Episode 06: Perfect Practice

In this podcast episode, Karl Erwin discusses the concept of practice for film score composers. He emphasizes that practicing properly is more important than finding resources to practice with. He suggests writing and sketching simple ideas to create emotional and intellectual quality in the music. He advises against focusing only on action cues and encourages practicing scoring from different perspectives. He provides options for finding footage to practice with, including shooting your own movie, using royalty-free libraries, or creating a montage of images. He concludes by reiterating the importance of perfect practice for mastering the skills needed to score to picture. Hello, I'm Karl Erwin, and this is Spotting Cues, a podcast for the amateur and hobbyist film score composer. On this episode, we're going to be looking at the concept of practice. The old saying is that practice makes perfect. I've actually heard this said many ways. Sometimes I've heard particularly educators for elementary educators, for young people, they'll say, practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes better. That's one kind of softer way to put it. I actually like, my favorite iteration of this saying is, perfect practice makes perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect, meaning that you can practice, but if you're not practicing properly, if you're not actually doing practice that is beneficial and is well-structured, then the practice isn't going to amount to much. In fact, it could create a lot of problems down the road if you're practicing the wrong skill sets or outside of the proper way to accomplish something. Perfect practice makes perfect. We're going to talk about what perfect practice is. First of all, I think the question I see often on social media about practicing is, where do you get resources to practice? When you're practicing film scoring, where do you get film to score to? Typically, you want to have a picture that you're going to be writing to because you're going to need to conform to timing of some kind. First of all, I want to say, I want to start this conversation by saying that's not as important as a lot of people think. I think practice in terms of film music composition really comes down to practicing music composition. The way I would approach this at the top, at the onset of all things, is to say, I think it's important to be writing. It's just important to be writing and sketching simple ideas, not necessarily thematic material, but just underscore mood kind of material, stuff that just projects some kind of emotional intellectual quality to it. It could be just vamping on a couple of chords and writing some kind of solo line over it that's not particularly melodic, but it could be just meandering, just to see if you can create some kind of a narrative, an ambiguous narrative that doesn't have necessarily a real plot to it. How many of these different kinds of narratives can you create in a setting? Can you sit down and spend a few minutes and create a minute of narrative that projects some kind of emotional quality to it? Again, it doesn't have to be very thematic. It doesn't have to be really top-shelf music. I think generally film music, particularly the underscore kind of music that is not thematic, it's generally not top-shelf music. It is subordinate to the picture. So I think if you can practice just doing that, writing some general mood kind of music that is understated and out of the way, you might even imagine some kind of a scene playing out. I think that gets you a lot further in terms of real practice and perfect practice than spending a lot of time just trying to find some footage to write music to. Now people are going to want to write to footage. That's what they choose to do. I think there's another element to this, though, in terms of finding footage to write to in practice that is, I think a lot of people won't want to hear this, but it is something worth hearing. If you really want to practice, you're going to need to practice the skill sets that are most common and most used. And that is not going to be action theme writing. And that's what a lot of people want to do. They want footage to score to to write some kind of action cue like their favorite composer and from their favorite movie, you know. That's not realistic, though. The vast majority of the film score, even in an action-packed movie, is still going to be the dialogue-heavy underscore or the montage sort of music that's not terribly thematic. So when you're looking for footage, keep in mind you don't necessarily need an action-packed scene to practice. And if you do want to practice action cues, you can really just write action music without the footage. Honestly, that gets you a long way, just creating themes that are recognizable. You can see the last episode for that. And creating iconic kinds of pitch collections and rhythms that will make a good theme. That's something that's done apart from picture anyway. But if you want to get some footage, find footage that gives you very simple narrative. It might be very ambiguous narrative. I highly recommend if you're just going to practice for yourself, you can take a movie and turn the sound off and rip that footage and practice scoring to it. And the key to this is that this is for yourself. You're not going to share this. Do not post this anywhere. Do not share this out to anybody in any form. This is about you just writing and being your own best critic, okay? Another option is to take old footage that you have from previous projects. So another possibility is to take out some of that footage from old projects that you've been working on, maybe older student films, older independent projects, just footage that you have already scored to and take another crack at it. Score it differently. Try some different ideas that maybe go against or apart from the direction you got on that particular project just to get some practice on it. Take a different angle. When you do this with footage that you have or, and I'm going to explain places where you can get footage that you can share too. But if you take footage that you have or if you take movie footage, proprietary movie footage and you practice it, I think one practice point is to practice scoring from perspective. So we talked about dialogue sequences in a previous episode. Practice scoring from the perspective of the speaker and then take another crack at it from the perspective of the listener and then maybe from the narrative perspective of the audience and try to score it from different perspectives because that's the real skill that you're practicing. It's not the writing of the music really. It's about the interpretation. Interpretation is what we're trying to achieve. Again, you can practice writing music apart from picture. You can be a very accomplished composer and be a very effective emotional composer without ever scoring to any picture at all. The picture process really is about interpretation and in some cases it is about timing. And on later episodes, we will talk about techniques for timing things and you have to write to picture, score to picture, and you've got a lot of hits that have to be attended to in the timing. There are techniques for that. They themselves don't really require a great deal of practice to be honest with you. They just require a, they require an understanding of technique. Now where to get footage. One recommendation I have is to shoot your own movie. You can just shoot your own short movie. Put some objects out, you know, on a kitchen table and do a montage or something or just take some images. You don't have to shoot live action footage. It can just be some pictures that you take and put together a montage with some fades and cuts, picture to picture. See if you can put together kind of an ambiguous narrative and then you'll have something to write to. Another option that you can do is to go to some of these royalty-free libraries and just find some royalty-free footage. Put together a sequence from a few different shots. Get about a minute, two minutes of footage so that you can write about a minute, minute and a half of music to it and score it in a few different ways. See if you can change perspectives. Try different instrumentation. Try different genres. Do it in electronic. Do it in, you know, do a pass that's acoustic. Do a pass that's a solo instrument. Make that a finite requirement that you're going to practice scoring but you're going to score with one instrument only, just one solo instrument. That's a good challenge that can really bring out a lot of interesting techniques and approaches that you otherwise might not have thought about but they become part of your toolkit that you can set aside. The nice thing about doing this from royalty-free footage is that you actually become a filmmaker. If you're using royalty-free footage or you're shooting your own footage or you're putting together a sequence of images, you're actually making a film. You can put this together, score it in a particular way or a few different ways and pick one you really like and that can be part of a demonstration reel that you can put on a, you know, small simple website or on a YouTube channel or something and then you can point perspective clients to that later on and say this is an example of a couple of my styles and it's just a montage of images or a montage of nature photography is really good or nature footage. Really great for this because you really can score just about any kind of music that you would find in almost any kind of movie to some kind of a nature sequence or nature scene. So that's another idea, just to put together a montage of royalty-free footage. It doesn't have to have dialogue. It doesn't have to have anything. Score understated. Score as if it is a dialogue sequence. Keep it sparse. Keep it simple and then maybe for another pass, make it really heavy. Make it really, you know, action-packed. Try to hit a bunch of different hits, not just within the shots but maybe within the cuts from shot to shot so you can practice that a little bit too. But these are just my suggestions with respect to practice and remember again as we started this conversation, I think it's true. Perfect practice makes perfect. Make sure that you're practicing the right techniques and the right skills that represent the bulk of what it is to score to picture and I really think that that has a lot more to do with understated emotions and simple narrative. I think it has a lot less to do with thematic writing. Thematic writing has its place but that's not most of what you do when you score to a film. The last bit of advice that I'll give on practicing, particularly if you're practicing to picture, if you do have some footage that you're writing to, I highly recommend that you not take the footage and merely just write a bunch of different type of music. One thing I think that musicians love to point to is the value of music in movies, that music is powerful, music is strong, music does something to us when we listen to it and because of that, whenever it is used in a movie, it can really sway the scene one way or another. There's a fun exercise that's been done countless times over where you take a piece of footage, maybe a silent film or something and you have some music that's very happy and goofy and then you take that same footage and then you have some music that's very sad and then you have some other music on another pass that's, you know, action-packed and the way in which it can really change your perspective of the footage is quite remarkable and again, it's a fun exercise, it does demonstrate the power of music in terms of its influence in movies but that is hardly ever what you're going to be doing when you're doing real film work. When you're doing work for a filmmaker, you're going to be writing to their vision. Again, a big point I made at the very beginning of this podcast series, so when you write and practice to footage, I recommend that you dig deep into what you see and make sure that whatever you're writing is logical. You can do several passes on the same footage, it might just be a montage of nature and each one of those passes might be very different from the other but make sure that each and every one of them is a logical conclusion and interpretation of what you see. I do not recommend that you take some footage and then just arbitrarily write into it some kind of a mood or an atmosphere. Always derive your music from what you see because that's the real practice point, isn't it? The real practice point is testing oneself to see how well you can interpret what is provided and turn that into a musical voice rather than just superimposing any musical voice on the footage that you're given. So make sure that as you're writing, yes, do several passes, yes, take different perspectives, but always, always, always try to read out of the footage you're looking at what is a logical end in terms of music as you're writing and try very hard to stick to that within the confines of that. That's a very important skill is to be able to find the voice of the footage and to interpret it in a logical way. That is inevitable, I think, to the viewer. You don't want people, you will notice this actually, you can probably, if you think hard enough, you can probably think about movies that you've seen before where for a while you couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with it. But after some consideration, you realize that the music doesn't fit. The music doesn't quite line up with what the picture is saying. And I don't mean in terms of timing, I mean in terms of content and value, deep emotional value. So make sure that you're doing that. Watch the footage carefully, discern what the narrative is, ambiguous or as direct as it might be, and then make sure that you're writing music that fits it like a glove, as closely as you can. Then do another pass and take a different perspective. And again, derive whatever you do with the music from the picture, from that new perspective, but make sure you stick to it. So that's the last piece of advice that I have. So to summarize the discussion, number one, point number one, writing is writing. You don't necessarily need to write to picture to practice film scoring. You can just write without, just write mood music, try to create some kind of subtle narrative, understanding that you're not generating any kind of thematic material. It's just a sort of an impressionistic kind of sequence of music. And you can get quite a lot from that exercise, writing in different styles and different moods. The second thing is that if you want to practice thematic writing, well practicing thematic writing doesn't require movies at all, doesn't require footage. Thematic writing really means that you come up with a concept in your mind and you write the music. Create something that's formal and structured with a good theme and you can set that aside and use the conventions of what you learned from that later on as you work to picture at some point. I would say the same thing for action sequences as well, where you have a lot of motion, a lot of movement. Next, I would say get some montage footage, either put together some royalty-free clips or some images and create just a montage, a sequence of images, even still images or shoot your own film and you can score to that. Likewise, you can turn the sound off on a scene from a movie that you know and try to score that as well. Just don't share that with anybody. It has to be only for your own exercise. If you do make your own movie from royalty-free footage or you shoot your own stuff, that is a very useful film. You've actually become a filmmaker when you do that, where you've created a film and you've done the music for it. You can use that for a reel later on. I just highly, highly recommend that when you do this exercise, you're actually scoring from perspective that is in the film. Score from different perspectives, take different passes, but make sure that whatever it is you're doing is being derived from the footage and you're not reading something into it. It's very easy to say, I want to write this kind of music, let me find some footage so I can practice doing that. I think it's a bad way to go. You want to find footage, whatever it is, write to that footage, whatever confines it creates, whatever parameters it creates, you want to write within that and make sure that you're being genuine and true to it. So, yeah, those are my recommendations in summary. On next episodes, we'll be looking at how to get some work, how to find some real legitimate projects, where to go, how to get some work, paid or unpaid, you know, whatever. Just getting some projects that you can work on. There's a couple of different tactics that you can take to get some work and that will be coming on a later episode. So, good luck with that. Get to practicing and happy composing.