How I Wrote a 60 second Underscore

I was commissioned to compose underscore music for a picture book trailer.

As you’ll see below, a book trailer typically shows some illustrations from a book while a narrator gives a brief overview of the text. The underscore is the background music under the narration.

Here’s the finished product for this assignment:

By the way, did I mention that my wife Rebecca E. Hirsch is the author of this amazing book? (She is so inspiring to me in so many ways).

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If you’re curious as to how Rebecca and I made this book trailer, read on. Here’s how the process looked from the composer’s standpoint.

1) Book immersion

Seated at the keyboard piano in my music room, I read the book and immersed myself in the feeling of the text and illustrations.

2) Develop a few different themes

Using my phone’s voice memo app, I recorded myself improvising 3 different themes. I would then send these to Rebecca (the author) so she could decide which one seemed to create the mood she wanted for the trailer.

Here’s what I was thinking when I came up with each theme:

1b: Gentle twinkling of stars, space, sweet innocence of a child.

2: More motion than the first, but also with space and a warm feeling.

3: This one was a little more generic and didn’t really seem tied to the feeling of the book, though it does use a couple of the motifs heard in 1b.

(My instinct was that offering a ‘wrong’ option would help the other ones seem more ‘right’).

3) Author chooses the theme she likes and sends any feedback

Rebecca chose theme 1b, which was also my favorite (though, I didn’t reveal this to her until after she decided).

4) Flesh out theme to full length.

By this point, Rebecca had made a rough draft of her slides and narration in iMovie. As it turns out, she timed her slides to go with shifts in the music, like when the owl appears in sync with the musical color change. It was truly a two-way collaboration.

To flesh out the music, I improvised while viewing her iMovie draft to make the music support and complement the full narration. (I watched the video on an iPad resting on my piano keyboard’s sheet music holder). When I felt like I had it down—and could play all the way through with out messing up—I made a ‘good’ recording. (This was important, because my piano-performance chops are quite limited. Trust me on this).

To get a clean recording I plugged my keyboard into an audio interface using two speaker cables (one each for the left and right channels). The audio interface sent the signal into GarageBand on my computer.

5) Finalize the A/V

We imported the final audio recording into iMovie and reduced the volume of the music during the narration. Rebecca did some final tweaking of the video and narration timing to make everything fit together seamlessly.

6) Notes:

• I didn’t notate the music, as there was no need. It was easier for me to remember where my fingers were supposed to go, than to take the time to notate and then practice the notated music. (See note above inre my limited piano chops).

• It was fun!

• Here’s the final audio at full volume:

Now go get a copy of this book for your favorite kid!