The Art of Production Music Composing

Alan Lazar is a composer, Production Music Association (PMA) Board Member, and co-founder of the BMG Luminary Scores production music catalog. He has scored more than 50 films and TV shows.

Much has been written about the art of composing score for film and TV. Traditionally, this has meant writing music to picture. But today, according to BMAT surveys, at least 40 to 50% of the music in TV and streaming productions comes from production music catalogs. Production music is also widely used in many other types of audiovisual material, in social media, in education, for brands, and much more. Whereas decades ago, ‘library music’ or ‘stock music’ was seen as low quality and a poorer cousin in the industry, today’s production music catalogs are massive and include high quality tracks from brilliant composers including the likes of Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson-Williams. Very little has been written about the emergent art of composing specifically for production music; in this article, I hope to broaden that discussion.

When people are watching visuals with music, they are generally entirely unaware if the music playing is scored to picture or sourced from a production music catalog. However, the process of creating these two types of music is different in many ways. During my career I’ve spent about half the time composing to picture and the other half writing for production music catalogs. I’ve produced almost 600 production music albums, working with many amazing and talented composers for BMG’s Luminary Scores catalog and Lalela Music, the catalog I founded previously. Here are some observations about how scoring to picture and writing production music differ, and what makes the latter a very specific artform that deserves wider recognition.

The Picture

Most music written by film and TV composers for a film or TV show is scored directly to picture. When there are long established relationships between directors/showrunners and composers, the music might come first, and there’s certainly more flexibility with the advent of digital technologies. But the picture is always the king and queen in the process. When one scores to picture, one might have musical ideas in mind before starting to work with the picture, but it is really the painstaking process of making music work to moving images that is the core of the final result. There is a magical dance between music and visual stories; music significantly uplifts and strengthens the emotional impact of the story when done well. When tracks are composed with that visual story in front of you, every note and texture, every instrument chosen, the tempo of the piece, the structure of the melody and chords, all these elements unfold in a tight connection to the picture. When one scores a film, you live in the world of the film for weeks or months or more. Even at the very end of the process I’m often still shifting cues back and forth by a frame or a half-frame, and that affects the way a cue plays against the visuals.

When writing a production music track, the composer knows it’s destined to be paired with a visual story in the future. Often it will be paired in different ways with many films and TV shows over the years, as well as games, social media content, phone apps, ads, promos, and more. The composer has no idea what all the usages will be. They all exist in some sort of future visual netherworld. The composer is literally confronted with a blank slate, a dark screen. It's much more like writing a book or a screenplay. No visuals to work with or inspire you. What do you do??

We all consume tons of different types of media, so perhaps one has some sense of the places where our tracks will be used. But at the end of the day, the production music composer needs to rely on a fertile imagination to create music so good it’ll be placed on many future visual stories that are only created after, sometimes long after the music is written. The production music composer needs to make up visual stories in his or her head, imagine scenes, invent characters, or just tap into the deep emotions that music must convey. When you’re writing production music tracks, your muse needs to be right there with you. You need to walk with your muse into that magical space that exists between music and visual stories. You need to find your own very specific ways of accessing your muse. The most successful and most creative production music composers have their own special rituals for connecting to their muse without the benefit of having picture in front of them.

Collaborators

When you score to picture for a film or show, it is an intensely collaborative process, working with directors, producers, editors and production company, studio or network executives. In film your primary collaborator is the director, and in TV the producer or showrunner, although there are many different variations on this. These good people have often worked on the production for years and care deeply about it. Although some may have knowledge of music, they generally prefer to communicate in the language of visual story, focusing on character, conflict, plot, pace, theme, arcs and beats. Your job as composer is to translate what they are saying into the deep and powerful emotional language of music. Skill at this job of translating collaborators’ input into musical language is a defining feature of being a film and TV composer scoring to picture.?

Some say the director and producer are the last remaining dictatorships on earth. I am not generally a fan of dictators, but in this one case I believe in them. A strong director or producer who has a clear vision and knows what they want will create a strong visual story out of the chaos of filmmaking. There’s nothing worse than dealing with a collaborator who doesn’t know what they want or changes their mind all the time. Much of your work as a film or TV composer scoring a production is about your relationships with the director and producer, supporting their work whilst bringing your own creativity to it and guiding your score through this long process of collaboration.

For production music composers, your collaborators are quite different, and fewer. Sometimes production music composers are hired by catalogs to create tracks, and they will work with catalog owners or, in bigger companies, Heads of Production or Producers in creating tracks and albums. In general, the production staff at production music companies are great people who love music and can provide much insight and support to the production music composer. The input they give is often phrased in much more musical language than you would get from a director or producer, so there’s less of the ‘translation’ you need to do when scoring. You may also be writing tracks for your own catalog or just writing tracks that you can pitch to catalogs. You’re pretty much alone again then. Hello, muse! Even if you’ve been hired by someone to write, there is not that sense of being in a big team creating a film or show. It’s pretty much just you and the music with a blank dark screen and the promise of a future for your track with some unknown future visuals.

Musical References

When scoring to picture or writing production music tracks you are often provided with musical references to use. In a film or show this is most often the ‘temp score’, a patchwork assembly of cues from other scores or from the director or editor’s album collection which has been edited into rough cut after rough cut to get a sense of what the music is going to be like. Some composers hate temp scores and some find them valuable. I’m somewhere in the middle. The problem is from watching the movie with the temp score many times, directors and producers sometimes develop ‘temp love’ which can take weeks to cure. Film and TV composers may essentially find themselves competing with temp cues on the film that did the job quite effectively. Of course, a score carefully crafted to picture has a specificity and unity that ultimately works a lot better than temp tracks, and this is the reason why productions continue to hire composers. On the plus side, the temp score may provide valuable hints as to what the director or producers want in the score and what the picture requires. But then simply regurgitating a temp score does not generally result in a successful outcome.?

In production music composing, there is no temp score. In fact, our tracks might one day form part of a temp score, perhaps even get licensed because the hired score composer couldn’t come up with a good alternative! What we do get are ‘reference tracks’ in situations where we are being hired by a catalog or production music company to create for them. They sometimes want tracks that sound like the references, but not too much, because, hey, that would be copyright infringement! Here again, your muse is helpful. We can carefully pluck elements from a reference track – the genre, the style, perhaps the tempo range, some of the instrumentation, and throw it into the muse’s astonishing mind so that it emerges anew, not unlike the reference track, but also fresh and unique and beautiful, in the best circumstances. When reference tracks are given to production music composers, there are generally not the same feelings attached as the ‘temp love’ one might encounter with a director or producer. There is the expectation that you will come up with something unique and original that is connected in invisible ways to the reference track but not the same. Finding the way to walk this line between similarity and originality is an important skill for production music composers. The best production music composers always create fresh and original-sounding tracks even when they’ve been given references.

Budget

There are significant budget differences across the film and TV scoring world. I’ve heard of less than $1000 paid by some indie filmmakers for their scores, to several million dollars to composers of big budget studio pics. This all impacts important production factors like the number of live musicians used, recording locations, time allotted for mixing, and the size of a composer’s backup team including music editors, assistants, orchestrators and more. Budget size definitely affects the quality of a composer’s work, although being creative on a limited budget can be a learning opportunity. Not surprisingly, I’ve found the respect of colleagues on a film and the working experience tends to be better the more one is paid! Low budget filmmakers unfortunately can treat their composers worse than anyone, in some instances.

In production music, there is also a range of budgets. Much of the production music out there is produced by composers in their home studio, out of ‘the box’ – fully digital with little live instrumentation. In many cases composers also perform and mix their own music. Successful composers are often provided more resources by production music catalogs who can give them access to live musicians and live ensembles including full orchestras. Mixing and mastering budgets are also included in some circumstances, giving an extra sheen and quality to their tracks. Once again, smaller budgets can be constraining, but they can also encourage creativity.

In my own experience, the most important factor that budgets influence is the use of live musicians. Just as a director needs great actors to interpret his or her script in unique and special ways, live musicians interpret a score in beautiful ways that a composer might not even have envisaged, bringing a uniqueness and emotional depth to their performance that would not have happened with a sampled score no matter how good the samples are. It’s tough to get significant budgets for film and TV scores these days, and it’s even tougher for production music composers to get decent live musician budgets. It’s worth fighting for.

That said, samples are outstanding today, and one can create excellent work staying ‘in the box’. It’s part of the reason why the barriers of entry into the industry have lowered so much, and sadly this has put downward pressure on music budgets of all sorts.

Getting your music heard

What determines if your music is heard at the end of the day? Through my experience, film and TV composers who score to picture are hired because of two factors: their musical voice, and their relationships. Over time, a renowned film and TV composer will become known for a specific sound, style or genre, that becomes associated with them although they may score many different pics. So often, sameness is seen in the younger composers coming into the industry – many love John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman, and they use similar sample libraries to many other composers. Regardless of their talent or the quality of their work, new composers are advised to be unique!? This is the best way to ensure a long and successful career.

Film and TV composers are often hired to score a film or TV show because of relationships, primarily with directors or showrunners, but also with producers, editors and studio/network executives. So much of what film and TV composers do involves collaboration with other creatives, and through this collaboration translate or interpret a director’s vision into musical language. When directors, producers and editors find a composer they have a strong rapport with, who creates music that satisfies the needs of their project, they will hire them again and again. Maintaining and building new relationships with these key creatives is a simply vital part of a film and TV composer’s career. It’s not enough to be talented.

Again, it’s quite different for composers of production music. Production music composers write on spec or are hired by production music catalogs. Relationships with production departments are essential and important to nurture. But what determines if the music created by a production music composer is actually used and heard after securing release through a production music catalog??

Music scored to picture goes through a long, collaborative process before being finalized. Production music composers will generally have no interaction with the end users of their music. Editors, mixers, and sometimes directors and producers will be auditioning many tracks to find potential music for their projects. They are listening to tracks without picture during this first stage. The music must sound great by itself, even though its intention is to ultimately be used with picture. Something about the track in isolation must grab the listener’s ear so that they put it into their potential tracks folder. I’ve noticed over the years that tracks by certain composers tend to get used more than others, and this observation has been reinforced by others I’ve spoken to. Something about their tracks has a strong, intangible quality that leaps out to potential users – a mix of production standards, composition and form. Some say loudness is very important when mixing production music tracks, but I believe it’s more than that.

Once in that folder, the track, along with many others, will probably be tested against picture and favorites may be seen by important creatives on the production including director, producer and editor. During this latter stage, the track is likely to be edited and possibly remixed through use of stems. This points to two important qualities production music tracks should have if they are to be used again and again – stems must be readily available, and they need to be easily editable. Regular hit points in the music are important, and key changes are in general are not advised as this limits editability.

This process of making it to picture for a production music track is something entirely out of the original composer’s control. The music must be as good as you can make it when you send it out to the world.

Music is music

As noted, the public is generally unaware of any hard distinction between types of music used on films, TV shows, streaming or any other audiovisual content. I’ve found scoring to picture and writing production music tracks to be two very different processes, but they can also inform each other in important ways. Scoring to picture taught me a very important lesson –viewers are often not even aware of the music in a film or show, music that acts in deep and unconscious ways to shape emotion, pace and story. Yet viewers would most certainly notice if it wasn’t there! The music must be powerful, but not intrude too much. When I’m writing production music tracks, this is often in my mindset; without the benefit of visuals, it’s easy to get swept up in the music and forget where it will eventually be heard.?

Since production music tracks are written without picture, there are fewer restrictions on what a composer can do. Many say there is much more freedom. Production music composition is often an area where composers can experiment more with a particular style, idea or instrumentation; such creative experimentation would be difficult or impossible on a film or TV scoring project. ?The results and knowledge gained by this experimentation might later find important applications in a composer’s future scoring work.

Overall, I hope it’s clear that production music composition is truly an artform all its own. It is a unique process, reliant on the imagination and muse of individual composers like no other artform. Today there is so much fantastic music being created by standout production music composers in global catalogs, and I hope it gets the recognition it has long deserved.

More info on Alan Lazar at?www.alanlazar.com

Find the Luminary Scores catalog at?https://bmgproductionmusic.com/en-us/discover/label/luminary-scores/c177bba43291c4c0

?