The Amazing Race > The Amazing Race Discussion
TAR 25: Lee Sanders' Music Podcast!!
Lee Sanders:
--- Quote from: TexasLady on September 29, 2014, 12:54:59 PM ---I am SO happy that you will come take our questions. When I started watching TAR I began noticing the music for the ending credits and I loved it! How do you decide what to feature in your music for each show?
Welcome to RFF! (And UGH on the extractions! Feel better.) :_
:bigwelcome
--- End quote ---
Don't know if I quoted that correctly, but the question is how I decide what to feature in the music for each show. The answer is that I generally don't—decisions over what music goes against picture in reality TV shows start with the picture editors, then are signed off on by producers and network as the cut of the episode goes 'up the food chain.'
In the case of Race, we do quite a bit of custom scoring per episode, so obviously that music is intended to go with certain scenes… but even then, if a producer feels the intended cue isn't working for whatever reason, a replacement will be selected from the 13 years of Race music that are already on the editors' hard drives.
If there's time (rarely!) I'll get notes and a request for revisions, but things are usually moving so fast that there's just not enough time to do that. Part of the thrill of scoring the show is that there's no time to "miss a pitch"—I generally have one shot to get the music right for a given scene.
Hope that answers the question. If you were just asking about the end credits, specifically, then I think the show producers and editors sort of powwow at the end and decide what the most iconic moment from the episode was, and sometimes they put that music in under the end credits (other times they default to the end credits cue they've been using for a while now).
Leafsfan:
Hi, Lee
Its cool there was a bit of steel band in the music this leg (I used to play the instrument back in high school, so instantly recognized it!). My question is do you travel to these locales visited on the race to scout the musical culture present?
Lee Sanders:
--- Quote from: maf on September 29, 2014, 01:39:47 PM ---And I'm interested in the technical bits. What equipment do you use? And how much freedom do you have when you create the music?
Are you at all involved in the small musical motifs some teams sometimes get_
--- End quote ---
Quoting seemed to work, so I'll just answer this one!
(If the first couple of paragraphs below are all opaque geek-speak, please feel free to skip a bit…!).
I use Digital Performer as my sequencing software (i.e., the "writing canvas" onto which I program all the musical instructions for a given piece of music). For sample playback I use Vienna Ensemble Pro to coordinate multiple Macs, which run Kontakt, Omnisphere, and various PLAY-based libraries. Mixing is generally done "in the box" with a few pieces of outboard gear that I like, as they're needed. And if I need to create scores and parts (rare, but it happens) I'll use a separate music notation app called Finale.
As for team themes, yes! I'll sometimes be asked to write something specific to a particular team. The Cowboys are probably the most obvious example of this. The first "Cowboy Theme" was used so often that, when Jet and Cord came back each successive time for All-Stars, I created two more Cowboy Themes. The three, taken together, make a nice little Western Suite, actually.
The show is mature enough now that producers and editors sort of know what they're going to need, and we've devised a kind of language to talk about the cues I'm going to create. Beyond that, though, I'm free to write whatever occurs to me… and, in fact, I'm almost always encouraged to go as big and as wild as I want! That's one of the great fun things about The Amazing Race—painting with the sort of epic-scale brush the show so often requires is something not every composer has a chance to do.
Lee Sanders:
--- Quote from: Leafsfan on September 29, 2014, 02:58:45 PM ---Hi, Lee
Its cool there was a bit of steel band in the music this leg (I used to play the instrument back in high school, so instantly recognized it!). My question is do you travel to these locales visited on the race to scout the musical culture present?
--- End quote ---
I wish they'd just pack me in with the luggage! I travel a lot, and I'm always taking notes about what I hear wherever I am in the world… but I don't specifically scout out the countries on the show. If it's a place I haven't been (and many, many of them are) I will do all kinds of research.
Whether it's searching around online… or via musician friends who specialize in the style of a culture/region… or even things like taking a meeting with an embassy staffer to talk it over… there are a bunch of things I do to try to start from a place of knowing everything I can.
Having said that, I should add that, when it's time to write, I end up having to distill it down considerably! Telling the story in the most compelling way possible means that, a lot of the time, some really cool elements of a culture's music just don't convey the emotion we need.
So it's a constant balance of the three elements that make up the show: 1) travelogue, 2) action/adventure story and 3) character/relationship drama. Not necessarily in that order. Music has to be serving one or more of those at all times, and that means that often I'll need to step away from the ethnically-accurate palette and into something a little more orchestral and/or traditional. Finding the balance is always a challenge, not just for me, but for the picture editors, who place a lot of the music into the show.
georgiapeach:
Start to finish, how much time are you given to do one leg usually?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version