Steve Ford Music, a Chicago-based commercial music/sound design house, is launching a youth-oriented division.
The as-yet-unnamed division was conceived to offer agencies more choices. It features composer/producer Dave Winer, composer/sound designer/audio engineer Kurt Festge and composer/producer Joel Corelitz, who have come aboard over the past few months. The entity will focus upon new sounds and unusual combinations, according to company owner/composer/producer Steve Ford.
"One of the reasons we’ve done this," said Ford, "is that it’s fun to have different creative points of view. The other thing is that our clients now want a lot of choices. For every commercial, they want to hear options. This makes us more able to provide that. You can get anywhere between eight and twelve options on some things. We need to provide different creative solutions. We actually operate not unlike an ad agency creative department, in that different people come up with ideas and then we have a creative review. It really helps keep us focused."
Steve Ford Music staff composer/producer Steve Mullen added, "Every job seems like it’s more competitive now. It’s not just between other music houses, but within the company as well. Clients will typically want to go to several music houses, and a lot of music houses are sending more than one track. One of the things we’re trying to do [with this approach] is keeping it in-house, rather than having different freelance writers off doing their own thing. There’s a lot of collaboration here; there’s more of a coordinated creative approach from the beginning."
Festge, whose primary expertise is sound design in addition to electronic music, had worked with the Warner Bros. Band Citizen Kane, touring with them as they opened for Ben Harper. Festge got his start by assisting on music sessions with The Violent Femmes, Jerry Harrison and Peter Buffett.
Winer, who plays keyboard and trumpet, is a member of several music groups including the J Davis Trio, the Baltimores and Chia Pet. He wrote and produced the music and sound design for the Chicago Underground Film Festival trailer and scored the independent short It Takes Two, directed by Greg Nixon and due out later this year. Mullen described Winer as the most eclectic of the three, and added, "He has a great sense of putting odd things together; he has a great sense of audio humor. That’s a key thing for advertising music."
A former intern at Steve Ford Music, the 21-year-old Corelitz is an electronic and dance music composer who is majoring in music at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. Thus far, he has scored a few spots at Steve Ford Music, including "Integrity" for Hallmark Fresh Ink via Leo Burnett Co., Chicago; "Water Fountain" for Nintendo, also via Leo Burnett, and "Another World" for National Geographic via Earle Palmer Brown, Baltimore.
Additionally, Festge, Winer and Corelitz each composed a track for possible use in a single client-direct commercial, "Message," for Indianapolis-based radio station WKLU. It turns out that the client liked all the tracks and, as a result, decided to air three versions of the spot, according to Mullen.
The talent roster at Steve Ford Music also includes composer/ producer David Blamires and composer/arranger Mark Wolfram. Midwest sales are handled in-house by Alexander Stonor Saunders.
