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MillimeterThe Sampler
Dec 21, 2004 9:37 AM
Production Music Library History Continues
Open your textbooks to p. 478 please, and follow along as we explore more of the history of the production music library business. Shame on all of you I see out there reading the abridged Cliffs Notes version. And there’s simply no excuse for hiring other people to read this so you don’t have to! We’re keeping it in bite-sized nuggets.
The rise of Production Music Libraries in the 1940s and early ’50s did not come without some controversy. In England, for example, the Musicians' Union banned library music from being recorded in British studios for a time because of what it viewed as exploitative conditions with regards to the payment of musicians and arrangements for payments to publishers. As a result, a considerable amount of the “mood music” (to use the parlance of the day) that was marketed in England during World War II was actually recorded in Holland and France.
In the United States, it was the advent of television that spurred the Musicians' Union into action. When the popular radio series The Lone Ranger made the jump to TV as a filmed half-hour program in September of 1949, its use of music from the Republic Pictures stock library and from miscellaneous classical record sources prompted the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), under the leadership of its powerful founder, James Caesar Petrillo, to seek additional payments for both composers and musicians who played on cues used in television shows and films.
Petrillo was certainly an important advocate for musicians--in the early ’30s he’d negotiated the first contracts compelling radio stations to pay musicians for live broadcasts; he organized the first wage strike for recording musicians in the late ’30s (and again in the early ’40s); and in 1944 he rammed through a contract with Hollywood film studios that guaranteed extra session pay for musicians who played more than one instrument, different pay scales for rehearsals and performances, and--germane to the rising PMLs--prohibited the use of film soundtrack music outside of the films the music was written for. It was Petrillo, too, who tried to enforce a ban on records being played on the radio (because it put live musicians out of work). By the late ’40s, the AFM had some 200,000 members nationwide, so its clout was substantial.
Not surprisingly, the producers of television programs balked at the idea of having to pay additional money--equal to live performance rates--to musicians for their work on library music recordings. So those producers did what capitalists have always done: they skirted or broke the rules! As had happened in England, library companies started recording in Canada, Mexico, or overseas, simply bypassing American musicians altogether. Or, in a few cases, they simply lied about the origin of the music cues.
In the case of The Lone Ranger, the producers commissioned new, slightly rearranged versions of certain melodies and cues and recorded them in Mexico. Other early TV series got creative, too: The Cisco Kid’s music mostly consisted of cues from the original Cisco Kid films re-recorded in France. This became quite commonplace in Hollywood, which is one reason why so many TV scores from the ’50s sounded familiar--they were recycled from movies! And the dirty little secret of the era was that there were also “dark” sessions, in which musicians would congregate in studios secretly, with no union supervision, and record TV and film soundtracks, with musicians being paid under the table for their work. “Pssst!… Hey, buddy!…Yeah, over here!… I’ve got some hot cues for a detective series… Just recorded ’em last night—er, I mean, they just came in from Europe last night. Sure they’re on the up and up! Would I lie to you? Uh, cash only!”
Next time: Lazlo, Chudnow, and what now for production music in the ’50s.
SFX Library Airplanes Fly High in Scorsese’s The Aviator
At this point, most major American films have big enough budgets to cover all of their sound needs, from location recording through the lengthy postproduction process, with its requirements for sound effects, Foley, ADR, various re-recording tasks, music and dialogue editing, and, of course, mixing. Even with those ever-growing sound budgets, however, supervisors and sound designers still occasionally find themselves dipping into commercial SFX libraries to find the perfect sound for a scene or to use as a base for new effects.
For director Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed new film, The Aviator, which covers the life of eccentric film producer, pilot, aviation executive, and Hollywood bon vivant Howard Hughes from 1927 to 1947 (in other words, before he turned weird), sound designer Eugene Gearty wanted to go out and make new recordings of vintage planes for the film; unfortunately it was not included in the original sound budget. As Gearty (Gangs of New York, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) told me in a recent interview, this decision came back to haunt the production when the temp mixes were being made during January and February of 2004.
“Thelma [Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime film editor and trusted aide] would say, ‘We need the sound of this plane,’ and I’d say, ‘Thelma, I don’t have that.’ It came to a head, and then the postproduction supervisor, Mike Jackman, got involved and said, ‘Well, we’re not going to start recording now--we can’t make our temps if you go out and record now. So you have to come up with a plan.’
"So my job was to scour Hollywood and talk to [noted sound supervisors] Steve Flick and Jerry Ross, and they turned me on to [sound editor] Dave Yewdall, who’d done a movie back in 1985 called The Aviator with Christopher Reeve, which had Sopwith Camels and Fokker D-7s, which is how our movie starts--with the making of [the film] Hell’s Angels. Then I went online into Google and came up with a sound library from Aircraft Records--this guy who uses a Crown Sass [microphone] and a DAT had recorded tons of stuff up at the air races in Reno and various other places, and he put together an eight-CD set, so I bought that and culled together my temp stuff from those sources. It worked okay for that, but it clearly wasn’t going to work for everything we needed--even Marty complained about it. But that became my ace in the hole to say, ‘I told you so. Now let’s go out and get the real stuff.’”
Gearty got the green light to do his own plane recording sessions, but he still ended up using some of the Aircraft Library recordings in the final version of the film.
“[In The Aviator] there’s a great scene where Hughes is filming his Hell’s Angels dogfight sequence,” Gearty says. “In the original it’s really well done. If you listen to it, you wonder, where did they get those sound effects? Because it was 1927! Anyway, one of the issues I faced was getting all the sounds of those Fokkers and Sopwiths and various RAF aircraft because if you were to find those today, there isn’t a guy who would risk screwing up his plane so you could record him on, say, a barrel roll or whatever. They just don’t do it anymore.
"But Aircraft Records had these little acrobat biplanes called GB racers that sounded just right for what I needed, so that’s what I used. I kept a list of what takes I used from which CD, and I know [the producers] paid Aircraft a fee of some kind to use that material. So I was lucky to find those. However, the other 98 percent of the [plane FX] are original.”
For more on SFX for The Aviator, see the January issue of Mix (or visit mixonline.com after the first of the year.)
Twisted In the Windy City
“I think of this company as a creative collective,” says Derek Frederickson, founder of the up-and-coming music library, Twisted Tracks. “There are many mega-talented, top-notch musicians whose works comprise the Twisted Tracks library.”
Including Frederickson himself. A former touring musician and a veteran of Chicago’s recording scene, Frederickson originally launched the Twisted Tracks website to be an outlet for his own voluminous output of original music, but he quickly moved to incorporate the music of other composers, as well.
”I realized there were so many people I knew and had worked with just here in Chicago who had tons of music they’d written through the years that wasn’t sold to record companies or released nationally, but it was still good music. So I started adding musicians, starting with people directly in my circle, and then as I started adding to the site, I began getting calls from people from all over sending me demos and wanting to get involved. There are currently about 30 artists or groups [in Twisted Tracks]. Its still a small company--we’ve got about 40 volumes and a couple thousand tracks total--but it's taking off.
“The people who have been using Twisted Tracks are looking for something a little different; maybe something a little edgier, a little bit out of the mainstream,” Frederickson continues. “I’m not really interested in having trendy, corporate, motivational music on there--not that I have anything against that kind of music. But there are lots of people who do that already. Most royalty-free libraries are focusing on the corporate market, and if you’re lucky there might be a nugget in there for somebody making a dark, independent film. But I want to focus on that guy, as well as anyone who is a little more adventurous. It’s probably more of a niche market than I should be concentrating on,” he says with a laugh.
And truth be told, about half of Twisted Tracks’ business has come from corporate clients so far. “We’ve also heard directly from a lot of recording studios who use the music in various productions, from commercials to independent films. Pretty regularly we're getting filmmakers calling and browsing.
"We do updates every three to six months,” he notes. “In fact, I have has another ten artists signed and ready to go. I just have to make the decision to devote the next month to all the production it takes to actually get the new stuff up online.” With comprehensive compilations in a wide range of styles--including Atmospheric, Ambient, Chillout, Club, Electro, Rock, Soundtrack, Underground, and more--Twisted Tracks has, in a relatively short period of time, proven itself to be a vital (and popular) source of contemporary library tracks. And in the process, Frederickson has also established his growing collective of talented musicians and composers.
Frederickson says that about 90 percent of Twisted Tracks sales are online, and he foresees a day in the not so distant future when it will be entirely Internet-driven. “I think the days of people needing something concrete, like discs, is coming to an end. It takes a while for people to get accustomed to working in new ways. It takes knowing that you're going to have reliable access to get what you need. And I think we're already there with selling [library music online]."
For more info, go to www.twistedtracks.com.
The DMA: Opus 1’s Magnum Opus
One of the biggest and fastest growing music library companies, Opus 1 is actually one of four sympathetic entities under the umbrella of the Alan Ett Creative Group, which is named for its president, a noted TV and film composer. “There’s also the Alan Ett Music Group, which does custom music and music supervision, and we have a company called Media City Sound, which is a big audio post facility in Studio City [Calif.],” notes Opus 1 VP of sales and marketing Mitch Rabin. “Then we also have one called CPG, and we do spots and production through that entity. So it’s a very, very busy place; very robust.”
Opus 1 Music Library started as an outlet for Alan Ett’s prodigious output, but it has grown exponentially to incorporate myriad styles and composers. “We have well over 2,000 titles in our library and represent music in every different genre,” Rabin says. “We now represent 16 different catalogs and libraries from around the world; our own is a couple of hundred CDs' worth.” In recent years the company has struck deals to represent the New World Music Catalog, comprised of some 300 CDs of New Age, World Music, and sounds of nature; and Sound of America Records (SOAR), which includes more than 200 CDs of traditional and contemporary Native American music from dozens of tribes and a number of well-known composers. In fact, one trend we’re seeing more and more in the production music business is the use of "name" composers.
However, Rabin is eager to talk about “one of the things we have that sets us far apart from other music libraries--the DMA, the Digital Music Assistant.” The DMA is a dedicated delivery system that offers clients an astounding array of production music options in an extremely user-friendly package. “It’s a small, 120GB external hard drive that fits in the palm of your hand,” Rabin notes. “It has 40,000 songs in high-res MP3, which is a Microsoft technology that has proven to be broadcast quality--we use it in our audio post facility every day, and we’ve never had a quality issue with it. And of course the DMA is also a search engine--you’re able to search by genre, mood, style, instrumentation. Basically, it lets people audition hundreds of songs in a matter of minutes. It’s infinitely more efficient than going through piles of CDs. It’s pretty much plug-and-play on most systems. Like on a Mac, an icon shows up on the screen, you click on it, and you’re off to the races.”
Opus 1 sells the drive for $299, “which is about break-even for us,” Rabin says. “We’re not trying to make money off [the hardware]. The idea is to license music and get people solutions to their needs. Basically, we’re a service and we think the DMA offers a tremendous service. You’re saving time, and time really is money in this business.” There’s also a server version of the DMA, in which the software is loaded onto a desktop for easy access.
“We add music to it every four to six weeks, and we add features all the time,” Rabin says of the DMA. “We’re always looking to make it better and more useful to our customers.”
For more, go to www.opus1musiclibrary.com.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
