Tag: mac quayle
In this episode, Brooke speaks with Mac Quayle, the Emmy-winning and Grammy-nominated composer of shows like Mr. Robot, Feud, American Horror Story, American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Here, Mac shares how he started out, working with composer Cliff Martinez (Traffic) on films like Contagion and A Normal Heart and how he became the go-to guy for show runners, Ryan Murphy and Sam Esmail. He also reveals his inspiration and process for creating music for some of the most memorable scenes on television.
Music is one of the final elements added to a film or television show, and for the four panelists on Gold Derby’s Meet the BTL Experts: Music panel, they all had various starting points when it came time to craft the sound of their projects.
[…] On the other hand, Brendan “Eskmo” Angelides (“13 Reasons Why”) and Mac Quayle (“The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” “American Horror Story: Cult,” “9-1-1”) are visual composers and prefer to wait for scenes or an episode cut before creating a score. “I could be saying something different in seven years, but I feel like I need the visuals in front of me to be able to do it,” Angelides said.Plus, as Quayle pointed out, sometimes the ultimate screen product could be vastly different from what was written on the page. “I’ve yet to write anything from reading a script. I’d start getting some ideas. The script obviously has some information there,” he said. “[But] there could be not much on the page and what’s on the screen is like this whole world, so I tend to wait.”And when those scenes come in, oftentimes they’re backed by temp music — placeholder music inserted in the editing process to serve as a guideline for composers to write something similar or simply to know where music is wanted. Quayle calls it “a blessing and a curse.”“The blessing is that if it’s a good picture editor and they’ve put the temp in and they’ve cut to it, there’s a lot of good information to get from it,” he said. “There could be a tempo, where a big modulation should happen, where it should hit here or hit there. There could be some really nice information there. And if I know that I have the freedom to just use some of that information and then write my music with that information in it, that’s great. The curse is when they think the temp is the best idea that could ever be in that scene.”
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
@Impact24PR: The incredible music supervisor and composers behind The Music of @LegionFX , @EmpireFOX , @ACSFX, @AHSFX, @911onFOX, @TheAmericansFX and @NBCThisisUs discussed their work at Monday’s @The_SCL Event, moderated by actress Katie Aselton! #Composer #MusicSupervisor #TV #Music
BMI Composers Talk Scoring Hit Series at SCL Panel Discussion
The music of award-winning BMI composers Mac Quayle, Siddhartha Khosla, Nathan Barr and Fil Eisler was front and center during a recent panel discussion hosted by the Society of Composers & Lyricists in LA. Moderated by Katie Aselton, the presentation also included clips from their respective shows: American Horror Story, This Is Us, The Americans, and Empire, and offered the eager audience an inside perspective on scoring and what’s needed to help propel an ongoing series.
In addition to this discussion’s featured series, each of the composers are renowned for their work in several other projects. Quayle’s credits also include Mr. Robot, for which he won an Emmy, FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, and the Emmy-winning The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. Khosla’s credits include Marvel’s Runaways, and E!’s first scripted drama series, The Royals. Among Barr’s many credits are the Emmy-nominated main title theme of Netflix’s Hemlock Grove, as wells as Flatliners, while Eisler’s resume is also impressive with music for Shameless, Revenge, To The Bone and CHIPS. | 14 June 2018
‘Versace,’ ‘AHS: Cult’ and ‘9-1-1’ composer Mac Quayle explains how he scores so many shows at once [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO INTERVIEW]
[…] Compared to the low-key score that accompanied “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” the “Versace” sound was deliberately grander and baroque, befitting the tone of the show and the subjects involved. “’O.J.’ was a lot more subtle. We tried to do it more grand at first and it didn’t work. We went back and said it needed to be more subtle,” Quayle revealed. “There was a lot of discussions about the sound for ‘Versace.’ The murder took place in ’97. A lot of the backstory is in the decade before that. There were scenes in nightclubs, there was this creepy serial killer, there was Versace’s love for opera. When we latched onto the sound, I then started calling it if Giorgio Moroder was scoring ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ in an Italian villa.”
When it came to the theme for Versace’s (Edgar Ramirez) murderer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), Quayle concocted a piano melody before folding in a screeching, haunting horn sound — an aural symbol of his twisted mindset.
“For such a creepy sound, it ended up with a very friendly nickname around post-production. It was ‘The Seagull’ sound. I was hunting around and going through some weird sample libraries and I just came across this — I can’t even tell you what it is now, where it came from,” Quayle said. “All of the sudden, it’s like, ‘OK, there’s Andrew’s creepy mind.’ It had different levels of intensity. It could be really just screaming, very creepy and then a little more subtle, sort of in the background, just adding into the melody, so it was a fun little texture to add.” | 14 June 2018
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
ACS news 