Composing? It’s a Synth : Digital Tools ‘Make Tunes Happen’ for Film Score Creator

The studio has enough electronics to steer a space shuttle: One wall is covered with racks of music synthesizers, sound processors and mixers; another rack is filled with about 20 samplers, themselves storing thousands of megabytes of sampled musical instruments and other sounds.

In front of Hans Zimmer, film score composer, are three large video monitors. Two are for his Macintosh computer; the third is a letterbox Proscan monitor on which the new movie he’s scoring plays. His hands rest on an electronic keyboard salvaged from a synthesizer. This is Zimmer’s writing room.

At 39, Zimmer is one of the world’s top film composers, having scored approximately 65 movies in the last nine years. His work includes action pictures such as “Crimson Tide” and “The Rock,” romantic comedies like “The Preacher’s Wife” and “Green Card,” and the hits “Rain Man” and ‘Driving Miss Daisy.” Along the way, Zimmer has won an armload of awards, including a few Grammys and a best-original-score Oscar for his work on Disney’s “The Lion King.”

But now Zimmer must concentrate on the Russian army general driving over the tundra of a nuclear missile base depicted on his Proscan monitor. The film at hand is titled “The Peacemaker.” It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and upon its release later this year, it will be the first feature from the DreamWorks SKG studio, where Zimmer is director of music.

Director Mimi Leder telephones.

“I’m four minutes and 45 seconds into the first reel,” Zimmer tells her. “The general’s car has just driven up, and I’m stuck.”

It’s an ominous shot, shadowy and mysterious, but Zimmer wants the general’s character to maintain a certain ambiguity. We don’t know if he’s the good guy or the bad guy, after all. He rewinds and replays what he has written of the previous musical passage, or cue.

As the scene plays on the video monitor, a fully orchestrated classical score thunders out of the speakers, the theme carried by the French horns. It sounds like a real symphony is playing, but all the sound is being artificially generated by the synthesizers and samplers that line the walls.

Zimmer decides to change the French horns to trombones.

“The ‘bones are very Russian,” he says. He slides his computer mouse, highlights the “trombone” line out of a list of dozens of instruments on the monitor, plays a new chord progression on the synthesizer keyboard and then does a lot of fiddling with the computer keyboard and mouse that’s too complicated for an observer to follow.

Zimmer’s Macintosh Quadra 800, running a music software package called Cubase, can display a written musical score, which the software generates automatically along with its mixing, sequencing, editing and recording functions.

Zimmer doesn’t pay much attention to the written music.

“I’m one of the few composers around who doesn’t read music,” he said. “But I sure can code.”

Finally, Zimmer replays the scene with the new music; again, the exalted sound of a symphony fills the room. Another minute of the movie is scored. Eventually, the music will be played by a real orchestra for the actual soundtrack.

“Something happens when the orchestra plays,” says the composer. “You get all the humanity back.”

Zimmer, who has no formal training in music, says he cannot imagine doing his job without the electronics and new digital technology that fill his studio at Media Ventures, the Santa Monica music production company he co-owns.

“I wouldn’t have a career without the technology,” says Zimmer. “I hear these tunes in my head all the time, and these things let me make those tunes happen. It’s as simple as that.”

In his compositions, Zimmer combines pop, rock ‘n’ roll, and classical music to create the evocative textures and themes that mark his work. But he dismisses the idea that newer computer-based music technology is somehow separate from the old traditions, pointing out that change and innovation have always been a part of music.

“Bach, Beethoven, Wagner--they all had new kinds of instruments built to create new kinds of sounds,” he said.

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Freelance writer Paul Karon can be reached via e-mail at pkaron@pacbell.net