Sounds, Samples, and Studios

All twelve composers use digital keyboards and computers as they create music, though they also work with acoustic instruments in hand. Some experimented with technologies early in their creative lives. Eric Whitacre played with synthesizers and drum machines as a teenager. Daniel Bernard Roumain’s high school had a Fairlight system—an early digital workstation that included a keyboard and computer. Roumain’s experience became useful during an internship with what was then Skyywalker Records led by Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew.

The composers with careers in film, television, and advertising have seen tremendous changes in technologies they use, the ways that they work, and the people with whom they work. John Adair described the transformation:

Early in my career there was the composer, then there was the arranger, and then the orchestrator, who was not necessarily the same person. Then there were the performers, different people altogether. Then there was a recording engineer and a mastering engineer. Now all this has to be done by one person with a computer in their home studio. It may not sound like a dramatic change but consider the fact that all of those roles were hugely developed specialties and now they’ve been collapsed into a situation where one person like me needs to understand what an engineer does, the nuances of performance—whether it’s live instruments or samples, synthesize it, put it together, and turn out something that sounds real and believable.

While these composers worked with musicians on sounds stages, and sometimes still do, their practices have changed. Steve Hampton, Adair’s long-time creative and business partner, commented, “Now we all have home studios and we have gazillions of great sample libraries. The players come to our home studios, whereas 20 years ago, we would have booked one of the many LA recording studios and met there"

Home studios have also changed as well. “There were no computers or anything when I started" Miriam Cutler explained. She moved from recording decks and mixers, to consoles and tape machines, to synthesizers and samplers, to her current set-up of computers and keyboards. Anne McGinty has also “pared it down over the years to a computer and keyboard synthesizer.” Conversely, Jennifer Jolley collects mini and modular synthesizers, even learning how to build them for use in her pieces for acoustic musicians and electronics.

Computers, sample libraries, and other technologies, including notation programs, offer advantages for creating music. Steven Bryant, who also writes for acoustic ensembles and electronics, described scrolling through patches on the synthesizer to explore sounds as part of his working process. Connor Chee commented on the affordance of capturing and retaining ideas via technology: “I can hit the record button as I’m improvising or coming up with things. If I’m at the acoustic piano, I might play something and within seconds it’s gone. If I’m at the computer, I can rewind and listen, or cut that little piece out and save it for what I’m working on"

On the other hand, over-reliance on technology can be misleading. Jessie Montgomery described a sense of getting “stuck in the score” and needing to step away from the computer. Steven Bryant noted that midi sounds can be misleading. “The number one thing you need as a composer is to hear the music played by humans, if it’s for human beings, for instruments" he said. “You can render it, you can hear the computer play it, but that really lies to you. Have someone play an eight-bar melody, for example on a flute, and then you really learn, ‘Oh that feels so much higher than it did.’ You get a visceral sense of it. Those are the real orchestration lessons" Similarly, John Adair cautioned that “some composers have, let’s say, a trumpet patch on their computer. But what they don’t understand, because they haven’t worked with real trumpet players, is that tessitura matters. If you write everything on the ledger lines, their lips are gonna bleed" He explained a similar but more subtle problem brought about over-reliance on technology in his own creative practice:

When sample libraries started to become effective for computer composition, I got lazy and started to write from my samples. In other words, I would call up my orchestral template and start building a piece that way. Boom. Off I’d go. Well, one day I had an epiphany. I listened to some of the things that I had done earlier and setting aside the comparison between live musicians and sampled music, I noticed that the more recent stuff was less impactful, kind of cloudy and less focused. And I realized what was happening. I was doubling things that I otherwise never would have doubled—j ust slathering on trombone and cello parts. Yeah, it worked, but it was kind of mush. And I finally realized, I’m letting the technology lead me. It needs to be the other way around.

Technologies for creating will continue to evolve. Steve Hampton advocated that teachers “blend traditional instruction with new technologies and resources." Similarly, Eric Whitacre suggested that “if you can get students who are already playing instruments in front of synthesizers, then a single note is a whole world and can unlock a direction in a way that a typical instrument can’t" Anne McGinty suggested having students “play around with GarageBand" And, once students are using digital technologies, John Adair advocated learning “how to prioritize and what to purchase out of the bazillions of sample libraries out there"

While none of composers in this chapter work specifically in the popular music industry, they pointed to ways in which popular music genres, particularly hip-hop, evolved concurrently with digital technologies and sampling. “It’s a completely different discipline," John Adair explained, “I had to dig deeply into the computer world to understand how things were put together and how to create a sense of movement, build, and release when you are working with pre-existing electronic artifacts" Peter Bernstein noted that “what holds today’s popular music together might be technological in nature. So there’s a lot to learn. Where did it come from? Why is the way it is? Who used it? What is there to know about it? And the answer is, a lot"