24, composer Sean Callery, and the Synclavier

24 is about to start its new season... the best blog post I've seen is from Ken Levine, who made up a hypothetical 24 spec script rejection letter. Read it, it's funny.

24 gets its big hybrid orchestral / synthesized sound from Sean Callery. I was surprised when I learned the show does not use a real orchestra, but just Sean working in his home studio. The soundtrack album is lovely stuff, you can hear a little from the album in this 24 parody on YouTube.

It turns out Sean Callery got his start at New England Digital, the makers of the Synclavier, the $250,000 digital recording solution that was the high-end machine to use in the 80s. Sean was a product specialist, and got involved with hands-on productions and sound design early on.

I met another Synclavier vet this past week, at an excellent 2-day seminar on Logic Audio led by Bruce Nazarian, who has a digital media consulting practice in Las Vegas. Bruce has a number of sound editing credits on IMDb, many done on the Synclavier. As Bruce was training us on Logic, he often noted how easy things are today vs. the Synclavier back in the day.

The Synclavier is a classic, check it out the here and here. (I assume you all know where to find 24...)

Heard...Damien Rice: CSI Promo

A Very Special Episode of CSI (Grissom Leaves CSI) deserves a Very Special Promo Song...Damien Rice, 9 Crimes. Here's a video of him and Lisa Flanagan performing it on The Tonight Show...

Heard....CBS Football

The Jets-Raiders game just played a 10-second excerpt from Trevor Rabin's National Treasure soundtrack (look for "The Chase" down the page....by the way I like it a lot more than that reviewer does)...

How to Get Your Song on a TV Show: Try Emailing It

While music catalogs have endless supplies of cues available to music supervisors, a show looking to stand out will look for vocals (presumably during montages and not under dialogue). From the Boston Herald:

"My mailbox is stuffed with 400-plus submissions a week, but I still go looking for songs, too,” said Alex Patsavas, music supervisor for both "The O.C." and "Grey’s Anatomy." "While there’s plenty of instrumental material around to fit almost any scene, it’s become a powerful creative choice to have vocals that somehow comment on the story line."

It's interesting that a music supervisor *only* gets 400 email submissions a week. As for the submitters' chances, it probably matters who is doing the emailing. Still, 1 in 400 is not a bad shot, more unknown acts ought to try.

The story goes to talk about unknown, some even unsigned acts that have gotten onto shows - my favorite is probably The 88 (though I've never seen How I Met Your Mother, the show that featured them).

David Byrne Composing for Wired Mag's New Talking Head TV Show

David Byrne (of Talking Heads and The Last Emperor fame) is contributing theme music for a Wired Magazine TV show pilot on PBS. From the press release:

WIRED SCIENCE brings Wired magazine's cutting-edge vision, stylish design and irreverent attitude to the screen with breakout ideas, recent discoveries and the latest innovations.
...
WIRED SCIENCE is a co-production of KCET/Los Angeles, the West Coast flagship station of PBS, and Wired, the pre-eminent science and technology magazine. WIRED SCIENCE is a production of executive producer Tod Mesirow ("MythBusters," "Monster Garage"), senior producer David Axelrod (Emmy winner for the NOVA special "Galileo's Battle for the Heavens") and production designer Grant Major (Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong). David Byrne, Grammy- and Oscar-winning composer (The Last Emperor) and co-founder of the Talking Heads, produced the theme music for the show.

No word on who's scoring the rest of it...however they say they will be covering NASA's extreme underwater astronaut training program NEEMO. Maybe the music for that will sound like this.