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MillimeterThe Sampler
Nov 22, 2004 3:44 PM
Production Music Leads to SpongeBob Gig
If you scan the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) listing for Austrian composer Gregor Narholz, you’ll find a formidable list of German and Danish film and TV titles, and then, right up near the top, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. What’s going on here?
Narholz is one of our own. He comes from the world of production music; indeed, since he made his first recordings for the German music library company Sonoton at the tender age of 15, he has written and recorded more than 1,000 library pieces. Okay, Narholz did have an in at the company: It’s owned by his father, composer Gerhard Narholz. But Gregor developed his talent on his own, culminating in post-graduate studies in film music at USC. Though he came to Los Angles 11 years ago, he still does much of his music library recording work overseas.
“My specialty is dramatic music,” he says. “I’ve written orchestral music for 20 years and recorded it all over—we do a lot in Budapest.” He also has a home studio in L.A. equipped with Pro Tools, MOTU software, Tascam DA-78s, and various other gear. He notes, however, that he still writes out his orchestral music by hand.
So how did Narholz get the gig as composer for the SpongeBob movie? After all, when one thinks of the funny, lovable cartoon character and his wacky, underwater world, the first music that comes to mind is the old-style Hawaiian steel guitar music that dominates the soundtrack of most episodes. “That’s true,” the composer says. “The show’s music editor, Nick Carr, and director Steve Hillenburg created the musical idiom of SpongeBob with the Hawaiian guitars, but they also sometimes like to use an overdramatic orchestral score. Somehow Nick, without knowing me, and having all the many libraries to choose from, used a lot of my dramatic music on the television show, and kept using it and using it, and many cues became sort of signature cues for the show—they kept coming back, almost like characters. Then, when they went to work on the film, they figured, why not use the guy who did so many of the cues on the television series? So that’s how I got the job scoring the movie.”
Narholz describes the score as a rollercoaster ride emotionally. “It’s cute sometimes, but you know SpongeBob—when he’s sad the music gets really sad,” he says with a laugh. The score was recorded at Abbey Road in London. And though scoring a major American movie is a nice plum for Narholz (the film grossed more than $35 million opening weekend), he has no plans to stop his music library work. Not long ago he finished a Sonoton CD of “big, emotional, epic music for trailers,” and on average he turns out three or four discs a year.
“Writing for a film and writing for a library are different, obviously,” he says. “With a film, you’re working with images and the thread of a story, whereas with a library cue you might be working more off a genre or a title or some emotional lead that isn’t part of a story. In some ways, library music gives you more freedom because if you write 17 minutes of, say, sad music, you can really explore many ways of expressing sad feelings, whereas with a movie you might only get one shot at it in one scene and that’s it. But I like doing them both. Either way you have to be open to ideas and to emotion.”
Sonoton library music is marketed and distributed exclusively in North America by Associated Production Music (APM), www.apmmusic.com.
Music 2 Hues Makes Music To Use
Chances are you’ve heard of the two owners/principals of the highly successful library/custom music company Music 2 Hues. Unfortunately, these musician-entrepreneurs prefer to keep their identities secret, letting the music take precedence over their celebrity. Hey, whatever works! And, in fact, Music 2 Hues is much more than just the sum of its two owners—as sales manager Keith Spring notes, “We have a slew of other composers that work for the company. With close to 80 CDs [in the company’s arsenal] we cover a lot of ground.”
Music 2 Hues features four distinct, royalty-free product lines: the “Flagship Series,” which Springs says is their most popular offering, consists of more than 50 production music discs ranging from “Neon Soul” (their latest) to “Symphonic” to “Island Adventures” to “Nu Funk Hop.” The “Broadcast Series” has beds ranging from a scant five seconds up to a minute. The “SFX Series” contains more than 1,200 sound effects of every variety on a set of 12 CDs. And the “WaveTrack Series” consists of more than 500 WAV file music cues on a pair of DVDs—“A lot of people wanted drag-and-drop capabilities to eliminate the step of having to convert files, so we tested the water with this,” Spring says. “It’s taken off well.”
Though the company headquarters is in Connecticut, recording sessions for Music 2 Hues’ libraries and custom scoring jobs take place at several different East Coast studios. How do they decide what styles of music to offer? “At this point we’re client-driven,” Spring says. “Years ago, when the company was first growing, we would decide what to put out, but now it’s almost all ideas from our users. Every month we get a lot of emails, calls, and faxes saying, ‘We wish you had this,’ or ‘Why don’t you put out that?’ We let the ideas build up for a while and then we’ll go in and put together a new title. We put out new ones almost every other month.” Music 2 Hues counts a number of Fortune 500 companies among its clients, but Spring notes, “We also sell to the wedding specialist and the everyday videographer; we try to cover as broad a range as we can to please the most people.”
Spring admits that keeping up with the demands of their clients is a lot of hard work. “You have to be so in tune with both current and coming trends. At the same time, with something like the "Flagship Series," you have to be able to cover the general bases. Like we put one out recently called “Retro,” which has a lot of Big Band and swing on it and, it’s been very successful. That’s one that was not asked for particularly, but we did it because there was a need for it, and people have bought it. Even if what people are asking for is what’s on the radio right now, there’s always going to be a market for the bread and butter core music—oldies and ’70s, ’80s, country, romantic … There are so many different needs out there.”
For more info, go to www.music2hues.com.
MYB Has Got the Beat(s)
In a field that is already crowded with big and small players, sometimes finding the right niche can be the key to success. That’s what David Weiss is counting on with his relatively new loop sample company, Meet Your Beat. A drummer for more than 20 years, as well as a sound designer with experience in television and live theater, Weiss arrived at the idea for Meet Your Beat through one of his other pursuits: writing about music and technology. While researching an article for Drum magazine about companies that were putting loops online, such as Sonomic and Looperman, “I realized it was something I could do,” Weiss says. “I’ve been getting more into programmed beats and drum and bass, and it seemed to me that there weren’t a lot of the kind of [loop libraries] I was thinking of.
“When you’re doing a loop company, I’ve learned there’s an insatiable demand for fresh content, but within that, if you’re going to be the one supplying it, you have to find a different angle and see what you can contribute to the existing body of work. I knew some musicians who I thought were in uncharted territory when it came to loops, and the first person I thought of was Larry McDonald, who’s an amazing Jamaican percussionist who’s worked with Peter Tosh and Bob Marley and Toots & the Maytals—basically everyone in reggae. There’s not that much in Afro-Jamaican percussion loops available, and Larry literally lives next door to me.”
The Manhattan-based Weiss has a home studio, and he found it easy and convenient to bop over to McDonald’s apartment with a Roland HPD15 HandSonic percussion controller and a Yamaha AW16G DAW to sketch out ideas for McDonald’s loop library. Later, the duo went into a proper studio (Dragonfly Studios on Manhattan’s West Side) and, joined by engineer Peter Hason, recorded live performances of McDonald on numerous percussion instruments. After the sessions, Weiss edited the performances into one-, two- and four-bar sections using Cubase. In a number of cases, too, he put together takes of multiple percussion instruments in the same groove. The McDonald loop material is available by download only through the Sonomic website (www.sonomic.com), which offers a huge variety of music and sound effects samples. “Adam Strauss, who runs Sonomic, is an extremely astute marketer,” Weiss says. “He really encouraged me to do the loops because he says there’s very little of that sort of content out there.”
Since those first sessions with McDonald (dubbed "MYB Volume One"), Weiss has made more loop recordings with the Jamaican rhythm titan and also added a second percussionist to the Meet Your Beat stable: Doc Gibbs, best known as the versatile band leader on Emeril Live. “I can really see Doc’s stuff being used on commercials and other kinds of material,” Weiss notes, “because he has a real working knowledge of what kind of percussion performances work on TV—not only do his loops naturally ‘pop’ in a TV mix, they are also extremely effective for embellishing dance groves. He can really play anything.” The Doc Gibbs material will be up online sometime early next year.
“I’ve been extremely encouraged to see how many people have been downloading our loops so far,” Weiss says enthusiastically. “We have a lot of directions we can go in, and of course I hope to be able to do some of the loops myself, too.”
For more, visit www.meetyourbeat.com.
