In Conversation with Music Editor Chad Birmingham

In this episode we welcome our first guest, Chad Birmingham, a two-time Golden Reel award-winning Music Editor! (Song Sung Blue, Materialists, The Penguin, Past Lives, Emily in Paris)

Chad joins us to break down what a music editor actually does, his journey into the music industry, and what composers need to know when working with music editors. We dig into the love-hate relationships with temp tracks, and where AI might (or might not!) fit into the future of film scoring.

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Transcript

Jeff

Hey everyone, Jeff Meegan. 

David

David Tobin.

Jeff

Welcome back to Two Composers, Two Continents. We have our very first guest today. Chad Birmingham is a two-time Golden Real award-winning music editor with credits that include The Materialists, And Just Like That, The Penguin, Tokyo Vice. He's also a master knitter. Chad, thank you so much for being with us today.

Chad

Some of that is true. It's a pleasure to be here. 

Jeff

What about that’s not true?!

David

Do you know what, we'll fix it all in post and it'll be true by the time of going to, you know...

Chad

I mean master could be you know, misconstrued, but I do like to knit I'll give you that

Jeff

And we've seen your knitting and it is masterful. So that's all I'm gonna say.

David

And we should talk about how we know each other. So the first project we worked on, I'm not going there, I'm going to let somebody else start. Where did we meet, Chad? 

Chad

I believe it was on a documentary about chicken farming in the US and the tournament system for getting paid and whatnot. And I was introduced to Audio Network through a producer that was involved with the show. And you were composing on it. And I was hired as a music editor. And when I heard the work that you had done on it, I was really blown away because of the quality of the compositions and this the whole production value was really a cut above, you know what I had worked with before.

Jeff

He's the perfect guest. 

David

He’s a keeper!

Jeff

He's already perfect. Thanks for joining us today. Goodbye.

David

That's fantastic. You know, we should just say, you've mentioned working as a music editor and how we've met. Can we just clarify from the get-go, music editor?

Jeff

Yeah, what does a music editor do?

Chad

It's really anything you want it to be, Jeff. I mean, sometimes it's just, you know, saying something nice to a copyist or booting somebody's machine in the morning. You could tell a composer that they're going in entirely the wrong direction. Yeah, principally, a music editor would be responsible for all of the music getting synchronized into the film. So if it's custom music, if it's licensed music, that those things are accounted for and edited in a way that can be mixed and kind of works with the final product. 

Jeff

So this is any piece of music heard anywhere throughout a movie or a television show or whatever the production is, right?

Chad

Well yes, I mean, you know, to the extent that we're all writers, few of us are actually credited as writers for penning grocery lists or letters to the editor. A picture editor could also edit music, things like that, but on jobs of which there is that specialty, the music editor is off, that type of work is offloaded onto that position to make more time for other people to do other things.

Jeff

Gotchya, okay.

David (03:20.398)

So how did you get into that? mean tell us a little bit about early Chad in terms of the journey

Chad

Early Chad was a different animal.

Jeff

That's what we all were my friend.

David

Is this a different podcast?

Chad

Early Chad spent time as a child with instrumental lessons. 

David

In what? What were you playing? 

Chad

Piano and trumpet. 

David

I did not know that, okay.

Chad

Vocal ensembles and things like that. And so I had good instruction as a child. I never really made too much of it, but that sense of when is something good enough to be shown? I think was very on the mind of the people that, you know, taught me and...

David

That's great. Don't do that in front of people.

Jeff

So there's no future in it for you.

Chad

So I mean I've benefited from that professionally then too to make mistakes privately to try things to have the space to kind of you know, ideate and be creative without having it to be client-facing as it were. But so when I moved to New York I got a job kind of serendipitously at a music company that was doing a lot of commercial work. And then a friend of a friend was working in film post-production and sound. And I ended up doing some interning, if you could call it that, at this sound post-production facility. And I learned that there was such a thing as a music editor and it was this special specialty that the sound facility didn't really handle. And really at that point, the people who were large enough to have an assistant had all hired an assistant. So for years, I stayed as close to the people in the process as I could trying to get an opportunity to get in there. And on some smaller non-union things, I was able to cut a song for end credits, for example. And so being on a mix stage as an assistant sound editor, people would say, this song needs to be longer or shorter, could you edit it? And sometimes I was given those tasks because I could find the beat or had an interest in it. 

Jeff

Because you were musical, yeah.

Chad

So it kind of blossomed from there. I was really able to kind of be mentored by a couple individuals who were very instrumental in helping me learn the things that a music editor does. And then when they became too busy to handle smaller jobs, they would toss them my way, and so it kind of took off from there.

Jeff

Did you, because obviously there is a large amount of technical, I mean you need to, I would assume everything now you do is in Pro Tools and maybe it was in Avid at one point or you know, where did that knowledge come along? Did you just learn from the people you're working with? Did you take classes? Did you already have the knowledge when you got to that point or?

Chad

I'll say, Jeff, that back in the day when people worked –

Jeff

You were cutting tape?

Chad

I don't go back that far. I've never actually done a job on film.

David

I do! I did cut tape.

Chad
I mean, cutting sound on tape where you don't have this visual reference to me feels like you're missing one of your senses, but mixing and audio was principally not a visual medium for so many years until the graphic interfaces were developed and you could just take a look at the frequency spectrum, things like that.

Jeff

It was relatively new, yeah,

Chad

But so the Pro Tools of it all is something that... 

Jeff

I like that, the Pro Tools of it all.

Chad

It's a thing that has been consistent for me for the last 25 years. I learned Pro Tools in the 90s and that's still the program that I use every day. So it's nice not to have that becoming a new thing too, learned for a job and then abandoned. But working in a room with a bunch of assistants who were all trying to figure something out at the same time was super useful because we could turn to each other and ask questions and kind of, it was like a database that just kept growing in real time. That was super useful to be in an environment where people were working for people who are working at a high level and you could figure things out. You didn't have to figure things out yourself, there was somebody to work with. And I try to create that for people now who are interested in getting more experience. But unfortunately, it's a little tricky being offsite because if you'd be in a room for eight hours with an editor and maybe there would be 20 minutes where something very interesting happened that you could learn from and the rest of it was just normal, usual stuff. So trying to distill that in a meaningful way to show somebody to kind of compress time and say, okay, here's a four-month internship in a 40-hour class. You get an overview, but it's through repeating something tens of thousands of times that it really becomes just internal.

David

I mean, obviously I know you're often taking stuff that a supervisor has suggested we're going to be taking this music presumably. Do you at any point then say, actually, I'm going to change that music, I'm going to choose myself some music that will go somewhere or you're always just working with what you're given?

Chad

Oh it's interesting. Yes, that's an interesting question.

David 

How much power do you wield?

Chad

None. 

Jeff

Influence, let’s call it influence.

Chad

Yes, soft power.

Jeff

Soft power. Love it. 

Chad

Yeah, you want to make friends and influence people through the principles of attraction but the - it's interesting because you'll see in the credits a sound designer for a film and think that they must have come up with every sonic idea in the film, but maybe it was in script.

David

Hey I did my job great, I didn't realise I was as good as I am by the time they heard it.

Chad

Right, I gave this person a voice. I decided what timbre they should say, what range they should speak in. Of course not. So the music editor kind of works with the whole team to kind of figure out what, you know, how best to express an idea and if an idea is needed people can step up with that, and so I do when that's the case. It varies, though, from project to project. Sometimes I'm polishing something that's been kind of set in stone, and sometimes I'm given a wide-open space to come up with an idea for music that could work in a scene. 

David

You’re given that much latitude to - ?

Chad

Yeah, sometimes, you know, talking about music is really hard, and you could blame people for being so inarticulate and saying, well, nobody knows what they want. But they just want something that they like. And so, it's a fun space for me to kind of work in and say, here's what I like. You know, this had a great synergy with the visuals or just feels appropriate or things like that. 

David

And that makes the track easier to work with. But when you get a track that's difficult to work how do you know, I mean you presumably you probably know intuitively, this is going to work well or it's going to be easy to work with. I'm going to really finesse this.

Jeff

Yeah. When you are choosing music for a scene, whether you're wielding your influence or it's something that's been given to you, do you, when you get the stuff, say it’s stems or you hear a track, what makes a track more difficult? Are there other things you listen to and you're like, oh I don’t, that's one that's going to be really hard to work with. I know that's really specific, but I'm just curious.

Chad

I think there's two things going on with that question, if I may. And one would be, are you writing a track that's intended to be edited? So are you making a little toy car that could have two wheels or it could have four or the roof could come off? What's the widest possible audience for this track or this song? Versus, has it been written to picture, has the intention for this context already kind of been fixed? And so in that case, the right thing could be to do nothing. You don't need to torture things to become something that they're not. And so I guess that's one metric that would apply to both is that which is the least amount of work that we need to do, you know. I had a colleague, this a funny story, I'm not sure if we have time for but –

David

We call these a sidebar.

Jeff

Sidebar!

Chad

He said that the best piece of music for a scene is the one that requires the least editing

So he sorted his library by duration and picked the one that was two minutes and 13 seconds and then that wasn't quite right so he picked 2:12 then 2:14 and nothing was quite right so he just wrote something. The idea of editing, it was new to me because, especially with editing a song I thought is it remixing? If you license a song, are you going to want to remix from stems? But the license, unless it's a special license, you really need to stick with the intention and the... And try to fit it in the space that it needs to be fit in while creating the illusion that nothing has been changed.

Jeff (13:41.294)

So let's talk about that. Let's actually talk about the nuts and bolts of you've got a scene, 30 seconds we'll say, right? And you've got a song that's gotta be put in there. So what kind of editing are you doing? Are you looking for the sweet part of that music? Are you actually editing? Oh I'm gonna go from this verse to the chorus right away. I mean, yeah, what are you doing to these pieces of music?

Chad (14:03.882)

Right committing active unspeakable violence basically.

Jeff

How are you maiming these beautiful pieces of music?

Chad

You're taking a finished piece of work and then you have a beautiful painting in a frame that's too small, so you just take a knife and throw half of it away? No. So what you would do? Let me see how to answer that question

Jeff (14:28.526)

I'm sure it's different in every single case, but...

Chad

Well, sometimes I think about this as an example for somebody to try, is to take one of their favourite songs, like a pop song, if they like that, or classical or whatever genre they're drawn to. But if it would be a pop song, maybe make an 85 second version of that. So with an intro and a verse and a chorus.

David

So it would have the arc, but yeah how do you make it work with an arc but shorter?

Chad

Yes, which is something that you might want to do for a montage. So, convey the idea of the song without turning it into a music video. Shorten it, which is oftentimes what you're doing. You're not repeating a song, parts of a song. So you're shortening it, but in ways that make sense internally with the logic of the song. Other times, songs can be used a lot as transitions. So you wanna go for the impact and something to take us out of one scene into a next scene. So find something that starts strong and then tails appropriately under the dialogue in the next scene. So there are different kind of shapes that you could want to do, but mainly, I think, of doing no harm in terms of not changing the fundamental. 

David

Doing no harm, I like that. 

Chad

Yeah, just, you know, the Hippocratic oath. 

Jeff

Right, yeah. 

Chad

Not changing anything fundamentally about the way the song feels or is presented, that it should still very much be identifiable as that song. But if you come in and the middle 8 or some interesting section of it too, that could be fun, that's not something that's been crafted with editing. I mean, editing, you know, principally editing could be thought of simply just as where to start and stop a piece of music without changing anything internally. And it's surprising to me how much can be accomplished without having to do that, just shifting things a couple seconds so that the lyrics fall where there's space in the dialogue or coming in appropriately without having to change anything internally. That's when it gets a little bit dicey.

David

So flipping this around, I've got a question here. Flipping this around, now you're a composer. 

Jeff

I am a composers

David

Imagine you're a composer. I don't know, this might be tricky for you. And you're writing something and as a composer, your advice to them, would you have an editor's needs and wants in mind at the point of penning the work? Or do you say, screw that, write your piece of music, I'll worry about it when I get it. So you're not counselling a composer to say, it would be better if you did this because I'm more likely to be able to edit it easier. I mean, what do you think?

Chad (17:22.914)

Well, I could say that if you were writing for, if you didn't know the ultimate use of the piece that you were writing, things that I've noticed with library music and production music is on some recent projects where the showrunners definitely wanted a sense of progression or sections. And there are a lot of things that are kind of unvaried and don't modulate at all. And I think having a B section or some end and then another end or little added points where you could make this longer or shorter, which is completely different though than writing to picture it, in which case you would be already kind of,

David

You're writing your own arc as you go. It's just that we're often taught when we do production music, there are some truisms that you get told. And one of those often is one idea, one piece. So don't suddenly have a slow section after a fast section. Don't do happy then sad because it's too much. 

Jeff

Make your piece of music do one thing. 

David

Yeah, do one thing. But that can be misinterpreted as don't do anything else other than your first idea. Don't write a B section. Don't make it interesting. Just stay flatlined, which is the exact opposite of what you're saying.

Chad

I mean, it depends on the use. There's like a wallpaper type of music for reality shows and things like that where they just need something going on in the background continuously that's not drawing your attention. But increasingly, I've been working on projects where they really want to do more scoring with production music. And so if it has a moment where we're released from the tempo to let the character pause and take in some information or things like that. This can be very, very useful.

David

So production music isn't being used as production music, it's being used to score effectively. That's really interesting.

Jeff

For context is this like classical kind of stuff or is it -

Chad (19:34.126)

Well, I could speak to And Just Like That recently. And Sex and the City had no composer. That was a music supervisor who licensed things and created pieces, Dan Lieberstein. And so for the reboot, And Just Like That, there was also no composer. And so thinking about how to track the storylines, we came up with the idea that was not maybe so explicit, but instead of having melodic motifs for characters, kind of a style that they would be associated with. So one of them had kind of a urban New York sensibility, kind of comedic, one was cool, one was a little bit more- 

David

So you identify with it when you hear it you know who it's for

Chad

A little bit. That was kind of the idea, is to try to track the characters' arcs through the style rather than the melodies. Because that's very hard to do, to come up with a different sounding version, a sad sounding version of a cue that you would...

Jeff

Yes, right, of a style of music that maybe describes a character but not the scene. Yeah.

Chad (20:51.01)

Yeah, it needs to kind of do both. So that was a case where we scored with production music and a lot of the time you would hear a piece that started really good, sonically on point, beautiful musicianship, nice recording, the right density, it felt not too heavy, left something to the imagination. Let the comedy breathe a little bit and then you just wish that it would do something because something's while it's playing it's not just people talking at a table until the next scene, it's something is discovered something happens there's some dramatic moment yeah

David (21:39.63)

And you've got no way of pointing that.

Jeff

So what do you do in those cases? Did you just cut to a different piece of music or did you boost the volume up and throw in a shaker?

Chad

That would be something that I wouldn't probably be able to use. Some cases where stems were available we could do a kind of a B section by taking out an instrument or things like that. I don't think anything was really pitched to go up a third or that type of thing to make it more interesting. 

Jeff

So you can create your own modulation.

Chad

Could possibly.

David (22:10.454)

Get your trumpet it out maybe or play a little bit over the top and that's my moment.

Chad

I'm not sure that we be allowed to do some of those things, but on that subject that you just mentioned, David, about playing over pieces and how in a licensed song, for example, the rights holders might not want you to replay the bass line or things like that. And with some libraries of production music, it's a little bit more flexible and they're a little bit more likely to work with you on things. Temp music, however, is a bit of a free for all because it's not going to be monetized, it's not going to go to air. So that's very different than actually editing pieces of music that are going to go to air. 

David

Playing or singing over it –

Chad

You could loop things, you could take instruments from different tracks and mix them together and put in your own synths or what have you. It's just kind of a proof of concept.

David (23:10.19)

So are you creating that temp as you go? Is that your gig?

Chad

Yes, yeah, temp music is something that music editors are tasked with, which is a prototype of a score that would ultimately be commissioned.

Jeff

Boom, there's your influence right there. Because that is, so many people get temp love or whatever they call it, they get married to the temps.

David

And you know what? Yeah, and I remember back in the very, long 90s ago, when I said, what the hell is a temp track? Somebody said to me, watch a programme, turn the music off, now see if you have any emotive response to any of this. And when you realize you don't, you'll realize that when people are making programs, you have to have some music there to know how to elicit an arc to an emotional response. Because without it, the rest of it's...It comes first from music, comes first from sound. And I remember doing that, exactly that, watching something with the sound down and just thinking, okay, got it.

Jeff (24:13.07)

Boring. Yeah, so how do you, I mean because that, I know you asked the question earlier about influence and things. So when you do that, you are really creating a soundscape or the whole, I mean, if you're doing it for a whole show, right?

Chad

One wishes it were generative.

David

I love that line.

Jeff

There you go, not as much influence as we thought.

Chad

Music for picture is a conversation between what the audience is expecting and what you want to say, right? So when somebody says, I want to hear a score that I've never heard before, do they really or do they want it just to have some unique features but, hue to the genre that you're working in. It's a comedy or it's a horror film or something like that. Usually working in some kind of...

David (25:09.614)

Yeah, it can't be genreless.

Chad

Right, it's not an avant-garde.

Jeff

If you wanted something completely new, you couldn't put any temp in there because it'd be like, well, everything already exists, so...

Chad

And that's why it's a little bit of a closed loop, the film music thing. It’s because people want what they've heard and so many cases I have come across the situation where somebody gets hired as a composer and then the producers say we want the film temped with this composer's music from other films.

David (25:51.81)

They were perking from their own temps?

Chad

So that we know that we made the right decision as to the composer. 

Jeff

Ah, interesting.

Chad

And you could say, well the composer hasn't really done this type of film before.

David

So you're temping with music that doesn't come from the type of movie, you're onto a loser to start with, surely?

Chad

That's a strange assignment for me. We want to see how much we like so-and-so's music based on what they've done for other shows. So you know, temp with this if you can, I think, is a reasonable expectation.

David

Do you ever get the issue where you make the temp, I mean, you must get this, they love the tent. And now what? When everything else is not good enough because it's not the temp.

Chad (26:32.686)

I never get that David. No, I purposely

David

No, my temps are never good enough. That's just not an issue.

Chad

I try to leave a lot of room for improvement. Really I could say that I try it's just that there's a lot of room for improvement. I'm going for some emotion. I'm going for some something that no one is going to beat the composer over the head with and say do this exactly. Nothing could work better from this. There's a lot of space for improvement. There's a lot of space to reimagine. 

David

God bless you for that, because getting those gigs we've all been there and we've been there and somebody will play you a temp and say it needs to be like this you say what in the style of they say no exactly.

Jeff

Yeah, we'd take three stabs at it and they're either like, err and then we're finally like, all right, well, let's write something exactly like this and then they're like, we love it!

David (27:23.47)

And it's just a question of how close can I get to that without getting sued? Because you won't accept anything that isn't exactly the same as this. That was cut together presumably by a music editor, so thanks for that.

Chad

I think the temp serves a couple purposes. It can be part of a conversation between the composers and the filmmaker of what the music should do, but it's also to tell the producers that they can stop cutting picture and start finishing the film. So once the film tests well enough with the temp score that they can lock, so that may dovetail with the purpose of getting a good score from your composer, but they're not born of the same need.

David

Just one thing you said there was interesting, because this has never happened to me as a composer for film. You're saying that the composer is consulted on the temp? There may be a thousand composers out there saying...

Jeff

Well, yeah, yeah, all the time..

David (28:31.424)

Not to me it doesn't.

Jeff

You’re just not there yet.

David

No, maybe so but that was an interesting thing. I've not seen that.

Chad

I feel like the composer might not be consulted, but in the pitches that the filmmakers have received from agents are, here's 10 disco playlists from people who we would want to work with. And those might come to a music editor and say, hear anything you like?

David (29:04.972)

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and what about styles of music or things in terms of wait? Do you see trends happening of where things are going or is it trend based or is it time?

Chad

It's hard for me to speak to the industry in general, but I feel like on the jobs that I work with that have a composer, the filmmakers are very interested in hand-played instruments, in thematic material. I feel that having a composer is a luxury for a lot of shows, and they really would like to make use of that for what they can do and not just...

David

Yeah, hiring a composer to go for 40 bars. You're like, well, we got that already. So we don't need. That's great. I like the idea that things still have to be hand played because one of my questions actually was going to be, and maybe we don't need to touch on this, about the influx of the dreaded AI into the world of all of this. Is it a thing that you see affecting your job?

Chad (30:10.414)

I just worked on a film that in the credits in the end one of the last cards reads ‘No generative AI was used in the making of this film’.

Jeff

Oh love it.

David

God bless them all.

Chad

I think that producers are very shy about any generative AI work ending up in their product because it could be a lean on their sale of their production future. I know one composer who told me that he used AI to calculate a list of timecode durations. And he stuck 30 numbers into ChatGPT and said, what's the calculation of these? 

David

For the SMPTE yeah.

Chad

Yeah, and ChatGPT said, what's the frame rate? You know, pull up, pull down. And then spat out an answer, but you can't trust it.

David

We're gonna check it anyway, so what's the point?

Chad

Yeah, so it's not it's not intended for that. So I think that I've talked to people working on promos and they're looking to come up with temp versions of things, hiring themselves as a vocalist with a voice-changing plug-in to do a scratch VO or things like that. So I think it's impinging on the levels of the industry that are maybe more easily accessed because it's not a final finished product. Just some of the temp phases.

But the problem that I've encountered and talking with people who use AI for visual effects and things like that too, is that just taking notes and making changes is not –

Jeff

Is impossible, right?

Chad

You ask it to do one thing and it changes everything. It's just like you throw the dice again and you don't have anything. It's very hard to get those.

Jeff (32:21.782)

Can’t work in increments.

Chad

Exactly. 

David

So you may not be able to talk about it, but anything coming up interesting that's about to-

Chad

I just had a wonderful, wonderful experience working on a film that Craig Brewer directed and with a colleague, Jim Bruning, who is a music editor who I've admired for years and years. And it's a musical with Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson singing the Neil Diamond song. 

Jeff

I just saw something about this.

Chad

It's called Song Sung Blue, and a lot of their live vocalists actually were used in the finished product. Amazing vocalists, the recordings were stellar.

Jeff

What the heck does a music editor do on a musical?

David

Do you have to create the temp for that?

Chad

I came on toward the end. Scott Boomer, the composer, worked with Jim and their editor Billy Fox. But so I was interested in this workflow on a musical because there's a lot of channels that are recorded on set of playback and individual mics and the workflow for getting all of those things digested and into editable form is formidable and interesting. And so the score was really the performance numbers of which there are many. And the songs kind of form a large basis of the music in the film. And then Scott Boomer who works in Memphis and he arranged and produced all of their prerecords and did a remarkable job then of writing score for the film as well for the places that needed to be. So there was temp music from other films in those sections that Jim had put in that Scott then replaced, but it was a real treat. It's a treat to work on a film where the music is really foregrounded. And that people don't, I mean, this joy for me of post-production is that if you do a good job, no one notices that the whole thing just worked and you didn't say, oh, that was an amazing dialogue edit or –

David

The crossfade on that!

Chad

But you notice the music and you notice just the emotion of the performances. You feel like you're there. It's really special. It was an honour and an absolute treat. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, Christmas Day. 

David

Christmas day? Oh man. 

I'm there. I'm there. This has been a treat. It's been an absolute treat. Thank you so much.

Jeff (35:05.006)

I feel like there's a million other questions that I would love to ask you. 

David

We could do version two of this.

Jeff

Maybe sometime we will. But again, I'm not sure what people are interested in. So how, you know, the stems that you worked with, are, you know, so, but I'm interested. But we're gonna go to dinner after this anyway.

David (35:25.646)

We're going to go out and talk more. I want to know about the stems that you're working with.

Chad

I may have some in my backpack. We could have over them for dessert. 

David

Thank you so much for joining us.

Jeff

Thank you so much.

Chad

It’s a pleasure fellows. I look forward to working together again. 

David

Oh, it's gonna be fun. Until the next time. 

Jeff

All right. See you everybody go see some movies, the Materialist, And Just Like That -

David

It's just Materialist, but it is THE Penguin. Go see it. 

Jeff (35:53.87)

Thanks everyone, bye.

David

Bye