Working from templates
The demands of writing music for picture can be brutal. Talk to any film composer and you’ll hear stories of sleep-deprived writing sessions for crazy directors who have sacked another composer with the mixing deadline just two weeks away. Of course, everyone loves a harrowing tale and not every job is always so grueling but it’s true that writing music for picture is a remarkable job where you can easily have no work for months on end and then find yourself chained to your studio for 18 hours a day, seven days a week on a diet of adrenaline and strong coffee.
As a result, learning on the job isn’t really an option for anyone who has been commissioned to write music. It’s implicitly understood that if you put yourself forward for a job and you’re successful, you know how to import film into your chosen DAW, that you know how to sync dialogue and sound effects tracks and how to manage their volume while you’re working. It’s also understood that you know how to operate the sample libraries and instruments that you’ll be using for the composition and how to use the film to determine tempo and structure. This is all considerably more straightforward if you begin a project from a template starting
Learning on the job isn’t really an option
point. A template is a blank project inside your DAW into which a collection of instruments is already set up, so that when you select it, rather than having to load every instrument from scratch, while you make coffee, your computer is loading a useful collection of sounds so that you’re able to develop a promising musical idea quickly. Imagine knowing that you were going to compose for a virtual orchestra every day and yet you chose to set up your first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, double basses, oboes, flutes… (and so on) from scratch every single day. That would, of course, be a colossal waste of time. But that’s just the starting point.
Thoughtfully-constructed templates also route groups of instruments to auxiliary busses ready to be stemmed once a composition has been approved. In other words, if all of the strings are sent to Bus 1, all of the woodwinds to Bus 2 and so on, printing groups of instruments in a single pass further down the line is easy. And effects routings can also be built into templates so that you can avoid the horror of the strings reverb also containing a ghost of the French horn part when you’re balancing a mix in the heat of an edit. Building a template is a process of ‘working backwards’; find out what the demands of the ‘final stage’ are going to be and configure your template from that end point.