5. How Long Does It Take?

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Working With A Composer

Composing music is, and should be, a long process. From the conceptualization to editing the score and mastering the recording, every step is crucial, and rushing them will only be hurting the final result. In the case of a collaboration, extra time will be needed to understand each other’s ideas and make sure everyone is on the same page. Altogether there is no exact answer to the question, except that it is probably longer than one would hope. An experienced composer will be able to say accurately how long they will need, but keep in mind that some factors are out of their hands. The factors to consider are

—The amount of experience a composer has makes a tremendous difference. As a matter of fact, I learned that information out of my own experience, I have seen my own evolution over the years and how much faster I can score a project these days compared to the beginning of my career. Every composer builds their own method over time, some techniques work best for some, others do not. That is what makes every composer different. For instance, in my opinion, some types of sounds go best with some types of reverb whereas other sounds go best with other types of reverb. I have my favorite effects ready to go for whenever I need them, I will rarely spend hours searching through all the ones I have, like I did in the past. Also the way I approach new projects now is much more structured. It took me years to learn my tools, experiment, and keep ideas to decide what my core sound is, and where I should allocate more time into experimentation on each project.

—The type of project is an important factor. Decide in advance if your project will be music-heavy, or almost silent for a more realistic feel. For a 100-minute film, scoring 25 minutes, 50, or 75, will double or triple the amount of time needed for the composition. The next question the composer will ask is whether we are taking an acoustic approach, i.e., with an orchestra, a small chamber group, or maybe one single instrument, or if we go for a computer-generated soundtrack. Those are crucial questions that will heavily influence the music process.

—The budget will decide realistically how big the music team can be. If the idea is to go for a full orchestra, some contractor, orchestrator, editor, coordinator, will be needed. If the decision is to keep the budget as low as possible and go for a computer-generated soundtrack, it might sound less prestigious but a lot of producers go for that route as it is by far the cheapest one. Depending on how big the music team is, it will cost more in team members but will speed up the process a lot. If the process stays in-the-box (completely computer-generated), the music production will be faster and cheaper, but the composer will have all responsibilities on their shoulders which may slow down the process. This is a fine balance to be discussed ahead of time with the composer.

—Your flexibility is the factor that the composer cannot predict. As experienced as they can be, they will still write some ideas for some scenes you may not be into. If the communication is good, you should be able to solve that pretty quickly. But some scenes are more complex than others, and it is normal to make adjustments, or sometimes try again several times. The number of versions you will need makes a big difference time-wise. Every new idea is a brand new track. Be aware that some composers protect themselves from spending too much time on projects by contractually limiting the number of versions for each scene.

Comments, suggestions, experiences you had with composers, and consequent advice for others are encouraged.
This blog will be updated with new experiences and illustrations as they occur.