Anthony Baldino

Hollywood’s trailer soundtrack artist du jour talks to James Russell about hanging with soundtrack royalty, working on his special edition Nebulae module and happening upon an ARP 2600 with a story to tell…

Interview

In 2020, movie trailers have grown to become cinematic events in their own right, with major projects like Star Wars announcing release dates for the latest promotional shorts – never mind the film itself. Naturally, in this world of previews for previews, a trailer’s audio has to be louder, better and more polished than the next one’s. It’s all in a day’s work for Anthony Baldino. “It’s funny, when I first got started, I didn’t even think about trailer music being its own genre,” says Baldino. “A lot of people think they would just pull the music from the movie. But there’s so much that goes into these trailers. All the Star Wars trailer work I’ve done was an awesome experience, and I’m so grateful to be invited into that world and to get to pay homage to the mighty John Williams!”

If you’ve seen a movie trailer in the last six years, the chances are that at least a handful of sounds within have come from Anthony Baldino’s studio. With his list of trailer credits spanning horror, sci-fi and action/adventure, including many recent Marvel movies, his new album, Twelve Twenty Two, is packed with analogue modular character, spacious synth rolls, ambient soundscapes and hard-hitting drums. It’s cinematic, sure, but there’s a sense of musical purpose that’s clearly been bursting to get out.

It must be great to be involved with so many cinematic worlds, but how hard is it to distil everything into its purest form for the trailer?

“It is really great and at the same time it’s a lot of work; a lot of brain work. It’s like doing the same math equation you’ve done before, but it has a different answer every time. For example, the opening has to be something new but still has to work as a trailer opening that we’d all recognise. For every part of the trailer, the sound design has to fulfil a specific purpose.

“I’ve been working in trailers for a long time and a lot of my work is generating a massive collection of music and sound design-based compositions that editors can pull from. Often times, though, an editor will have a specific idea which is where it gets really fun.

“The interesting thing about trailers is that the sound design is much more complex than, ‘Oh, here’s an impact’. It’s a swell into an impact, into another impact, into a long tail into an even bigger impact, into another designed tail. It’s easy to see where this very quickly starts to cross the line from sound design over to composition – just with different ‘instruments’ or ‘voices’.”

…and it’s all got to be coherent with itself.

“Yeah. I always try to treat it as a mini composition; my mini, 15-second sound design-based composition.”

In your studio, you’re pretty much surrounded by modular gear. Does that get to be used much at all for trailer and film work? It sounds like you manage to use it to the fullest on your own album.

“It depends on the project but it almost always finds a way into what I’m working on. There’s a certain magic to all the modular gear that I can’t find a replacement for. Some of that is simply because it’s a hands-on experience so there’s a visceral emotional reaction when using these instruments. The other part is that some of this gear just sounds amazing right out of the gate.

“I’m certainly not saying you need this stuff to make a record or for any film music, but it takes me a lot longer to get where I’m going sonically with software than it does with my modular instruments. For example, and I’ve been given a fair amount of jabs for this, but my ARP 2600 is just so beefy and has a way of cutting through the mix. But most of all I don’t need to spend time doctoring it up to make it sound huge. It just sounds huge!

“For this record, the focus was modular synths. The 2600 is my only non-Eurorack modular, so I guess the focus was mostly Eurorack. Otherwise, it depends on the project. I do some processing in the box, too, with Reaktor, and all the typical go-to sound design plugins.”

Was the process behind the album all about jamming with the modular, recording it into the DAW and then going through it later to harvest the best bits… or was it more of a hardware setup using sequencers?

“Half of it for this record was pretty much straight out of the machine. I would make a patch, build it up to be as insane as I could, and then figure out the performance and the arc of it after the fact. For a lot of it, I would use the whole system as a compositional tool – like a sketch pad.

“About halfway through, I stumbled upon this patch that was really emotional and made me rethink my whole approach to the track I was working on – and later to a majority of the remainder of the record. I’d get a bunch of different ideas, record those in, mess with the structure in Pro Tools or Logic, and then keep harvesting stuff from the modular system; adding, layering and making it more complex and glitchier.”

So the computer’s more of a second-stage machine for you…

“For this record, yes. It seems kind of obvious to use the computer for its strengths in these situations. I rarely use hardware reverbs within my modular system for mixing purposes – it gets really muddy really quick. So I would lean on the computer mostly for mixing and for reverb, more so than writing or actual sound generation.

“If I was doing really simple patches or ambient patches, I could see using Eurorack filters to EQ and mix things somewhat… but mixing in the computer offers more clarity. ”

We guess after the initial idea is down, it’s not experimentation anymore? You know what you