Trending with New Tech in the Recording Industry

–   Making Music Anywhere and Everywhere: With the advent of processing power and storage, our work allows for much greater mobility.  Today, you can take your laptop and high-capacity drive and create an orchestral score in the rural wilderness—if that’s your style.

–   Band in a Box: It’s becoming increasingly impossible to decipher the difference in a recording between an actual orchestral recording and the synthestration version.  Electronic pitch holding and time stretching have become so sophisticated that we can completely avoid the “muzak” disaster of elevator music.  Though you can create some pretty realistic sounding music, vocals and guitar still have to be the real deal.

The Opening Act: Underscore in Music Video

While working on underscore and sound design in a music video is an extremely collaborative and creative effort, the composer on the project first and foremost has to make sure he/she is looking out for the vision of the artist and client.  The composer can be brought in late in the editing process, but often can enjoy the luxury of working one-on-one with the director to ensure that the score and sound design come together to perfectly package and compliment the project as a whole.  Swell composers lend their skills not only to music video intros, but also for heightened moments in the video that need to be accentuated with music and sound design (e.g. slow motion, hyper-reality).

Swell Music worked on this Soulja Boy video to create the intro orchestral score along with the slowdown effect.  Jon Shamieh co-wrote on this project.

Swell Hitting a Big Crescendo in San Francisco

Crescendo! Studios open their Barbary Coast doors to welcome Swell Music, now in residence at the venerable San Francisco audio post shop. Although the two companies remain independent, they are excited to be able to offer a wider range of audio services together under one roof. With this move, the fifteen-year-old Crescendo brings in Swell’s stock music library, as well as customizable tracks and original composition capabilities.  Says Crescendo Director of Operations Jason Plunkett, “We can now offer more on the creative side and this allows us to respond to our clients’ needs faster.”

Headed by lead composer Elad Marish, Swell Music recently relocated from Los Angeles, where the Swell team produced a wide variety of projects ranging from commercial work with the likes of Pepsi and AT&T, original music for movie trailers including The Hoax (Richard Gere), and Easy Money (Forrest Whitaker, Jay Mohr) to score and sound design for music videos from P Diddy, Ne-yo, Fefe Dobson and many others, as well as promos for sports team Miami Heat and Fox Sports MLB Baseball.

Recent and upcoming work from Crescendo includes work for high-end brands such as Kashi and Rubio’s.  Over the course of its fifteen years, Crescendo has worked in nearly every aspect of the audio post field.  Past clients include Budweiser, Comcast, Hyundai and Nintendo Wii.  The studio’s audio expertise extends to projects with indie films producers as well.  From Absinthe Film’s exhilarating “Neverland” snowboarding film to “Alambament,” an intriguing foreign language short, Crescendo embraces any audio project.  They also recently worked on the recording of Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s Nurture Shock, which won a  2010 Personal Developent “Audie Award” (presented by the Audio Publishers Association).

Bird Man “Fire Flame”

Score and sound design by Swell Music.

In the Studio

There’s no better way to have your life fast forward 10-12 hours than to disappear into the abyss of a windowless sound studio.  On this particular day (was it sunny or rainy—we don’t really know) we were set up at Abbot Kinney Studios in Venice, CA with Jonathan Gorman (drums), Eric Holden (Bass) and Will Sandals (Engineer) recording the Beatific four-song EP “The Moonshine EP”.  Since we’re painstakingly obsessed with details, the music goes through a lot of changes at various studios before we’re actually ready to mix.  Hopping in and out and laying down tracks in such a small control room led to some pretty interesting body odors… it’s amazing how the sounds of creativity can bring on some of the most equally creative scents.

Breakin’ it down with Bonch

Los Angeles-based postproduction house Bonch, Inc. has truly evolved into a creative collaborative since opening its new office in April 2009. The boutique facility offers services in offline editing, conforming, finishing, visual effects, compositing and color correction. Focusing primarily on music video and commercial work, the innovative company is currently expanding their “alternative thinking” into the film arena. Their work has garnered them generous acclaim from creatives in the music and commercial industries as well as award recognition including a 2009 MTV Video Music Award for Jarret Fijal on Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” video and a 2010 CMT Music Award for Richard Alarcon for Keith Urban’s “Til Summer Comes Around” video.

Avril Levine gets emotional for Canon

Recent commercial work from Bonch includes a Svedka Vodka “R U Robot” spot directed by Francis Lawrence, Canon “Emotions” directed by Marc Klasfield, a Clear Shampoo campaign featuring Maria Sharipova and Sandra Dewi directed by Jake Nava and a Stand up 4 Cancer campaign directed by Rich Lee and Marc Webb.

Ne-Yo "One In A Million"

Bonch and Swell Music have recently collaborated on the Ne-Yo “One in a Million” music video and a series of spots for Diadem featuring Cindy Crawford. Stay tuned for more updates on work from Bonch and Swell!