The “Other” Academy Awards

I’m an awards show junkie, and I love Oscar® night.

Last night, Brian Ralston and I hosted a video-chat with several people who came out for SCOREcast’s Oscar® Crowdcast. We met with folks from the UK to Germany, Toronto to Los Angeles. It was awesome. We discussed the Academy’s rules for Best Original Score and Best Original Song, who we thought should win versus who would probably win (and boy, was *that* a conversation!), the history and pedigree of Academy Award show music directors and conductors, and a lot more.

Brian Ralston and I hosting the "SCOREcast Oscar Crowdcast", with my stepdad's "deer head" looking on

During all of it, I kept thinking about our community. That room, those seats, all the actors and actresses and directors who were in them — it’s not that big a group of people, really. The composing community is even smaller. We talked a lot about that in the crowdcast —  the community of composers that we belong to. It’s one hell of a community we have. There are a lot of good people who don’t get the recognition they should. If I was going to hand out some of my own awards, there are people in this community that would win big. Some of them you’ll know by name, others you probably haven’t heard of. But, if you are passionate, as I am, about connecting with people who have talent and brains, you’d be smart to hook up with as many of them you can. My categories are a little all over the place, but so are the ideas these unique and forward-thinking folks are putting out there.

Last night we had two Oscars® to honor artists in our field… here are my five “Ogsters”! (No “registered trademark” [®] yet, but I’ll get Amy right on that!)

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Best “Pro-Community” Move

Cinesamples, Michael Barry and Michael Patti

Recording musicians have been one of the hardest hit groups of people caught between the erosion of film music budgets, the industry-wide move toward digital computer recording techniques, and the proliferation of loops and samples in our industry. Messrs. Barry and Patti , co-founders of Cinesamples, made huge strides (and broke new ground) last year by striking a legitimate deal with the American Federation of Musicians union in LA for Cinebrass and Cinebrass PRO, enabling royalty payments from one of the first union-sanctioned sample libraries to go directly to the actual contracted musicians. That’s a big deal. A REAL big deal. The newsworthiness of that move was quickly overshadowed by the sheer quality of the library itself upon release, but I believe that a thoughtful strategy such as theirs will pave the way for other companies to now think differently about how they exploit musicians, and whether they take care of them on the backend the way that they should.

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Most Selfless Composer

Russell Bell, United Kingdom

I’ve been pretty clear here that I don’t get too excited about how many composers market themselves. But there are exceptions to every rule, and I’ve found a big one in Russell Bell, a composer from the UK. Chances are, you’ve not heard of Russell, and that’s sort of my point: Whether you’re in the States, England, or god knows where else, I promise you’ve heard Russell’s music. Russell is not one of these “beat the drums” kind of guys in regards to self-promotion. Instead, Russell lets his music speak. He’s quietly humble. “He talks in .wav files,” as one of my mentors likes to say. And it works! Russell’s music is everywhere — he’s quickly gaining ground as a sought after trailer composer, and his work in US network TV is hot as hell right now.

But that’s not even the coolest thing about Russell. He also helps people who are looking at his success and thinking, “Man, I’d like to do what he’s doing.” I kid you not, every day I can remember out of the last two months, at least one person has mentioned Russell helping them with something. As a community advocate, that’s the kind of stuff I want to hear. Check Russell out when you have a minute of down time. Test his music. I ain’t lyin’ — the boy can write. And coolest of all, he’s not afraid of teaching others to do the same. That’s the mark of true confidence, in my opinion.

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Most Attentive Developer

8DIO, Troels Folmann

I have a love hate/relationship with most of my “store-bought” sample libraries. Not the developers… the libraries. Thanks to solid online demos, try-packs, and good old-fashioned dev relationships, there haven’t been many things I’ve purchased in the last few years that I’ve regretted. That said, all libraries have certain flaws, and all developers put out the occasional ”miss”. There is no “end-all-be-all” in any genre of sample library because… they’re all fake replicas of the real thing. It’s just not going to happen any time soon.

Almost every boutique developer out there now were composers who found they were lacking certain sounds in their palettes, and thus, decided to just create them on their own. That morphed into a habit, which morphed into a company, which morphed into, “Holy shit! I could be making a second living here!” However, every once in a while you run across a developer who really “gets” composers. They really seem to be in-tune with the things we are needing most, and they seem to be able to read the pulse of the community and discern what’s going to work and what’s not going to work when directors are sitting there telling you shit like, “I need more banana peel! It. Just. Needs. More. PEEL, damnit!”

Troels Folmann is guy who seems to get that for us. There are a lot of developers I could have given this award to, but Troels hit the mark accurately more this last year than any other developer I can think of… and that’s saying a lot — last year was probably one of the best in five years for quality sample libraries. With kick-ass libraries like Rhythmic Aura I & II, Legacy 1928 Scoring Piano, Bulbul Tarang, Hybrid Tools, and the highly anticipated Adagio Violins (due May 2012), Troels and his company 8DIO are paying careful attention to what composers need, want, and don’t have yet. That’s the right way to listen.

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Most Community-Centric Studio

ABC Television

These last couple of decades, it hasn’t taken a Rhodes Scholar to recognize that the days of live orchestra in television looked to be pretty much dead and finished. But a several years ago, a small few composers seemed to “get lucky” that the studios were allowing them the freedom to go back to the grand way of scoring a show — with real players. Giacchino, McCreary, Jones, and Clausen were among those lucky few. Today, live orchestra is on the verge of trending again, as if it’s some newfound method of dramatic enhancement, but it feels like ABC Television set that pace.

There are all kinds of opinions on this subject, and I’ve heard them all (and frankly, I don’t really care to hear them again), so I’ll just say this: ABC is a big supporter of live music in TV. They don’t always get there, but they push for it, and they push pretty hard when they feel it’s right for the project. Other studio have shows that are working with live players also, but ABC has been consistent about it for years. Consistency speaks louder to me than trends and fads do, and when the craft in our work is valued highly by a corporate entity that has finicky stockholders to keep happy, that’s worth honoring.

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Most Community-Centric Composer

Robin Hoffmann, Germany

All of us are online. We have Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles (more than one, usually), Google+ circles, and Soundcloud pages. But those places, as open and free as they were designed to be, are still pretty closed off in terms of the peek behind the curtain that a gossip hungry society like our really goes ape-shit over. Very few composers offer that “secret sauce” approach to the community, Very few composers are willing to give away a few trade secrets to lend a hand to those who are just getting their feet planted.

That’s what Robin Hoffmann does. Robin is a composer and arranger out of Germany. I first heard about Robin from SCOREcast’s composition director Ryan Leach (another top-notch composer) when we were talking about people with exceptional orchestration skills. Robin is at the top of that list, believe me. If you go to his site and listen to his mock-ups (that’s right… those are mock-ups!!), you’ll think about peeing your pants right then and there. He’s that good. But Robin also does something called his Daily Film Scoring Bits — little Tweetable mini-helps that the average beginning composer would never think of, but are probably some of the most overlooked and underused skills in our business, even by veteran composers! Robin gives this stuff away for free from his website and his Twitter feed, and has helped countless composers, new and experienced, write better cues and craft deeper orchestration.

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These are just my choices. There are many other people/organizations/entities in this game who are big league helpers to our creative music community. It takes a lot of people to make this industry work as well as it does. Who are the recipients of YOUR awards in your world? Introduce them to the world and honor them by leaving a few lines on how they’ve helped you in a comment below.

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EASTERN CHRONICLE is my new album that is available worldwide on T-ABC Records. You can download it here on the website in any uncompressed format you can think of. You can also get it in AAC format from iTunes, on MP3 from Amazon.com and in various formats on just about every digital carrier that is out there including Spotify and MOG. If a physical copy is more your speed, the CD is available at retailers throughout Asia and North America.