Remember is a project that I scored for a friend of mine named Daniel Kavanaugh. In my senior year of college, I was looking for a movie to score for to get experience in writing music for film. Daniel sent me this film that he had done before with stock music and some other people and I was immediately hooked.
The film was exciting, different, mysterious, and overall dark and atmospheric, perfect for creating an 80’s style synth score. I ended up doing research on some famous early 80s movies and how they incorporated electronics into their scoring while writing for the movie. The 80s was a time of mass synthesizer work in pop culture, after all.
The first movie that I studied was Alien. What a great start for seeing how a composer can tug at the hearts and feelings of the viewer, however, the score was orchestral (not that that’s a bad thing!) What I needed to watch was a movie that used only synthesizers for making the music.
Then, I discovered Blade Runner. I watched this movie and was in awe the entire time. The movie’s soundtrack was so atmospheric and tinged in its own special texture (maybe it’s the reverb?) The sounds were so unique and the score is memorable. I looked into the synthesizers that Vangelis used and discovered synths like the CS-80 and then found free vst recreations of it to get that signature sound.
Then, I looked into a movie that people hail as one of the best 1980s movies: Terminator. First off, I love this movie and had never seen it before studying it. The sounds were pretty abrupt at times and had an interestingly dry aesthetic to it. After some research, I found that some of the synths used on it included the Oberheim OB-XA and the Prophet-10, both synths that I found free vst versions of for the movie.
After Terminator, I discovered what Wendy Carlos did on the original Tron. Although I did not get to watch the entire movie, I did hear some excerpts and what the Moog had to offer (and listened to my vinyl copy of Switched on Bach). I also started looking at all of the movies I had been watching under a spectrogram and noticed that they all had frequencies cut above 15k (I did use DVD copies for my studying. Maybe this is a consequence of this?) So, to make my movie sound like it came from the early 80s, I also put a slight analog modeled high-cut around the 15k to get a smooth sound on the highs.
While studying all of this music and film, I also listened to famous albums of the early 1980s and earlier including: Phil Collins Face Value, David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, The Police, and many others.
After finding all of my synths, drum machines (Roland’s CR-78 changed my life), and 1980’s synth tropes, Remember’s score started to pick up a life of its own. I only used synths (digitally recreated) and effects that composers had at their disposal in the early 80s, and I think the movie’s sound really got close. I plugged all of my found plugins into Renoise (I could get that early sequencer sound with it) and scored the movie. It was a gradual process, but in the end it is a soundtrack that I am proud of.
Doing a project like this is super rewarding, especially if it gets you to do some research on hardware and synthesizers to actually match a certain sound. The project really got me into 1980’s music and sound and became a part of my musical vernacular. I am almost positive that it has affected all of the work I have done and been doing afterwards (chorus effect is now a favorite go to effect!) Please enjoy and let me know what you think about it.