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The Sampler

May 25, 2005 10:42 AM

Stephen Arnold Music: Their Niche Is News

Like a lot of musicians, Stephen Arnold once harbored dreams of signing a big record deal and living happily ever after touring the land with a rock band. So in the mid-'70s the Texas native moved to Los Angeles to pursue that dream. "I call it the 'Hollyweird syndrome,'" he says. "You always feel like you're so close to getting that deal, but then it just falls short." After a few years of disappointments, Arnold returned to Texas to record a jingle, then got involved with running a studio. "I was going to record rock 'n' roll bands and do local albums as a way to have a free place to record," he says. "But to make a long story short, that went nowhere because the bands never had the money to pay the bills, so that's how I got into doing jingles for banks and car dealerships and what have you, and that eventually led to me doing music for a local TV station." That, in turn, led Arnold to his current niche: creating custom music and operating a very successful music library devoted mostly to television and radio news programs: Stephen Arnold Music.

"When you break it down, it's a certain style of music," says Arnold from his company's facility in McKinney, Texas, outside of Dallas. "I've been doing this for more than 20 years, so I've picked up on the science of it all—I understand what makes an opening [theme powerful] and all about promos and teases and all the different components that go with a newscast."

Arnold says that those basic components have not changed much through the years. "But the market itself has changed tremendously," he says. "It used to be there were maybe five or six channels that you'd watch, but then along came cable and satellite and everything else and it's all gotten so fragmented and the choices are so huge. There's also now so much competition in the news area that local stations tend to have a real quick opening now so they can get right into the meat of the news. But the general approach where they have four blocks of news separated by commercial breaks hasn't changed. So how you go about teasing out of block one and going into block two involves a certain amount of musical science, and that's a lot of what we do. Also, we've embraced the whole concept of sonically branding a station—creating a musical motif that's memorable. We often tell stations no one's going to hum your animation or whistle your announcer!"

These days, about half of Stephen Arnold Music's business is custom music work, and the other half comes from the library operation. "We have over 300 stations we do music for now," he says. "Most of that is what we call syndicated music. I'll do a big custom package for a station, but we retain the licensing rights, so we'll take that music and go to Omaha or Charleston or Kansas City, and you might hear the same music but with some different graphics.

To generate interest in the libraries, "We send out sampler CDs with a couple of dozen news packages in different styles—from real traditional to peel-your-face-off electronic stuff," Arnold says. "So the temperament of the station and their image in the community will usually dictate which packages they like. A package will have anywhere from eight to 12 music CDs in it, because you're doing all sorts of variations on the theme: sports, weather, community, election, war, it goes on and on—pretty much any of the emotion that is the content of the newscast."

Arnold's studio has three Digidesign Pro Tools stations but is based primarily around a pair of 24-track IZ Technology Radar 24 systems. "I like Radar because it's the closest thing to the older style of recording, where you don't have to use a mouse for everything," he laughs. Arnold is still the principal composer in the operation, and he notes, "I'll start with scratch tracks with loops and electronics, but then we bring in live players all the time and swap stuff out, depending on the style and the budget. We'll bring in live strings, live brass. I've never been able to be find a great French horn patch [on a synth]."

One of the company's most popular offerings is The Underground Collection, which is designed to be used for scoring specific types of news spots. "It's real visual music," Arnold says. "It's a nice, cost-effective way for stations to get library music that has a little bit more attitude for news than your big, all-things-to-all-people libraries. And, of course, it's always changing. In this business in particular, you're always treading that line between something that's got legs and shelf life, and making sure that it's not stodgy and dated."

For more info go to stephenarnoldmusic.com.

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A Production Music Library Market Check: Atlanta

The South is home to several sizable audio-post/commercial production markets. Atlanta is probably the largest in terms of gross revenues, though Miami, with its plethora of Spanish language radio and TV stations, probably boasts more actual facilities and small spot work.

Bill Quinn of Doppler Studios describes the Atlanta market as active. "Though it's not what it once was in terms of sheer volume," he says, "because I think there are probably fewer national broadcast-oriented accounts at the ad agencies here. Back in the 1980s, there were a few agencies that gathered some national accounts and it seemed as though Atlanta's star was rising in the sky. But then some of those agencies fell on hard times and shrank down and so those national accounts went elsewhere. There [is] still a number of large accounts here, but the complaint is always, 'Look at the companies that are headquartered here, like Delta, Coca-Cola, UPS, Georgia Pacific, Home Depot—why do they go somewhere else to do their major ad work?' I don't have an answer for you, because we do have strong agencies still and we certainly have the studios for the production. What we do have here is lots of regional and local work—there's a very active advertising community here."

Doppler is a seven-studio complex that turns out a high volume of radio and television spots, industrials, and other jobs—many requiring the use of production music and/or sound effects libraries.

"We have over 60,000 sound effects available through our mSoft server," Quinn says. "We have many libraries from Sound Ideas, a number from Hollywood Edge, and then a mish-mash of other smaller libraries, from Hanna-Barbera, Prosonus, and others we've accumulated over the years, because we've been doing this a long time. In terms of music libraries, we probably have between 4,000 and 5,000 CDs from APM, DeWolfe, FirstCom, Omni, Promusic, Network—those are our main libraries and they all do a pretty good job of updating what they have fairly regularly, so we feel we're able to stay on top of it with those for the most part.

"We have a search engine we started using years ago called the Gefen program," he continues. "I think Gefen's actually gotten out of that business, but they used to market and broker music and sound effects libraries and they developed a search engine which categorized things by action or style. And we've kept it up as things have come in. I don't think we're current with every CD we have, but you can go to a computer and type in 'patriotic music' or be even more specific, say 'Hail to the Chief,' and it will find them in the database. So that's been very useful for finding even the most obscure things in our library, because it's such a volume of material.

"Beyond that, though, various engineers have memorized their favorite fashion music or sports music or whatever. Each guy has his own perspective. When we get new music in, we have a committee that listens to it and evaluates it, and we try to get the engineers involved in that. It's asking too much for everyone to know every piece of music that comes in, but you'd be surprised at how much they do know; it's a part of their jobs and they do it well."

Over at Creative Sound Concepts, a beautifully designed two-room-studio, studio manager Nik Sarosy says that business has been good and the Atlanta post scene is "stable." CSC does a lot of radio and industrial work that requires the use of PMLs, so the studio has several thousand on hand, including large collections from KPM, APM, Promusic, Bruton, and DeWolfe. "And also some of the newer ones, like 5 Alarm," he says. "We're still mostly using CDs at the moment. We're aware of the possibilities of servers but haven't gotten there yet."

Chief engineer Bill Morrell is tasked with going through the CDs as they arrive, and he notes, "We have license agreements with most of them, and they send us updates once a quarter or even once a month. We also get approached by quite a few new production music companies, and right now what I do is try to determine whether or not what they have is something that we might be missing—if there's a gap in the type of music we have. But that is getting smaller and smaller because we have 3,000 or 4,000 CDs, and most of the companies are also getting to the point where you can go online to their site and find things there, as well. Still, I like having the CDs here because for me it's nice to visually see the spine—it sort of jogs your memory of what's on it."

How does Morrell know which PMLs will have what he wants? "Experience, mostly," he says. "I keep track of all the music we use in a library, so I can go back to that and that information tells you something and it also refreshes your memory of the search you might have done for that. Like I said, though, a lot of is a matter of going through them and looking at the spines."

When it comes to sound effects, Morrell has his collection catalogued through the popular Soundminer program. "I understand that Soundminer is working on one for music libraries, too, so down the line we may go in that direction."

Asked to describe a recent session that utilized a PML, Morrell relates, "I used music recently for Blue Links, which is part of the Georgia Pacific corporation. They do updates every quarter or so on their phone messages that tell about different things the company is doing, so we actually provided the music behind those phone messages, which in that case was all music from FirstCom. We used a sort of light alternative rock. It's very much in the background, but it's still important. We've also done some videos recently that needed music. We do a lot of corporate video work that has both music and sound effects that we place to picture."

Our last stop on our mini-tour of Atlanta took us to Tube Creative, a four-person boutique operation which bills itself as a "creative media design firm"—it provides both traditional audio/video post for a wide range of projects, but also, increasingly, DVD, CD-ROM and web-oriented projects. The company was founded in 1999 by an editor named Chris Downs and is situated in a large, modernly outfitted pre-Civil War loft space downtown. The audio suite is centered around a Digidesign Pro Tools HD system (with surround capability) and a Mackie HUI digital console.

According to production manager Greg Partridge, two large PMLs—Killer Tracks and Extreme Music—give him the sort of coverage he needs for the projects that come to Tube. "But even with just those two, I must have 1,000 discs here," he says. "But frankly, I've been using the discs less and doing online searches more. It's faster to find things and you don't have to wait for tracks to load in the CD player. So I'll go online and make notes right there."

Like many of his counterparts at other post houses, Partridge makes a point of listening to new discs as they arrive and making mental notes about what tracks might be useful in certain applications. Since Tube does work with both mainstream companies and clients who want a more edgy approach to sound design, Partridge says he is constantly on the lookout for new music. He says it "[keeps] the projects that we work on sounding fresh. I like to think that's one thing we do well here."

For more info on these companies, go to dopplerstudios.com, creativesoundconcepts.com, and tubecreative.com.

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More Star Wars SFX Revealed

We continue with our tribute to the Star Wars sound effects team by looking at a few specific sounds from Episodes I-III. Once again, Ben Burtt headed the FX team on all three of the new films. Can we let him do something else now with the rest of his career? By the time the most recent film, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, was ready for production, Burtt had amassed a library of some 7,000 sounds from the five previous films in the franchise on a FireWire drive.

The information for this article has been shamelessly extricated from three different stories by Larry Blake written for Mix in May 1999, June 2002, and June 2005.

Light sabers for Episode I: Burtt went back to the 1/4in. tapes that held the sounds used for the weapons in the original series. He says he "recombined them with different pitch and character [using a Synclavier] but so it still reads 'light saber.'"

Zam speeders in Episode II: According to Burtt, the sound of these vehicles was made by combining the sound of several musical instruments, including electric guitar, cello, and viola and then, additionally, using a buzzing electric razor to vibrate viola, harp, and bass strings. "I was thinking [the speeder] was traveling magnetically," he explains. "It was being pulled along the streets with changing magnetic fields rather than self-propulsion."

The buzz droids in Episode III: "I did a fair number of recordings at the Avid that were used in the final movie," Burtt says. "For the buzz droids that pop open and crawl around on the ships, while sitting at the Avid, I performed them on a trombone and later ring-modulated the sound in [Digidesign's] Pro Tools.

"I tend to work in a 'non-objective' sound design mode first: I'll have a gut feeling about pieces of sound that I want and will lay them out on the [sampler] keyboard. I'll experiment and do a performance until I hit on a combination of sounds that I like. Then I can fine-tune by further working with the samples."

Some new R2-D2 for Episode III: Burtt went back to one the main sources of the original 'vocalizations'—an ARP 2600 synthesizer that had literally been gathering dust (and mold) in Burtt's attic for more than 20 years. "I went back and got all of notes and paperwork as to how I had done a lot of it, including microphone selection. I got my patching diagrams out and with some practice I was able to re-create R2. I did my best to make it match with the old stuff.

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