I left the best out of these examples and hope you’ll watch the movie, “Runaway Hearts”!

My approach to the score: Being a story about kids and family, Keith Alan Morris and I agreed that an orchestral sound was best suited for the wide range of emotions I needed to convey. I decided to use the leitmotiv approach of assigning melodies and instruments to each important character because each underwent a personal transformation during the course of the story. They were created to be strong melodies and yet be able to serve as counterpoint to the other themes.

The film needed a light approach to orchestration because the characters’  emotions were often solitary and intimate, rather than sweeping epic-sized ones. I used the Vienna Symphonic Standard Edition Plus and Dimension Brass libraries, along with the Steinway piano and harp from the Native Instruments Kontakt 5 library.  Solo instruments rendered the solitary quality I needed.

 The music was not needed through every moment of the picture. Instead, many scenes required silence to promote a feeling of poverty and colorlessness, especially in the first half of the film. After a first draft through the movie with orchestra, I decided to add live steel guitar, electric guitar, and alto saxophone to the sampled orchestra. The steel and electric guitars used typical distortion pedals to create a more edgy and bluesy sound representing southern outlaws, as the film was set in the bayous of Louisiana. The saxophone was recorded into Logic with an M-Audio Sputnik through the Apogee Ensemble preamp. The electric guitar and steel were recorded directly into the Apogee into Logic, using stock guitar pedalboard plug-ins.

I also brought in acoustic guitar, performed by my brother, Kevin Lay. His guitar brought a comfortable familiarity to the score that could speak to audiences in a way that I could not achieve with a pure orchestra. The acoustic guitar tracks were recorded in a noisy New Mexico hotel with a pair of AKG 451B microphones by my twin brother Kevin. That noise was largely removed with Isotope RX in my studio.

I created both stereo and 5.1 surround mixes of the music using Logic X for MIDI through Vienna Instrument Pro for playback realism and Vienna Ensemble Pro5 mixer. Since the job did not have the budget to include real orchestral instruments, I did not concern myself with notation and focused on rendering a realistic sound in the sequencer. All of the tracks, both virtual and live, were precisely placed on the soundstage with Vienna’s MIRPro. This brilliant reverb software from Vienna Symphonic, which uses virtual ambisonics in their multi-input/impulse reverb, made mixing easy. No level automation, EQ, compression, or extra reverb was needed for any virtual instruments.   I pulled 6dB out of the center channel to carve out room for the dialogue. This, I hoped, would give the music more room to be up in the mix without interfering.  I used Logic X’s 5.1 compressor for the final and Waves to provide a Stereo Downmix of the 5.1 final to create a Stereo version. The downmixing approach should supply surround decoders with enough information for them to imitate discrete surround with just two channels of information. The actual 5.1 music tracks at this juncture are not being used for the initial release.