An intro into the Industry - Soundtrack Scoring

Currently, I'm taking a Post Grad in Sound Design and I thought I'd go through one of the subjects currently being taken.

That being Composing for Screen.

This one is all about making the musical score to match a film.
An area I love dearly from a listening and watching point of view, where my love for the likes of Goldsmith, Horner and Giacchino comes from.

Now my own background from the audio world is Sound Production. So that's working behind the scenes on Studio and Location recording work. And never on the actual making of the music itself.

This subject alone is allowing me to have my own attempt at adapting a Score to a film, and as someone that isn't a musician, poses quite the challenge! In this case, it will be based upon the post-apocalyptic film Crumbs from Ethiopia by
Miguel Llansó.

Now you might be wondering if scoring is just done by pen and paper with musical notation, well that's what I thought might be the case going into this. But thankfully not!

The Software we use handles that and can even provide printouts of the notation as required.

But to put notes in a place that can be done, well there are a few things required.

A decent computer is required, can be Windows or Mac, but still needs a decent amount of power. In my case I have it set up on my Desktop which is maybe a bit overpowered with an i9-9900 in it, but, I have it on a little Nucbox too with a 4 core Celeron that can manage the task too 😁

Software wise, can be any DAW you wish, but in my case, since I'm a Pro Tools Vet by now I've stuck with this, but Logic is popular with Mac users while Windows folk may use Reaper or even Cubase (Shout out to the Atari ST here!)

So to go through basic ideas of forming a piece, I picked up an M-Audio mini keyboard that plugs into the computer via USB and acts as a Midi controller for a virtual instrument within the DAW.

In this case, I'm using Xpand which comes with Pro Tools. The quality of the instruments within can be a little hit or miss. There are some lovely synth sounds with some nice stereo ping pong effects going on, but what I am aiming for is a bit more tied to real instrumentation

For which I've opted for the use of a Harp to form the main melody and with the occasional use of a large bass drum for percussion to create a break between harp segments.

I am aiming to fill this out more, maybe add some layers to the sound to make it fuller but I am quite a fan of the minimalistic concept to what I am working with.