Day 24: The Beast

I went back into the studio tonight after a very quiet day to work on my episode. This thing is a beast. 14 cues. Most of the episode has music to it, and as I discovered in short order, some of these cues are massive. I decided my goal was to do 5 cues tonight, getting me halfway through the episode. Once I hit 2m2, the second cue of the second act, I realized it was 3 minutes long, covers 2 scenes and 3 very different emotions. First a sense of being watched, then a feeling of loneliness and finally, a confrontation. 3 very different things to do. By the end of that cue, I was beat and came home for dinner and called it a night. I'm happy with my 4 other cues. Very happy in fact. I tried a lot of new things on this show, and I'm happy with what I'm doing for it. This last beast of a cue however, I may actually redo.

I like to take my time to write. I'll do a few bars, fill it in and move on. And that works quite well for orchestral music, which sometimes feels like building a ship in a bottle, where every move needs to be calculated and set up and it could all go wrong at any moment, only to come together in the end. But SVU music is so textural and atmospheric and it can't be written that way. And when you've got 40 years of writing music on me (22 of those on this show alone) like Mike does, it's why he can write that whole 3 minute cue on the first try start to finish. I'm trying to do it his way, and can do it pretty well, up until about the 90 second mark. That's about all the skill I have so far in writing in one go. This is twice that. So tomorrow, I'm going to go in and write hopefully 3 more cues and then go back and see if I can fix the beast of 2m2. If I can't, I'll redo it. And that's okay because this will not be the last huge cue I get, and I need to conquer it, so that's exactly what I'll do.