| Rob Simonsen is a film composer who hails from Oregon and now resides in Los Angeles. One of his first films was a feature called Westender that was shot on location in Oregon. Once Westender picked up distribution Rob picked up and moved to LA. Currently, Rob works with the film composer Mychael Dana. I had a chance to talk to Rob about some of the joys and pitfalls of composing for film.
The Interview
DE: When did you get started in music?
RS: When I was very young my Grandma forced me to sing X-Mas songs. Really, I mostly taught myself by ear. We had a piano in the house. My Mom played the piano and sang and my Grandma is a voice teacher and she really pushed me to play the piano, sing, and learn about music. So I grew up with music all around me.
DE: Did you take music in school at all?
RS: Mainly I was self-taught but I did take some piano lessons for some time. And then when I was in High School I went to a private, non-traditional high school and they had band, but the school’s version of band was a bunch of kids in a music studio with a seasoned rock and roll jazz musician and we would pick out tunes and he would teach us all how to function as a band.
DE: And did you study in college at all?
RS: Yeah, I did study a little bit at Southern Oregon University –not a very strong music study program, but I also took some classes at the University of Oregon.!
DE: So what experience do you have with playing in bands?
RS: I played in live Jazz- Fusion/Funk groups. Toured the bar circuit from here (Oregon) to the Rockies basically. I was involved in a slew of different projects but Freedom Funk Ensemble was the one that lasted the longest and we ended up recording and album. Yet, I’ve always wanted to work on film scores and an opportunity came up to do Westender.
DE: So how did you get involved with Westender?
RS: I was the main keyboardist on Tumbler and Jacks so that got me some exposure and I had some studio experience with FFE and was able to get the chance to score Westender.
(Editors Note: Rob Simonson and his circle of friends have been doing independent films since grade school and now have production companies like Crazy Emergency Productions (http://www.crazyemergency.com/) and M.O.B. Productions (http://www.westendermovie.com/) check out the websites to see a list of their projects).
DE: What was your background in composing at this time?
RS: I was always composing my own stuff. I started out with an Ensoniq-KS32, which had a built in sequencer. So I would write songs that way –but they were never really funk band tunes –just my own compositions that seemed more suited to soundtracks than bands.
DE: And this gave you the idea that you wanted to work with film?
RS: Well, more than that it made me realize that I could flesh out compositions and be a one man show and produce all sorts of sounds and genres on my own without having an orchestra and all that stuff. The KS32 was the first realization of that concept –the knowledge that I could be a self-contained entity rather than forced to be in a band to realize my ideas.
DE: What did you do to prepare for taking on your first film-composing project?
RS: Prayed. No, seriously I didn’t even know how to work a computer. I could barely check my email before I started Westender. It was really just trial by fire. Because I knew the director and was involved in the project in the beginning of the story creation I knew what the music was going to be –we had discussed it early on. It was really a matter of figuring out technically how to accomplish actually realizing the music.
DE: So how did your setup change from the Ensoniq to the setup you used for Westender?
RS: I got a Blue & White G3 with a Roland XP-30 and Digital Performer. That’s the setup I used to do the entire synth mock-up for the score. The XP-30 had a good string and pizzicato patch, a good horn patch, and it had a good timpani patch. Unfortunately, it limited my compositions because at the time I thought “these are the sounds I have to work with” –I didn’t think the option of having a live orchestra existed. Towards the end of the project I got Reason and also picked up the Roland XV-5050 -which really added a lot. And in the end, because Westender is a hybrid score, there’s lots of the XV5050 and Reason in the final score.
DE: What is the basic beginning process when writing music for film?
RS: Well, there’s what’s called spotting the film, which means going through the film with the director. You go through the movie and decide exactly were the music is going to start and when it is going to stop for each cue. Then you discuss what the music should be for each of these parts –try to get to the heart of what the scene is all about. Then you make the creative decisions of what to support musically, whether you play against the action or you play with the action. You decide whether you are trying to emotionally support what’s happening on screen or if you are going to try to support something you might not see on screen.
DE: What made you realize that you needed to have a live orchestra to complete the project?
RS: You can only get a MIDI orchestra to sound so good. Even if your using great samples you’re never going to get the real thing.
DE: Did you have to change your setup again to accommodate going from MIDI sequencing to digitally recording a live orchestra?
RS: I was constantly exporting the cue’s to see how the film was progressing, so I was constantly recording my MIDI sequences and working with the resulting audio. To record the orchestra we hired an engineer (Ed’s note -in this case your humble interviewer), rented a large studio room, and brought in a chamber orchestra with a conductor. We recorded it in three days and spent three months editing everything. Around the time we started going full bore with the orchestra I picked up a dual gig G4 and that was a dream come true. A bounce-to-disk that used to take ten minutes on the G3 would take less than a minute on the G4.
DE: What made you realize that you needed to have a live orchestra to complete the project?
RS: You can only get a MIDI orchestra to sound so good. Even if your using great samples you’re never going to get the real thing.
DE: What was the preparation process to take a MIDI mock-up and turn it into an actual score you could put in front of a live musician?
RS: That was all done by working with an orchestrator. We would export the MIDI files from DP and open them up in Finale. When you do this though you pretty much have to go thru by hand to perfect and massage just about every note. It turned out to be a very long, painstaking process -but it was worth it in the end.
DE: What was the process of meeting the orchestrator (Rebecca Oswald), conductor (Andrew Lang), and players -getting them all together?
RS: Basically, it was mostly people I had met through school. Not necessarily people I directly knew, but U of O has a fairly good classical music program so I knew some people there and asked for their recommendations. I ended up working with people I hadn’t previously met, but who ended up being very big assets to the project.
DE: Any unexpected surprises or anything you would have done differently if you were to do it all over again?
RS: The biggest problem was the lack of everyone being on a click and playing in the same room. This led to timing difficulties, which meant that I had to spend months micro-editing the performance for everything to sound in time. (Ed’s note -the horns and strings were recorded at separate times for both mixing flexibility and space limitation).
DE: So instead of everyone being fed their own click track you simply had a conductor listen to a click track and leading the group of musicians?
RS: Yes, which was the most heinous mistake I made on the project.
DE: But in theory that sounds like a plausible route to take –especially if you don’t own thirty sets of headphones.
RS: Right, well one thing to take into consideration is that these were orchestral musicians who are used to playing symphony orchestras and not the rigid timing needed for a film soundtrack. Time is much more fluid and organic to them as opposed to the mechanical syncing to a metronome you have in Hollywood. That’s a small part of the issue –but if they all had their own click they would have been dead on the money.
DE: Did the live orchestral recording provide a significant improvement to the overall sound of the score?
RS: Totally. Even though it took months in post-production it was worth the time. In the end it gives the effect of a huge orchestra when really it was just a small group of people. The magic of just having a few live musicians in the front provides the phrasing and the dynamics with a realism that fools everybody’s ears.
DE: What was the process of gathering everything you had done –both MIDI and live, and incorporating it into the film itself?
RS: Once I had mixed everything –and without reverb, I let the mastering engineer (Anthony Kasuchio of Xtremeadio.com was responsible for the superb mastering job) do all the reverb and mastering -the difference after mastering was just day and night. Once we had the stereo master we took it to Downstream Digital here in Portland. They were responsible for the final post-production stage.
DE: What made you realize that you needed to have a live orchestra to complete the project?
RS: You can only get a MIDI orchestra to sound so good. Even if your using great samples you’re never going to get the real thing.
DE: What resources would you suggest to someone who wants to get into composing for film?
RS: If someone wants to score films first you have to have the technical ability to accomplish it. You need a certain amount of equipment to achieve a good result. You also want to find someone who has a film that needs music and a composer –whether they are able to pay you or not. Maybe go to a school that has a film program and find the people that are making films.
DE: What, in your mind, makes for a good film composer?
RS: What makes a good film composer in my mind is somebody who does a really good job of supporting certain elements while not necessarily being redundant of what is going on onscreen.
Check Out Rob Simonsen!
You can check out the trailer for Westender, with Rob’s score here:
http://www.westendermovie.com. You can also check out all of Rob's current film composition work at http://www.robsimonsen.com.
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