By Chance Shirley
October 14, 2004
Part Fourteen: Score!
I met Eric McGinty a few years ago in a pick-up band put together by mutual friends. Eric and I got along well, probably because of our shared love of Spinal Tap and Jagermeister. Not long after that gig, I started playing drums for his band, the Avery Ellis Exhibit(s). Since then, not many weeks have gone by that he, I and some bass player (currently HIDE AND CREEP crewmember Kenn McCracken) haven't played a set or two at one of the local watering holes.
It didn't take many gigs with Eric for me to realize that the guy can pretty much do anything musically. So, when I started doing pre-production work on HIDE AND CREEP, I offered him the job of music composer. Well, actually I kind of told him "Hey, I'm making a zombie movie, and I'm gonna need you to write the music. Cool?"
It was "totally cool," apparently. Eric hit the ground running and started writing music for the movie before I even started shooting. And he kept writing, and recording, right up 'til I had to take the music away from him to get a sound mix ready for the Sidewalk festival premiere.
Oh, yeah -- on top of all that music stuff, Eric also plays the part of "Ned" in the movie.
But enough of my yammering. I'll let the man speak for himself.
Chance Shirley: What was the first instrument you learned to play and what was the first piece of music you learned? I assume you didn't write something right off the bat.
Eric McGinty: (laughs) No. The first instrument I played was banjo, which I started Christmas when I was 12 and the first piece I played was just an exercise. I think the first actual song was "Cumberland Gap."
CS: Bluegrass song?
EM: Yeah. All my first songs were banjo tunes. I excelled until I was 15. Then I picked up a guitar and learned heavy metal and stopped learning banjo.
CS: What's your favorite instrument to play now?
EM: It'd have to be guitar...
CS: I know you dabble in everything...
EM: But I'm more comfortable on guitar.
CS: So how'd you get from bluegrass and heavy metal into scores for movies and commercials?
EM: I was living with Patrick Sheehan who had a company (The Imagination Factory) that did that kind of stuff and I helped him, bounced ideas off of him, first just doing music-on-hold (for telephone systems), which eventually expanded to music behind commercials, music written for specific commercials, television bits -- things like that.
CS: And at some point in there you won an Addy award?
EM: That piece was actually written as an intro to this version of "Masters of War" I do, the Bob Dylan song. I had the idea to do a string arrangement of that about the same time that Patrick was looking for a piece for the Imagination Factory web site. So I kind of transcribed out the piece on notebook paper, which I had to do for an actual string quartet, real musicians, you know? So I just drew lines on notebook paper and notated it as best I could. Which, of course, was horrible. I wasn't able to be there for the recording sessions, but Patrick got an earful from the union Birmingham Symphony crew. (laughs) Because I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
CS: Whether it's pop songs or movie scores, are there any particular influences on the music that you write?
EM: I like to be one of those people who says, "I listen to everything."
CS: Which I think is pretty accurate.
EM: To some degree, just not all the time. There are certain styles of music that I don't dig. But, in terms of bands, I've been playing for twenty years, so different bands influenced me differently at different times. Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix were my first two big influences on guitar.
Then I was really big into heavy metal, but that's just because in the '80s the only thing with distortion (on the guitars) was heavy metal. The only angst music you had was heavy metal. Nowadays, they're (bands with angst) a dime a dozen. Everything's angst on the radio now, but back in the day...
CS: Getting into HIDE AND CREEP, I gave you some random soundtracks to listen to, completely unrelated to each other. Did any of that influence the HIDE AND CREEP score, or was it stuff from rock bands or other movies you liked, classical composers...
EM: Really, I didn't have much direction at all when I started that. When I'm writing music for myself, I'm the one judging it and deciding whether I think it's any good or not. But when I'm writing music for someone else, I need a sounding board, to kind of throw the ideas at. You giving me those movies kind of gave me an idea of the direction. PLANET OF THE APES made me realize, "I don't have to be melodic with everything, I can just get some random notes -- not that he (APES composer Jerry Goldsmith) was playing random notes -- but I can get some dissonant notes that sound like Philip Glass or just crazy stuff.
I think what really helped me a lot, oddly enough, was watching BUBBA HO-TEP and seeing how they used minimalistic music behind that. It helped me realize that I didn't have to fill up every scene with notes, that I could be sparse and still say something.
CS: As far as working out the arrangements for HIDE AND CREEP music, I know you did some pretty unorthodox stuff. What all did you take advantage of, instrument-wise?
EM: Just everything I had around me. The instruments I have at home are guitar, banjo, your mandolin, and acoustic bass. I did use a cheap keyboard. And I had some toys, my son's. I had a toy piano, this little Strumstick (a simple fretted instrument with three strings), and a little Kid's Konga drum. I started off thinking we'd have string players, actually... playing violins and cellos, you know? (laughs)
CS: But budget and time didn't allow for that...
EM: In place of those strings... I don't play anything bowed, but I did have a (cello) bow, so I just used the bow on the instruments I had -- like the strum stick, the banjo -- just to simulate what those string players might be doing. But those sounds got more of a positive response from people than if we actually got strings, so I ended up re-recording that stuff on purpose using the bow on my instruments.
CS: Innovation.
EM: (laughs) Just using what I got.
CS: A lot of the music in the movie is very much timed out to a particular scene. Could you walk me through that process, of writing and timing out a piece so it's just the right length?
EM: Most of the HIDE AND CREEP scenes that have music are action scenes. And action scenes, I think, tend to need music that goes along with the action. As opposed to transitional stuff, which is like a character just walking through the woods by himself. Those are more opportunities to just have background music... like in WAG THE DOG. Most of that stuff is just transitional music.
So I had to kind of time out where the music would go for the action scenes. My main resource was the built-in metronome on my digital four-track recorder. I would watch the scene and say "There ought to be a beat here and a beat there," and I'd watch the scene over and over again until I started getting an idea of what the tempo would be. Then I'd try to find that tempo on the metronome and fine-tune it. It's actually easier to write the piece around a tempo because then you can say, "Okay, it only goes three beats here or it goes five beats here," and that might sound complicated, but as long as you've got that tempo behind there -- assuming you already have some melodic ideas -- you can just fill in the blanks.
CS: And you ended up recording a lot of the HIDE AND CREEP music right there in front of the TV in your living room with the little portable four-track...
EM: Well, at first I did, when I didn't think we'd be using those tracks in the finished movie. But when I realized that we'd need better sound quality, I'd go on and time it out, remember how many times to do this thing, how many times to do that thing... and then just go in the bedroom and record it, for a quieter environment.
CS: This is the first feature that you've written the majority of the score for (Jim Roberson also contributed a few pieces). Any major lessons learned?
EM: I figured out that there were around 40 different places in HIDE AND CREEP that needed some music. Some of those were as short as seven seconds, some were as long as three minutes. I came in with the attitude of writing several different pieces, but I learned that I can have one central theme in mind and I can base different action cues on that theme. Or two or three, so it doesn't get too repetitious.
The way Jim Roberson wrote the music for ALICE'S MISADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, he wrote the intro (main title) music first, then he based a lot of music that happened later in the movie on bits and pieces of the intro. That made a lot of sense to me, because writing the intro is hard enough, but then you can take little slices of that and improvise off of those depending what the scene calls for.
CS: In a lot of movies, the main theme that is played over the opening credits is recycled throughout the movie, but you and Jim went kind of backwards on HIDE AND CREEP, because, originally, I had some music over the credits I'd stolen from PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. And you guys took the musical themes from later in HIDE AND CREEP and compressed them into like this two minute showcase that plays over the opening credits.
EM: I don't know if that's cheating or not, going backwards like that. I took the idea you had for the opening from PLAN 9, the cheesy '50s thing. For the most part, you had a tempo there. I tried to match that beat and, of course, being PLAN 9, it was just way over the top for everything it was doing.
CS: Melodramatic.
EM: I tried to match that over-the-top-ness, I just substituted each PLAN 9 bit with a piece I'd already written for some part of HIDE AND CREEP. I tried to get as many of those different themes as I could and put them in that opening piece.
CS: So, what are you listening to these days, when you're not working on your own music? What's in your proverbial CD player?
EM: Well, the CD player in my car sucks.
Honestly, I don't really do a good job in listening to music lately. The only time I ever listen to music is whenever somebody actually has me in their car and they say, "Hey, listen to this."
I'm usually trying to work on something of my own, anyway. When I've got some music I'm writing that's playing in my head, I'm just playing it over and over again, trying to figure it out, and other (outside) music distracts me.
CS: So, after scoring this movie, are you looking forward to doing another feature?
EM: Yeah. And I'd like to be able to collaborate with someone.
CS: Like you did some with Jim on HIDE AND CREEP.
EM: I can come up with ideas on my own, but sometimes it's more fun with someone else. They can take your musical ideas in a direction you weren't expecting.
One thing I don't know if I'm good at or not, because I've never tried it... so many movies have that lush string sound, of several...
CS: A traditional orchestra score...
EM: Right, where you've got a few instruments carrying it and sometimes it swells and you've got big oceans of stuff and sometimes it just breaks down to one or two notes. I was lucky with HIDE AND CREEP that you wanted more of a folksy, backwoods kind of thing, because that's what I do. But I'm interested at seeing how well I do at something different.
