Gil Talmi & Andrew Gross:
Music Fit for a King
Gil Talmi (right) at his New York studio with Andrew Gross via iChat AV. Projected on the wall to the left is a picture from “The Mummy Who Would Be King.” Photo by Peter Konerko.
Talmi chimes in, “Plus, Logic automatically detects the cuts in a film, then your Conductor track shows you where each one is. That’s so helpful because now we don’t have to hire music editors to do that tedious manual process of making a list of all the cuts and the SMPTE timecodes, and then figuring out which ones are important and putting them in our computers. Logic does all that for you, so you can instantly see where each cut falls — at which beat and measure in the music.”
Screens and Presets
Talmi likes being able to create the work environment that best suits each stage of a project, whether writing, recording, editing, or mixing. “We need to see different things at different stages,” he explains. “For instance, you can set up your Logic screen so you can toggle back and forth between a global overview, where you can see your mixer plus all tracks at once, and a micro view where you zoom in to a specific track. You don’t have to keep rearranging your screen — you just toggle while the music’s running.”
Talmi also appreciates Logic Pro’s presets for various instruments and effects. “Each preset includes stacked modules like EQ, compressor, delay, and reverb applied to an instrument,” he notes. “If you didn’t have those presets, you’d have to manually stack and adjust those parameters to build each track from scratch. And when you only have three weeks to score a film, you don’t want to spend half a day just getting the sound right.”
Logic Pro’s non-destructive real-time processing lets the composers do all their presets in real time. “The sound plays through, but the original file is unaltered, so you don’t have to commit,” says Gross. “You can make changes any time.”
Sell Everything Else
“The Mac is the only platform to work on for native 64-bit processing,” states Talmi. “You can use a lot more simultaneous plug-ins with Logic than with any other third-party software — other programs start croaking if you use too many.”
They also like the way Logic Pro lets them export audio back to video. Says Gross, “I can’t tell you how much time it has taken us, when we were finished with a project, to mix the music with the dialog on the video and compress it and upload it to our clients for review. Now, Logic does all that internally, in one process. Then we just email the mixed project to our client in a format they can easily open and listen to, at almost the same quality as they’d get in our studio, with the audio and video exactly synched.”
“Using Logic for the first time, I started to think, ‘Sell everything else!’” says Talmi. “Logic does so much it’s mind-boggling. A composer could score a film with just Logic, out of the box.”
Straight to the Music
“Andrew and I have been working with Macs to write music for 20 years,” says Talmi. “And the whole idea of technology geared to creative people is to allow us to get to the music without getting caught in technical snafus. That’s what Apple excels at, allowing artists to get straight to the music.” If he didn’t have the Mac to compose with, adds Talmi with a laugh, “I’d become a painter.”
“That’s what Apple excels at, allowing artists to get straight to the music.”
“I’m sitting here among all my Macs,” says Gross. “It’s like 20 years of this language I have spoken. I’ve been using it for so long I know exactly what to do. And when I see my Mac icon, I know everything is okay.”
“Because of the time constraints we work under,” adds Gross, “we want something that’s as stable as possible. The G5 is fantastic. The interface is so elegant and invisible, and the hardware is so solid.”
An Armenian duduk. Photo by Jacquie Bleth.
“No one else has done, or can do, the complete integration of hardware and software that Apple has done with Logic,” adds Talmi. “I’m just amazed by the efficiency of the workflow you get from Logic and a dual-processor G5.” Sometimes, he admits, he even tries to max out the system. “I turn it into this little contest, where I say, ‘Now, this is going to break you!’” says Talmi with a laugh. “But it doesn’t.”
