Nathan Furst

Mixing, without a doubt, is an area in which it’s very important for me to collaborate. When I mix a piece of music by myself I’m never happy with it. When I give it to a mixer and don’t interact with them I’m never happy with it either. I’m only happy with a mix when I’ve been involved and yet I’m not the one doing it.

You can have the most amazing piece of music that’s ever been written on the face of the earth, but if it sounds like it’s coming out of a 1990's synth no one’s going to care. All they’ll say is "God, that sounds like a bad video game from decades ago." They don't listen to only the notes, they hear the whole production. One note that sounds amazing is more valuable than a Rachmaninov score with bad MIDI.

I always try to be budget conscious in the reverse. I don’t want to have to ask people to do me a favor. I always want to pay something that, if it's not great, it at least shows that I respect that person and that I’m making an effort to say `You’re of value to me.' If I can’t do that financially then I try to do everything myself. I start by thinking about everybody I want to bring onto a project, but then I look a the budget. Can I afford a music editor? Can I afford a mixer? And then I take everybody that I’d love to have on my team and I start red inking names.

If you learn about yourself as a composer long enough, you’ll be very self aware in my opinion. You’ll know where you tend to lean and your personal taste is what you can rely on. If you don’t have any good ideas, then you rely on who you are as a composer and what you always like to do. When you start doing that thing I can almost promise you that you’ll find your way.

When I'm preparing for a session, I actually try to meditate a little bit to release my stress. When somebody comes in, they’re only here for a few hours and they don’t necessarily know me or the project. I don't want to bring my problems to the table or create a stressful environment. I want it to be a very comfortable atmosphere so that all they’re thinking is "Wow, it’s really nice to just sit here and play." You can’t necessarily do that with money any more, and even if you can it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the best performance. You get the best performance when you cultivate them as people and engage them.

I think to create a consistent balance is extremely difficult. We try to do that, but to a certain extent, we don’t get to dictate our own schedules. Missing your deadline is not an option but putting your loved ones on hold, unfortunately, is a possibility. You need to do that sometimes, and then you spend time to refill the well between deadlines. From a life standpoint you hope that you clock in even time, but month to month it’s not going to look balanced.

I don’t see the long term value in the formal education system. It costs a lot of money, and that puts you deeply in the red when you enter the real world. I’m also incredibly skeptical about a university's capability of keeping their finger on the pulse of how things are done in the real world. The technology and the music evolve too quickly. I don't think university education is a good option for composers. Education, certainly, but it doesn't have to be formal. I’m not the personality type to sit through an education. I’d rather crash and burn a dozen times than learn something formally.

I prefer it when the film doesn't have any temp music, but what I don’t mind at all is temp ideas. If I have a conversation with the director he might say he just listened to a band and he really likes their sound. That doesn’t mean I’m going to go try to sound like them, but I try to extrapolate what was the magical experience for the director when he listened to that piece of music. The better you can read their mind the more on target you will be.

The composer has to do everything, and that’s not going away. The only thing that will adapt is how a composer accomplishes those things, and that's changing constantly. I believe that baptism by fire is the best way to go in this industry, whether that means that you just try to make it on your own or whether that means you become an apprentice or an assistant to a bigger name composer who knows the ropes. You’ll learn more in 2 months doing that then you will attending 4 years at a university. They can’t keep up with how things are actually happening.

Sometimes you get a phone call and suddenly you only have three weeks to write a score. In that situation you don’t have time to have writer’s block, and fear is incredibly helpful. It’s one of the best motivators you can have.

If I ever do have writer's block, what I do to push through it is I just keep writing bad music. Terrible, horrible music. Just keep writing it. The worst stuff, the stuff that makes you want to quit the business by early afternoon. Just keep doing that. The uninspired writing is always a very useful process, because along the way you’ll learn some things. It's all helpful, and eventually you’ll have the opportunity to throw it out.

For me personally the most valuable thing in this industry, as a composer but also across the board in my opinion, is loyalty. If you have a creative team in which there’s a sense of loyalty, your success is important to those people as well. If I’m just using a random music editor, a random engineer, a random orchestrator, then I’m just another job. If I’m using people that I have history with, that I have a trusted relationship with, and I’m loyal to those people and I feel like that they do right by me, then it becomes mutual and we all want the same thing. I firmly believe that creates a better product and creates better people at the same time. That’s how you build your team.

I'm not there to sell directors something they're not buying. If they’re not behind what I’ve written 100%, I’m not going to spend any time convincing them. I’d rather rewrite the cue. I want them to think there’s literally no other composer that could have written their film score and no other notes that could have gone in that frame. The job is to serve the director at all costs, so only when I get to that point am I personally happy.

For schedules that are super tight, perhaps 2 or 3 weeks, my schedule is completely governed by the cue sheet. I’ll try to take cues that have a similar vibe, maybe a love theme or an action theme, and group them together. When I do that it helps me move a little faster because I’m already in that mindset. I’ll write all those cues at once and that becomes my schedule. On a longer schedule it becomes more of a complicated nuance.

It used to be that if you had a low budget you started creatively changing what your orchestration or your arrangement was based on your budget. Now that’s not necessarily what you do. If the director doesn’t have a lot of money but he still wants it to sound like an 80 piece orchestra then that’s what you shoot for, to the best of your ability. You might do a full mock up with an 80 piece orchestra, bring one or two guys in at a time, and track them in such a way that it sounds like they’re coming from far away. It's not perfect but the connectivity of how they’re playing will infect the MIDI orchestration a little bit, which is helpful.

Music notation changes with context and intention. Obviously, with an orchestra you can’t leave anything up to chance. It’s all has to be there. When individual people come in then it varies, but if there’s a melody line or they’re supposed to fit in with the score in a very precise way I write it all out. With orchestral instruments, even solo, I write out every single note and articulation and give it to the player instead of putting them on the spot. When you have great players you often want to leave a little bit of room, because they might do something really interesting and you want to be able to capture that. Especially with world instruments, guitars, or other instruments where improvisation is indigenous, it’s good to have the idea written down, but not so precisely that you contain them.