RECORDING July 2022 - 63

JUL Y 2022
TAXI's Virtual Road Rally 2021
How TV Editors Pick and Place Music
With TV Editor, Laurel Ostrander, Part 3
Interviewed by Michael Laskow
Let's talk about pacing for a moment. I was interviewing
Mary Ramos, who's the music supervisor
for all the Quentin Tarantino stuff, which has got
to be the most challenging music-supe job in the
world, and fun at the same time. He knows what
he wants, you know, and uses a lot of old scores
from old films, whether they're old spaghetti
Westerns or Blaxploitation films. He must have a
photographic memory, because if you look at the
music credits in his pictures, like who the hell
even knows that that piece of music even exists?
It's not something you're going to find in a music
library unless you already know that scene from
a spaghetti Western from 62 years ago.
All that said, I complimented Mary, because I
watched a lot of her work before I interviewed
her. Something that she does really well that
other music supervisors will use as a bit of a
throwaway: If there is background source music
in one of her scenes-for instance, two people in
a car going somewhere, and the drive becomes
frantic because they're running late or they're
being chased or something-they will stick any
old thing on the car radio. They just need wallpaper
there, or some sort of ambience in the car,
because they (the characters) would probably
have the radio on. Mary Ramos is really, really
particular and really good at matching-even
though it's background source and you may only
hear it for 10 seconds and it's really low in the
mix-she's really good about matching the pace
[of the music to the scene's pace]. And she's really
good at matching the lyrics to the storyline, even
though it probably doesn't matter. But by doing
that...
That's amazing.
Exactly, there are those times where the audience
will have a visceral reaction and not even
know why, and it's because she did her job a little
bit better than others might. So as an editor, it's
cool that the notes that you get back might be
Michael Laskow and Laurel Ostrander at TAXI's Virtual Road Rally.
about pacing. Wow, there are times we have to
match not only the emotion-sometimes maybe
the lyric has to work in the context of the
scene-but also the pacing. So I'm guessing as
the editor that would be your starting point.
When you're going through listening to cues,
" No, too slow-doesn't have the energy. " And
then you look for the other elements to see if
they work as well.
Uh-huh, and I think something magical happens
when you're doing your job right. When
you're editing dialogue, there's a natural
rhythm to the way that people speak, and you
can edit a scene without your music and then
find a cue that just happens to have the same
tempo as the conversation, and then you just
lay the cue in, and then I don't have to do anything
to it. I can just lay the cue in, and it fits
with all of the points in the conversation. And
there are breaths where people in the scene are
taking a breath and the cues swell at just the
right moment, and it's perfect.
I think one thing that might be helpful as people
are working on compositions is to just
record people talking, or listen to people talking,
and listen to the speed at which people
talk and use that to kind of dictate how fast
or how slow your tune is gonna be.
It's interesting. I'm thinking more about how
they're going more for scores now than using
songs with lyrics. We had a little impromptu A&R
meeting at the office about a week ago, and
Tom-who's our head of A&R at TAXI- we were
talking about the fact that we're seeing far less
requests from music libraries for tension cues
and for dramedy cues. And that's probably generated
by the fact that the overall tone of music
being put in particular into reality shows has
changed. So that's cool, now I understand the
whole thing full circle.
Let's talk about cue sheets. I think every composer,
every musician has had a moment where
they have been watching TV and they go, " Hey,
that's my music, and it didn't show up on my
ASCAP or BMI report. " Again, for those who don't
know, a cue sheet is something that's filled out
by the editor or maybe an assistant editor that
lets ASCAP and BMI know that your cue was used
from this timecode number to that timecode
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