MCB Interviews Jeremy Borum
Although he works primarily as a composer, Borum is also an orchestrator-for-hire, helping other composers get they're ideas to paper faster. "Most people that hire orchestrators or music copyists could do the work themselves," Borum said. "However there are certainly plenty of people that have their musical background outside of the concert hall, and they get gigs too." Every job contains new knowledge for his tool box. "They're rarely huge revelations, and more frequently they're just little good ideas I put in the back of my mind."
Like most tech-savvy composers, Borum uses technology to expedite meetings. "Even on local projects I'll post quicktime videos and review them over the phone with a director, just to avoid LA traffic," said Borum. "In that sense location is irrelevant, but sitting in the same room during the core parts of the creative process will always be valuable." Whenever possible, he recommends the composer be on set during principle photography. "Odds are whatever direction they give to the actors they will also give to you later, so it saves everybody some time. They use dramatic language to talk you about the music, so being on set gives you a head start and will get you on the right track from the very beginning."
Most good composers can spew out an endless number of motifs, but Borum has learned to refine his ideas. "It is the development, molding, and reshaping of ideas that makes a score sound like a score and not a collection of tracks," Borum explained. "If you can squeeze a good film score out of 8 bars of music, good. If it's 8 notes, even better. It is easy to spin out new ideas and much more difficult to develop existing ones."
More tips from Jeremy Borum:
- "Be humble, and always remember that it is not your music that you're writing. Critiques and complete discards of music are just part of the carving process. You have to carve out a lot of stone before you get a sculpture.""
- "Don't get wrapped up in the pursuit of gear. Your most important recording tool is your room. Great gear in a bad room sounds like a bad room. A good performance by good musicians in a good room will sound good every time."
- "The job of orchestration can range from being fairly mechanical to being almost like composing. There is not a consistent workflow from gig to gig. Each composer has different strengths, different needs, different software platforms, and their own pace. It's a little bit different every time."
- "We see record labels and the record industry in general collapsing before our eyes, and the end result is that a lot of working musicians are now finding their only consistent income on the road. I'm hopeful that the personal live experience will ultimately take root again in the film world as well, because music is meant to be a shared experience. I always enjoy both the sessions and the finished product more when I'm in the same room as the musicians, and nobody loves MIDI except for the producers."