Highmark 'Squash' - Making Music with Rackets

I’m pulling out another older, but highly deserving spot from the Big Science Music and Sound archives on a Flashback Friday revival. Highmark 'Squash'. For this spot the creatives wanted a powerful rhythm made of squash sounds, but there was no way for them to film to a premade rhythm track as you might for a music video. For the stunning visuals, the crew built a glass squash court in a wooded area and filmed a lot of action sequences with the players. Game play, stumbles, racket-on-ball, ball-on-wall. All of it.

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Meanwhile, I took a digital audio recorder with a stereo microphone, and hired a court with some talented players to hit, bounce, and ricochet the ball in all possible ways while I recorded it. Sometimes the ball was really near to my head as it whizzed by so that I could get accurately close sound of the ball hitting the wall. I also recorded a bunch racket hits, shoe squeaks, body and hand impacts, and more.

To make it come together in post, I gave the editing team a drum track of a simple beat at a proper tempo for the spot, and tossed in a couple of the ball hits. I didn’t want to box the edit in with where the ball hits were placed within the drums, so the track was more basic drums than not. The director and agency creatives arrived at a beautiful edit against this track and gave it back to me. I had taken all of the hits and sounds that I recorded and chopped them into individual sound samples, then programmed them into a keyboard sampler so that they could be ‘played’. I stripped out the basic drums and we played rhythms of the samples against the edit – sometimes matching exactly, sometimes liking a touch of extra punch in some sections. The track needed to start out with single hit and then find its rhythm and build to a culmination and release. At the release point, the announcer came in and it needed something to support the vibe of her words in that moment. I had wanted to create the entire track using only real sounds from the court, but I realized that wasn’t the best thing for the spot. So I played a simple bass line to set up the announcer and bridge the energy from frenetic, to a structured ‘everything is great going forward’ kind of rhythm to fade the track out. This let you revel in the climax moment for the campaign line. 'Have a Greater Hand In Your Health' to land.

That bass is the only instrument in the ‘music’ track that was not recorded on the court using real sounds. It ended up as a magnificent commercial and won a number of awards. I am still proud of it, obviously.?

The director, having spent so much time in the edit suite with the more basic drum track, developed a ‘demo love’ for that version and used that for his reel. Nobody is immune from demo love!?

Since then, I have scored or created soundscapes for hundreds of commercials and always love the challenging charges. Whether it is a request to make it actually rain cats and dogs , write a torch song using only the word ‘sale’ , or compose with sounds and melodies (like skee-ball) for powerful brand messages, it’s never boring.

Watch Highmark 'Squash' here.

agency: Mullen