curtis.macdonald's blog

The following are notes for a lecture I gave to students at the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on February 17th, 2012. These notes apply to aspiring composers, sound designers and musicians. A very special thank you goes out to Jake K. Leckie who invited me to speak and share these ideas.

1. Take measures to ensure that your team members succeed. For composers, this means supporting your musicians. This also means that you want the director or producer you're working with to succeed as well. Ultimately, all composers want to inspire an audience, so practice by inspiring your co-workers and collaborators. If you do, they will be with you for a lifetime of wonderful creation. Communicate concisely and effectively. Be open, and present your demos with sincerity.
    
2. Everything lies in the quality of your source. Composition does not lie in amassing a collection of software, it lies in the search sound: quality and purpose. Plugins do not make any sound by themselves.
    
3. Think of everything you create as a demo, sketch or idea. This way expectations are easily managed and you don't feel pressured by delivering over "final" results from the beginning. If you sketch out a truly good idea, others will resonate with it and you will want to take it to the next step, if needed.
    
4. Multitasking is a myth; it's impossible. You can only listen to one thing at a time: the whole piece of music, a part of the music, or the voice in your head. You can't really listen to the music if you're listening to the voice in your head (or checking the installation status of that new plugin-bundle!) Beauty lies in simplicity.

   A talented audio engineer once told me that for him, the difference between fancy plugins and cheap plugins was that fancy plugins got the sound you wanted faster, cheap plugins you might have to work a little harder to get the results you want. In the end, it's all just digital number-crunching algorithms at play. Okay, enough about that.
    

5. Get a field recorder. I strongly recommend that every musician and composer own one of these, and they come in all sorts of sizes to fit all kinds of budgets. Use this tool to record anything and everything available to you. Strike objects and record the sound. Build your own library of sound, sample it, mangle it, juxtapose it and layer it to your heart's content. Again, it's the sound of your source that you're after, so use your recordings as a tool to capture those sounds quickly and easily, without the need for any expensive gear. Curate an archive of these recordings and you will find ways of re-purposing your recordings in both abstract and conventional ways across many different projects which will serve you for years to come.
    
6. Learn to edit audio gracefully. Every DAW, regardless of price accommodates this. A wise man once said that all composition lies in the editing, so play with your sounds. If you are scoring and utilizing notation, don't be "married" to the notes on the page and seek to continue the compositional process well into the post production stages.
    
7. Learn to edit MIDI gracefully. Experiment with MIDI generators, processing and sampling, but be sure to use your own sounds. Too many modern composers think they need a orchestral sample library in order to be a film score composer. This is the wrong thinking.
    
8. A composer's best resource are other musicians. Utilize them fully, ask them to improvise freely and experiment with the ideas and material you give them. Remember that you want them to succeed. Record them in creative ways, in creative locations with your field recorder.
    
9. Collect and trade things like small percussion, toys, and other unique sound sources. This will serve to build your library with original, organic sounds that you can call your own. After archiving, you will want to find creative ways of using the sounds, much more than you would a commercially available sample library. If you're recording in a studio, have the engineer always be recording, even in between takes. Often I find that the most interesting and unique sounds from sampling come from sound-checks, and tune-up noise.
    
10. Experiment with pitch and tonality. As a composer and sound designer, the entire spectrum of color is at your disposal. Using only 12 tones is like using only 12 RGB colors for web.
     
11. Don't limit yourself to working in just one session file. Developing sound and music happens across many files, folders and ideas. Keep the momentum flowing and mix-down your work-in-progress often. Don't get caught up in trying to "fix" a session for endless hours if the original inspiration for it has left. In one session, maybe there are 2 - 4 ideas to work with, so then start a new session for each good idea and take it from there.

Nick Zammuto:

Nick Zammuto is an inventive, resourceful sound artist. You may be familiar with him from his work in The Books. The thing to notice here is that he doesn't use any fancy software or plugins at all, instead he finds creative ways to record fascinating sounds for sampling and compiling with common materials and devices. I highly recommend checking out his website for further ideas and inspiration.

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross

An amazing trait about Trent & Atticus is that they are a seamless two-man operation. Trent improvises, while Atticus records. Then, Atticus edits, layers, adjusts the raw material to mock-up ideas. The sound sources are vast and lush, thanks to Trent's huge collection of analog and vintage synths, guitars and hardware effects. This documentary is about the music of The Social Network.  

Sound of Lord Of The Rings:

An amazing sound documentary on what it took to develop all the sound and music of the cinematic giant, The Lord Of The Rings.  

Sound of WALL-E:

Ben Burtt is a legendary sound designer whose credits range from Star Wars to Indiana Jones to E.T. This is an incredibly important and insightful documentary where here he explains in detail his process and gives us a history of sound design on film.  

Wendy Carlos

Wendy was an early user and collaborator with Robert Moog, and pioneered synthesized sound on recording and film. She did many Stanley Kubrick films such as The Shining, Clockwork Orange and Disney's original Tron. Moreover, her album The Beauty In the Beast is a wonderfully original work combining micro-tonality and analog synthesis.  

Cliff Martinez

Formerly a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cliff Martinez is a film composer whose soundtracks have been heard on such momentous films such as Traffic and Solaris. Above is a track he wrote, heavily utilizing the exotic pitched-percussion instrument, the Hang.

Curtis Macdonald teaches music production, composition, and saxophone with Brooklyn Music Lessons. To learn more about sound design and composition, check out his BML page and schedule a lesson. 

This post highlights a simple procedure designed to extend longevity of reeds. My first saxophone teacher showed this to me and it is something that I have adopted as good practice for saving time, money and avoid reed headaches. This is one way to gain a little more control over the consistency of sound a reed can produce. Quality of vibration is what sound production is all about. Best of all, it takes only few minutes.

Every reed has microscopic pores that are the veins of the cane from which it came. To see these pores more clearly dip a new reed completely in water and blow on the butt of the reed and see the bubbles formed on the vamp of the reed. In the image below, the vamp is the part of the reed indicated by the arrow. 

Brand new reeds have these pores wide open which means they absorb all kinds of things like moisture, bacteria and other potentially disgusting things like bits of food, flesh, lip gloss, etc.  Acidic beverages like soda, beer, coffee, juice are the absolute worst. Sealing a reed limits the amount of moisture it can absorb, thus making it less susceptible to deterioration. All it takes is the pressure of your thumb on a moist reed on a flat surface, rubbing down firmly from the file of the reed to the tip. The key here is to apply downward pressure while rubbing upwards to the tip. Repeat this several times. Thumbs may get sore in the process.

Finally, you can check how much of a seal you achieved by once again dipping the reed completely in water and then blowing from the butt of the reed, observing how few bubbles are now forming. Keep in mind it’s rare to completely seal all pores entirely. Doing this procedure along with a simple reed rotation i.e. not playing the same reed everyday, might just save the cost of buying boxes upon boxes of reeds unnecessarily, and gain a truer reed vibration.

Curtis Macdonald
Saxophone, Pro Tools, Ableton, Production