You are imagining scenes, imagining soundtracks for films that don’t exist yet.
Julie Carpenter Musician/production music composer
I came to Los Angeles in the early 2000s from Texas, where I had grown up. I grew up in a small town, really hadn’t seen much of the world and arrived here a bit after college with a lot of other Texans who were also creatives and they were dreaming of being filmmakers or musicians. We all landed in the Echo Park area and lived in various big houses together, everyone pursuing all their creative dreams, but really having no idea exactly how to do that or how this whole thing works. As for myself, when I got there, I was just saying yes to everything. I came with my violin in hand, and I was like, “Ok, how can I use this to get around this town? How can I make a career in music?” Because I didn’t come with the dream of “I want to be a composer.” I just was like, “Well, I don’t want to stay in Texas.” It was more moving away from what I didn’t want, the kind of lives that I saw people around me growing up having, I was like, “Ok, I don’t want that… but I don’t necessarily know what I want instead.” So, I said yes to everything. I took every weird gig — I played in quartets at weddings, I was in a Rod Stewart infomercial miming violin. I was dressed as a mermaid at a Persian wedding playing violin… there were weird, weird gigs. And at the same time, playing with several different bands and just saying yes.
Maybe some people know from the moment they start a creative pursuit, “I want to be a painter and I want to do this genre of painting and this is what I want to do,” and that was absolutely not me. I had all this creativity and interest in music and some ability in it, but I really didn’t know where to focus it. So I did a lot of playing on people’s records, either paid or for free or some combination of the two, I did a lot of playing live with a lot of different groups and trying to find where I fit in all that. It wasn’t a very conscious-path sort of decision. But after a while, things start to emerge, like, “Ok, I like this and I don’t like that.” I liked being in the studio; I got to see a lot of different recording studios around LA, from very high-end things to people’s laundry rooms that they had converted.
The different, weird thing about me is that although I did start out on a violin, on a stringed instrument, and technically was classically trained, I love writing music. I love coming up with my own parts. That is not something that every string player wants to do or has the inclination to do. Some people ignore that entirely — you’re a machine. They hire you, you show up, you play exactly what’s on the page. Touring with a band like The Eels, you get handed a sheet music and you play it and you might as well be a synthesizer. You’re a synthesizer that looks cool on stage, that’s all it is. But sometimes you work with bands that are like, “I don’t know, what do you think should happen here?” So you start getting to have creative input on something that you work on, and you’re like, “Oh… hmm. This is more interesting to me.” So I started evolving away from wanting to play live gigs where you’re being given a very set thing to do. It can be very repetitive, especially on tour. You play the same stuff every night, the same way, and the more the same it is, the better. For me, that was just… prison. I'm very grateful for those experiences and it’s not that they were bad jobs, they were the wrong jobs for me. As a young creative, you just don’t know until you do it. You have to just put on a lot of different outfits and be like, “Oh, this is me.” And then you realize, “Oh, this is a bad fit, this is not me. That’s not who I am as a maker.”
What was becoming more and more clear to me was that I love writing parts. The interesting part of music to me is the production element; I loved being in all those studios and seeing different recording setups and seeing how people would achieve different goals depending on what they were trying to do. I love that process and I think it’s so interesting because we have such a rich history to go back to; I loved studying the way Brian Eno would do things in the studio and going back and finding out how people achieved all these different effects on different records. It’s really cool and interesting to me. Whereas playing to big crowds or the energy from live shows, I found exhausting. So I was like, “My place of belonging in this creative industry is somewhere in the composing/recording field.” But I didn’t really know exactly where.
I guess the way that it transitioned into doing composing for film and TV was my husband — well, boyfriend at the time — was working at Manny’s Music in Hollywood and he gave a demo tape to a couple of guys who ran a production music library. For people who don’t know, production music is probably 80–90% of what you hear on television, it is not made by composers who are composing to picture. It is made from these libraries of music that composers have created in different genres, different moods, different instrumentations, and editors can go and search these things. Most of what you see on TV has come from something like that. I didn’t know that world existed… maybe peripherally I sort of knew from the 60s and 70s, because people collect records from that period. This job goes back to that time and those records became very collectible later, because they were fantastic musicians that were making them and it was very interesting music and people use it for sampling. So I sort of knew that stuff existed but I don’t think that I had ever thought about that as an avenue that I could go down.
Once Dain was connected to this one company, they were like, “Well, we need all kinds of music. You make electronica but we also need indie rock.” At the time, I was playing guitar and I was trying to have my little indie rock band, so I got drawn into that group of people. Through them, I also learned the more technical, housekeeping aspects of how you build a library, how you manage the files, how you create searchable metadata so editors can find the music, how you build the website, how you do art for these things… because increasingly the market is geared toward things that look like real music, they look like real bands. It doesn’t look like it did in the 60s where they would have an album that was “Soothing Sounds of Strings” or something like that. It’s very much geared now toward producing things as close to what could be commercially available as a record, with lyrics and full songs. It’s a different landscape than it was. It’s a much more competitive professional landscape now because there’s so many people doing it that to get used, you have to be very very good. You’re basically creating your own fictional record label, really.
We worked for other people for years, we worked for that company and we worked for others that would hire us to do what we were good at. I was very good at doing orchestral minimalism, things that sound like Steve Reich or Max Richter, that’s particularly in my wheelhouse. I also do a good Danny Elfman. These are things that I can do very well. Dain Luscombe, my husband and partner in the business, he’s very much the electronica guy, the hip hop guy, so he does stuff more like that, but we literally do everything. That, to me, is the real appeal of this job, that I get to be curious and interested in a wide variety of things.
We just did an album of songs in the style that’s been popular in the last decade called stomps and claps. It’s sort of your Mumford & Sons, that kind of thing. You sit down and you’re like, “Ok, the client has requested this album. What about these songs, what about the rhythm, can I distill down and make the best version of that?” Because you’re not doing a sound-alike, you’re not trying to copy a song, but you’re trying to distill the essence of that style or that mood or the feeling that the client wants. To do that is a really interesting skill because it’s analysis. I love literary analysis, I love music analysis, and you get to research and go into a lot of neat avenues finding out, what’s the essence of this? What is at the heart of this project? I find that really interesting, where if I just worked in one genre, if I were the gal who gets called to do country albums or something, it would be so boring. But one day I may be hip hop girl, and I'm country girl the next day, and I love that because it’s something new and interesting every day. It’s a lot of problem solving and part of that is having a really good tool kit. We have a really wide variety of high tech to low tech things. We have everything from a 1910 upright piano to these crazy synthesizers, and we use it all, sometimes on the same song. It’s about having the right tools, but it’s also about knowing which tools to choose for which job and that’s endlessly fascinating to me.
For this particular one [Mumford & Sons-style project], this is for our own library that we founded two years ago called Audiobrat and so in that case, we have our partner in the business and our distributor that have to be pleased. But our distributor, 11 One/Music, is very trusting and believes in us, so they let us pretty much do what we want to do as long as they’re still happy with the quality. For that one, we kind of only had ourselves that we had to answer to, which ended up being harder because we were trying to make it so commercial-sounding, could this be on the radio? You’re flipping back and forth going, “We’re there… we’re not there.” And if you’re not there, then you’ve got to keep pushing at it.
You never want to say no to something because it’s difficult, because it’s a challenge. You do sometimes want to say no to things because they aren’t the right thing for you to be doing, but that challenge is always a good thing. I got hired for a really unusual project a couple of years ago where they needed vocal samples for a horror soundtrack. It was basically, “Sing this row of tongues in this scary voice, then we need some demonic chanting.” I got the brief and I was like, “I have no experience in creating demonic chanting, but by god, I will try.” This sounds interesting to me and I'm intrigued about learning some extended vocal technique. I'm not a trained vocalist; I'm an ok singer, I can get by. But sure, why not try it? Never say never, just get yourself in there and get your hands dirty and see what you make. That’s the wonderful thing about the studio, it’s a sort of safe space for experimentation or creation and seeing what you’re capable of.
I am a horror movie fan, so I had some idea of the kind of music they were trying to create. They were trying to create a sample library that they could put into their keyboard and basically play my singing as an instrument. So I was trying to think about what would be useful to them. And then this is where weird crossovers between your work and your ordinary life happen: we have this massive library and we have an occult section. There was a book with some example spells in it, so I got it down and I tried reading the scary-sounding spells. Disappointingly, it didn’t summon anything, but the client was happy. I was like, “Hopefully, this won’t work…” So, it’s a really wide variety of things that we get to do.
One project that I was really proud of because it’s as close to my art music — this band Less Bells that’s sort of my main outside-work creative outlet — I got to do something for once that sounded very similar to it for this awesome little documentary short called Row On, Wisconsin. It’s about the women’s rowing team at the University of Wisconsin, they have this fantastic rowing team and I got to score that, and that was really, really fun. It’s probably the closest to my style; I do a lot of things where I'm putting on a lot of different hats and pretending to be different kinds of composers and I love doing that, but this was very fun because I got to just be me.
AI has definitely started to be a threat in the industry and there has been a lot of discussion around who will own AI-created music, who will be owed the royalties on it. There’s a lot of fear among people like me about being replaced by it. But at the end of the day, I do not believe that we can be replaced by it. Ted Chiang, the writer, he just did an article in the New Yorker that goes into it really beautifully, but at the heart of it, as a creative, you’re not just synthesizing other people’s work and making copies of it. That’s not what we do. You’re working from your lived experience as a person. With music, we’re always doing things like, “That beat means something,” or “That chord change means something.” These things have meanings and they’re cultural and they’re deeply felt; when you hear it, you understand when a piece of music has these meanings to it. When AI gets ahold of it, what you tend to hear is the musical equivalent of those photos where people have too many fingers. You instantly, as a human, listen to it and say, “I know what’s wrong with that.” But it’s hard to explain to the AI.
Basically, what I think is going to happen is that there’ll be a flood of inferior, wallpaper music that floods the industry. But it just isn’t going to provide the emotional highlights that editors and films and TV shows really depend on. They aren’t really going to be able to take our jobs because they can’t — it’s a very subtle emotional act when you are scoring a film. You’re empathizing with what you’re seeing and you’re responding to it. AI can’t do that. It can copy the way someone else did that. That may be fine in certain situations, it may go unnoticed and used as wallpaper. But that’s all they’re ever going to be able to do is wallpaper. It’s not ever going to have the heart. I think unless you have a heartbeat and a physical body, you don’t really make art that connects with other people because so much of music is the physicality of you interacting with an instrument, it’s the sound of the place that you’re recording it in. As humans, we’re really good pattern recognizers, so when we hear a faulty pattern, something that doesn’t work, it’s that uncanny valley and it’s not going to quite connect.
People will lose work; I compare it to the rise of CGI in the early 2000s. Everyone was like, “We don’t need actors anymore, we don’t need an art department anymore, we’re just going to do everything in the computer!” And this got completely out of hand and everyone ended up hating it. Those movies have not aged well. If you go back and watch CGI from 2004, it is a rough experience. Whereas, if you go back and watch films from the 1980s that were done with practical effects, they still look cool. In the end, what happened in the industry was a lot of merging between the two. Using CGI as a tool where it’s helpful, but it’s not going to replace actors, it’s not going to replace real sets and real prop builders and it's not going to replace us squishy meat musicians, either. We have something else to offer, which is our life experience. Or so I hope.
Also, I think we tend to think of AI music as, “Is it going to be good enough for the consumer?” That’s assuming that the only value music has is to the consumer, that it doesn’t have value to the creators. The creative process is a valuable part of the economy and humanity. There are reasons to protect that, even if you could get rid of it and perhaps all the consumers would be fine with the weird wallpaper music, I think we would lose a lot as a culture if we lost creators. You can stop paying them, and that’s a genuine concern because people should have that freedom to make creation their career if they want. I don’t think we all just want to be consumers; we want to have makers in our culture, they’re foundational. It’s a Pandora’s Box that we are going to have to heavily reckon with in the coming years on so many fronts: the creative front, the misinformation front… celebrities have already run into this problem where they’ve been misrepresented saying things they didn’t say. Who will own your voice, who will own your face? These are all very real questions. It’s here, we can’t make it go away, so we’re going to have to figure out how to live with the robots.
Normally, it’s taking a look and thinking, “Ok, what do I need to do for this next delivery?” Usually, I do drums first. I’ll lay out the song in sort of a skeleton. I know what the beat is going to be and I make a scaffolding. And then I’ll go through, usually on the keyboard, and put some chords down. What do we want the progression to be here, emotionally? Are we starting sad and then things get better? What kind of scene are we imagining here? Now, if there’s a brief, there may be a very specific brief that tells you that. If there’s not a brief, then you’re deciding, “What would be useful here, what do I want to do?” So maybe I want it to get happy and then have a setback… you are imagining scenes, imagining soundtracks for films that don’t exist yet.
You’re imaging your little scene and you’re putting your chords down, and that can be a phase that you work on for a while because you really want to make transition points between sections of the song that are going to be really useful to the editor. You’re always thinking about the editor, you’re always thinking about how to build ramp-ups and then you try to drop to silence for a second… you’re sort of sculpting. There’s a lot of sculpting that goes on before I ever pick up a real, physical instrument. There’s a lot on the keyboard, a synthesizer, something that’s easy to bang out chords on. Different instruments lend themselves to different chord progressions better. For the stomps and claps one, you’re thinking, “I want to know which chords will ring the most open,” so I want to write that on a guitar because I want to know what’s going to get this very down-homey feel. Some chords on a guitar, because of what the open strings are, will resonate better than other things which sound more claustrophobic or more muted.
You’re picking your instrument to start things with, you’re building the structure of the songs, hopefully if you’re doing things right you’re going back to some references and saying, “Ok, these are the kinds of bands that we’re trying to achieve the feel of, or the kind of film,” depending on what genre you’re in. It’s a lot of checking your references: are you still on target? Are you getting done what you wanted to do? Are you giving the editors useful parts of the music? What I tend to do at the beginning is just spew a lot onto the recording, knowing that I'm not going to use all of it. You want to get all the possibilities out there on the page and then you start scaling it back and you start shaping and shading. Eventually, it’ll get down to the polishing process which is going through and fixing every little thing and making it the best version of itself and getting it ready to go.
Then there’s a long mixing and editing process that has to happen. One of the things that we do to make things very easy to get our music used is that we do cut-downs and edits. So, for every full song we do, we do 60-second versions, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, and then we do stings and tags, which are just little snippets of music. They all have to be coherent and they all have to add something emotionally, so you’re going back through your song like, “How can I edit this down, how can I capture this in 30 seconds?” You learn to write in this very modular way so you can take parts of the song and chop them up and stick them back together and they’ll still stick.
As you get more experienced, you really think that way while you’re writing. When I first started out, that was very hard for me because I tended to write in very large, melodic phrases that were all connected to each other, very legato. I was a very connected, melodic writer and so everything was woven thickly together and when I went to cut it down into a 15-second edit, it was very hard to carve out meaningful pieces of that. I've learned to write in a much more succinct way and keep things modular and movable and to think about which ones are melody lines and which ones are rhythm lines and to put them on different tracks so that I can treat them all individually. There is an assembly line component to it, but it never really feels that way because what you’re working on is so different from project to project. It’s a nice marriage between something that’s very factory and pattern-based and something that’s very fluid because this time it’s a Latin project and it’s completely different than the love songs project.
I could see how it be conceived of as, “You’re being so analytical toward this thing that’s supposed to be a heartfelt, emotional act,” and does that wring the enjoyment out of it… for me it’s the exact opposite. I really enjoy taking things apart and understanding how they work. To me, that is the beauty of something — it’s very beautiful to know how a piece makes you feel something, how you can manipulate people emotionally with this music. It’s really fascinating how it works, because it’s human psychology at the same time it’s music, because humans are the ones who are going to listen to it. Again, how could AI ever capture that? It doesn’t understand us, it’s not us. We know best how to manipulate each other... in a good way.
When I was a kid, it was definitely my parents living vicariously through me a little bit. They saw that I had a talent for music so I was put into Suzuki violin lessons… and fiddle lessons, being that it was Texas. They very much wanted to push me into this role of a performer and I was a kid, I didn’t know any better, I didn’t particularly have a choice in the matter. It wasn’t something that I really wanted but it felt like something that I had to do in order to have value in my family. When I went off to college, I was like, “Well, great, I don’t have to do this anymore. I can quit this.” But at the same time, thankfully, there was a little voice in my head going, “Maybe you don’t want to do that. Maybe you want to keep doing this a little bit but you have to find how to make it your own.” You don’t owe anyone else the career that they think you should have, and as an artist you may be good at things you don’t like to do. You have to find what’s really yours in it. The only way I could do that was to come to LA and do a thousand different things and figure out which ones were really me.
Thankfully, with the Suzuki training. I had ear training. The way they teach you is to listen to something and learn to play it back, which is in my opinion a much better way to learn than learning to read music first because that can lock you into needing the words in front of you. It would be like if we taught kids to read books concurrently with teaching them language — why would you do that? So I did have this ear ability, so I was able to pick up other instruments pretty easily and I just picked them up as I went along. A guitar here, a mandolin here, I play violin and cello as well. I'm probably sacrificing being really good at one thing to be a little bit good at a lot of things, but that suits my personality better because I’m always more interested in the next thing and the next challenge. It’s almost like as soon as something is done, I forget about it and I don’t give myself credit for it; I'm like, “That’s over so why would we talk about that? What’s happening now, what’s new?” That’s always what I'm searching for so that’s probably why I don’t stop learning instruments. A few years ago I stared getting more into synthesizers and electronic instruments and that was a whole new world to me and I found that extremely liberating because you can add so many elements of chance and you can plan out how you want the music to work and set it in motion and stand back and watch the machine follow your instructions. It’s a very different way of thinking about music. I really loved that. Anything that can give you a different perspective on your work is the best.
I think the long-term plan is to keep building the library and keep bringing more composers to work with because we don’t want to have to be fulfilling everything ourselves. It’s going to be about expanding, bringing in more people, editing their work, helping guide them through the process that I've gone through and showing them what I've learned and making them part of our library, too. I hope to do a lot more to picture in the future. I would really love to get to score a full length feature at some point, that’s my dream. It hasn’t happened yet, but I think it probably will; I just need to find the right project to work with. That’s something I would really love to do.
And we’re working on a new record for Less Bells right now for the band, so that’s all going on and that’s going to be a different style than the other records were, so it’s all very exciting. Always having a lot of different things going on. Sometimes you’re just not in the mood to work on a specific thing so if you have things you can pivot to, you can be the best self that you need to be for that work at that time. Because sometimes you’re not in the mood for something really high energy or something really sad, maybe you have some energy and you’d rather be doing that. I like to have a couple of things going and pivot back and forth between them and when you get frustrated or stuck then you move back to the other one and work on that one instead.
I guess what I would say in summary is that I would rather have a little bit of exactly what I want than a lot of something I don’t. This has all been a process of winnowing down what kind of musician I am, what kind of creative I am, and where I can do my best work in the world. This has been a great option. I don’t know if it’s something that I will always do; maybe I’ll pivot and do something completely different someday. But it’s been an amazing experience. I’ve gotten to try on so many different things. That’s very satisfying when you’re like, “I'm not sure I can pull that off,” and then you pull it off.
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