Matt Morton - Apollo Moog Mission
Matt Morton is a film score composer and something of a historian of electronic music. His soundtrack to the recent Apollo 11 documentary feature exclusively used the Moog synthesiser that was available at the time of the first moon landing.
This episode is a real deep dive into the fascinating world of vintage, analog electronic music technology with an award-winning composer, musician and collector.
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Music: Pensive Synthesizer by Kyle Preston, used under licence from Artlist.io / reCreation by airtone (c) copyright 2019
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
Photo: Henry Leiter
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sound, music, composer, instruments, people, notes, apollo, hear, called, tape, meaning, film, modular, score, apollo mission, play, orchestra, 60s, analogue, oscillator
SPEAKERS
Matt Morton, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber, on the director of Music Tech Fest and this is the MTF podcast. Now this month is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission. That’s the one where well known Coronavirus survivor actor Tom Hanks played well known spaceship mechanical failure survivor, astronaut Jim Lovell. And I can thoroughly recommend you spending some time on previous MTF podcast guests been Feist’s Apollo in real time.org. To follow along in that mission, that’s not only fascinating, it’s both incredibly educational, and potentially time consuming. If for instance, you have children at home with you right now. And if you did hear that episode with band that came out a month or so back, you’ll remember that a lot of the archival material that been discovered and restored was used in a fantastic Documentary Feature Film that came out last year called Apollo 11. Now, there were many brilliant things about that film 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and a five star Guardian review. But particularly if you’re interested in music tech, one of those things, is the synthesiser soundtrack. To create that music composer Matt Morton used only synthesisers that were available at the time of the first moon landing, which, if you’ll recall, was 1969, which means that his home studio contains floor to ceiling modular mode racks. It’s an impressive thing to behold. And you can marvel at it on his website, Matt Martin music.com. And well, as you might expect, Matt is someone who can talk enthusiastically about vintage music gear, which sort of makes them an ideal guest for this podcast. So I was delighted to indulge the enthusiasms of composer and gearhead, Matt Morton. If you share those enthusiasms in any way, as I do, you’re going to love this conversation. Here’s Matt Morton, enjoy. Matt Martin, thanks so much for joining us for The MTF podcast today.
Matt Morton
Thanks for inviting me.
Andrew Dubber
You’re very welcome. Now, obviously, I have to start with the Apollo 11 soundtrack, which is just an astonishing piece of work. But the thing that’s most astonishing about it, I guess, is you know what it looks like, behind the scenes with you making it because that’s some pretty impressive kit.
Matt Morton
Yeah, I went a little as some would say overboard. I would say, you know, I could have bought a few more things. But uh, yeah, you know, all of that kind of flew naturally out of the project itself, though, it wasn’t just me, trying to come up with excuses to buy rare gear, and rationalise it to my wife or anything.
Andrew Dubber
But just just explain, explain what it is you bought and used on the soundtrack? For people who haven’t heard it? Or maybe haven’t seen?
Matt Morton
Sure? Sure? Well, it might help us to go backwards, just a hair to kind of understand how we got to Apollo 11 as a filmmaking team, and in that will kind of inform why I kind of made the decisions I did gear wise,
Andrew Dubber
because this was not your first space movie.
Matt Morton
No, no. So we did a short film, called the last steps about Apollo 17, which was the final Apollo mission, or in other words, the last time that we ever stepped foot on the moon, back in December of 1972. That was done as a short film, we did a 30 minute version for film festivals and a 20 minute version for online, you can still see that I believe they might have renamed it. Something like NASA’s last trip to the moon or something like that. But it was called the last steps. And that was done in conjunction with CNN films and their, their documentary website called great big story. And so that just like Apollo 11 was an all archival film, meaning that all that you see in here as far as film, all the visuals, and all of the voices and everything was actually from the time of the mission. So there were no talking head interviews with 90 year old astronauts recall trying to recall the events of 50 years ago there, there was nothing new films for it. So for that score, I kind of let myself use any instrument that I wanted to. I didn’t limit my palette, I just kind of went for it. Any kind of anything in the studio that I wanted to use was fair game. And so a lot of the sounds that made its way onto that score. We’re fairly modern sounding. And there’s kind of a cool juxtaposition between the modern approach Have the score and the sound of the score because of the instruments and effects that I used and the completely period. visuals that you see. And there’s a cool side to that. But there was also this nagging question in my mind as I was kind of watching it on the big screen at a film festival. I was like, you know, it would be really cool if maybe I could, I might have, you know, done an approach where any of the sounds that you’re hearing from the score, could, you know, only could have been made what, you know, what if I would have only made it using instruments and effects of the time so that literally it was, you could nothing would potentially knock you out of that sense of being there and feeling like you’re seeing and hearing the past. So the viewership on the last steps was really good. I think, you know, the online version was 20 minutes, and our average viewership was like 19 and a half minutes, which means that almost everybody watched the entire thing if they clicked on it, which is pretty amazing in this day and age have short attention spans. So absolutely. So we got the nod, then from CNN, to to do the, the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 was coming up, and they wanted to do something similar. So essentially, they were like, Hey, you guys have already kind of proved this concept with your 30 minute version, just triple the length and switch from Apollo 17, to Apollo 11. And, you know, let’s see what we can do. So that’s what we did. And so I did get my chance to try and do a score using only period instruments. So there’s the answer to your question is that I only I kept myself to a limited palette. I only used instruments that could have been used by a composer in 1969. Now granted, he would have had to have a pretty big budget in order to have the stuff that I used, but primarily, I focused, you know, I used the orchestra because of course, the orchestra has been around for hundreds of years. But I also used him in Oregon. I used a Mellotron, which is an early form of sampler
Andrew Dubber
Tape loops, right?
Matt Morton
Yeah, it’s a keyboard instrument with like, I think 36 keys or, or around there. And each key on the piano would trigger an eight second tape loop, so is literally, you know, magnetic tape that was read by you know, that there were that many tape players in the thing. And it would be a recording of whatever instrument that was. So if it was flute, so they literally recorded a flute player, playing every single note on the keyboard for eight seconds, and then at the end of the eight seconds, then it was at the end of the loop, and it would rewind. So if you were still holding that key down, it would just go dead. So you know, the Beatles use that famously, they used the flutes at the intro of survey fields. Yep. Stairway to Heaven has the flutes on it as well. The strings and cellos and vocals are all over 6070s you know, the the the choir that kind of like eerie choir has been used by Radiohead and etc. So I used one of those I used a Hammond organ and Leslie speaker, I used old valve, guitar amplifiers and basses and guitars and stuff, but primarily, I focused in on I was like, what’s the main voice of this score gonna be? And I had, I had already dabbled with these a little bit on the previous score. But I was trying to think like, you know, the Apollo mission was the cutting edge of science and technology in the late 1960s. And a lot of people who study these things have kind of acknowledged it as, as having fast forwarded the normal pace of technological advancement by you know, 10 to 20 years. Some, you know, you pour that much money, so it was like 3% of our GDP or something like that. Now, it’s like, you know, point 3% is NASA’s budget. So you pour a tonne of money into it in you get 400,000 people working on it, and you know, it, lo and behold, we came up with a bunch of really cool stuff, especially computers, you know, that that technology and all sorts of things. We don’t have time to talk about. But anyway I was trying to look is Was there an equivalent thing in the music technology world. So, you know, throughout history, innovations in instrument building or the creation of new instruments, or just refinements of old instruments have led to, you know, new music being created, because composers and songwriters and stuff, they’re like, Ooh, look at this new gadget Oh, it’s, you know, we don’t just have to, like, you look at the, like, the horn, or the French horn, originally, that didn’t have any valves on it. So you had to, you had to write music, using the overtone series, meaning that you couldn’t just pick any key. And you, if you did pick, you know, a certain key, you had to stick to certain notes that were that would occur naturally with the instrument, but then same thing with, you know, the trumpet and whatnot. So once they added valves to those instruments, then they could play chromatically meaning that all 12 notes of the of music could be used, not just the ones that were in that particular key. And so then composers could write you know, a little bit outside the lines and you know, get a little bit more sophisticated with their writing. Same thing with the piano. The you know, the full name of the piano is the piano forte, meaning that it can play soft and loud, not just one volume, like the harpsichord or other keyboard, either the Oregon Well, the Oregon I guess, you could you could vary a little bit, but, you know, typically, you know, the main keyboard instrument used with orchestras was the harpsichord, and it could only play that just plot. Yeah, right. So you know, you had no dynamic control over your performance. So once the piano came out, now, keyboard players can put a lot more nuance and emotion into their performance Anyway, I’m not trying to teach a seminar on this or anything, but
Andrew Dubber
no, but it’s good informational background. Yeah,
Matt Morton
yeah, yeah. So you know, in, in, in, you know, the, the advances kept going. So like Beethoven, in the 1800s, kept pressuring piano makers to you know, he knew he wanted louder, more powerful, you know, lowered lower notes and, you know, more volumes, so that the keyboard could become more and more dominant for So, I was looking for something like that, what was going on in the 60s, what music technology was happening then, that I could harness and kind of use as an analogue to the technological advances going on, on screen through the Space Programme. And there was a lot of things that I could have chosen from, I mean, I could have could have gotten the electric guitar route because you know, there was tonnes of innovations and amplifiers and effects and you know, the wah wah pedal on the univibe and
Andrew Dubber
also purchase to playing Yeah,
Matt Morton
yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You’ve got people like Hendrix taking, you know, some of the you know, Chicago blues and in Robert Johnson and older styles of blues and just like, you know, basically adding acid and then making it into a technicolour like explosion. But what I wanted to focus on and what kind of there are a few reasons for this aesthetic and, you know, academic, but I focused on synthesisers. For one, the modular synthesiser started to be developed in 6364, independently on both coasts of America, by Bob Moog in New York, and Don Bukola, over in, in San Francisco. And both of them were, you know, right around the same time, they, they each kind of had certain strengths. No one disputes the fact that both of them were very innovative, and both
Andrew Dubber
entirely independently. Yeah,
Matt Morton
yep. Wow. Yep. So Bob had a, you know, even from the 50s he had a mail order theramin company. So if you opened up like, I forget what magazines he advertised in maybe Popular Mechanics, or you know, something like that. You would see if you went to the back of the magazine, you’d see a little mail away. thing, you know, send $20 to this post office box, to our a mug ink, you know, and herb Deutsch, who was a music teacher on Long Island, sent away for one of these Theremin kits and built it and was messing with it and loved it and was teaching his kids about electronic music and the Two of them ended up at, I believe it was the New York State Music Educators conference or something like that, where, you know, there was a room, a gymnasium full of people who were selling different types of orchestral instruments or band instruments. And you know, here’s Bob mug with his theramin kits in herb Deutsches is a music educator in that state and comes into this room and literally no one’s in the room, except for Bob mug and herb Deutsch. And he goes over and sees what’s on the table. He’s like, I bought one of those from you. And so they start talking, they and you know, herb, also, and he’s still alive, Bob has passed, but her was really into electronic music, and he was kind of hip to some of the avant garde music that was happening in New York, New York City. And he was like, you know, there’s a lot of exciting stuff going on. Like, could you build me a module that does this? Or does that you know, up to up until that point, electronic music was pretty much all music concrete, which was all done with tape recorders, kind of like the BBC. Radiophonic workshop. Yeah, like Delia Derbyshire, and, and all those guys, that doctor who, you know, theme ins in 1963. And so, you know, in order to get electronic tones, they either had to, you know, record like the sound of a lampshade or something, and then speed up or slow down the tape player to get different pitches, or they would use a laboratory oscillator, which at that time was, you know, those were, they were crazy expensive, and they weren’t voltage controlled, meaning that you, you had to turn a dial to get different sounds. So if they knew that they needed, you know, they almost had to write the piece in their head, or on paper before they set out to do this, because they would need to know what notes they needed for their composition, and then do the math to figure out what frequencies to set the oscillator at, then they would record those notes onto tape. And then in order to get a sequence of notes, you’d have to literally get a razor blade out and cut the tape. And you you know, after you pick the tempo, you would know, okay, based on my tape recorder being, you know, seven and a half inches per second. A quarter note equals exactly, you know, at this tempo, it equals you know, 3.7 seconds or something, which equates to how many inches of tape. So, like, if I want a quarter note of, you know, middle See, then I know I have to cut this tape, you know, to two and a half 2.47 inches or something. It’s like,
Andrew Dubber
yeah, I can’t sort of spoiled with digital multitrack Yeah,
Matt Morton
yeah, I mean, I know, I’m going down the rabbit hole. But like, basically, it was very meticulous work to do something like the doctor who theme song. I believe that, you know, Delia did not write that. But she, her job was to realise that using electronic, you know, music and music on credit. So that took her weeks, and
Andrew Dubber
yeah, really puts in perspective, the sort of the scale of what was required in order to put something like that together.
Matt Morton
Exactly. So it was exactly this tediousness that was motivating. Bob and Don, to speed the process up, you know, for people who don’t didn’t want to make music, live using a, you know, a rock band or an orchestra or whatever the people that were really pushing the boundaries of electronic music were were hoping to find ways to speed up the music on credit, or, you know, just the avant garde music production process. So that’s where like, the voltage control idea came about where you could use voltage being sent from either a keyboard or a, you know, anything an oscillator or a sequencer anything to control the oscillator to to change its pitch quickly. So you didn’t have to cut up a bunch of tape. You could kind of do these compositions in real time. So anyway, yeah. So I live in play live. Yeah. So herb and, and Bob and also like, actually a bunch of other musicians, you know, Wendy Carlos, Vladimir, who’s chesky. You know, various people had different ideas for like an envelope generator, which would control the contour of, you know, the attack, the decay, the sustain and the release of a note, you know, when you hit a key, how quickly does the note come on? And then how quickly does it fade away and Stuff like that. Other people had ideas for like the low pass filter, the very famous like war, how kind of kind of sound where you would be filtering away certain frequencies after you make them. And anyway, Bob, Bob’s approach was very, he was in touch with a lot of musicians, a lot of successful composers, commercial composers in the ad world in New York City. And so his designs tended to be a little bit more musical, traditionally wise, meaning it adhered kind of to the traditional Western 12 note scale, it was easier to kind of incorporate along with traditional instruments, you could you could make it Play Stick to normal scales, whereas Don Buccola was like he was out there, you know, making this thing and he was like, why are we making new instruments to make old music? So like, you know, when switched on, Bach came out which used a mogh synthesiser to to play old Bach music. That was in October of 1968. That was Wendy Carlos it was that it was a gigantic sensation at one chip. Yeah. Huge. blew up the synthesiser into into the mainstream awareness. And a lot of me’s it really divided all of the the synth lovers because there were a bunch of people like Morton subbotnik and Don Buccola. And, you know, Susie and Johnny and you know, all of the the folks who were trying to make a new music with the the new instruments and weren’t using 12 tone, the 12 tone, Western scale or, you know, traditional music scales or anything. And for them, it was like, Oh, my gosh, you know, now everyone’s going to use this synthesiser to just play the same old music that we’ve been playing for 100 years. So but you know, it’s got a sound squelch here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s, I like both worlds. I really do. There are things that that Bob’s machines do really well. And there are things that Dawn’s machines do really well. Because I was going to, basically, So, to answer the original question, I found the synthesiser to be sort of that analogue of the advances that were going on in NASA and you know, just like NASA’s advances in technology, that kind of what they came up with ended up having far reaching applications that they could have never dreamed of, it was almost like, you know, they came up with some of these ideas that were, you know, the, the effect on the future was like a cone shaped dispersion pattern, just reaching out, you know, left and right, hugely. Same thing happened with the synthesiser because, you know, you got the bleepy blew up West Coast synthesis stuff that kind of forged ahead and made sounds that no one had ever heard or dreamed of. And then you had the synthesiser, you know, the the more traditional applications of it. Going through Wendy Carlos and, and Keith Emerson with Emerson, Lake and Palmer and, you know, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. And in all of the guys, that tended to use it a little bit more within the framework of traditional music a little bit more but, and then you’ve got all of the sound effects being used on commercials and movies and whatnot. So it really blew up. Plus, you know, the synthesiser also enables, you know, things like dance music to happen. me think of like Giorgio Moroder you know, some of the disco era sounds that, that that repetitive you know, cycling of the sequencer, you know, the same eight notes over and over and over again, it’s propulsive and it, it sort of gave birth to new genres of music, you know, it’s it was still creating stuff in the late 80s, early 90s. With, with with acid house and stuff like that, and all the dance music that’s still going on. I mean, it’s pervasive in all of music now. But back then it wasn’t and so it was kind of the synthesiser was having its big bang, in the late 60s, just like all of the technological advances were at NASA so well,
Andrew Dubber
that’s a good cosmological way of explaining it the Big Bang of synthesisers and parallels, really nicely this idea of sort of mapping it onto a period space film Tell me about the three C’s specific Because that’s that I mean, that wasn’t an original that you got your hands on, was it
Matt Morton
right right? Yeah. So there you know, in the 60s A Moke synthesiser to get one like I have which, like you said it’s the Moog synthesiser, three see it’s it’s a modular synthesiser. But it was a pre configured set of modules. So in the early days, you could order as many or as few of any of the kinds of modules that you wanted. So, for people who aren’t familiar with what a modular synthesiser is, if you could picture like a 1920s or 30s telephone operator, with their little headset on and someone calls them and says, Please connect me with klondyke 57329 or something. And so they’re like, okay, hold please. And they get out a patch cord and they literally patch the call that they’re on into another part of their little electronic circuit board. And that literally in an analogue sense connects that call with this, the the network that they need to get to, to call the person that they want to a modular synthesiser is just like that you’ve got different modules that are mounted into this enclosure. So you’ve got basically wooden boxes with a bunch of electronics on the front. It’s, it’s, it’s very inspired. The design inspiration actually came from a lot of like World War Two type stuff with, you know,
Andrew Dubber
transmitters and that sort of thing.
Matt Morton
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, if you picture like a battleship with, you know, the radar going and like little dials and switches and stuff that it basically looks like that. But each module has a different job. And if you don’t connect them together, it makes no sound at all, you need to connect to the oscillator, which is the sound source. And any synthesiser has a bunch of oscillators, you patch those all into a mixer, which gives you the ability to kind of balance the different ingredients sound ingredients, then you patch all of that up into the filter, which can take away frequencies that you don’t need, which is it’s called subtractive synthesis, you start with a very rich sound, and then you take away what you don’t need. And that leaves you the sound that you then hear. Then from the filter to a VCA, which is basically like it, it only it’s kind of like an organ, it only lets notes through the gate, when you press the key on the keyboard. And then you’ve got the envelope generator that that gives shape to the notes and then you’ve got a mixer, then that runs into your, your recorder and whatnot. So the three see, you know, in the early days, you could you could configure your system any way you want it to but they started to see that everyone tended to like certain combinations of modules. So the there in us, I believe was 67. They started selling prefabricated, modular synthesisers, the one, the two and the three and the three was the biggest one. The C stands for wooden cabinet. So mine, mine was meant to kind of stay put in this in a studio. They later made the three p which is p for portable. And that came in like you know, black tolex cases that you could then put a you know, you could case it up and you could take it with you to a gig or
Andrew Dubber
right what you’ve got is kind of wall sized furniture, essentially a bookshelf system with knobs or knobs and cables all over the place.
Matt Morton
Yes, if you’ve ever seen a picture of Keith Emerson, playing the mogh modular synthesiser with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, where it’s just this huge wall of electronics with all these patch cords looking like you know, psychedelic like spaghetti. That’s what my basement looks like.
Andrew Dubber
So yeah, how much of the the sound generation and sound design and musicianship To be frank is about stumbling across sounds by playing with the knobs and how much of it is like you know, you know, we’re in the same way as like for instance, I guess a cellist as you also are understand knows where to put your fingers because that’s where you put your fingers before when it made the sounds that you like last time. How much of it sort of by accident how much by design when you’re creating sounds on the on the modular synth.
Matt Morton
I would say that it would vary from Q to Q or just you know, from musician to musician. I definitely wrote some music It totally sprang up from experimentation, you know, so there’s something really scary but fun about taking, just wiping out a patch. So if you stumble upon us a sound, it’s awesome. But like, you know, if you use a software instrument, you can, you can save that preset and come back to it anytime you want within, you know, a split second. It’s, it’s just like calling up, you know, if you’ve got Microsoft Word how you can open up a document, work on it, save the changes, close it open up a completely different document. And it’s always, it always brings you right back to the state of the document, when you left it last time, well, yeah, it old analogue gear doesn’t work that way. And actually,
Andrew Dubber
he taking photographs of, you know, how the setting was, when you liked it,
Matt Morton
I actually found that, it would be a little quicker for me to actually just use paper and pencil, I mean, totally old school way and just, if, when I would stumble upon a sound, I would, it was typically for a certain scene or for a certain piece of music, and I would, before I would wipe out the patch, I would just meticulously documented and sometimes it would take two or three pages, because you not only have to document you know, how the signal is routed, and how all the modulating the voltage modulation sources are routed, but you also then all the modules have, you know, switches and knobs and dials and stuff that are at certain, you know, spot, so every knob and switch and patch all has to be documented. So yeah, it would take quite some time, but I would kind of knowing that it was, it would take you 20 minutes to wipe out a patch and you know, a half hour to 40 minutes to build a patch up, even if I, you know, documented it perfectly, I would try to record, if I was doing a particular scene, or a queue, I would try to do it in various different ways, almost like you tried to get an actor to do it, like, all right, do it with more energy this time. All right, this time be a little sadder, you know, I would try to get takes of the queue down with some variety so that if I needed something different from it, you know, if the cut of the film changed, or I decided that this this sound was too bright, and I wanted a darker one, I would have it without having to, you know, do all the work of reconstructing the patch and re recording it and all that kind of stuff. So how
Andrew Dubber
are you thinking this two pictures?
Matt Morton
Um, well, so I recorded everything through the computer. Unfortunately, I you know, I would have loved to carry this idea of only using 1969 technology all the way to the bleeding edge, but the way that that modern movie making works, you need to be able to be fluid and make changes to the you know, the picture was changing up until like two days before the Sundance deadline. So I needed I needed to be able to make very small timing changes and all kinds of changes that just would not have been possible if I had to, you know, get a razor blade out and you know, do us a reel to reel tape recorder like they would have used back then. So I was using a computer back in the day and in the 60s, if you wanted to synchronise your synthesiser to a tempo, you would lay down a metronome click onto the tape. So say you had a you know, an eight or a 16 track recorder. Maybe you’d pick you know, track 16 or track eight to be kind of your tempo source. And so, you could then route that those steady clicks, you could route those into the synthesiser into a module called a envelope follower. So what that does is that you feed the the sound source into there and every time this it hears a sound that goes above a certain threshold of loudness. It not only generates a voltage route relative to that volume. So it you know, if you if, say your threshold was at negative 30 Db if a sound source came in at negative Have 28 db, it would trigger the key the the envelope follower, but it would, it would only put out a little voltage. Whereas if it came in at negative 10 db, which is much louder, it would, it would generate a voltage much louder but at the same time, it would also generate what’s called a trigger or a or a gate signal. And that gate signal could then be used to advance a sequencer by one step. So what a sequencer is it? It’s the thing that makes repeatable patterns in a synthesiser work. It basically spits out the notes over and over again, it’ll have an internal oscillator that’ll allow it to run at its own speed based on however you set the knob on the actual unit or it can be controlled by external gate signals or trigger sync signals. So essentially, I was sending trigger signals to the synthesiser it was hearing those trigger signals and it was advancing the sequencer by one note every time it heard the click coming off on a computer,
Andrew Dubber
so I’m not you’re not using MIDI in any way.
Matt Morton
No, I didn’t use MIDI for any pitches or anything like like say there was a melody and you know, I, I messed up and I hit a C sharp instead of a C. If you’re recording in MIDI, you could go back and you could you could just literally drag that note in the computer and just drag it down and then rerecord it to audio and you’d be good. All of the keyboard work all of the you know filter sweeps or changes in the synthesiser, those were all done in real time with my hands. I didn’t use MIDI for anything. But I what I did do I did use MIDI to control the sequencer on the synth. So instead of recording a metronome down to tape and sending it through the key, the envelope follower, like I explained, you know that someone in 1969 would do. Yeah, I could skip that step. And just send, you know, generic notes at a certain frequency I sent those to a MIDI to control voltage interface. And so I cut out the envelope follower and send trigger signals directly to the sequencer I held myself to the rule of Could it have been done and yes, it could have been done. But in certain, you know, situations where if it was just six in one hand and half dozen in the other, I opted for the easier route. So I did use MIDI but not in the way that you traditionally think of MIDI as being able to control every aspect of a synthesiser.
Andrew Dubber
So what apart from the the mode, three see sense. And the strings, obviously you’ve got from the orchestra. What other kit Have you got kicking around in there?
Matt Morton
So one of the main things that I used in the score was a, a, what’s called a binson echorec to it was, you know, back in the day, the only ways to get Echo, which is like you know, you make a note and then it goes you know, it’s like Echo, Echo, Echo Echo, something like that was either using a tape echo, which is you would use a tape recorder. And you would put it into record mode and but instead of monitoring the sound off of the record head, you would monitor it off of the playhead which would be you know, an inch or inch and a half or whatever, further down the tape path. So there would be a sound delay there. You could hear it in like kind of the early days of Sun Records. Elvis Presley, and in that, you know, john lennon used it a lot in his voice to where you get that slap back delay. So that would use magnetic tape. But in the 60s, there was an Italian company called Vinson, and they came up with a method of using a rotating drum with instead of tape they would put a magnetic strip around this rotating drum and then use tape heads around it and generate echo that way. And I was made aware of these through Pink Floyd, David Gilmore, and Syd Barrett and, and Roger Waters and those guys, those they use these back in the 60s and 70s for a bunch of kind of, you know, trippy, you know, sound design II type stuff and there’s a company in darbyshire specifically gritch up in the north of England, called sound gas limited, and I came upon them on Instagram. And they, they restore and modify all sorts of old vintage instruments and effects. And so because the Benson was developed in the 60s and, and whatnot that, you know, it was kind of fair game and I just saw these videos that they would make of just, you know, running old drum machines into them and u dub and stuff out and getting, you know, make coming up with all these trippy sounds. And I was like, that would be amazing to use on the soundtrack. So I bought a 60s era all valve binson echorec to which was not cheap, but very worth it. So a lot of the sounds of the synthesiser in Apollo 11, I would actually, I would direct all of the direct sound of the synth to one of the stereo sides, so maybe the right side or the left side of you know, just that one speaker, and then I would feed that into the Benson. And then sound guests actually did this modification, I was the first person to ever ask for it. But they gave me a wet only output of the binson echorec, too. So normally you would the output of the unit would give you the original sound plus the echoes added on to it right. But you could only turn up the echoes so loud. So you could never like have it be louder than the original source, for example. And I was like, you know, I’ll have more control with it in the mix, if I could just get the echo on its own. So they did that for me. And I ended up like really having a lot of fun during the experimentation process of using that wet only output and panning it opposite of the original dry signal. So if you would hear a note, you’d hear it on the right side, and then it would ping pong over to the left side, right as the new sound was appearing on the right. So you’d get these harmonies going. Instead of just hearing eight notes in a row, you’d hear the you know, note one on its own, then you’d hear the echo of note one and and the new note two on opposite sides, then you’d hear two and three, then you’d hear three and four, etc, etc. So I was able to use that throughout the whole score. But and
Andrew Dubber
I guess you’re adjusting the speed of the rotation of the cylinder in order to get them to match up.
Matt Morton
Yeah, the other thing that they did, which was not available on the original binson echorec units was they did a very speed modification. Meaning that on the Vinson, you have you know, an erase head and a record head and then you’ve got four to six different you know, playback heads and those playback heads, the positioning of them, and the distance from the record head gives you the delay time, right. So that delay time would kind of lock you into certain tempos that would work in musical ways. Say you wanted like an eighth note delay, or quarter note delay or something, you could only pick tempos that were mathematically you know, related to that, that speed or whatever. So what they are doing and still do is they will take out the old motor that only worked at one speed and they’ll put in a variable speed motor and add a knob on the side. And what that allows you to do is to match the the delay speed of the Benson to any tempo. So So yeah, I use that a tonne. And it’s a huge part of the score.
And it’s not like they couldn’t have done that in the 60s. It’s just that they didn’t.
Andrew Dubber
Right, exactly right. Gotcha. I have to say when I watched the film, and I seen this as the same incident, I didn’t get to see it in cinemas, but I did get to see it on a big system on a big screen. And it’s an incredibly impressive sounding piece of music as well. I mean, the, the presence of at the base of it the sort of the fullness and richness, the layers of sound, all that sort of thing. Is that something that is maybe a little bit more 21st century in terms of the production qualities that were going on?
Matt Morton
Yeah, probably, I mean, I probably had more tracks at my disposal than, you know, most people would have. I didn’t, I didn’t go overboard in in most situations. And, you know, if you look at the fact that, you know albums like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 67, when that came out, it blew everyone’s minds because at that point, all there was technology wise, were four tracks. I think in America, we were We’re a little more advanced than EMI was, you know, in London at Abbey Road in the Beatles were constantly on their case about like, come on, you know, like Motown has got an eight track or you know, yeah. goldstar has a 16 track or wherever. So what they would do is they would record four tracks, and then they’d live mix those four tracks down to one track on another four track. So they they would do what are called reduction mixes. So they turn four tracks into one track, and then they’d erase those original or start with fresh tape on the original four track. And then, you know, and then that’s a little Yeah, yeah, so it was possible to have endless tracks back in the day. But you had to make mix decisions much earlier than I needed to. And, you know, obviously, I tried to use period style mic preamps, you know, tube style preamps, and early solid state technology, as much as I could, but still, you know, the computer is always going to sound more clear than tape. And, you know, the other thing that you battle with reduction mixes and endless bouncing is that in the analogue world, you just end up getting more and more hiss and background noise. And the more times you rewind, and record and rewind, and play and rewind, you know, you’re wearing the tape down to the, the oxide is actually stripping off of the magnetic tape. So the audio quality probably was much higher with my production than it would have been at the time. But you know,
Andrew Dubber
well, I mean, I guess that sort of fits really nicely onto the, onto the archival footage that’s been restored and sort of maybe digitally enhanced and cleaned up clarified. And I guess there’s that sort of punch to it as well.
Matt Morton
There you go. It Yeah. And really, you know, there’s a difference between being just completely anal and and sticking to a rule that you set for yourself. And I don’t think that’s necessary. You know, I wasn’t trying to sound like Bernard Herman got a Moog synthesiser and did a score back then. And, you know, make it sound like someone who only heard music up until 1969 tried to make in 1969 sounding right score raises a
Andrew Dubber
really interesting question, because one of the things that had me wondering is to what extent is this Matt Moulton doing 1969 music? And to what extent is this? This is what Matt mountain music sounds like,
Matt Morton
right? Well, my main thing was, use an A period palette, but let myself be me. You know, let myself write music the way that I want to hear it, but because I’m using these old tools, it will have a certain sound that will hopefully kind of bridge the gap between then and now. I think if I would have written it, like a composer, you know, if you even just go back to scores recorded in the 90s, they sound kind of foreign to a modern ear. I would argue that a lot of you know, scoring, style changes. It changes more slowly than pop music, but it definitely you know, if you if you go back and listen to old comedy routines in the 70s some of them just, the jokes don’t land.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, for sure.
Matt Morton
If you go back and you listen to old scores, they, a lot of times they sound kind of cheesy or a little bit just too on the nose.
Andrew Dubber
Although Having said that, like 1968 I think it was Planet of the Apes was a sort of legendarily avant garde soundtrack. Yeah. And people were really pushing the boat out on what music should sound like for films. Yeah, at the exact time you were sort of aiming for how much of that sort of factored into what you’re doing? Well, I, you
Matt Morton
know, I certainly listened to, you know, my approach to scoring is very much like a method actor. I mean, I watched every NASA documentary, I could multiple times, every, you know, narrative recounting of the Apollo mission, I read as many books as I could not, not just on the Apollo programme, but also about music at the time, I watched other period films, etc. And I built up playlists in iTunes and Spotify of music of the time that you know, different palette ideas that I could maybe be inspired by and that kind of stuff. And if we wanted it to sound exactly like 1969, then maybe we should have just licenced tracks from back then because it’s impossible to remove. The last 50 years of music history from my brain. Yeah, like I was born in 77. So what do I know about like what it felt like to be in 69? Right. But at the same time, you’ve got an audience in the theatre, who also were not around at the time of the Apollo mission, either,
Andrew Dubber
or at least not functionally,
Matt Morton
right. But they and they want to experience this, but in order to communicate with them and tell the story in a way that they can feel it as a modern person. I felt like I needed to score it in a modern way.
What What is the sound of Matt Morton’s music, what, what sort of sounds authentically, you
Matt Morton
know, I don’t know. I mean, it’s different every day. And that’s kind of why I’m a composer, I mean, I have been in bands where you have to kind of shoehorn any idea that you come up with into the genre that your audience expects to hear or wants to hear, you know, being in a rock band, if you come up with an idea for like, you know, an electronic music track or a string quartet or something like that. You either file it away for another day, or you figure out a way to kind of transpose that into the genre that your band is coming out with. I mean, there are a few artists like David Bowie or back or Madonna, or, you know, people like that, who are chameleons. But they’re, you know, most bands, or artists tend to have to stick in their wheelhouse a little bit. You know, if, if Jay Z came out with an opera next week, I don’t know that his fan base would, you know, go along with him. But when you’re a composer, you get hired one day to do, you know, a hospital commercial using piano and strings, the next day, you have to score a rocket launch and make it sound, you know, super mean, or big or gigantic, you know, then the next day, you’re, you know, you’re doing a bluegrass tune or something like that. And I love that like, right, because I listen, I listen to and love all those types of music, I don’t do all of them equally well, but I really enjoy the variety. And so because I, I love all kinds of music and love all kinds of instruments. And you know, if you saw my, my studio, it’s just full of everything. It’s like, you know, sometimes you see the the box of Crayola crayons, and it’s like eight colours or 16. And like, I’ve got the pack of like 5000. And so when I’m working on any certain project, I’ve learned that you can’t just like let yourself use anything, I find that I could get more creative, come up with better ideas and work faster. If I limit my palette, limit the time that I spend on it. And, you know, kind of Ironically, the, the smaller the corner that you paint yourself into, the more free you are to kind of be creative and come up with innovative solutions that you wouldn’t normally if you could just use kind of anything under the sun. So, you know, I’d say that my music started when I was nine as a guitar player and bass player. And I definitely come from like a rock pop area, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, you know, all the music of the 60s 70s 80s all of those tones, just kind of in my head in a blender. And, you know, like the Beatles, their use of the orchestra definitely opened my eyes to the fact of like, you don’t just have to be a rock musician. You could take a song that you wrote on guitar and turn it into a double string quartet, like Eleanor Rigby. I take stuff I write on the ukulele and turn it into orchestra or mode or whatever. You know, in a band, you have to filter all this stuff through your bandmates in in filmmaking, you have to filter it all through the story you’re trying to tell and the collective vision of all of the filmmakers that you’re working with. And I dig that too, because you know, the the ideas that other people have and the length of the scene and the overall visual approach and artistic approach of the film also paints me into a smaller and smaller corner. And so it’s like, I like those creative restrictions and kind of, it’s, it’s like when you’re in school, and you you want to write an essay, like you have to you have to write a 10 page paper or something. Well, you can’t make a 10 page paper, about wine. It’s too vast of a subject. It is It’ll give you paralysis and you won’t know where to start. But the more and more you drill down to a specific thing, then then it opens the floodgates. And you can just gush out the information that you have. So you could write a 10 page paper on organic winemaking in the Sonoma Valley, you know, after 2010. And after, you know, the effects of you know, this or that amendment to the National Organic standards or something like that, you know,
Andrew Dubber
if the more you narrow down and focus, the more you can say things that I guess universal,
Matt Morton
yeah, and it just, it takes out that like paralysis by analysis thing, where it’s like, Okay, if I’ve only got these eight colours, then you’re a lot quicker to flow through your ideas. So much music gets the life edited out of it. I try very hard, I’m very detail oriented. And so I have to be very careful to try to not let myself you know, quantize everything or, you know, meaning line it all up on on the grid exactly mathematically where the notes should lie. If you listen to real musicians, they don’t, when a track is really groove, and you listen to a really good funk band. They are not quantized they are not on the grid, they are dragging that beat at various different levels. In fact, like after years and being in bands, I was at this party and it was right when Guitar Hero was coming out the video game where you kind of like match the notes on the little five button guitar controller. Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
And accuracy is everything right?
Matt Morton
Yeah, yeah, accuracy is everything. And it wants you to be like robotically on the beat. And so I was, I was put, you know, I knew that how to play the songs on a real guitar. Because I’ve been teaching guitar for almost 20 years and playing since 1986.
Andrew Dubber
Right. But you swing. So you did so I
Matt Morton
was swinging and I was behind the V. And I was like, Oh, he’s getting destroyed by non musicians who just knew how to manipulate the controller, and you know, what the game wanted for from you, you know, timing wise. So.
Andrew Dubber
So what’s next for you? You’ve I mean, obviously, Apollo 11 was was massively successful. And and, you know, hugely acclaimed, where do you go next from there?
Matt Morton
Well, I did a short film for ESPN in top rank boxing with Peter Berg. Last fall, it was called heavy, which was fury versus shorts. So fury, the the heavyweight champion boxer had a match. And basically peterburg saw Apollo 11. And he was thinking, I think one of the things I tried to do with the score was try to underline the danger that the astronauts were under, and basically just how difficult the task was. Because nowadays, it’s like, people don’t understand how if it wasn’t a sure thing that they were even gonna survive. I mean, now we we grew up our whole lives, knowing that we walked on the moon and Apollo 11 was successful, and who cares, Yon move on to the next thing, but back in the day, I mean, they had a one in four chance of dying like that. If you hand me four, face down playing cards and tell me that one out of the four is means that you’re going to put a gun to my head and kill me. I don’t like that game very much. But those guys knowingly did that. Well. So I tried to make put that in the music. He saw that and he actually, so he’s a he’s a director of famous for lone survivor. Friday Night Lights, all of Mark Wahlberg’s last five or six films, he but he also owns a boxing gym. He loves it, he it’s kind of his life. So he saw that in he was seeing in the in the headlines that tonnes of boxers were dying from swelling in their brains, you know, a couple of days after a match that, you know, they walked out of the ring and then died in a hospital bed a couple days later. So he was like, you know, that music and that vibe of Apollo 11 kind of works. It would be cool to do a verity boxing, short film, and have it give it the date the sense of danger and the
Andrew Dubber
heavy peril. Yeah,
Matt Morton
yeah. Yeah. So we did that last fall. And, and I actually just this week, got the Greenlight. We closed a deal on an upcoming thing for broadcast but I’m not allowed to talk about it, yet. But something very exciting is coming up. So
Andrew Dubber
More spaceships?
Matt Morton
No, not spaceships. But But definitely people living on the edge and trying things that have never been done. And, and it’s also back 4050 years ago era,
Andrew Dubber
so human conquest and exploration.
Matt Morton
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I’m really excited about that. I wish I could share more. But that’s one of the bummers about being a composer is, you know, if you’re in a band, you know, right away while you’re playing the song, if the song is being, you know, received well by the audience, if you play a great show, you end your set, you put your guitar down, and you go, you know, go to the bar to get a drink, and, and somebody comes up, and it’s like, oh, my God, amazing. And it’s like, you get instant feedback and gratification. So if you’re a composer, you might have the day, you’re the composing day of your whole career, and just nail it and just, you know, do the best cue ever, and no one will know for six to 12 months, and even then, like, they might see it in the theatre and be like, wow, that music’s awesome. But never, you know, that compliment never makes its way back to you. So
Andrew Dubber
Well, the good news is you can still go to the bar. Yeah, that part of it still works.
Matt Morton
That’s right. That’s right. There’s always the bar.
Andrew Dubber
That seems like a good place to leave it. But thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Matt Morton
Oh, man, thanks for having me. It was it’s really fun on I could talk about this stuff for hours. So
Andrew Dubber
that’s film score composer Matt Morton, and that’s the MTF podcast. You can find Matt and a lot more about his music and his vintage synthesiser gear at Matt Morton music.com. I’m Andrew Dubber. If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find me at Dubber and mtfs at Music Tech Fest all one word dmtf podcasts out every Friday. So if you haven’t already, you can subscribe on Apple podcasts, overcast Spotify or whatever your favourite podcast app might be. And if you do like what you hear, you can share rate and review us. It really helps other people who might be into this sort of thing to find us. Go wash your hands, be safe, be healthy. Have a great week and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.
