Hollywood Strings Sketches by BenBotkin

EastWest’s Hollywood Strings is, in my opinion, the best string library out there for someone serious about string writing. It is more cumbersome and resource heavy than the other best-string-lib-contenders out there (largely because it is so expansive and in-depth), but if you are willing to work around these realities, it does yield the best sound of anything out there right now.

The audio file above is a medley of some string sketches I wrote up with HS in a very short amount of time–about 15-45 minutes each.

Pastorale Strings by BenBotkin

A quick sketch I did with East West’s excellent library Hollywood Strings. All strings are playing Con Sordino (with mutes) in this clip. Photo: Audri Botkin.

Ace Wonder Sketches by BenBotkin

Every musical project requires a certain amount of preliminary experimentation and ground work before you can begin on the final thing. For Ace Wonder, I spent a long time working up an assortment of little musical ideas and sketches based on the adjectives and vision the director (John Moore) articulated for me. (At this point in the process, I had also read the script and was getting little clips of the film to wet my musical appetite, but did not have an edit of the film.)

I immediately started versing myself in the pieces of music that possessed the flavor and feeling that John particularly liked– I also had a number of ideas of what existing pieces of music would capture the essence of his verbal descriptions. Wading through a lot of existing music first can really help the composer understand the musical tastes of the director. This is crucial. John’s understanding of what “Crazy- madcap-science-steampunk- action-adventure-detective-noir-mystery-music ” sounds like may differ greatly from my own, or may not be fully formed yet.

The pool of inspirational material we dove through was pretty wide and ran quite deep. John Williams, John Powell, Danny Elfman, Michael Giacchino, Randy Newman, Hans Zimmer, James Horner, Michael Kamen and more– all these composers and their scores were frequently referenced in our dialogue as we tried to mold and define that Ace Wonder “sound.” If someone asked me what my main source of inspiration for this project was, I would have to hand them half of my music library.

At least that’s what it felt like.

I wrote of dozens of these short, rough musical sketches, experimenting with everything from instrumentation to rhythm, melody, and meter. It took anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple hours to sketch one of these up, so every couple days I would send John a new batch of samples for him to peruse and pass judgment on–every piece of feedback I received told me a little bit more about the way John’s mind ticks in regard to music.

After a while of this, we ended up having a pretty good sense of the feel and flavor for the music and had worked through melodic ideas and the use of themes throughout the film. I was ready to begin scoring to picture, which at that point was nearing the “locked edit” stage.

I have never posted this before, but I was reminded of this short film I wrote the music for the other day when I was thinking back on the prehistoric before-marriage-era (which, surprisingly, was only last year). I remembered that I had been working on a film right in the middle of a very intensive getting-to-know/cross-examination period with Audri in April 2010 which subsequently swallowed up all the mental processes that would allow me to remember said film project… or actually anything at all besides love, courtship and marriage. (Shameless plug: Audri and I will be speaking on an upcoming webinar on courtship and marriage next month–check it out)

Anyway, Wanted the western was put together by some friends of mine, primarily by the fine fellows at The Effects Forge, whom I have worked with on multiple projects to date, and have had a great back-and-forth with on Ace Wonder (they’re handling the special effects and motion comic scenes). The music and instruments in this film are a little outdated, but it was fun to compose.

Wanted from Conquest Productions on Vimeo.

Ace Wonder Score Teaser #3 by BenBotkin

NOTE: the music doesn’t have any special connection to this artwork– it just makes the post look a lot more cool.