MCB Interviews Brian H. Kim
As a composer and music producer for hit TV shows like How I Met Your Mother and Switched At Birth, Brian H. Kim has combined his musical and technical skills to meet the ever increasing demands and deadlines that modern composers face.
"I didn't get brought up in a very traditional compositional environment," says Kim. "I studied music in college and enjoyed the required seminars, but only took one composition course. When I was a teenager I was a very intense competitive classical pianist, studied a lot of Bach and Beethoven and Chopin piano works. But when I started writing music, I was really excited to write really basic electronica."
Kim began to explore music by M83, Rufus Wainwright, Chemical Brothers, Junior Boys and others. While other students at USC were dissecting Mahler and Beethoven, Kim followed his passion for modern music. "If you want to orchestrate like a badass, get some Mahler or Beethoven and pick it apart. If you really like mainstream pop music, download some of Max Martin's catalog and study what makes it click."
His love of computers and music intersected in college and spurred a new found passion for writing. "I'd say my creative process very much depends on the tools immediately at hand, because I didn't start writing until I had those tools," says Kim." I was eventually drawn to Logic Pro because of its flexibility and customizability (in the Environment) and how it could be tweaked under the hood as the technology around it expands, setting up converters that customize how MIDI is transmitted to external hardware, for example. I just purchased an iPad in order to incorporate TouchOSC's customizable control surface into my rig too."
Kim uses sample libraries including Vienna, Audiobro, East West, Spitfire, Spectrasonics, ProjectSAM, SonicCouture Tonehammer and custom made libraries in Logic's EXS sampler. "I always feel like this is a black hole, because every sample library offers something different," explains Kim. "If you have so many libraries that you're not even familiar with what is offered where, then you're just wasting money and hard drive space."
For more information about Brian H. Kim, visit his website here.Listen to Brian H. Kim's Music:
White
How to Eat Bacon
Daphne's Theme
Ballad of O-Ren
More Tips from Brian H. Kim:
"First, don't be afraid to play the game. If you think work is going to come to you, you are fooling yourself, because that only happens to a few out of thousands. But this doesn't just mean go to lots of mixers and make lots of superficial acquaintances and post a lot on Facebook. And this leads to my second piece of advice -- be a good hang. A lot of the work I have gotten has come my way not only because I wrote a decent cue once, but also because someone enjoyed working with me. Or, even less than that, because I was friends with someone, and they were friends with someone else who needed music. You never know where work is going to come from, who is going to succeed, when it's going to happen. So you don't have any control over that. What you DO have control over is how you interact with people and the sort of vibe you put out, and if you genuinely want to be someone's friend and are lucky enough to develop real, lasting relationships with creative people, I think that sort of networking will return more good fortune than attending a dozen mixers full of strangers. This is especially important for film and TV composers, because we are so often at the whim of the industry around us. A writer has to think of a project first, then a director has to get attached, and there's a whole dependent chain. Existing relationships are so key in that chain."