Editor’s note: If you were to ask Chris Bell about the good old days of advertising music, you would hear stories of lush recording studios, big glorious orchestra sessions and a lot of time hanging out with clients tweaking and trying ideas face to face. Now the composer/sound designer, who heads Chris Bell Music and Sound Design (chrisbellmusicandsounddesign.com), sees quite a different marketplace today. Here are his impressions of this brave new world, which has led him to adopt a new approach to music and sound design for commercials:
It’s a different world out there today. Our industry just doesn’t support high-end music facilities anymore. Many of the most famous recording studios in history are gone as a result of drastic changes in economics and technology. In the 1990’s we would have client sessions every week. As we moved into the 2000’s we’d often go months without an actual client session. Everything was moving towards the Internet and the high rent space was neither necessary nor a wise place to spend money anymore.
Today the whole approach to music for advertising has changed. We have come a long way from the day when a creative team hired one composer or music house to work on a spot until it was perfect while sipping lattes in a fat studio. Today it’s all about the demos and “winning the job.” In this market we may have many composers and music houses all vying for the same spot with little budget to go around during the demo phase. I have put a lot of time and effort into creating a business model that actually works in this lean environment–you definitely need to lose anything that isn’t a vital part of the process. But on the positive side, the technology we now have makes that a “more than fair” exchange. We now work in real time with many composers and clients from every corner of the world. It’s way different, but it’s also a very exciting and high-tech way to do business. Nobody really needs to go anywhere anymore. It all comes to you whether you are the client, the composer or the player.
Our typical job now takes place in up to 30 different “virtual” studios around the world. As our composers complete tracks, [my composer colleague] Chris Neilman and I evaluate, make changes and then we either post a presentation on FTP or we send a presentation right to the desktop of our client wherever they are.
For the final recording session, often times there will be five or six more “virtual studios” depending on the players we need.
The world’s talent pool of amazing players is huge. Through today’s technology, we have access to them all through “virtual” studios. Many new and exciting concepts are surfacing that would not have even been possible in the past. For example, through Neilman, who is involved in The USC Thornton School of Music, we now have as many as 20 brilliant young composers from USC available to us online, as well as 20 other composers who work in “virtual” studios in every corner of the world. It brings a whole new edge to the competitive demo process.
Click Here to Read SHOOT’s Music & Sound: SHOOT Summer 2008 Top 10 Spot Tracks Chart
Click Here To Read SHOOT’s Music & Sound: Getting On The Fast Track
