Hey I'm Ryan Elder, composer for television, I work on Rick and Morty
on Adult Swim, The Boss Baby Back in Business on Netflix and Harmon Quest on VRV.
Today we're gonna take a look at my workflow and see how I create a cue
for Rick and Morty.
So basically I've been writing music since I was very very young
I started playing violin when I was at age five and my dad had a home
recording studio and I would write little boy band songs when I was a kid
and I went to college and got a degree in composition and shortly after college
I started an internship at a company called Emoto Music and I worked there
for a long time as a staff composer and then in about 2011 I started working on
Rick and Morty and the rest is history I guess.
So my process for working on Rick and Morty
is I generally will get an animatic and it's really just simple
drawings in a slideshow format with the timings locked so that when it happens
in the animatic that's when it's gonna happen in the animation once they get done with it.
But it gives me a really good roadmap so that I can score the
show and I understand what's happening early on in the process.
Within a few frames or seconds
they're pretty accurate to where the timings are gonna be at the end
once I get that animatic then it's just sort of up to me to kind
of watch it down figure out where there needs to be music where there doesn't
need to be music which is just as important as where there does need to be music
and I tend to try to put more music than I think is maybe necessary at
first because it's much easier to pull something out than it is to add
something in at the last minute.
I'll submit it to Justin and Dan and they'll come
back with their thoughts, their notes and I'll dive in again and make any changes
that need to happen, sometimes that means removing a music cue entirely and
sometimes it just means subtle changes here or there.
For this cue that I'm gonna be working on today
this was a cue that I did have to rewrite almost
completely the first time I wrote it because I spoke to Dan about it after he
heard my first pass and he said you know in this scene Rick is very determined
he's very focused, he's trying to accomplish a goal and he's
really set on that goal and so the music needs to convey this sort of sense of
purpose, this direction that Rick is going and imply that nothing is gonna
get in his way at all and so I came back with what you're gonna hear today and
you'll see as I work here the cut that I'm working with today is not a final cut
the final cut almost always comes after we're done mixing it so you'll see some
dialogue missing, some of the shots might be different than what
you've seen on the final show and that's what I end up working to and usually
then we'll adjust at the very last minute if need be.
So I got this scene here from the show it's a scene from season four
and Rick is sort of infiltrating this war between robots and i don't know if they're
crocodiles or alligators
let's ask a biologist
but he's on a mission you know he's on a mission to find out who's been using his toilet
so before I play the music at all I'll just like play the scene here watch it down and
sort of maybe I'll stop and comment on where I think key moments are so
So the the music is gonna start with this dramatic moment here it's just
this battle on the planet so action, action, robots talking
then Rick shows up and then that theme needs to change we need to
do something that shows Rick
oh and interesting note he turns this thing around and there's this QR code
In the final version of the show you can
actually take a picture that and scan it I believe and it will take you to a web page
where you can buy one of these hats anyways he's talking to these robots and
then some action happens and the robot dies and he's got to get the chip out of it
it's in a couple pieces so at this point it's just we need to just play up the action
So the first thing I wanted to do was like create this dramatic
moment as we transition from the previous scene into the one we're gonna score
so we need sort of like an orchestral build here
so that sort of action-y sets the tone and what I use to create that is a lot
of Kontakt libraries, right here I'm starting with some tremolo strings which
are in the cinematic strings
doing those to build into the scene and then big snare drum
and timpani is a big part of it too
things with timpani rolls too like
going on so
and then we're down here for this dialogue here
then Rick shows up.
So there's two ways that I'm kind of creating this sense of focus and determination on Rick's part
the first one is using this library Damage which is just a percussion library
with these big drums
you know pulsing through
and then the other one I'm using is this library
called Analog Brass & Winds by Output like a synthy brassy
hit that gives it that's like really dark and menacing and so together they
form this sort of basic underpinnings of the track
In this scene he's like you know obviously causing a ton of damage he's
killing living and nonliving things and you know Rick is not the bad guy of the
show he's a bad guy but he's not the villain of the show it's tricky to show
both sides of Rick like we're rooting for him we want him to find out who's
been using his toilet but we also know that he's like doing a lot of bad things
and that's sort of a fine line I have to ride on the show a lot in this case it
was like let's focus in on the determination
So in addition to those
sounds I just played there's also timpani hitting and then there's these
action strike drums
kind of going on and then I got like a snare drum
nothing says like I'm determined and focused like like a marching snare right
that's kind of building through and then the last thing that's really important
are these staccato strings which are kind of doing this downward motion
melody here
over the low chugs that match with the analog brass synthesizer sound and then
I also got classic Rick and Morty gong which is really crucial to the sound of
Rick and Morty it's like in every Rick and Morty
orchestral queue basically instead of the crash cymbals I always use gong
because I think it just sounds more mysterious I don't know.
Lastly I have Omnisphere going here it's just like a cool synth that I have that has like a
million sounds and this is like a like a percussion loop
that's going on
to give it kind of a droney
sense of foreboding action here
so all together those sounds kind of
go together to create this
All right and so here's a key moment that's about to happen so the first thing I want to say
is like yeah this is like a little repetitive right but the point is
they're talking so I can't have the music be too in-your-face I can't have
it be trying to get your attention too much because I want you to focus on what
Rick is saying what the robots are saying and if I'm doing too much if I'm
trying to steal your attention away from that I'm not doing my job so I want to
keep it simple I want to keep it almost predictable in its repetition until
something happens in the picture to take us away from that and that's this moment coming up here
so like that's a big flaw in Rick's plan right he's trying to get this robot's
attention the robot dies so we want to create a big moment for that and that I
used this library called Vivace which has these cool full orchestra sounds
big hits
and I used those two together like this low
low brass one this high brass
and that's just like to create a moment
when that happens also I add in some more percussion there
then we're back to our groove here as Rick lays waste to these robots and alligators
building tension now because now it's just sound design there's no dialogue
so we can add a little more to it there we got there's this big high
high string and brass hit when he lands and I've added extra octaves in the
staccatos here, I'm going up higher so we hit the high strings in there and
then he finds three of the pieces turns out this guy has the last one and this
guy's dialogue is missing because they added it at the last minute I don't even
remember what he really says in the final version but now we want to come
down and build the tension again
because
this is a moment
and then we're out of the scene because Rick is really taking it to the next
level now we don't really need to see all of that though we'll just look at
the news report on TV and that's like how they transition to the next scene
but at the end of this scene we really want to build as Rick is like okay this
is it I I didn't really want to have to use this ability that I have so
the music needs to convey that okay you know the shit's really hitting the fan here
so we're building we're building
and this is using this tension builder patch from Symphobia which is really
cool it has tremolo strings but it also has this string flageolet on top
so you get this high-pitched extra string sound way way way up high to give it some texture
so yeah that's the scene that's kind of most of the
elements that I walk through there once I got all the sounds the way that I want
them like they are here in MIDI form then I will just input them into
audio form and I just I just dub them down here onto audio tracks and now I
can start mixing it I like to mix as I go along so a lot of these sounds are
already at the right volume relative to each other and I tend to put a little
reverb on all of them I have them sort of bussed out just to sort of glue
everything together so it sounds like it's an ensemble that's in the same room
and I like to use Altiverb for reverb this is the Disney Hall preset and it's
pretty cool it's like an actual model of the way that Disney Hall sounds in Los Angeles here
and then you know these sample libraries are all pretty specific
to like a large massive orchestral ensemble and they have a lot of the
mixing already built in so really it's just a matter of getting the levels
right making sure everything sounds good and then you know I just want to make
sure everything is mastered and up to level and hitting the speakers in the
right way so I'll tend to use maybe a little bit of multiband compression and
then maybe a little limiting as well just a little bit because if it's
squashed too much once we get it into the final mix with all the dialogue and
sound design stuff it will take up too much space I just want it to be real
simple in the background here
I generally try to mix myself I try to
keep things simple and fast because I'm writing a lot of music and I'm having to
write it fast and if I have a track that's more involved or if it's like a
real set piece song like Goodbye Moonmen for example I will send that to an
engineer or a mixer to make sure that it's really spanking and sounding great
once I got all that a little bit of mastering on there a little bit of
reverb I'll just output this and it's ready to go and move on to the next cue.
Usually it takes me about a week and if I'm feeling generous towards myself
I'll I'll take two weeks to do an episode and that's that's a first pass
now there's many rounds of revisions after that they take more time
with a good template and the sounds that I know that I like and I want to use and that
sound good together it's a lot easier to write it fast and then move on to the next one.
I'm creating the music and I want to put a lot of thought and
creativity into every cue I also really want to deliver high quality stuff on
time and so there's a push in a pull between working fast and overthinking it.
Sort of like the software template that I have the sounds that I want to use I
also have my outboard gear that I use and especially when I'm recording live
instruments guitar, bass, acoustic guitar things like that I'll record in
all these keyboards over here too if I need inspiration got this old Moog Rogue
which was made in the 80s they sold them at RadioShack and then I have this
Korg Prologue that I used sometimes and a Microkorg
I bought a bunch of guitars that were
made the year I graduated high school because it's like a
midlife crisis or something but I got a cello back there that I bought on eBay for
seventy-five bucks sounds terrible but sometimes it's useful
in terms of my interface I use AVID Omni i/o very simple straightforward I like to keep
things simple I really only need one input most of the time and that goes
through this LA610 and then last but not least I use the Audient Nero to monitor
it sounds really good and I usually work in headphones just because I can
hear the details better and that's one of the reasons why I like the Nero
because the headphone path is really clean really clear I can really hear
what's going on better and then you know if I need to I'll use my HR 824 monitors
in the room if I need to hear how it sounds in the room too.
So that's how I write a cue for Rick and Morty, the software I use, the hardware I use
and hopefully you enjoyed it and hopefully I didn't leave anything out.