Episode 10: Templates

Karl Erwin discusses the concept of templates in film music composition. Templates are commonly used in digital audio workstations and virtual instruments to save time and ensure consistency in the composition process. Templates can also be used for notation and effects chains. They help composers format their creations properly and maintain a consistent sound across different cues or projects. Templates are especially useful for professionals who want to establish a recognizable sound. Hello, I'm Karl Erwin, and this is Spotting Cues, a podcast for the amateur and hobbyist film score composer. This is going to be a relatively short episode. We're going to be talking about templates today. Templates is kind of a buzzword. It's a very contemporary buzzword, and it has a particular meaning to film music composers. Usually when we say templates, we're talking about digital audio workstation environments and virtual instruments. That is usually what it means, but I want to talk a little bit broader about templates and how this subject and topic can relate or may not relate at all to the more hobbyist amateur film score composer. First of all, let's discuss what are templates. What are templates? So, do we use templates? I use templates all the time. I use templates whenever I'm doing any kind of documentation. If I have to write some kind of a form letter, I'll use a template, and usually there are templates that come with word processing software that will have a format that I can follow to create my form document, and this is true for a lot of different occupations. You might be a writer. You might be a playwright, or you might be an author, a novelist. You might be a screenwriter, and in each one of those, you may use some kind of a template that helps you to format your creation properly and early so that you don't have to do a lot of conversion later on in the process of writing. You can kind of write directly to a template and compose your art form there in proper form. When we look at templates with respect to notation, there are, again, templates that have to do usually with instrumentation, so if I want to write a symphonic piece and I'm going to write for symphony orchestra, I may start with a notation template that has all the instrumentation in proper order for a typical symphony orchestra. From there, I can make modifications. I can add or remove instrumentation to make it more customized to what I want, but it saves me time, and therein is the issue. This is really about saving time. It's about making sure that we're not recreating work that can otherwise be done one time and then shared over many different projects. So what kinds of templates can we have with respect to film music? Well, we can have digital audio workstation templates, and as I said, this is usually what people are talking about when they talk about templates. Templates related to virtual instruments, a palette of virtual instruments or a set of virtual instruments that are typically used, they are formatted in the proper order in the workspace, and it includes all of the virtual instrument plug-ins that might be used entirely in someone's library. If you're a professional and you have a powerful enough system, you can do that sort of thing. Or it may just include the most common fundamental instruments that you use in most projects, and you can start from there and then add or remove as you see fit. And then also, part of the template is another aspect of it, which is the channel routing. So this is where we're sending signal. Where does the signal go through the processing chain until it gets to the master output? This is where you would create maybe instrument buses or family buses. You might have a number of different virtual instruments for the first violins that come from many different virtual instrument makers, and then those might funnel down to a bus that's just for that instrument, which might go to another bus, another channel, which is for the section of strings. And then from there, it might go to another bus, which is for your spatial effects, like reverb, right, for that particular area in the space. And then that might go down to another submix of some kind, and then eventually get down to the master. And in there, you might have a variety of different plugins and effects, effect plugins, that will change the signal in some way to make it sound more to your liking. So that is the other aspect of the digital audio workstation template or the DAW template. So you have virtual instruments on one side, and then you have signal routing on the other, and those are all part of the template. Your template might only have one, might only cover one side of it. It might just be about virtual instruments. And then you might have a very generic signal routing that gets down to a submix and then a master without having any kind of specific signal processing plugins in between. You might have a very simplified template that just really focuses on the virtual instruments. You might have a template that does not focus at all on virtual instruments, but only includes the bus signal routing through channels to the master, and then from there, you will bring in instrumentation and place them into the appropriate starting point, the appropriate bus to start at. And that might be your template. It's just about signal routing. I've had templates like that that I don't have any virtual instruments loaded in. I'm just dealing with my mixing and mastering kind of focus. That's what I'm working on in that template. So these are the different ways that you can treat a digital audio workstation. But there's other templates. As I said, you can have templates for notation that give you proper instrumentation. Now, with notation software today, having playback capabilities and using very sophisticated, robust playback engines that depend on sample sounds, and especially being a hobbyist, an amateur hobbyist, I render a lot like this, where I don't really ever go into digital audio workstation until I'm doing the final synchronization. So what I have templates for is my instrumentation, but those are mixed down to signal buses, channel buses, within the notation software with proper virtual instruments applied to them and down to the master. So I can load up a notation template, and I write to notation. That's what I prefer. But I also have my mock-up that's already ingrained into that at the mixing level because the software can handle it. And you may choose to do that. That might be your template and what you refer to as your template or one of your templates. You might also have a template that is merely for an effects chain. It's separate from the digital audio workstation at all. So if you have a plug-in, in Linux we use plug-ins in this way. We have one in particular that is very good for this. It is an effects rack, and the rack itself is a plug-in. And within the rack, we can load in various effect chains and save those as a template. And I can save that aside, and then whenever I open up my digital audio workstation, I can just drop that file, that template, with the effects preloaded in the proper chain sequence into any channel or bus that I choose. And that's another form of template. So it's kind of a modular subordinate template that fits into another one, into another environment. And then on top of that, you also have organizational documents. So these are just text documents, so they might be various kinds of spreadsheets that you use just to keep track of what you're doing. Maybe you keep track of iterations, or you're keeping track of timing with respect to the time code for specific cues, and you're registering that in. Your cue sheets work in this way. I don't keep cue sheets personally. I am a member of ASCAP as a composer and a publisher, but I don't really engage in the submission of cue sheets for media composition because I'm an amateur hobbyist, and I don't really earn money on this. I usually work for nothing whenever I'm working for student projects. So that's not something I have a lot of experience with, but you can talk to some people that are more at the intermediate level of this kind of field that are doing paid work or at the professional level. And you can get cue sheets that fit kind of the ASCAP or the BMI standard so that it's easy to keep track of this data early on in the process and then submit it and have it in the proper format. Again, it's about saving time. I have kept some spreadsheets that have to do with timing not related to the music, but timing related to the calendar. When are specific tasks, when do they need to be done, what are the deadlines, what tasks have been completed, and they'll have checkboxes for that. So when you have a more complicated project, you might have templates that you can rely on to plug your information into, and it saves you an enormous amount of time. So when I think of template, I think much more broadly. Now, why use templates? I think we've already addressed that. Number one is to save time. It's merely to save time, but there's another reason why you might want to use templates, and that is to maintain consistency. So why would you need to maintain consistency? Well, in your project, you want to make sure that one cue doesn't sound dramatically different, even though it has the same instrumentation. You don't want it to sound dramatically different than some other cue. You want to make sure that the cues sound like they're for the same project and were created in the same environment with the same instrumentation. So keeping a template and maintaining a template with virtual instruments can help you to accomplish that, or maintaining a template in notation but that has virtual instruments established for that instrumentation in the template that can also do the same thing. So that is to maintain consistency in the palette, in the instrumentation, in the sound of the cues as they relate to each other and in the tone. If you are a professional and you compose a specific type of music and you're known for it, you probably want to have consistency across projects. And in this way, templates can be very useful so that you're relying on a basic template to start from, and from there, you start all projects. And then by doing so, you create consistency in your sound that people have come to rely on. This is probably not so much a concern for the hobbyist amateur, but if you're a professional and your work is becoming well-known, that would be an issue that you would want to address. Balance and blend is another thing. You want to maintain balance and blend across the various cues in your project just to make sure that the instrumentation balances. Even if you have the same instruments that you're using throughout the project, you want to make sure that each cue is balanced in a like manner, that it sounds the same. You would use a template to set your stereo configuration and the sonic kind of scape with your plug-ins, as we mentioned before, and again, you would want to maintain consistency in this way. That would be a reason to have a template is so that all of the cues are consistent within a project or is such that all projects of the same kind of music are very similar to one another. And then, again, for mixing and mastering, you want to make sure that your mixing and your mastering chain is fairly universal across the cues in your project or even across projects themselves. This especially matters if you're submitting to streaming services. You want to make sure that everything is appropriate to be acceptable to the service whenever it goes out to publication. That's a reason to use templates. It's more than just saving time. It's also a very practical, pragmatic reason, and that is to be consistent and to maintain consistency over a period of time and also certainly within a project so that the cue in one place doesn't sound dramatically different from a cue with the same instrumentation in another. Why not use templates? There may be a reason not to use templates. I can't think of too many, but there are reasons to not bother with it, and some people work in that way. They don't use templates at all, and the number one reason I can think about why you wouldn't use templates is because it is what others do. Why just merely do what other people do just because they do it? A lot of, I think, people, particularly searching on social media and online and various video tutorials on the subject, might start creating templates just because they see other people doing it, and they have no other reason and no comprehension as to why it would be useful to them, but they know that they have the same gear that someone else has. They have the same libraries that somebody else has, therefore, they feel that they need to have a template like other people do, but they never really have a reason to have the template other than the fact that others have it, and they find, they feel or they're convinced that this is some kind of standard. That's not a good reason, right? That's not a good reason to do it, and if that's your only reason, well, I would question why you would need to have a template of any sort. That's not really a good cause. It's just merely conforming to industry jargon, I think, in that sense. However, you might choose not to work with a template because your projects are diverse. If every project you do is different and calls for a fresh idea or diverse instrumentation, it may not be useful to have templates. It just might not be. I heard a professional who did a lot of work for, it was, I can't remember who did it. I think it might have been collaborative. There were a few different people that worked on it. It was BBC Blue Planet 2, the second iteration of that TV series. I believe I heard an interview where they said they did not use a template for it, that really every single idea was new and fresh, but if you watch the series and you listen to it, you hear that everything is new and fresh. That's kind of by design. As an amateur hobbyist, I can say that almost all of the scores that I do are new and fresh. They don't relate to one another. I hardly ever do symphonic, full symphonic music. It's usually going to be a chamber group of some kind, a more intimate setting. When I do symphonic music, it's usually very slanted toward a style or a genre, in which case I'm going to really limit the instrumentation in some way to make it fit that sound. If I'm writing Celtic music, but I'm writing it in, which I just did this, I wrote a very Celtic kind of score for a fantasy piece using a symphonic setup, but the type of music meant that I did not, a template would have been no benefit to me because I was going to weigh heavily on the unique instruments that were part of that palette and that ensemble. It really didn't matter. All I need to do is grab a symphonic template, delete a bunch of instruments I didn't need, and then throw in instruments that I did. In this way, that template was of no use to me in terms of how it applies to other projects. It was just generic to start with. I saved time, but it wasn't something that I spent time designing. It was just the generic template that was part of the software. I just grabbed it in the notation software. That's a reason not to use it, is you just don't have a need. Don't make templates that you don't need. That's simple. If templates are to help you save time, don't make them something that wastes time. That is possible, so that's a reason not to do it. But I want to talk about this something, this area in between. It's a little bit more gray, and this is probably going to apply better to the amateur hobbyist composer, film score composer. I call this template on the go. It's a template on the go. What it means is that when you start a project, you may design a cue. When you've created that cue, and usually it's going to be kind of a core sketch. It's a core idea. It's a mainframe kind of concept that you're submitting early in the process. What you do is you take that idea, whether it's going to be an official cue for the project, or whether it's just a sketch. You take that idea, and you save it as a template. Because what you've done is you've created your palette for the project, or at least the fundamentals of it, the basics of it, the basic building blocks. And then if you save that aside as a template, which a lot of software will let you do, it'll let you save a full project as a template. It'll remove all the data inside of it that is part of the composition, but it will maintain the elements that are template-based, such as the instrumentation and the signal routing. And if you can do that and save that out as a template, if you can't do that, all you've got to do is delete all of your data that's in the notation of the MIDI data, and then you have a template that will work for the project. And this is a good way to do templates, this template on the go. That will help you to maintain consistency throughout the project because you have one starting point from which all cues are based. And that was what the first sketch set out. You can add and delete from that, but you'll always have those core consistent elements in terms of instrumentation and signal routing. So template on the go. And this is really what I do most of the time when I'm working with templates. I will start a project, I will write some kind of major idea, and then I will save that. And from there, I will always go from that original concept to other cues. And I use that as a template, and it saves me an enormous amount of time. I don't have to reconfigure everything that's already been designed and put there. And as time goes by, I may go back and change that in some way or modify it a little bit further or nuance specific cues from other ones. And I'm free to do that. But it does give me the same starting point and helps me to maintain consistency. So this can be applied to digital audio workstation. It can be applied to notation. It can be applied to effects chains. It can be applied to just about everything, the template on the go idea. You start with one core idea, and then you save that as your template. And then you work from there as you complete the project. And then when you get to a new project, if you have something preexisting that you can start from, you can go grab that as your template. If you don't, then you start a new one. And then that becomes your core template for the project going forward. So those are just some ideas for the amateur hobbyist on the subject of templates. Again, check me out on X, formerly known as Twitter. Find me at SpottingCues. Send me a message. You can also comment here on the podcast. Leave a comment if able. And please rate the show if you haven't done so yet. Give me a rating, not just on the episode but on the show, if you've been listening to various episodes up to this point. Feel free to drop a rating on there so that we can get the word out on this podcast for people that are like you and me and do this kind of work. So I wish you the best of luck, and happy composing.