It had been a long time since I had worked together with my dear friend and mentor Hans Zimmer. Though we share a studio space, we rarely intersect on projects (I play some exotic instruments from time to time, and I created some ethnic cues for Gladiator a while ago). When Hans began planning the score to Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott’s jaw dropping portrayal of an American military event gone horribly wrong in Somalia, his idea was to assemble a band of musician/composers that could interpret and flesh out his thematic ideas in near real time. Naturally a film as technically and emotionally complex as “BHD” is far more complex than that, but a studio was set up to allow for a small group to work quickly and fluidly alongside Zimmer for the duration of the scoring process.
Due to the topical nature of the events of 9/11 it was decided to move up the release date of the film (the military forces in Afghanistan were the same that the movie depicts in Somalia). A deadline that was months away suddenly became mere weeks. And so it came to be that I would lend a hand in the scoring of Black Hawk Down. Hans was open to whatever seemed appropriate. I knew that it would have been a mistake to try and simply jump in and work on the same cues and themes that everyone else was doing. It was early enough in the process that creating some unique ideas could still be blended with the main themes and concepts on which Hans was working. So I decided, and he agreed, that unlike the rest of the people involved, I would more or less work on my own, away from the rest of ‘the band’. I took ideas and sounds that were thematic to the score and began to organize them in my studio.
Hans organized a very unusual sampling session. He and orchestrator Bruce Fowler put together a set of musical fragments and textures for strings and brass. These short, and sometimes long, pieces were fed into GigaStudios. The band, which was comprised of Hans on keyboards, Heitor Pereira on guitars, Michael Brook on guitars and electronics, Martin Tillman on cello and electric cello, Craig Eastman on violin and electric violin, and Mel Wesson programming synths and grooves, set up together in the main studio at Media Ventures in order to start performing on the score. The band began with a series of lengthy (10 to 20 minute) improvisations to picture that created drones and rhythm beds that became the basis for a number of cues.
Now while I love the GigaStudio, I am on an aggressive mission of my own, and decided that anything I would do on BHD would be done entirely inside software - no additional devices of any kind would be used. No wires! I am running Logic on a Macintosh, with a second Mac connected by lightpipe strictly for more synthesis and sampling power. The output of the second Mac comes up directly inside Logic’s mixer through 8 channels of Digidesign hardware. This avoids any issues of latency in dealing with incoming audio (although I am currently experimenting with fast sound cards and the TC Powercore DSP processor for more native audio efficiency). So the main tools for my BHD music were Logic with the EXS24 sampler, a number of Native Instruments software including Absynth (I love this synth!), Pro52, Battery (drum sampler), and samples created in Native Instrument’s Reaktor. No audio goes unpunished in my studio, and it is critical to find interesting and complimentary effects to enhance sounds into a more interesting form. Straight, normal sounds can be coaxed into service by experimenting with all kinds of audio plug-ins. I will run through virtually every plug-in I have in order to find something that surprises and excites me musically.
The film’s location in Somalia, in North Africa, became an important factor in choices of sounds and rhythms. We all listened to music from Morocco, Iran, Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East. I practiced my Arabic ney flute for as organic a feel as possible with the synths. This became a main element of my cues, and spread to some others as well. I put the ney (a breathy whooshing sound on its own) through a battery of effects in order to make it feel as dangerous and threatening as possible. I made it loud, bright, harsh and strange. I created a harsh reverb setting, multitap delay, and a bit of harmonizing. In one cue I did some time stretching, but used the poorest quality setting in order to make it sound “damaged”. Hans and the band used a number of wonderful odd instruments - mostly ethnic guitarlike things. Martin Tillman’s wonderful cello stands in for some of the bowed instruments of the region, such as the Persian komanche. I actually played a stringed instrument myself, a strange tube shaped harp from Madagascar called the valiha. I used it for a single note pulse on a cue.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Black Hawk Down was not just the very tight schedule, but also the level and method of creative collaboration. Hans typically stays in control of virtually every element of his scores. But on BHD he intentionally relied on the interplay of the group to design the score’s sound and architecture. Each person working brought a unique musical view. In order to channel all that musical energy into a cohesive score was very, very complicated. While Hans was the driving force here, it became the role of Bob Badami, the film’s music editor, to act as a filter, producer, translator, psychologist and military general. He and film’s other music editor, Marc Streitenfeld created temp scores for the director and producers, listen to all the music as it was written and suggest possible placement, edit the music after it was written when the film was recut, present new cues to the director, and keep track of each piece through it’s stages of creation and completion. Of all the film’s I’ve worked on, this was probably the most complex from the perspective of the music editing. Much of the music, especially early on in the process, was not written to picture and required extensive editing to make it mesh with the film. Add to this several people each outputting music that needed to be considered for any given scene, the need for revisions, the need to get certain pieces recorded by “the band” or by certain soloists, or get processes by a synth programmer, or recorded with an orchestra (yes there was a little), along with producers and the director changing their minds about what was working and what wasn’t, and the ever ticking clock and you had a project that could have easily crashed as easily as a Black Hawk helicopter in Somalia.
Throughout the scoring process it was known that there was a need for a singer to perform the opening of the film. The original temp score, created by director Scott and his editor Pietro Scalia, was the opening cut to Peter Gabriel’s “Last Temptation of Christ” score. The piece was performed by outstanding Senegalese singer Babaa Maal. A number of singers were considered. But none of them conveyed the sense of forlorn longing that Maal did. But getting him to LA from his home in Senegal was considered impossible. But when no one else could fit the part, massive strings were pulled all the way to the US congress, and lo and behold Maal came for two days of singing on the last days of the score. His lengthy improvisations were carefully edited into the pieces used in the film. He is an absolutely astonishing artist.
On order to collaborate on each others cues, audio files were shared between composers and musicians by passing hard drives and CD ROMS around. If I wanted the band to play on a piece I was writing, I would put a demo into an audio file and pass it to the engineer in charge of recording the band. They would record they parts and pass the audio back to me to insert into my Logic file to edit and refine. If I was to play ney on a cue for Hans, he would pass a demo file to me. Drives were contantly moving around.
The massive job of mixing Black Hawk Down came to veteran engineer Alan Meyerson, who has mixed most of Hans’ and my scores. And while he had the massive arsenal of the Media Ventures Studio A at his disposal, he made the choice to mix the entire project inside of ProTools, and used no outside gear whatsoever. An impressive task and with brilliant results. And no matter how much pressure there was to finish a cue that was needed “immediately” he would not release a cue that was not polished to perfection. There is no one better for this kind of difficult music. The album was remixed and edited by Brit mixer “Big Al” Clay.
Of the cues I wrote, only one was written to picture, and even that was used in a different part of the film. The other cues I wrote were played for the music editors who would look for placement and suggest possible changes to make them work better. Of the five cues I wrote, three were used one or times, and elements were taken and used in a number of other cues as well. It was a thrill to work on a movie of this caliber. And after so many years it was great to be working with Hans Zimmer, who after all these years of friendship still has the capacity to inspire.