Beach Town local report March 31 - amassing songs

L-R: Erik Hammen, Sarah Winsor, Ahren Buhmann
(photo by David Thomas)

I got a lot done on Beach Town this week.

It was kind of gloomy here in Seattle, but the sun finally came out yesterday and I went out for a run. On my new route, I passed right by the area you see in the photo on the left, where we shot a few scenes last summer.

I spent a lot of time talking over email with Greg Wharmby this week. Greg is one of the handful of great musicians around the country (including but not limited to Graig Markel, Punishment, Thomas Wold, Fermentation, and Thee Samedi) that I'm working with on the huge variety of tracks we need to complete the soundtrack for Beach Town.

It's a lot of people, I'll tell ya what.

In fact, one might say that as usual, I'm doing a lot of "collaborating"!

Here's the tricky thing about movie music. It's more about feeling than melody. And, in Beach Town, most of the music is presented as actual songs motivated by a specific source (usually the radio), as opposed to traditional omniscient soundtrack cues.

So in addition to being great tunes, these songs have to be specifically-atmospheric, the right tempo, and sound right with the rest of the film, and not get in the way of dialogue or suggest the wrong thing through lyrics.

In other words, the music has to serve the movie, not vise versa.

I have very high hopes for my musicians, because any gaps left over will have to be filled in by me. Unfortunately, I have to fill the gaps first, then backfill with new tunes as they come in.

I generally like to work on songs one at a time, but I've found with the amount of material and the sort of material I need to crank out, my burnout rate is a lot lower I actually have a bunch of pieces in progress at once. So I blast away on one song until I can't get any farther with it, and then switch over to a different one and keep working. Ultimately, it's headphone-fatigue that makes me stop for the day.

Arrangement is a big thing. And instrument choice. Sometimes the 20 dollar plastic, belt-clip preamp sounds more "right" than the real thing. Sometimes the cheezy software keyboard emulator that everyone in the world owns and is sick of sounds very right...  but only after I put it through a phalanx of top-secret studio-processing tricks of the damned. Many which I learned in making my previous film, Time of the Robots.

Speaking of studio tricks, I'm also working on getting together with David Thomas, to go over the mixes he's done of all the performance material, and today, I'm sending out release forms to all the musicians whose music is already baked into the rough cut!

Very exciting.