Except for the tweaks. I counted 18 emails back and forth between Charles and I before we got everything just so– which is par for the course.
Now if I can just get hold of a Windows Phone, I can play….
Find out more about Node.Hack at http://www.nodehackgame.com or follow Charles’ blog at http://www.charlesncox.com.
Until he died this week, I never paid much attention to Steve Jobs. I was vaguely aware of the dramatic ups and down in his career, and that he was some intense guy with a vision. I was too busy working on and playing with the products he created to notice to the man behind them.
With Steve gone that’s changed. I realize that starting with my first Mac in the late 80s, Apple products changed how I made music, and how I made money from it. How I got my information, and in turn communicated with the world – as with this blog. When I gave up composing for writing a memoir I bypassed paper and pen, typing directly into a Mac (granted, on Apple rival Bill Gates’ Word.) But by then it was second nature to use the same machine as I was writing on to jump to Google, Wikipedia or Gmail to extend my research into my past out into the world wide web.
The man to thank for all this is Steve Jobs, including the world wide web, the first version of which was developed on his NeXT machine in 1990.
The Times’ fine obituary is titled “Apple’s Visionary Re-defined Digital Age.” Steve was a true visionary. He made no bones about the roots of his vision. As the Times said, “When he graduated from high school in Cupertino in 1972, he said, ”the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there. After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.”
A lot of people will brush past that last fact with a moment’s discomfort, then forget it. LSD to this day is a fraught subject. People fear it, and with good reason. It’s microgram for microgram the most potent drug known to man. It’s driven men and women temporarily mad, and sometimes permanently so. As I could attest myself, it could give you experiences 1000 times scarier than the creepiest horror movie.
LSD also inspired positive visions. Most of those had an annoying habit of evaporating once the drug wore off. But some of the acid pioneers – because that’s what we saw ourselves as –brought something back to this mundane world from their trips to fantastic realms.
Though most of my handful of trips were quite nightmarish, the first hours of the first one I experienced nothing less than a Peak Experience. When I came down I saw the world differently. Among other things I saw that the path of science my parents and grandparents had set for me was not my way, that I must instead follow my heart and become a musician.
I was far from alone. Many went away on acid and returned to change their lives – to give up on parents’ visions of them as lawyers, dentists or corporate executives, to work with their hands under the sun, to create music and art. To try to change this world in some way to reflect that ideal world we’d briefly glimpsed.
Which meant to invent. That was the real promise we saw in LSD – that we could return from our trips and invent new lives for ourselves and others.
Acid revealed that everything, and everyone in the world was connected – something the Buddha had figured out a long time ago. Once we saw that in a chemically induced state, we wanted to see it in this sober, mundane world.
As a young pioneer I naturally looked to my elders for guidance. In 1968 I devoured Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip, in which Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters painted a bus and drove it around the country. They conducted Acid Tests, and the band that played them was the Grateful Dead, lead by Jerry Garcia, “Captain Trips.”
Soon I was on a painted bus of my own, traveling with the same festival as the Dead. I spent a memorable afternoon interviewing Garcia. The Dead invented a new kind of improvisational music, in which form dissolved into the whims of the moment. It was an experiment, one which often failed. But when it succeeded it was revelatory.
The Jefferson Airplane were five very different people who espoused anarchy as a philosophy, who rarely could agree on anything. Yet employing copious quantities of the solvent LSD over a four month period they did come together to create a psychedelic masterpiece – After Bathing At Baxters. It was marked by a dissolving of the lines that had previously existed between classical, jazz, folk and rock music.
Mike Bloomfield of the Butterfield Blues Band did the same thing – he took acid and listened to ragas all night, then made “East-West,” one of the abiding works of the time.
And of course there were the Beatles from Revolver to the White Album.
Acid had given me the courage to follow my bliss and become a musician. My psychedelic musical heroes gave me the notion of combining rock and classical music, from which I forged a successful style.
The inventers weren’t just musicians. Stewart Brand, the Prankster who ran the Trips Festivals, created the Whole Earth Catalogue, with that famous picture from outer space of our planet as one. He and other acidheads created the ecology movement, and the notion of sustainable technologies. Andrew Weil, a cohort of Tim Leary’s Harvard, was behind the movement towards holistic approaches to medicine. Ram Dass – who as Richard Alpert was thrown out of Harvard for acid antics –wrote Be Here Now, a spiritual book which for many broke down the old barriers between Religions, opening for them new spiritual paths.
But with his death it’s obvious that the greatest inventor of us trippers was Steve Jobs. What does his enormous legacy have to do with LSD? Maybe nothing. Acid has an insidious way of convincing its users of all kinds of profound truths, none of which can really be verified, because they come in the form of strong feelings, intuitions, instincts.
So maybe Steve was just a genius who would have done what he did regardless of LSD. Maybe, like so many, the drug grabbed credit for what was really his doing.
Except….the world we now live in, which Steve Jobs largely was responsible for creating, and which young people take for granted, is an old acidhead’s dream.
Political tyranny detoothed by the internet and smartphones. People exchanging information instantly around the world, for better and worse.. Artists drawing, composers composing, dreamers making their dreams real, all at the touch of a mouse.
Whether it was hallucination, or the grace of the Buddha’s vision, we saw everything as connected. So did Steve.
And he made those connections happen in the real world.
RIP.
DIY is all the rage in music production these days. Which explains the success of everything from Garage Band to phenomena like Pamplamouse. And who doesn’t want to have their own recording studio/digital worksatation to play with? Especially if it costs next to nothing, or comes free with your Mac.
We’ve all seen the downsides to do it yourself culture: buying a piece of furniture you have to spend three days putting together; software minus manuals which lands you on hold for hours trying to get help from some poor soul in a far away country.
There’s another downside to DIY that is not obvious to consumers, but is clear to music professionals. Music creation, which was once the responsibility of teams of specialists, is now handled by a single person. Imagine the medical profession if all specialists disappeared and all you had was GPs. That wouldn’t give you the best feeling going in for open heart surgery.
Before the 1980s, a single song going on a record would require many of the following people:
1. Lyricist.
2. Composer.
3. Arranger.
4. Producer.
5. Recording Engineer.
6. Assistant engineer(s)
7. Mastering Engineer.
8. Conductor
9. Musician Contractor
10. Musicians – anything from a band of four to a hundred piece orchestra.
Every one of these people spent years honing their craft before they got to do their job professionally. So every 3 minute 20 second song had a minimum of 30, and as many as 300 hours of cumulative experience behind it.
Today we expect one kid with a computer workstation to compose, arrange, orchestrate, perform, produce, engineer and master every piece of music he makes. Oh yeah – and market himself too. Whether he’s been at it 5, or 20 years, he’s still got a lot less to offer than that team in the old days. A majority of the tracks on TV, in Video Games and in music libraries are made just this way.
Not only that, but in fields like Video Games mid-size companies have a single composer on staff who’s expected to produce any style of music from Romantic period classical to Reggae.
Barring the one-in-a-thousand renaissance man – Prince, or Stevie Wonder – there’s just no way the product of that one guy can possibly be as good as the results of all that skill.
At Manchester Music we have found ourselves moving steadily towards the old way of production: using a team of experts.
I composed most of the first ten CDs in the library myself. But hired musicians to play them, and an engineer and mastering person to finish them.
I tried my hand at new styles like Hip Hop. Though it was fun, I soon discovered that my 60s musical sensibility was not ideal for that genre. I found guys who could do it much better, and easier too.
Our new Custom Music service is based on a specific model: the NYC music house. We have a group of composers, each of whom has years of experience perfecting the specific genres they love. If rock’s their thing, they’ve played thousands of gigs finding out the keys to what makes people dance. If it’s electronica, they’ve spent years working late into the night fiddling with knobs and dials. And it’s our job to get them work so they can do what they do best: make music.
All of them also have spent years learning the skills required to deal successfully with clients on deadlines:
1. Knowing how to talk music with non-musicians,
2. Having the patience to see a project through seemingly endless tweeks to the very end, and without losing their cool.
3. The ability to write a piece in a day or less, or make a whole hour of music under a brutal deadline, and still make it good.
I don’t mean to imply that there’s no upside to the new music technology. Our composers do use workstations, stocked with great sounds from around the world. But we can also hire first call NY session players, full orchestras, or other composers to help them arrange and do styles outside of their groove. And our tracks are mixed and mastered by our Golden Ears engineer Simon Smart, who cut his teeth at Abbey Road Studios in London.
It’s telling that the one area of instrumental music where they still employ a team of experts is film scoring. Take a listen next time you go to the movies. The scores all sound great.
