“The Sprinter” Part Four: The Music
Joe Heider – Drummer.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, the format that we decided on for the film was basically a linear narrative divided up by bursts of quickly edited, noisy imagery. The linear narrative would have musical accompaniment while the short bursts would be put together with layers of noise recorded with our dictation recorders. The noise part was pretty easy, but the music was still up in the air.
Around this time I had started playing in a band named Call In Call Out. Our drummer Joe Heider was very good and was a natural when it came to free form playing. I knew that Justin and I could riff off of one another and I thought that he and Joe would work well together. So on November 30th, 2003, we took the computer to the Call In/Out practice space and set up our gear to record. We had two separate tracks to work with, so we put the drums and bass on one track and separated the guitar on the other track. We pressed record and Justin, Joe and I played music for 2 hours.
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Driving 07 – Excerpt from our 2 hour session.
Sketchy Pro Tools Setup
Prior to our session with Joe we hadn’t really discussed any particular style or sound for the music, we just wanted to see what happened when we got together. We gave Joe a VHS with a rough compilation of the shots to give him something visual to reference, but other than that we just played what we wanted to hear. For lack of a better word, we just jammed. What we came up with turned out to be surprisingly fitting, even with the mistakes inherent in unrehearsed music.
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Driving 01 – Excerpt from our 2 hour session.
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Driving 05 – Excerpt from our 2 hour session.
Justin Kemerling – Bass Player
After that Justin and I went through the audio and trimmed it down to a set of small moments that seemed to fit the pace and feel of the film. We added second guitar to some parts and ambient noise to other parts. We also created a few pieces of sound separately with a drum machine and some instruments in my apartment.
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Driving 03 – Excerpt from our 2 hour session.
There was only one piece that wasn’t part of that two hour session with Joe. It came about a little differently. Around this time my fiance and I got married and took a honeymoon. While we were gone we gave Justin the keys to our apartment and he lived there, working on The Sprinter. When I came home there was a note on the computer directing me to some music that he’d worked on. One track specifically really knocked me out. It was a simple drum cadence with a somber, beautiful bass-line. I listened to it once and immediately picked up my guitar and started playing along with it. After a couple minutes I had a part that seemed to match. I’m definitely a believer in creative synchronicity, so when the inspiration hits, I stop what I’m doing and take full advantage of it. So I recorded my part and we ended up using that piece in the final climax of the film.
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The Release – “The Sprinter’s” final song.
Once we had all of the tracks assembled we gave them to our friend Brendan McGinn to master the audio. After that we had all the music and noise for the film, save for one late addition. We went back to the practice space and recorded our friend Ian Whitmore yelling. We wanted the only voice in the film to be subtle and almost imperceptible, but we also wanted it to be hugely expressive, so we asked Ian, who was the singer in Call In/Out, to give us one good yell to layer deep into our film.
He yelled for a long time and almost threw up. It ended up working perfectly.
To hear the finished product use the link below to download a zipped file containing 14 refined tracks from “The Sprinter” soundtrack.