Recording - June 2011 - 57

Continued from page 54 sand tracks now. Matt: Probably by the end of this year, about a thousand. That’s a lot of tracks, and you’ve been doing this for 13 years. Matt: Yeah, but in the beginning I wasn’t doing that much. So really, actively, I’d say since about 2003. So seven years to gain that kind of momentum and build that kind of library. Matt gets a lot of calls from libraries—I’ve been working with him for years—and they say, “Next March we want to put out a CD of instrumental Latin music that’s this particular kind,” and he’ll start writing. He does custom CDs, where they hire him to do a whole CD of stuff, or maybe multiple CDs. Sometimes it’s just a cue. The point I’m trying to make is, are there times that you get to create whatever you please? Do you still have time for you to say, “I think that I just want to do this kind of music and move off into a genre I haven’t worked in before?” And, if so, how do you choose your direction? Matt: Yeah, sure, that happens. But, first of all, I don’t view it as not doing what I want to do, because I like to do all these different styles, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this particular line of work. If I really wanted to be writing my sad singer/songwriter stuff, then I would be desperate by now. Probably, I would have killed myself. You can’t do that. Then we’d have to find another panelist! Matt: I enjoy the variety. A lot of times I get to do several things simultaneously. So a guy might call me up and say that they are on their new production run and they’d like me to do a couple of Reggae songs, and maybe a few Latin things and a little bit of reality show, so then I can kind of mix and match it with what I feel like. On a given day I do a little bit of this, or maybe the next day I do something else, so it doesn’t get monotonous. I also do things sometimes where I just write something specifically for the future, where I figure I’m gonna write stuff like that and market that in the future to some other outlet that I haven’t made the connections with yet. Then I give myself a brief [a description of what’s needed]. It’s basically either somebody tells me, or I tell myself what I want to do. I’m not just sitting there noodling around. That’s what I was after. How do you tell yourself? How do you pick what you tell yourself to make up that imaginary brief and challenge yourself?

Matt: Well, I just maybe say, “You know, I’ve never tried to do something like this”—some specific kind of piano that uses unusual chords, or something like that. And then I just go with it. Of course, immediately with me, I almost always think of what could this be used for? As soon as I start playing something, I go, “What could this be used for? Is it sad or more dramatic? What does this tell me?” And then I start thinking visually in the sense of what kind of scene could this be used for? And then a lot of the other elements that come in are determined by that initial reaction I get from what I play and the emotion that it evokes in me, then I’m gonna support that with the other elements that I add on.

It’s interesting. So really you just kind of sit down and noodle and create until something starts to jell, and then you figure out where you want it to go, versus, “Hmm, I think I’ll write a sad one today.” Matt: I’ll do both. I mean, sometimes, yeah, I’ll say, “I’ll write a sad song.” But if you’re asking me specifically what I do if nobody tells me what to do, I usually just experiment around a little bit, and when I come up with something I like, then I let that dictate where it should go emotionally, or ultimately what kind of market and what kind of visual it would eventually accompany, hopefully. Make sure to read Part 2 in next month’s Insider!

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Recording - June 2011

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