Daniel Pemberton: Renaissance Man
Apple technology is helping composer Daniel Pemberton realise his dream of a world where quick and easy creativity is available to all.
Daniel Pemberton is interested in power. Not the world domination variety, but a more democratic strain. He envisages a time when everybody will be able to exercise their creative imaginations to the full, generating music, movies, scripts, books, Web sites... all from the comfort of their own homes.
What’s driving the revolution? Among other things, technology and, in particular, hardware and software such as that created by Apple.
Pemberton, a London-based composer of musical scores, says: “When you have something that somebody’s done on their own, that’s when it gets really exciting. If they wrote it on their own — if they do everything themselves — that’s going to be really empowering because that’s when you think: ‘I could do that’”.
Pemberton released his first album, Bedroom (so-called because he created it in his bedroom) in 1994, when he was just 16. Since then, he’s carved out a successful career for himself in the film and television industries, writing music for a wide range of productions including Bad Lads Army (2004) and Hell’s Kitchen (2005) — both of which are soon to return for second series – as well as a soon-to-be launched comedy series called Suburban Shootout (2006).
He creates his music in Apple’s Logic Pro (version 7.1) running on a dual-processor Power Mac with 175GB of memory. He says: “In this job, you have to turn things around quite quickly. I used to use loads of equipment that was inter-connected — like the sampler and other bits and bobs — which was fine but there were difficulties because you always had to concentrate on one track and you couldn’t get on with other things until you’d set up the mixer and the track was finished. Now I’ve got pretty much everything I need in Logic”.
He admits that, initially, he was slightly dubious of the idea of creating every aspect of his music within one computer. He says: “I always thought the sound wouldn’t be that good but actually it’s really amazing. And I’ve managed to develop a system where I can use outside sounds — like a guitar or a piano — and incorporate them into Logic”.
Over the years, Pemberton has amassed a huge library of samples that he uses in his work — everything from a Fisher Price music box playing London Bridge to sounds captured from his own fender Rhodes keyboard. He says: “When I’m making music, I always want it to be my own sounds. Lots of people use preset sounds, but I always feel I want to make music that no-one else can make and my tracks are often made out of sounds that I’ve recorded. The best thing now in Logic is that you can build up massive libraries of your samples”.
“In Logic I can do what I want with the sounds. The possibility of making much more interesting music is suddenly a lot easier and I can experiment with much more interesting ideas, a lot more quickly.”
Whereas previously Pemberton had to search through row upon row of discs to locate a particular sound, now he simply conducts a quick search of the Logic Pro library. “It means that musically you can incorporate so many different textures and ideas really quickly”, he says. “In Logic I can do what I want with the sounds. The possibility of making much more interesting music is suddenly a lot easier and I can experiment with much more interesting ideas, a lot more quickly”.
Pemberton himself fits the model of creative polymath. In addition to composing, he also writes scripts and articles for magazines, and uses a DV camera and iMovie to make his own films. He says: “The majority of my time is spent writing music but I do lots of other things simply because they’re a good way to engage myself — making Christmas cards, writing a book, writing for magazines, making movies”.
He adds: “The great thing about Macs is it’s easy to make them work with other bits of equipment and they come with lots of things as standard, so you can plug your camcorder in and it will just work. That’s a really great feature and makes things really easy. You don’t have to fiddle around for ages”.
Pemberton is a man with a vision — one that is underpinned by empowering technology. “In my ideal world, people wouldn’t be driven by money or status, but by creativity”, he says. “These days, there’s so many different ways to express yourself creatively — the technology makes a lot of things possible. If I was growing up now, with the sort of software and hardware that’s available, I really don’t know what I’d be doing — now you have so much power, you can go in any direction”.
