Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg Curtis  My gawd, with all the time, money, and BS associated with getting farms of samples up and running on complex computer networks, why not hire some talented musicans to sit down for 3 hours and just play the damm parts? |
because not everyone likes to compose music this way- i score the vast majority of my films playing all the instruments myself, usually late at night, with the studio as my instrument- be it real instruments like guitars, basses, drums, percs, effects, or synthesizers (analog and digital), sometimes emulating strings. even when i do bring in real string players, i rarely if ever write music on notation paper- i teach them the parts! so the whole argument of use real musicians instead of computers really breaks down when you start to think of the synths as a real instrument.
here's a good example for you- i recently scored an oscar nominated film. they had a fairly good budget and i was able to hire a top tier, triple scale cellist (and good friend) to come and play a bunch of cello parts for me. i also own a beautiful mellotron (a custom one from mellotron.com with a bunch of the remastered tape loops thumbsup) which i had played the vast majority of the cello parts on, just as roughs. i did a whole day of tracking cello parts on many major cues for the film with my friend the cellist. we got beautiful results. of course, you know where this story goes- the filmmakers chose almost entirely mellotron cello parts for the film and we barely used any of the great real cello parts. the tron won out almost every time! so often times the "modelled" instrument might even win out over the real thing. you may lament this fact, but it's reality- it's 2007 and the death of real instruments draws closer every day...
another factor in this is budget- filmscoring is pretty rough until you get to the top of the heap. many smaller films have ridiculously small budgets- so to make ANY money on these things (considering the time it takes to score a film and the level of BS you need to deal with with every filmmaker and producer) you need to play as much of the music yourself as possible. hiring musicians costs money, and so does hiring a studio to record them in. then there's scheduling, writing out parts, coordinating with the filmmakers and getting approvals, having players return to the studio to fix/change for the filmmakers, etc... so many of us turn to buying a bunch of gear and doing it ourselves (or if you are lucky to own the studio, like i do, this helps a lot!).
and then there's dealing with string players (could you breath a little quieter please...)... enjoy pram
