Greg Tripi walks into the studio control room with a nervous excitement. Today the full power of an orchestra will be unleashed on the music he finished writing only days before - there is no other feeling quite like it and is one of the experiences he loves most about being a composer.
The booth is crowded today - as many as 20 people ranging from the mix engineer, to the director of the film, to the orchestrator, to the music editor, who will make a note of the takes to use. As the orchestra strikes up in front of a big screen showing the movie, Tripi is concentrating intently on the printed score in front of him. Does the tone fit? Does he need to add a little more bottom end or a little less high section? Are they blending correctly with the electronic music and pre-records?
“Sometimes what it’s really about,” says Tripi, “is just listening to the whole execution of it. When you hear live people playing it, it takes on a whole different life of its own and you pick up ideas to enhance it. Sometimes you’ll hear a wrong note and it will probably stick out, but usually it’s more a matter of a misprint on the page than the person playing the wrong note. And the musicians’ sight-reading is impeccable so they’ll play the right notes even if they’re wrong! ”
Is the movie’s director present during the recording process?
“Occasionally, but I’d say it’s more their own interest in the project than feeling they need to contribute something.
“I think a lot of directors find it exciting to do it. A lot of times you work on a movie as a director and you’ll spend a year, maybe multiple years, getting to the point where it’s almost finished and recording the orchestra is one of the last stages of the entire film. A lot of them find it very exciting to be reinvigorated by the whole process and see that the film is close to completion.”
Since recorded sound first appeared in movies in 1927, technology has continued to affect the score production process in different ways. Recently, it has become popular to record European orchestras and this has opened up possibilities for those who wouldn’t usually be able to afford an orchestra on their score. The string section of Tripi’s score for Dark Places, for instance, was recorded in Macedonia which he monitored over Skype: “We could talk to the conductor and he would translate for the orchestra any comments I had and I would just stream the audio into my studio.
“Granted it was evening there and it was 6am here, but it was great because, by the time they finished, it was uploaded and downloaded over here and mixed by my mixing engineer and put into the movie 24 hours later.”
Despite all the advances in software samplers and synthesisers, having an orchestra in your laptop, so to speak, is still no substitute for the real thing, but it does allow the composer to provide a preview of what it will sound like before they record. In the past, the composer would simply play it on a piano and ask you to imagine an orchestra.
The influence of technology is shown also in the number of electronic artists producing film scores in recent years, perhaps most notably Daft Punk’s work on Tron Legacy. The scope such crossovers provide excites Tripi immensely: “Jazz can be fused into it, folk can be fused into it. And vice-versa you can take classical orchestra music and fuse into electronic music, and really that’s something that interests me a lot. It’s not just electronic music being fused into an orchestra, it’s an orchestra being mixed into electronic stuff.
“So that cross pollination of musical styles is something that really catches my ear.”
These days video games are becoming closer to films, hiring actors, scriptwriters and, of course, music composers which series such as Grand Theft Auto have taken to the extreme using a whole troop of famous musicians. So how does scoring a game compare to a Hollywood movie?
“It is quite different”, says Tripi, who has worked on Eat Sleep Play’s Twisted Metal and Ubisoft’s Far Cry 4.
“Often when you work on these bigger games they have big music teams working with them and you’ll supply tracks to them broken out into stems where you’ll take the whole track and break it up into individual components.
“They can reassemble it and have the track as I wrote it, or they can cut it up and extend maybe a five minute track into a 15-minute track, and they can collaborate with you to make this big game environment happen where you’ve got this piece of music that’s constantly evolving and reacting to the environment as you’re playing through this scene in a game.”
Tripi also looks forward to a world in which Virtual Reality can remove the mouse from the composer’s set up as well as composing for VR games: “I would love to try it. There’s an aspect to it that would certainly lend itself to surround-sound composing.”