How To Get The Most From Your Composer

In this edition of Producer-Director Music Notes, I’d like to foreground common challenges between composers and creative leaders (producers, directors, showrunners and anyone else responsible for the final cut). I’ll also bring to bear perspectives and recommendations from three professional composers whose brilliant ideas I know you’ll want to hear. It’s great advice and it will really help you get the most from your composer.

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I’m sure it’s no secret that the quality of the relationship and collaboration style you have with your composer will be instrumental in shaping your final product. A composer’s ability to translate your creative vision into reality can make or break your production. It’s this nexus, this intersection, between creative leaders and composers where there is potential for huge success or huge flops. I want you to be super successful.

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Before we get into these topics, I’d like to remind you of the mission of this newsletter and who it’s for. The newsletter exists to empower creative leaders to get the best possible performance from their music and sound team. This edition will not cover a very important topic I know many of you are interested in: composer contracts and compensation. That topic is so complex and nuanced that I’ve decided to devote a future edition completely to it. I’ve already been in contact with entertainment attorneys who specialize in this area.

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In this edition, I’ll highlight the top four challenges our three composers identified and present their recommendations to address these challenges. These composers picked these challenges as the most common obstacles they run into when working with creative leaders. All these insights and recommendations could be just what you need to realize even better outcomes on your next production.

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Three Professional Composers

It is my great privilege to introduce Esin Aydingoz, Chris Wirsig and Adonis Tsilimparis. In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that Esin, Chris and Adonis are all, like me, members of the SCL (Society of Composers and Lyricists). This is how we all know each other and it is a common point of contact between us. We look forward to SCL events because of the sense of community it has fostered between working composers. My sincere thanks to all three composers for allowing me to pick their brains and for their wonderful insights. Here is a bit about each one.

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Esin Aydingoz is a media composer from Istanbul, Turkey. She composes music for a wide array of projects, including animation, silent films, documentaries, TV series, video games, and musicals. She was nominated in 2023 by the Society of Composers & Lyricists for the prestigious David Raksin Award for Emerging Talent for scoring the feature film Simchas and Sorrows and her latest documentary Black Barbie just premiered at SXSW. The Monster of the Desert and Noor both brought her Best Score awards on the indie film circuit. She wrote music for the Apple TV+ show SEE, Hallmark’s One Summer and Presence of Love, and Netflix’s Princess Power and The Witcher: Blood Origin starring Michelle Yeoh. Esin’s cello arrangement of “Paint It Black” for Tim Burton’s Golden Globe-nominated Netflix show Wednesday was #1 on the Billboard Classical Charts, with over 19 million plays on Spotify.

Chris Wirsig is an award-winning composer, songwriter and producer, who enjoyed classical training on piano and saxophone, studied audio engineering, and has more than 20 years experience in music production. His music can be heard in the award-winning documentary series Halloween Obsessed, the vampire feature The Things We Cannot Change, several short movies, the comedy feature 39 And A Half, as well as in games like the acclaimed Top Ten iPad game Alien Tribe 2, and in numerous TV shows on ABC, E!, MTV, History, Oxygene, Fox Sports, and many others. Current and upcoming projects include the pilot for an LGBTQ+ animated comedy series, Be More Popcorn, the cyberpunk boxing drama Steel Will, and charity projects with cover versions of Depeche Mode's People Are People with 36 musicians and singers, and a Heavy Metal version of the Ukrainian National Anthem benefitting the Red Cross.

Adonis Tsilimparis is a born and raised New York City composer. He began studying guitar and piano at age 11. He played in several pop and rock bands as a lead guitarist and singer. He became a staff writer at a commercial jingle house called Fearless Music, where he wrote and performed countless commercial ads. He continued to write at Fearless for several years before expanding to compose music for other Film and TV Projects. He has composed music for CSI:NY, NCIS, and numerous reality shows. He has also written music for cable shows and several indie and documentary films. His recent film credits include Demenia 13 and American Spark.

The Top Four Challenges

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My approach to the topic of—how do you get the most from your composer—focused on two questions that I posed to all three composers:?

1. What do creative leaders tend to struggle with when engaging composers?
2. What solutions do you recommend to address these challenges?

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Here are the top four challenges the composers identified:?

1. “I don’t speak music.”
2. Clear guidance is essential.
3. Music is an afterthought.
4. Limited budgets.

I Don’t Speak Music

This was the number one challenge that Adonis, Chris and Esin identified. When engaging with creative leaders, there is often a language barrier. To characterize this challenge, I’d like to provide quotes from all three composers. These are things that creative leaders said to them when trying to describe what they want their music to sound like:

• Chris: “I want it more purple.”
• Adonis: "I want it to sound like tendrils of magic."
• Esin: “I’m sorry but I can’t tell you want I want it to sound like.”

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The challenge here seems to be that most creative leaders, even those with a background in music, struggle to translate what’s in their head into language that the composer can understand and can take action on. Here are several suggestions to address this challenge.

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Esin says, “I don’t think they have to apologize. In fact, I expect most creative leaders not to know how to express in musical terms what they want. So, apologizing or feeling bad because they can’t use musical language actually impedes us from working together as two creatives to solve a problem.” Instead, Esin has developed an effective approach to this situation. “When we get into spotting sessions, I like to ask them to come up with five-to-eight word (mostly adjectives) to describe the scene. What do they want the audience to feel? From whose perspective I should tell the story musically? This gives me a starting point for writing music that conveys the right feelings.”

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Chris takes a similar approach. “I like to understand the emotional landscape of the characters. I can glean some of this from the script. But the characters’ emotions change throughout the story. And sometimes, their emotional state isn’t revealed through dialogue or screenplay notes. Sometimes it’s only the director who seems to know what’s going on inside these characters.” When collaborating with creative leaders, Chris often asks two questions. First, what’s the emotional state of each character in this scene? Second, what is each character thinking, what’s in their mind that they may not be saying out loud?

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Adonis takes a somewhat different approach. “I find that even a little bit of education helps a lot. I try to help them learn a bit of music terminology. This is often simple stuff like tone, octave, half note and whole note and different tempos. I recommend both online resources, like tutorials, and small books that they can read quickly or just reference. There’s so much great information out there and it’s pretty easy for them to pick up on language that can help us both.”

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Adonis also has another suggestion. “Most of the time, these productions include a number of creative people, like editors, writers and even sound recordists. I think it helps, if a creative leader doesn’t have specific ideas about what they want, to ask other professionals. A lot of filmmakers get stuck in their own head and feel like they have to come up with all the solutions on their own. But these other people on the project could really help.”

Clear Guidance Is Essential

This is yet another area where it could be easy for a collaboration between creative leaders and composers to break down. When this happens, frustrations mount, deadlines are put in jeopardy and budgets can be strained. There are two points in most productions where the guidance from creative leaders to composers needs to be clear: kick-off and revisions.

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Chris Wirsig characterizes the challenge quite well. “The problem, a lot of times, is that the creative leader is simply overwhelmed. They don’t have time to really think about the kind of guidance to give us because they have so much going on.” Chris’s advice is pretty straightforward. “Value the early stages more than the late stages. Be prepared to invest time and energy with your composer up front. Then turn them loose to do their work. Then provide feedback. This almost always produces better results.”

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Chris also notes that one of the big challenges with guidance is that composers often work alone. They are frequently left out of the production and post-production flow where meaningful conversations are happening that could help them get a better understanding, one that would not require so much time from the creative leader. This not only helps with the kick-off phase, it also can help with revisions.

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Chris says: “Bring the composer into the flow. Introduce them to the post crew. Zoom meetings work just fine. Composers and editors should be good friends. The more they can collaborate, the better. This can relieve creative leaders of the burden of communicating about a cut that needs to get made or something that needs to change. Any time we can take something off the creative leader’s plate, it helps them.”

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Esin also made several good suggestions. “Get your composer involved at the script stage. This will help us get into the world of the production. We can begin to write themes based on the scripts, even basic melodies. I also like to get raw footage. I can sense so much just by seeing the visuals. I can intuit and write based on the footage that may not be complete yet but that’s already telling the story.”

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Regarding revisions, Esin also has some further thoughts. “It can lead to problems when creative leaders have too few or too many distinct ideas. If they have too few ideas, they might like everything I write until someone else makes a comment that they didn’t anticipate. Because they didn’t have conviction up front about the music, this can make them second-guess themselves and create unnecessary revisions.”

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“If they have too many distinct ideas, especially if those ideas are in contention with each other, that’s a problem too. My collaborations are the most fruitful when the creative leaders have thought about what they want, communicate it in words that we can both understand, and then give me a little bit of freedom.”

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Music Is An Afterthought

Many of the challenges between composers and creative leaders occur because music is an after-thought. For many productions, composing kicks off in mid-to-late post-production, as deadlines are looming. Often, temporary tracks have been edited into scenes and these can be problematic.

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Adonis says: “Before they meet with the composer, creative leaders often use temp music. It’s important to make sure your temp music is close to what you want the final music to sound like so the composer can jump right in. But it’s easy to suffer from ‘demo love.’ This forces the composer to try to produce something similar, like a sound-alike, and often this doesn't work out. As composers, we have to be careful about copyright infringement because the risks to our careers are too high.”

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Adonis goes on to say: “If you plan to use temp tracks, consider using music from the composer’s existing library. There will be no copyright risks and the composer will know how they created that music. So if they have to write something original, they’re not starting from scratch. Many composers have a broad enough existing library that can serve as temp tracks. In some instances, that music can simply be licensed and that speeds up everything.”

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Esin says: “Music really can’t be an afterthought. You usually can't shoot a film in one week, and composers usually can't write an entire film score in one week. A composer doesn't just write music. They’re often entrepreneurs who have all of the same challenges as any other type of entrepreneur: business development, taxes, sales and marketing, searching for new projects and clients and on and on. Most composers, to make a living, have to work on multiple projects simultaneously. If all projects have emergency needs, it becomes unmanageable and overwhelming.”

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Esin goes on to say: “It can be a real problem when you get big surprises near the end of a production. Let's say you’re working on a TV show and you’re on the last episode and the director goes - well we haven't written a theme for this character and we need to go back through all the episodes and integrate this theme. That last-minute surprise could make it almost impossible to hit the deadline, let alone what it does to the budget. Clear up-front planning and guidance can help prevent this.”

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Chris notes that sometimes the problem is that the swim lanes haven’t been clearly defined between composer and other music professionals. Chris says: “It helps so much to plan out your music team. How much goes to composer versus music supervisor versus singer-songwriter versus music producer? Give your composer at least 6-8 weeks from the time you initially engage them. In an ideal world, the composer is brought in as soon as the script is finalized. The sooner you can decide between needle-drop versus custom score the better.”

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Chris also discusses something that creative leaders often don’t understand and tend to overlook. Composers need time to research, listen to reference tracks, define the instruments they’ll use and even write some initial sketches that the creative leader might not ever hear. Chris says: “Composers don’t just sit down and start writing. They need time to do all of the work that comes before actually writing.”

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Limited Budgets

Every production operates on a budget and sometimes, by the time the production is ready for music, that budget has been depleted. Of course, it’s a best practice to cordon off your music budget from other parts of the production. But sometimes that’s not enough. Fortunately, all three composers have ideas that can address this issue.

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Adonis notes that often the budget was too small to begin with. He says: “Line producers usually control the music budget. It’s a good idea to add 20% to whatever you budgeted at the start. This way, even if the budget gets absorbed by other things, you still might have enough to cover the composer’s fees. I think it’s important to remember that composers have to make a living too. I’ve known really talented people who’ve had to leave the industry because they couldn’t make a living. That’s a loss to all of us. Who knows what they might have been able to create?”

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Adonis has other ideas for addressing budget short-falls. He says: “Music budgets often include fees for composers, music supervisors, licensing tracks and even hiring producers to record singer-songwriters. If your composer has skills in those areas, consider giving that budget to them. I am a music supervisor, a songwriter and I have a music library. Sometimes, to make the budget work, I do all three.”

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Chris notes that sometimes budgets get stretched because of a misunderstanding of copyright. He states: “Some creative leaders have been told that they need to own everything to get a deal with distributors. So they negotiate for more than they need. If I have to give up rights to royalty income, I have to charge more. This can unnecessarily drive up costs. Make sure you know how you intend to use the music: main production, trailers, social media promotions and live events.”

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Esin also has a great suggestion. For projects with very limited budgets – and even more limited timelines, directors can still have original music but have their composers rework themes and cues as opposed to having brand new music for each scene. “I can write variations on a primary theme that still sound great. I can change time signature, tempo, instrumentation, and other things and can really change the overall feeling of the cue. This allows me to quickly create music that fits the need but doesn’t require the same amount of work as completely original cues. That can save time and money when necessary.”

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Wrap Up

I want to thank Esin, Chris and Adonis for their wonderful contributions to this article. They certainly came up with many more ideas than I had considered. I’ve included links to their LinkedIn bios so you can learn more about them and even reach out to them if you feel there would be a fit.

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Until next time, happy storytelling.

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Randall

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