Need Your Help!

My good college friend Jon Goldman, whom I've done three projects with, has entered his film 'Paul Sussman's Eleven-Step Guide To Self-Actualization' into the Netflix Find Your Voice Competition. He's currently a semi-finalist, and sitting in sixth place. In order to qualify for a chance at $350,000 worth of funding to complete the film, he needs to place in the top five, and he needs every possible vote he can get.

Please take a minute to click on the link below, and cast five stars for 'Paul Sussman's Eleven-Step Guide To Self-Actualization'. It's a great script, with a great writer/director and a swell composer attached (me).

Netflix Find Your Voice Competition

Also of note; this project is a bit of a reunion for me and fellow Stanford alums. The actor you see portraying Paul Sussman is my old housemate Andrew Leeds, and the music you hear playing in the trailer is by the On Ensemble, co-founded by Shoji Kameda and Kris Bergstrom, whom I played taiko with back at Stanford.

Tonehammer Samples

A colleague of mine, Troels Folmann, is a very well-respected composer in the game industry, having scored such award-winning titles as Tomb Raider Legend and Tomb Raider Underworld. Many of us first met Troels through his fantastic annual lectures at the Game Developers Conference, in which he teaches us his tricks on how to improve the quality of our sampled orchestral mockups. It's always one of the highlights of the week for me.

He's a big proponent of custom recorded samples. In fact for years, he simply brought a Zoom field recorder around with him everywhere he went and just created his own sample library, recording off-beat objects like handrails and furniture, salvaged junk, etc. Now he's making that custom library available for purchase, and it's definitely worth checking out if you're a media composer.

Tonehammer is the company he founded with sound designer Mike Peaslee. Their catalog is rich in offbeat, unusual instruments: examples include a hangdrum, whale drum, cylindrum (essentially a PVC pipe instrument), marching band, detuned piano, etc. And if that's not enough, he has a couple sample sets called 'Anti-Drum Vol. 1 and 2', in which you can find samples of water coolers, stopwatches, Converse sneaker squeaks, soda can tabs, and a leather couch (which is actually quite an impressive, usable sound!).

I bought seven of his sample libraries, and was immediately able to use them in a project I'm working on. They're definitely worth a listen.

Christopher Tin on the Preliminary Grammy Ballot!

I got an interesting email last Friday, from a New Age pianist named Michael Dulin last Friday. It read like this:

"Hi Christopher,

Congratulations on making it to the first ballot of the Grammy Awards for your song, Civilization IV Medley. I wish you the best of luck. You certainly deserve a place at the big table this year!"

My response was: "Huh?"

Upon further investigation, I discovered that indeed, in one form or another, I was listed not once but TWICE on the Preliminary Grammy Ballot for the 51st Grammy Awards:

Best Song Written For Film/TV/Visual Media: Civilization IV Medley - Christopher Tin

Best Classical Crossover Album: Video Games Live: Vol. One

So what does this all mean? Let me take you though what happened, and how the Grammy process works.

- As you all probably know, Video Games Live performs a medley of my music from Civilization IV, consisting of 'Coronation' and 'Baba Yetu'. Earlier this year they struck a deal with EMI Classics to release a collection of selections from their show, including my songs; they titled this album Video Games Live: Vol. One. Right away the album was a hit, and shot up to #8 on the Billboard Classical Crossover charts.

- October rolls around: the time when all the major record labels submit all their artists, songs and albums to The Recording Academy for Grammy consideration. EMI Classics submits Video Games Live: Vol. One for consideration in a number of categories. It's the Recording Academy's job to sift through every single song, artist and album submitted, and eliminate the ones that are ineligible. In the case of the Video Games Live CD, every single submission got eliminated except for two: their submission for 'Best Classical Crossover Album', and 'Best Song Written For Film/TV/Visual Media'.

- The Recording Academy then sends out a ballot listing all the artists, songs and albums that made the cut into the Preliminary Ballot. As mentioned before, I made the cut in the Film/TV/Visual Media category, and the Video Games Live CD made the cut in the Classical category. These ballots go to every single voting member of the Academy. Each member gets to cast a single vote in each of the four big categories (Record Of The Year, Album Of The Year, Song Of The Year, and Best New Artist) and gets to cast up to nine more votes in any of the 31 fields on their ballots.

- The Recording Academy tallies up the votes, and sends a final ballot to its members, containing the five finalist 'Nominees' in each category. Again, each member can vote in the four big categories, but this time they're limited to eight votes in any of the 31 fields.

- The winners of this final round of balloting are announced at the Grammy Awards.

Because I'm sure some of you are curious, there are 110 categories grouped into 31 fields. The fields are pretty broad ranging, and roughly correspond to genres: Folk, Gospel, R&B, etc. Some fields defy explanation: there's a Polka field, with a single category in it ("Best Polka Album")--only around 20 albums get entered into consideration each year, so if you're really hungry for a Grammy, you should consider buying an accordion.

Other fields, understandably, are massive. The biggest categories (like Song Of The Year) get over 700 entries, and it's somehow the responsibility of the voting membership to narrow that down to 5 nominees. (This is when things like marketing come into play.)

As for the categories/fields that I'm listed under, the Best Song Written For Film/TV/Visual Media is pretty stacked, with some heavy hitters such as Alan Menken and Diane Warren, Jack White, Regina Spektor and Peter Gabriel, as well as a gaggle of songs from Camp Rock. So it, uh, doesn't look particularly good, especially since, as far as I can tell, I'm the only one on the list for a song from a video game.

The odds are looking better in the Best Classical Crossover Album category, however. A subset of the 'Classical' field, there are a little over 40 entries on the ballot; and Video Games Live: Vol. One already has some chart cred. There are certainly some big names, such as André Rieu and Libera--but the numbers aren't as overwhelming as the other categories.

So there you have it! Let's hope that I have some good news, and have another reason to blog about this sometime soon.

Joel McNeely

One of the reasons why I started this blog is to talk about my influences--whether they be favorite artists, genres of music, or other composers. And without a doubt, one of the most formative experiences for me as a young composer was working with Joel McNeely.

I first heard Joel's music in The Avengers, and was blown away by it. When I first moved down to Los Angeles, I contacted Joel to ask it he'd be willing to mentor me--a year later, I started working for him on The Jungle Book 2.

One of the reasons why I was interested in working for Joel in particular (and indeed, I left an internship working for Hans Zimmer to do so) is because he writes music the way I do: the old fashioned way, bar by bar, with a pencil and a sheet of staff paper. But while this method yields the best music, you still need to be able to play a mock-up sampled version of your music for the director; that way they can approve the music before you get to the expensive step of recording on a scoring stage.

Since Joel writes everything out, he hired me to create elaborate synthesized mock-ups of his film scores. In essence, that means that I played every note of every piece of music he wrote for these films into a computer. So after working for him for six films (including Lilo And Stich 2, for which he set me up with my first writing job for Disney), you'd better believe I absorbed something from his style.

One of my favorite scores from the time that I worked for him was Pooh's Heffalump Movie. Check out the 'Heffalump Main Theme' (linked directly from Joel's site):

After working for Joel, my own orchestral style bloomed. My orchestrations started becoming lusher--high strings soaring in octaves, horn counterpoint filling up the middle, trombones doubling the low strings for added warmth.... Unfortunately many times I don't get the opportunity to write music in this 'classic-Hollywood' style, but a lot of what I absorbed from him still finds its way into songs like 'Baba Yetu'.