I recently had the pleasure of sitting down to chat with David Heymann, a talented young composer originally from Germany. David has had a roller coaster start to his career, getting thrust into the limelight as lead orchestrator on the hit game, The Elder Scrolls Online. Read on to hear more about his move to LA, and his wisdom gained in the industry thus far.
Tell me about how you got your start with music - and how you made your way into the film/game music world.
I was around ten years old when I started to play music which is actually pretty late for a musician. I started with private keyboard lesson for a while and then took the step to take piano lessons at the municipal school of music. But at some point playing just classical music wasn’t really satisfying anymore so I started to improvise and compose my own pieces on the piano which was a lot more exciting for me. Around the time I finished school, my interest shifted more towards composing for an orchestral ensemble rather than just piano alone. This was mainly due to my love for orchestral film music. Since this all happened during the time I had to choose a major to study, it was pretty clear to me that I wanted to study the art of scoring films and other media. This led me to one of the biggest art colleges in Europe, the HKU Utrecht in the Netherlands. During my 4-year study there, I started to get my first scoring jobs for some of the most interesting projects I have worked on so far.
At what point did you decide to move to Los Angeles to pursue your music career?
Before I moved to the Netherlands, I already had in mind to continue my own study of film music in the entertainment capital of the world and work on more projects of any kind of budget. As a film composer, if you get the chance to prove yourself in Hollywood, you should go for it and see where it takes you or you could regret it for the rest of your life.
I’ve read that one of your first big projects was providing trailer music for a “real life game” - tell me a bit more about this.
“Prison Escape” is a game you don’t play on your Playstation but in real-life, in a former prison. When the whole project was established it was pretty clear to the team that a trailer was needed to effectively convey the idea of the “game play” and the whole purpose of it. Composing the trailer music for this was different than usual trailer music writing because here the picture was already shot and edited and the music came in as one of the latest steps. So I had to write the music synced to picture with all its sound effects etc. in the final audio track. It was a great experience doing it!
I not only wrote the trailer music for it but also provided the music for the actual game. Since it plays in prison, you can hear the music coming out of the speakers that are installed there. For the participants who are playing the game it’s supposed to feel like actually being in a game so they experience everything you’re used to from a normal video game.
I’m happy to see that the game really took off and now has thousands of participants each year!
I’ve read that you were the lead orchestrator on the score for The Elder Scrolls Online. Tell me about how this opportunity came about, and a bit about the experience of orchestrating the music. Were you previously a fan of The Elder Scrolls series?
Although it is one of the biggest online games ever, I must admit that I had never played The Elder Scrolls series before.
I was just 23 years old at the time so I felt really honored to have had the opportunity to be the orchestrator of such a huge game, being so young yet. As the orchestrator you have to deal with a lot of people during your work to get everything done properly and on time. There is an overwhelmingly huge number of musicians who rely on all the sheet music you are creating. So it’s a very collaborative work between the composer, me, the producers, all the way to the solo musicians who are all recorded separately and apart from the orchestra. Being an orchestrator is not only about music but also organizing and being economical. Since there had to be done a specific kind of mixing of the music afterwards, we couldn’t record the whole orchestra as a whole but had to record the different sections separately from each other. So it was also a lot about when to record e.g. brass and when to let the string players come in and how much music we can get recorded in a session. We ended up booking the “City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra” for an entire week due to the huge amount of music that needed to be recorded.
What are some of the biggest surprises you’ve encountered while working in the music industry?
Well, for starters there are some big differences in the film music industry in Europe and in the US. In Europe, an unbelievable amount of music is created in the computer with sample libraries, mostly due to a lack of budget. I talked to a German composer once who wrote the music to one of the most succesfull movies at that time in Germany and he told me only the drum set was recorded live - and that was a fully orchestral score including guitars and drums. In the US it would have probably be the other way round and only the drums might habe been sampled. Or the composer would have used an ensemble size that could have been recorded with the available budget. So there are some huge differences in the mindsets of composers around the world.
It’s also often shocking to see how much composers undersell themselves and their service in order to land a job or two in a market that’s getting more and more competitive. I have seen this everywhere in the world.
What do you think are the best parts of being a film composer? What about the worst?
The best part of course is being “allowed” to contribute to a film with your own music. Sitting in the theater and watching the final movie and hearing your music is the moment every composer is waiting for and excited about from the moment he gets the job to score the movie. Dpending on the music, if it’s an orchestral score and you have the opportunity to actually record it with live musicians, this is often a lot of fun as well. That’s when you hear your own music for the first time live, instead of the worse sounding midi mockup. One of the worst parts however, is probably sitting in front of your blank sheet music, or nowadays your empty DAW, and having no idea how and where to start.
Tell me about what you’re working on now. Can we expect any new things from you to be released soon?
Currently I’m working together with J2 and his team on a few trailer albums that will be coming out within the next few years. The latest album, called “Synthwave” is currently only distributed among trailer houses and music supervisors but will soon also be publicly available. Apart fromt that, I’m also continuing with some compositional work for solo piano that will be published as sheet music later in 2018.