Gil Talmi & Andrew Gross:
Music Fit for a King
A shriveled mummy that has lain neglected on a dusty museum shelf at Niagara Falls could be the remains of a long-lost Egyptian king. Photo © Aladin Abdel Naby/Reuters/Corbis.
Making It Stick Together
The scoring process began with the partners watching the final edit to select a tempo and what they call a “sound palette” for the show. “We write music around the palette and a tempo that feels right,” notes Gross. “But we also want the music to work on its own — it can’t feel contrived or like it’s trying too hard.”
They strove for a tone that complemented the mummy’s heritage. “We wanted to do the mummy justice through the music,” says Talmi. “For us that meant mystery and respect, something regal that reflected ancient and distant times, hints of Middle Eastern influences, and, since the story moves right into the present, the melding of East and West, old and new.”
Their cross-country workflow helped blend these ideas into a unified score. “I’d write a sequence and upload it to our FTP site and Gil would download it, play it back, and make comments,” explains Gross. “That process kind of homogenized the character of the music, because even though we wrote different themes, we were using similar sounds and constantly reviewing what we’d done, so that made everything stick together.”
Ney, Duduk, and Dumbek
The composers’ challenge was to create a rich sound palette on a lean budget. “Sure, you can emulate an orchestra with samplers, but you spend a lot of time trying to make it sound like a real orchestra, and it never does,” says Talmi. Instead, the friends were able to “hint at an orchestral sound, which gave us some of that timelessness you can’t achieve with anything else,” while selecting key instruments to define the score.
“We used the ney, a Middle Eastern woodwind,” says Talmi, “and the duduk, a double-reed Armenian flute that creates this haunting sense of a faraway soul — it’s been in the forefront of a lot of cinematic scoring lately. Then we added the Egyptian dumbek for percussion.”
They started with samplers to create a temporary melodic line; in the final soundtrack this was replaced by a musician playing the actual instruments. To the wind tracks they added ambient arpeggiated synth sounds and sampled strings from Sonic Implants.
Master of Shoes and Seaweed
They turned to master woodwind musician Chris Bleth, whose playing has been featured on such recent blockbusters as “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “King Kong,” to perform the main melodic themes and atmospheric material. Says Talmi, “Chris is one of the most talented musicians on the planet. He plays any instrument he can blow into, and he can take almost anything — a shoe! — and make beautiful music with it.”
“Logic does so much it’s mind-boggling. A composer could score a film with just Logic, out of the box.”
Duduks and dumbeks notwithstanding, surely the oddest instrument on the “Mummy” soundtrack was the seaweed. “Chris picked up a piece he found on the beach and dried it,” recounts Talmi. “He actually played on it for a couple of the cues, and it created these super-high, tiny little melodic overtones that we used for atmospheric background.”
Once again, iSight allowed Talmi to participate in the Los Angeles recording session with Bleth from his studio in New York. “I was able to see him, listen to him and communicate with him as if I were in the room,” says Talmi. “I could hear the notes and the emotion behind them and see him playing. We had a lot of control over every facet of production.”
An Armenian zurna. Photo by Jacquie Bleth.
Logic Pro 7
Logic Pro is the backbone of the partners’ musical editing suite. “Logic lets us bring together the sounds we use from three distinct areas,” explains Talmi. “We use its internal sequencer to control our outboard synths and MIDI gear. We use its soft synths and processing power, and it also hosts our third-party plug-ins. And it’s the totally professional recording environment in which we record our live players.” Adds Gross, “Logic handles all three of those operations really elegantly.”
The composers love to talk about their favorite features. “It’s really cool that we can open up the movie in a QuickTime window within a Logic sequence, and everything is perfectly synched up,” says Gross. “To add a music cue in a specific place, we just go to that region in the film, assign a start time for the film and the sequencer, and the music automatically aligns with the film. You set it and forget it.”
