I was recently contacted by Søren Hyldgaard, a film composer in Denmark. He wanted glass armonica in his score for a film called Red, but flying me to Denmark to record them just wasn’t in the cards. So instead he sent me the cues (each musical ‘chunk’ of film score is called a ‘cue’) and I recorded the glass armonica parts in my own studio and sent them (by ftp) back to Denmark. Søren and his engineers then dropped my glass armonica recordings into that of the rest of the orchestra. Søren wrote:

Thanks to your precision AND the advent of digital editing, we spent a mere 45 mins adjusting and sync’ing your glass cues to my score - - and the blend is magnificent, no less! Your GA adds a haunting facet and makes an integral part of the score’s and thereby the film’s ’sound’. The Prague studio is direly pressed for time, so we did not make the final 5 channel mix of the score. My engineer will do this tomorrow or Saturday at the latest. So we’re are all eagerly awaiting the final score, mixed and sweetened and ready to adhere to the pic. FYI, final mix commences 2 January and the film will open on Sundance around 19 January.

We’ve never even talked on the phone–the whole project took place entirely over the internet. The world is indeed a-changing!

Obviously I’m making a switch from doing nothing but the glass armonica to including the piano also. I should say something about that.

A constant challenge for me and the glass armonica is that folks have no basis of comparison for knowing whether I’m any good at what I’m doing or not. How many other glass armonica players do folks know? (Um, zero?)  Now I don’t care about that personally, but it is definitely a problem in terms of marketing myself. For example, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people come up after a performance and say: “That looks easy. Let me try.” Sometimes I let them try (…”oh, it’s a lot harder than it looks!”) but that is a dangerous path: it’s too easy for things to degenerate into what I call the ‘glass armonica petting zoo’ where everyone wants to try it and things too easily can get out of hand–with my $20,000 instrument made of glass. It’s just a bad idea.

So I’ve decided to incorporate the piano. EVERYONE can recognize a capable pianist in about 10 seconds. Maybe even start concerts with piano–”ah, this guy really IS a musician.” THEN, having established my musicianship, I can do things on the armonica as well.

To paraphrase the immortal words of Bill Clinton, “It’s the music, stupid.” Ultimately the whole point is to get past the novelty, and even “me William”, to get to a musical experience that moves people. Which is the whole point in doing all of this. Getting stuck on issues like “that’s novel” or “anyone could do that”–those are impediments to The Music. When it’s easy to dispose of those issues, why not?

Plus, I’m a capable pianist. No reason not to share that too!

I got a call to play glass armonica on a film score for a feature called Terra. (A ‘feature’ is a film that is distributed to movie theaters (first), not for TV—at least initially). Here’s how recording film scores work:

‘Post Production’ at Warner Bros.

When making a film, they have ‘pre-production’, which is when they do all the planning for the film, ‘production’ when they actually shoot the film, and ‘post-production’ when they put all the pieces together into the finished product. Although the film composer will already be working out the themes and can start writing the music for the film during pre-production and production, the composer really needs the final edited version to time all the music right. So the film score is largely a ‘post-production’ task, and they never really want to give the composer much time because by this point they’re very anxious to get the thing done. Then once the score is done there’s generally a bit of a mad rush to record it all—for the same reason. (By the way, it’s surprising how many films are completed and are put on the shelf.)

Assuming that the film score is using an orchestra, orchestral musicians are used to playing with other orchestral musicians, and they can get a lot more music recorded in the same amount of time if they record the whole orchestra all at once. One thing they typically do, though, is have a separate microphone for every ‘desk’ (two musicians playing the same instruments—e.g. two violinist—sitting next to each other reading off of the same music). This can require 24 track recording or more, but later as they’re doing the final mix, they can decide “we want a little more French horn in this spot”.

The sound stage

But there are instruments that are problematic to record in this context. Percussion is a good example—it can be so loud that it’s hard to balance it with the rest of the orchestra in the orchestra recording session. And then there are quiet instruments—like me!—that can too easily be drowned out by the orchestra. So a frequent plan is to record the orchestra, and then record the percussion and instruments like glass armonica, one at a time, later. Which is what they did this time.

In the control booth they have the edited film, and the orchestra recorded to it; they give me the music, I’m the only musician in the studio at this point, and I can hear the orchestra in headphones. I also hear a ‘click track’ that clicks out the beat, and I have my own display of the film that also shows the measure/beat number in the upper corner. So they start the recorder—I’ll be track 42, say, along with the rest of the orchestra—I know I come in on beat 3 of bar 92, I watch the measure/beat counter and listen to the track and play when I’m supposed to.

Later they’ll do the final mix down of all the musicians into the final product that you hear in the theater.