' One Way to Do It'- Music Professionals chat about their skills.

Ray Harman - composing for TV/Film

• Paul Brewer • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Ray is a composer of Tv and Film . He started his music career in 90s band ‘Something Happens’ - though that wasn’t always an advantage when he moved in to TV music … all is revealed in the podcast ! 

If you'd like to buy me a coffee - Many Thanks ...

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/GeniusMove

Paul Brewer:

Today's guest is film and TV composer Ray Harman. I've been chasing Ray for an interview for a few weeks and eventually got a slightly crackly line to his studio in Wicklow. If you're familiar with 90s Irish rock, you may know him from the band Something Happens. If you're listening to this as a film music fan, you may not. As Ray expanded upon in the podcast, the interview was conducted a couple of days after the passing of Sinead O'Connor. I started by asking him did he know her and what were his memories of her? You've probably had some past crossing with Sinead. Very sad her passing.

Ray Harman:

Yeah, very sad, very sad Actually, I've got to say I'm sure, like everybody else, that hit me much harder than I expected it to. She was obviously very important to everybody in the country in different ways. I was surprised how hard it hit me. I didn't know her that well. I worked with her about 20 years ago, alright, okay, I did a couple of gigs with her and my memories of her are that she was a really unusual, different person, very funny, very funny and very down to earth and great fun she was clearly just very important to everybody in so many different ways, which has become really evident over the last couple of days.

Paul Brewer:

You were gigging last er course.

Ray Harman:

Yeah, that's it, yeah. So we did a little bit of Mandinka in one of the tunes, which was nice to do,

Paul Brewer:

You do music for films, tv shows. Is that what goes on?

Ray Harman:

Yeah, my day job for the last, I suppose, 20 years really has been scoring music for film and television. I would say 70% television and 30% film and within that, with the TV work that I do, it's mostly drama and comedy. And then with the film work I do, it's either dramatic feature film or documentaries. That's sort of the niche that I tend to get hired for. I don't know how I ended up doing that. To be honest, it must be something that I worked, or it was just circumstances that people yeah, that's why I get hired for it. I work from home. I work from a small converted showmere in my backyard Because, honestly, if it wasn't for technology, I wouldn't be able to do it for so many different reasons. It's, I love it and I've been very lucky to sustain it as a career over the last 20, 25 years.

Paul Brewer:

I'm just presuming now. I guess that something happens. The RTE link, because Alan is now the director of Late Late Show and wasn't he doing the music on the Late Late Show at one stage? Was that a link, getting into meet people and those sort?

Ray Harman:

No to be honest, I think that All right, okay, no, no, no, that happened much. I think Alan ended up working in RTE much later than I actually started the way I got into it.

Ray Harman:

I think actually the way I started was I started dipping my toes in the water with this Probably when you and I were touring together way back. I started trying to get involved in believe it or not advertising music because I felt I could see around me at the time there were a few people, just a small handful of people, who were involved in writing music for advertising at the time in Dublin this would have been the mid-90s. They were clearly making a fortune.

Ray Harman:

Wasn't there one, we'll add in particular, there were a couple of people then. Yeah, there were a couple of people and they were doing loads of work, but I couldn't get arrested. I literally couldn't get any work with that. So, as the band, something happens, we all started to grow up a little bit with day jobs. I really wanted to keep writing and try to figure out a way of making a living from it. So there were a few things, a few circumstances that I benefited from. It was quite lucky in a sense. So the technology improved a huge amount during the 90s with MIDI and computers and software, and then, at the same time, there were there were tax breaks and incentives that you could take advantage of, and you know, you had a yet yet at the what do you call it? The artist exemption captain.

Ray Harman:

So yeah so somehow I was doing very little work, but I was doing some work, scoring short films and documentaries and little things like that because of the tax incentives, just about able to keep it afloat for a few years. And I'm shanaid, my wife, our savior kept us afloat for a long time. Well, I was building up a career as a poser, but really it was that it was. It was a combination of them Starting to do short films because I said I couldn't get any work in advertising, I decided I would just start scoring short films so you don't get paid anything for them, or for if you do, you get very little. And they made some connections with directors on those short films who then went on to do bigger jobs. I think that's an important thing with them. I think with any creative Endeavour, endeavor in this sort of this field is that you're working with your peers and you're growing with them and you're developing, you're moving your, your career is moving along with theirs.

Paul Brewer:

All right.

Ray Harman:

So you know you're not. That's what. That's what I think. I don't know if it's the same, if you have the same opinion, but the kid coming along now looking for a job as a composer with a 55 or a 56 year old, it's unlikely to happen. But that 20 year old Composer will get hired by a 22 year olds director for their short film and that, and that's pretty much I think, the way it works and you build up those close relationships and then you develop. So that's how I ended up moving into film and television scoring work and Honestly, I don't do it any better or worse than anybody else.

Ray Harman:

I don't have any. I'm not exceptionally good at this and just the basic skills for it. I was very lucky in that I was one of a small handful of people doing it at that time who, just you know, got me. I got my head around the technology end of it because I wouldn't have been able to drive. Just you know, I'm not formally trained as a musician at all. I can still barely read music. So the technology was absolutely invaluable.

Paul Brewer:

And do you find the lack of a formal music training is a disadvantage?

Ray Harman:

Mostly, it's not actually right. It's not just a couple of reasons that you will find that. It just makes certain aspects of a job very occasionally slower. That's all, that's the only thing it does. If I was an environment where I was dealing with an orchestra or players, like players, all day, every day, well then it would be a serious disadvantage. Most of the time I'm not right.

Ray Harman:

Most of the time I'm working in the box here and then I prepare stuff. If I do have, you know, a budget for A live group, I prepare stuff in advance, I work it all out, I arrange it in advance and then I ask for. You know, I heard somebody's helping to make sure it's legible for the players. And then the other thing that's that speeds it up is that when you go into a room with, you know, 16 or 30 or 80 players, they're actually really keen to do the best job they can for you. It doesn't matter how you articulate what you want from them. They're always willing to help, and actually they don't.

Ray Harman:

People make think that they. They make a laugh of you because you don't know the terminology, or so they're not. They're. They're the most approachable people in the world and they just want to do the best job for you. So, as long as you can articulate the feeling that you want From them, they're actually the best people to work with. And it's a real misconception that, actually, which is an interesting I don't know where I came from. I even had it before I started working with. You know, live players and orchestras they're, but they're always, they're always the best fund to. They're always they bend over backwards for you. I do wish I had that formal training, you know, because, um, just to speed up things, speed things up, yeah, it's all it's about. Yeah, practical things, you know.

Paul Brewer:

What's, in a percentage of your work, involved strings and orchestras?

Ray Harman:

To be honest, not a lot, and I mean. I mean not a huge amount, and A lot of my work is serial drama, say, and that does actually require orchestral scores. What I would do is with I worked in logic and put a lot of the um, the sample libraries that I use are deluxe of vienna instruments, spitfire, oh, you know all that. All that stuff. You can do an awful lot with that um.

Ray Harman:

To make it very convincing, and the the reason I do it and don't often Well, not always. I don't always use live players because the budgets simply don't allow it and the time, because television is, of course, quick. It's a very fast turnaround. Sometimes you do have the time, sometimes you have the budget. In reality, it's just not practical to say, for example, if you're doing a six-part TV series where you've got six hours of music, the six-by-six sorry, six-by-one hour show probably has about Each episode. If you have a one-hour show, it probably has about 40 minutes of music in each show. Wow, so you're not, yeah, so you're not really going to be able to score a full 40 minutes for everything. So in reality, what you would do is with something like that you would pick and choose the elements of the show that you would use the orchestra for, say, for example, your title music and maybe a couple of teams that you would reuse again, and then you work around that. That's the practical way of doing it. That's what they're doing with the young offenders. That's a combination of both, whereby you reuse certain teams that have been recorded with a live orchestra or live players and then you drop them in. It depends on the show Completely depends on the show, right? So you need to score in that day. You get to reuse teams again and again and once you have those elements recorded, you manipulate them and arrange them for each individual episode. Yeah, that's it. It's an interesting thing.

Ray Harman:

Actually, it's come up a lot lately because of streaming, and I'm on the board of ImRot as well, and this is one of the things we discuss is the fact that streaming is that's where everybody consumes their media nowadays TV shows and so on. But when you watch an average TV show or an episode, as I was saying, it's like if you watch an hour long show, there's 40 minutes of music in there. That's the equivalent of an album of material Every week, every time you watch an episode. And then when you consider the audience, the amount of people who are watching the same show, it's a huge industry, the composing, and there's so many people doing it all over Europe, all over the UK, all over US, and there's a voracious appetite from the streamers for product.

Paul Brewer:

All right, okay, amir to mine has been to. Is it Bulgaria where they do a lot of recording? Yeah, he was telling me that what they invariably do is because the sample libraries are so in tune, is they invariably put it underneath? I see it just sweetened the whole thing up a little bit. Do you do things like that? Yeah, do the string people have enough time to actually perform everything?

Ray Harman:

Yeah, that's an interesting one. I did a thing on for an arena about Hans Zimmer and I think actually he's to blame for a lot of this. Okay, because he was one of the first guys to like way back this is just one of my mad theories, I think because he was one of the first guys to assemble his own sample libraries. He actually went and recorded his own personal players doing all the articulations to different dynamic levels, all that sort of stuff, and had it on these way back when computers storage and so on was very expensive. He could actually assemble this thing, that thing of augmenting a live orchestra with samples. I think sort of started back then when he was doing it. It was to be in the late 90s or something like that.

Ray Harman:

It's become the sound of cinema and television now, like if you don't get bass as loud, the bass is not nearly as loud as you think it should be, because when you're listening to a score on TV it's punchier and more present and all that sort of stuff.

Ray Harman:

The technical part of that stuff is not my area and you're right about the tuning. That has to be looked at as well, because people expect that from the if you were to hear something that's slightly that you would have been fine in the 70s. Yeah, you wouldn't get away with it now. It's just, it's this very slow creep towards that, but it's that said. When you have a, you know, a mock-up demo let's call it a mock-up demo which you're Vienna strings, you do it as well as you possibly can, and then you have the live players doing the same thing. There's just, there's no comparison between the two, the amount of life and the amount of energy and the deep connection that you'll have with music, even though there may be flaws in the live performance of it. It's just way more convincing and attractive, compelling always.

Paul Brewer:

Where do you record? If you're recording over here, I presume you record in Ireland. Yeah.

Ray Harman:

Yeah, so where have we recorded In? Various studios around Dublin, often in the big studio in RTE, the radio building.

Paul Brewer:

Oh, right, okay.

Ray Harman:

Another thing I commonly do is I will hire individual musicians to record remotely oh right, okay, and send me their parts. And how does that work? Oh, it's great. It's great. I mean, obviously, having four players in a room together when you have the time and, as you're saying, the eight players to really work together and do something is fantastic. But, as I'm saying, like most of my work is very fast turnover TV stuff, so you need to be able to do it without having to put aside an entire day to travel up to Dublin.

Ray Harman:

I live in Wicklow, so I travel up to Dublin and stand in a room for days. So what I can do is I work out the parts that I need them to play, I give them instruction on the scores as clear as I can, and I send it off to them. And there are so many players with their own remote setups great microphones, beautiful instruments. They record the parts and they send them back to you. You go back to them with some corrections and you drop them into the session and invariably they're beautiful and it's amazing.

Paul Brewer:

Does that imply that because of the speed of television, that lads sort of don't set up in the studio anymore, or kind of thing, and is everybody working remotely? That's the trend, I think.

Ray Harman:

I mean, obviously there's still a place for us. I suppose I start to think of an example right now while we're on this, but like, the bigger the budget, the bigger the show, the bigger, you know, like the ten pole shows that the streamers will have, they will obviously have budget and time to allow for the composer to go and organize a session, do a great opening, a succession is probably a great example of that sort of thing whereby he clearly wrote that brilliant tune and demoed it but then obviously went and recorded, had maybe two or three days in a studio where he recorded the orchestral parts and put them into a session, and that's a classic example where you have the technology and the live player things mixed together. It's only on huge shows like that that you'd I think you would really have the time and the budget to do that. The other one I think is a brilliant example of not the lower budget or medium budget one as the high budget one.

Ray Harman:

There was a great show I think it was George Cogart, it was the Queen's Gambit, it was about a chess player and that score was really hard working in the show and it was really beautiful, but it was videos online about how it was done as a sort of masterclass in how to put together a really, really in-depth and intricate score that sort of meshed with the film so beautifully or the TV show so beautifully. And it's a classic example of how the whole thing was demoed first written out so that the directors and producers could hear what it was going to sound like with the full orchestra, and then the composer went and recorded the entire thing with the full orchestra and blended two together so that the one augmented the other. It's not really the samples of augmenting the live players, or it's a bit of both, you know, but it's a beautiful sounding score. And yeah, and there's videos online about how he did it I can't remember that's an Italian composer, I think. Right, american, italian.

Paul Brewer:

So what sample libraries do you use Predominantly?

Ray Harman:

Vienna symphonic or something. Open everything now. Yeah, most of what. I forget the names of them. Yeah, vienna instruments and I use a lot of spitbar stuff, a lot of LA scoring strings. I use anything and everything that say, for example, with Vienna strings they're really good and the library I find is the easiest to manipulate in terms of articulations and dynamics, but they're very clean sounding. They're a bit too clean sounding and too in tune and so on. So other libraries, like, say, for example, spitbar, are a little more sort of grainier and grittier and so on. But they work through contact, which is, you know, they're not always as predictable when you're doing the dynamics and so on. If you're doing it fast. It's not as solid an interface as the Vienna instruments.

Paul Brewer:

And the Vienna instrument. One has its own interface. Is that correct? It does, yeah.

Ray Harman:

Right, it was one of the first ones to. I think it was one of the first libraries to come out that really went at it in a very professional way. There's loads of them now. That's mostly what I use. I mean, to be honest, it's like you're spoiled for choice nowadays with all the orchestral and instrument libraries. It really is amazing.

Ray Harman:

That said, I think it's really important that there's as much as you can you put live players into it. I mean, the first thing that happens, I think, is as soon as you start putting live instruments into it, the cue what I say, the track that you're working on, the cue becomes simpler and more sparse. You can take stuff out. You can. You know you're replacing it. Yeah, you can keep it simpler. So I try as much as I can. I'll give you a quick spin around here to the studio. You can see there's lots of instruments around the place that I try and play as much as possible. See, even like scratching away on a cello or a viola, I could do that and bluff my way through and just enough to get away with it and just give it that little bit of a reality yeah.

Ray Harman:

Yeah, or it's just something that's unexpected for you.

Paul Brewer:

That's the strings covered. How much of your work is actually recording strings, Lutith?

Ray Harman:

I mean, I go to it every day when I work. So, for example, at the moment I'm working on a TV show called Harry Wilde and we're into season two of Harry Wilde. The cues, let me see. I'll just open an episode here to just talk you through what.

Paul Brewer:

I have. The reason I'm asking is because you can obviously play keyboards, you can obviously play guitar. Do they feature at all, or are they ever the center of? I'm watching Detectors at the moment. The whole music is fingerstyle, acoustic kind of thing. That's the whole.

Ray Harman:

Yeah, even though my first instrument is guitar, I actually don't use it a lot at all in score. The fundamental elements of any of my cues for a lot of the shows tend to be a combination of. I'm just going to open one because I can't remember Nobody's ever asked me a hard question, I can't remember. Let me see, it's a combination that's one that's particularly orchestral. It depends on the show. It completely depends on the show it really does. Some of them will be a combination of electronic synth elements.

Ray Harman:

I mean I'd say predominantly piano is the biggest instrument that you would go to in film and television scores.

Ray Harman:

That's the fundamental first instrument that you start with and then you would build on it and try and use it. To be honest, the core I think the way to think about it is that the people's conventional expectation of film and TV scores is still based on the one that was established in the 20s and 30s and 40s with classic Hollywood, vienna composers coming over to LA and scoring films and that traditional orchestral style. We still sort of half expect to hear that. But it's evolved over the years so that it's now a sort of hybrid of electronic instruments, piano, orchestral elements and sometimes just it doesn't really matter that you're using sample libraries, it's just, that's the palette that everybody sort of expects, and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. You can still do unusual and unexpected things with the same old tools, which is interesting in itself. So I suppose, to answer your question which I'm tiptoeing around, is that it's fundamentally piano with some orchestral elements. I don't want to go too big on energetic sort of drama, car chase strings all the time.

Paul Brewer:

It doesn't work, it's boring?

Ray Harman:

Yeah, it does. The key thing, I think, with a lot of shows is try and find some sort of. In a band you're expecting to hear guitars, piano, drums and bass, right, and unfortunately you have to have a singer sometimes. But the thing that makes the band interesting is some sort of quirkiness that you've never heard before in a band. But mostly it's 90% similar to all the other bands that you've heard before. Right, but it's just some weird thing that they do. That's different and it's precisely the same, I think, with film and television scores is that you're using traditional elements because you don't want to freak the audience or the director or the producer out. You have to ease everybody in. You don't want to lose the audience. You have to keep them inside the bubble of the show that you're in. But you want something that says, hey, that's weird, that's bringing me somewhere else. Some tiny little X-Factor, some little quirk. That's not expected. I'm not telling you anything new.

Ray Harman:

I know, you know this, that this that's the fundamental interesting thing about any music, isn't it? Or any idea, artistic idea, it's a combination of familiar elements and then something that you've never heard or seen before. That's, I suppose, what you're going right and that can be anything in music, for film and television. It can be anything to be a weird sound, it can be an instrument that you've never heard before, or an instrument that you have that you've manipulated in some way that makes something really quirky and odd. You know, I've like a oud here, of a sazz over there, of like all sorts of odd instruments from all over the world that just Occasionally, occasionally get an outing and you try them and most of the time it doesn't work, but the odd time you get that little thing that that makes it different, but one you know what. It's one of the things I wish I could do. I really, really really Slagging singers all the time, but I really really wish I could sing. Because that's one thing that you don't hear.

Ray Harman:

In film scores and television scores you don't hear vocals use that much. It's maybe because there's so much dialogue and film and television that as soon as you put vocals in, it sort of Pulls you different ways and could be that. But you can do so much stuff with vocals that can be. It's literally the most Flexible instrument that you could possibly have. Actually. Just, you know, I can't think of one score. It's really good is the white lotus. You know the TV show about the, the resort. The guy who scores this is really interesting eccentric guy, something, crystal ball. Your audience can look up the white lotus but the score is amazing. He's a trained percussionist but he also sings, but he has this sort of bonkers way of singing and it's really unusual. You think it's a flute or something, but it's actually him singing and that's really cool and it's and it's sort of one setting. That's exactly what you look at.

Paul Brewer:

It's interesting what you say because, like the idea of, you obviously don't want to, you know, distract the the listener. But where do Drums fit in what? Where do electronic drums fit in that that sort of palette? Where does that palette fit in?

Ray Harman:

exactly Harry Well score is. I have like in my do you use logical or do you use pro tools? What do you use?

Paul Brewer:

Oh, because I've grown up with pro tools or things.

Ray Harman:

Oh, yeah, it's not interesting. That's another interesting thing. Everybody has their own thing. That I've just. I just use logic because that's what I go. But but the same thing applies in any of them, right?

Ray Harman:

I have a template for every show that I've worked on that repeats, and in that template you will have established sort of palette for that show that directors have approved Initially. When you start on a show, what would happen is they will, they'll ask you for demos, for team tunes and for certain cues for certain scenes, and you'll give them loads of ideas and 90% of them are rejected and then they hone in on one and then you do more like that until eventually a settle on this palette of ideas and instruments. And, for example, with Harry Wilde, the common instruments that I would use on this are like an 808 kick drum, orchestral strings, without too much of the high car chase stuff, lots of low-end cellos and basses doing long legato lines. They love percussion on this. They love percussion, so big drums for chases or for exciting moments, and then you can use brass piano as a big element on this one. So it is a combination of all these little things, piano probably being the predominant thing here on this on on this show.

Ray Harman:

I just did another show which is it hasn't come out yet but it's roughly. It's based on a North African Irish family and it's a comedy and that score is is mostly done with a combination of believe it or not live banjo and Darabuka and and some electronic drums all mixed in together, you know. So it totally depends what what the show is. You know, you just sort of have to figure it out as you're going to Try different things. Literally. The idea for that show came about because they wanted to get some sort of combination of Irish and Middle Eastern. Things would edit right to Middle Eastern. You know you don't want it to be on on the nose too much, so you do, you try everything, try anything. There's no rules. The thing I'd say about it is that the the process of getting to that stage where you have, where you nail down the town of a show Is the most painful part.

Ray Harman:

I was just thinking that yeah because you spend a lot of time just churning out little ideas, little ideas, and and the director and the writer, the producers, they all have different ideas. It's so subjective and what you're trying to do is get into their heads. The only way you can do that is by trying different things, trying them as fast as you can, fired them at them as quickly as you can, and and get a reaction. And then when you get that reaction, then you know okay, we're going this direction now, or roughly.

Paul Brewer:

You'll be able to create music from there. Yeah, is it 30 or 40 percent the work or 50 percent the work?

Ray Harman:

even yeah, you're not far off actually. Yeah, you wouldn't be. It certainly gets much easier once you've established that. Yeah, it is definitely the hardest part. Ideally they'll do that Early on in the show so you have time to establish it. It's not a rushed thing at the end before the whole thing gets mixed or whatever, but oftentimes you do have plenty of time to establish it.

Ray Harman:

Sometimes is the crunch with like I do a lot of shows for, say, channel five in the UK or the sort of fast turnover One-off four-part TV series, that sort of thing, and that can be a real roast because they're under pressure. You know you're under pressure as well, and trying to establish Entirely new thing or something as unique as you can make it in a very short time is quite difficult and so sometimes it's only by episode two or three. That's what should be. Wish we'd done that on episode one. You know that's right. That doesn't happen all the time. The wonderful thing about doing TV shows when you can come back on a second series, third series, fourth series, is that it gets you have this solid palette, sorted and the tone, and then and you also have this and you also have this communication shorthand with the directors, writers, showrunners. You know what they want, they know you can do it.

Paul Brewer:

It's much less stress, you know right, so you can just sort of concentrate on the music. Then what politics been involved?

Ray Harman:

Yeah, well, you know. You know it's interesting to say politics because it's like you are sort of people managing, you know.

Ray Harman:

Yeah you need people skills. Yeah, you need to be able to communicate with people without you have to leave all that stuff behind. I'm because when you submit, it's a fast turnover the writers, the show notice directors they're under pressure all the time to create content for the broadcast or or the Streamer. When they give you feedback about something, you can't take it personally. If they say, no, that's terrible, that doesn't work, and 90% of the stuff that you submit to them will be like that at first. So you can't take that stuff personally. You have to understand that you're part of a big machine and You're trying to do the best possible job. You have to be Production friendly, as they say, and just go along with them. Then these rapids as and stay in the boat with them as long as you can. You know it does get easier. And there are yeah, there is politics. You know there are politics involved. It's, it's the politics involved in everyday life. It's a very natural thing. You know yourself You're either good with people or you're you're not.

Paul Brewer:

So that's Ray Harman's way to do it. Normally this would be the end of the podcast, but I've included this following section as a seemed relevant, even though it was part of our general chit chat after we recorded the podcast. Had you started the film music then?

Ray Harman:

Yeah, that was when it was really hard.

Paul Brewer:

I don't remember you chatting about it at all, so maybe that's how hard it was.

Ray Harman:

Yeah, it would have been tabling it. I would have been like at that stage, 97, I probably would have 98. I was definitely doing short films, literally writing cards saying composer Willing to score short films, and going into colleges and putting them up on walls. That's sort of oh yeah. Before you could you know we had any of the social media or online Advertising methods, but that's what I was doing and then it was at the time there was a booklet rather than an online database. Like you know, there are now of all the producers and filmmakers in Ireland. It was literally a booklet that you have to buy.

Paul Brewer:

With the hot press thing was.

Ray Harman:

It wasn't hot press, it was very specific to the film and television industry already and it would have a. You know all the active producers and I called every single number. I Tormented them looking for work. Didn't get any of them Anyway, did you?

Paul Brewer:

know who you were no no, actually the band connection.

Ray Harman:

Yeah, I love people think that that was actually a connection. A lot of cases that wasn't. It went against me. Right, there was. There was a thing sometimes, like I know, actually I preferred a house or preferred the stunning.

Paul Brewer:

You know, yeah, well, okay, many thanks to Ray for taking the time to chat. Please visit wwwgeniusmoveie to find out about audio courses to suit you. Thanks for listening you.

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