# Music for children's TV shows?



## Mason (Mar 19, 2019)

Anyone here who have any experience with this? Do they use library music or usually hiring a composer? I've always thought it would be fun to do and there's a lot of easy listening orchestral music in these shows.


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## Guy Rowland (Mar 19, 2019)

"Children's shows" is such an incredibly broad term its almost meaningless when it comes to music. A show for preschoolers will be worlds apart from a drama or factual show for early teens. It's about as varied as the rest of TV - some library, some commissions etc. If you have a specific genre and age group in mind I might be able to narrow it down a bit, but even there I only know much about the UK in truth.


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## studiostuff (Mar 19, 2019)

Depends quite a bit on the show budget which is usually pretty low... 

Also depends somewhat on the production group leaders. If they feel like purpose-built music contributes to some sort of show creative mission, there might be money for real humans.

I agree, sounds like that might be a fun gig.


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## Mason (Mar 19, 2019)

Guy Rowland said:


> "Children's shows" is such an incredibly broad term its almost meaningless when it comes to music. A show for preschoolers will be worlds apart from a drama or factual show for early teens. It's about as varied as the rest of TV - some library, some commissions etc. If you have a specific genre and age group in mind I might be able to narrow it down a bit, but even there I only know much about the UK in truth.



Haha, that's so true, so I'm gonna be very specific:


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## Guy Rowland (Mar 20, 2019)

Ah right, the much younger end of things. That one is scored - sometimes they are made from a kit of parts. But they can be verrry lucrative with repeats on rotation, so its pretty competitive.


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## Desire Inspires (Mar 21, 2019)

Guy Rowland said:


> Ah right, the much younger end of things. That one is scored - sometimes they are made from a kit of parts. But they can be verrry lucrative with repeats on rotation, so its pretty competitive.



Hmmm, I need to knock out some of these and get them into the hands of Youtubers.


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## Guy Rowland (Mar 21, 2019)

Umm, not so lucrative with YouTubers. That's a whole different thing. I was referring to syndicated TV.


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## studiostuff (Mar 21, 2019)

It's very competitive. As with any of this work, it helps an enormous amount to know someone on the show... who knows and likes your work... and likes working with you.

Everyone has a nephew who "writes music" and a girlfriend who is a "great singer". Many times, it does not matter that your work is perfect for the show, or that the music the show is using is less than skillfully created.

As mentioned, if the show is on 400-500 TV outlets in the US and Canada, seven days a week, sometimes more than once a day, for several years... it can be a lot of fun to go to the mailbox.

Everyone wants that gig. Most of them are very good at doing this sort of work!


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## re-peat (Mar 21, 2019)

I wrote the Uki music. The series — which was produced more than 10 years ago — needed original music because, there being no dialog, music had a rather important role to play in helping to communicate the content. That’s also why it’s mostly unashamedly mickey-mousing music, illustrating just about every single emotion, facial expression, idea and movement that occurs on screen.

Couldn’t have worked with library music. You’d be searching for days — nay, weeks — in library collections to find suitable cues but you’d never end up with anything even remotely close to the way the original music wraps itself so tightly and evocatively around the visuals and storylines.

And besides: days or weeks weren’t available. The production was quite an exhausting period (for everyone involved) as you will immediately understand after I tell you that most of the 52 episodes had their music made — written, recorded, mixed and delivered to post-production — in … a single day. That was the schedule: one episode per day. I still get faint in the head when I think back to that time.

Every 5 min. episode has a 2’20” central story which always has completely new, non-stop music. The ‘didactic’ segments around that central story however often re-used short bits of music that was written for earlier episodes.

The schedule being as crazy as it was, also resulted in the fact that there were never any corrections or revisions to be done. No one looked over my shoulder while I worked (as everyone was terribly busy doing their own thing) and I simply could do what I wanted to do. Well, most of the time anyway. I just had a look in my Uki-archives and of the 52 Logic files, there are only two that have the tag ‘corr’ in their name, meaning that in only 2 episodes I was asked to make an edit or a change.

Also keep in mind that all of that music was made with libraries, software and tools which are not as user-friendly and instantly-gratifying compared to what’s available today. All of it was made using the old Sonic Implants (EXS-version), XSample, Advanced Orchestra, some early ProjectSam stuff, Synful, VIR2 Elite Percussion and, in a prominent role, the old VSL Horizon Woodwind Ensembles (also the EXS version) … (plus lots of stuff I can't remember).

Sadly, on top of the limitations of the sample libraries, the absurdly strenuous work schedule was also one of the main reasons why much of the music sounds as bad as it does. More like a sketch, if you ask me today, and a very rough one, than a finished product. It’s terribly poorly mixed and produced, I find. Entirely my fault, I’m afraid. But there simply wasn’t any time to polish.

I am however quite proud of much of the musical content. Not only does it do what it is required to do, but it’s very tuneful music, and there are also many moments where there was room, I felt, for techniques that you wouldn’t immediately expect in music for pre-school kids: bitonality, dissonance, unusual modulations, …

And there’s no arguing with the fact that the series was *hugely* successful. It was sold to and aired in 25 countries and it’s still being shown today in some of them, it received awards, spawned a wide range of merchandise, got great reviews all over the globe, and it’s also the only time that I received mails from parents, some in very distant countries, wanting to tell me how much their children enjoyed Uki and its music.

And that was the greatest reward of all. Because that is precisely what I set out to do: create music which one or two generations of children, when grown up, would remember fondly, the way I remember some of the music of tv-shows from my childhood with undying affection. I think those are *very* powerful memories. And I am also of the opinion that it is of undescribable importance to feed our youngest other music — gentle music, more melodious, a bit old-fashioned perhaps, sunny, expressive, pure and uncynical, yet not without some musical sophistication — than the loud, noisy, one-dimensional, dancebeat-driven music which one hears way too often these days, in my opinion, in pre-school kids tv-shows.

_


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## Saxer (Mar 21, 2019)

Great story! Thanks for sharing!


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## NathanTiemeyer (Mar 21, 2019)

Awesome stuff. And great music


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## ism (Mar 21, 2019)

re-peat said:


> I wrote the Uki music. The series — which was produced more than 10 years ago — needed original music because, there being no dialog, music had a rather important role to play in helping to communicate the content. That’s also why it’s mostly unashamedly mickey-mousing music, illustrating just about every single emotion, facial expression, idea and movement that occurs on screen.
> 
> Couldn’t have worked with library music. You’d be searching for days — nay, weeks — in library collections to find suitable cues but you’d never end up with anything even remotely close to the way the original music wraps itself so tightly and evocatively around the visuals and storylines.
> 
> ...




Great story. And that’s very lovely music. It works wonderfully with the content.

Would love to hear more about writing in this kind of uncynical emotional space , should you ever feel compelled to write more.


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## Desire Inspires (Mar 21, 2019)

Guy Rowland said:


> Umm, not so lucrative with YouTubers. That's a whole different thing. I was referring to syndicated TV.



It depends.


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## Saxer (Mar 21, 2019)

Guy Rowland said:


> ...with repeats on rotation...


This was probably a kind of divine afflatus?


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## Guy Rowland (Mar 21, 2019)

Wow, didn't know you did that Piet. 52 episodes must have sent you stir crazy, but I'd love a 2 1/2 minute score per day gig for, well 30 of them? You got terrific results for that time and budget, and I can well imagine how gratifying the letters were.


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## Mason (Mar 21, 2019)

What a wonderful surprise to have the composer here! I realize that with the question about library music this series wasn’t a good example as it’s easy to hear that it was made especially for the series. But it’s a perfect example of wonderful music for this age group and I agree that they deserve good music. So well done, and I love your intro and the very thoughtful outro.


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## re-peat (Apr 25, 2020)

Here's *a montage *(much of it remixed and in parts re-recorded) of some of the Uki-music.

_


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## ism (Apr 25, 2020)

Such a great thread.


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## AlexRuger (Apr 25, 2020)

Composing for anything that's animated and/or children-oriented is one of my favorite things in the world. 

I've done a good bit of this work, but a notable one is a Nick Jr show called Mutt & Stuff. I worked for the lead composer Michael Picton (an absolutely brilliant dude, total monster of a composer) and eventually brought on @NoamL to take over my position when I left to go work for JXL.

As others in this thread have pointed out, it's tough. There's no room for lazy writing, and music editing is often a fool's errand. We were fortunate on M&S that there were several recurring segments that only required minor timing tweaks, so I (and later Noam) handled that either with the DAW session or with stems. I also wrote a good deal of additional music, which was a blast. That sort of stuff is precisely why I got into this work -- writing colorful, dynamic orchestral music that turns on a dime. It's super detailed stuff and can be quite exhausting, but that's the fun of it for me. It's when I can write lazy that I start getting burnt out and depressed. Being forced to actually bring it on a musical level day in and day out is energizing -- to a point, of course. As with so much TV, the schedule eventually got nearly impossibly short (I want to say 2 days for a 22 minute episode at its shortest?) and of course at that point there's hardly time to take a dump, let alone spend an extra 5 minutes working on your brass programming. 

The silver lining, though, is that orchestral realism often isn't the goal here. I had one recurring children's gig where I was encouraged to not only use the stock Kontakt libraries, but to even make them dry! "Plastic" orchestra really just works for this stuff, so usually the time spent tweaking and producing is very very minimal. As we all know, that takes the most time, and well-orchestrated music mixes itself. So it can just about feel like you're just writing notation and calling it a day. It's very "pure."

It's weird -- that segment of work isn't typically what I'm trying to "brand" myself as, but if I'm honest with myself, if I had to choose only one genre to do forever, it'd probably be that.


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## asherpope (Apr 25, 2020)

Great thread! I've only done a couple of animated sizzle reel shorts myself, but I found them to be the most satisfying scoring jobs I've ever done.


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## Kent (Apr 26, 2020)

AlexRuger said:


> I had one recurring children's gig where I was encouraged to not only use the stock Kontakt libraries, but to even make them dry!



Interesting! The producers specifically requested Kontakt Factory Library? Do you know why this is?


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## AlexRuger (Apr 26, 2020)

kmaster said:


> Interesting! The producers specifically requested Kontakt Factory Library? Do you know why this is?


No, it’s not like they actually know specific products. We just kept landing on faker and faker stuff and all those were what they responded to best.


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## Nils Neumann (Apr 26, 2020)

AlexRuger said:


> No, it’s not like they actually know specific products. We just kept landing on faker and faker stuff and all those were what they responded to best.



That's interesting. I wonder if this is just the result of conditioning. Centuries of underfunded children's tv show music, and suddenly the "cheap sound" is associated with children's music?


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## AlexRuger (Apr 26, 2020)

Nils Neumann said:


> That's interesting. I wonder if this is just the result of conditioning. Centuries of underfunded children's tv show music, and suddenly the "cheap sound" is associated with children's music?


I suppose so, but I think it's less negative than that...the animation style of this stuff tends to be very flat and bright, and that sound just works. Realistic orchestra ends up feeling very contrived and too dramatic.

That said, Mutt & Stuff was live action, so our mockups were quite realistic and we recorded a fair amount of soloists. Just depends on the gig.


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## Nils Neumann (Apr 26, 2020)

AlexRuger said:


> I suppose so, but I think it's less negative than that...the animation style of this stuff tends to be very flat and bright, and that sound just works. Realistic orchestra ends up feeling very contrived and too dramatic.
> 
> That said, Mutt & Stuff was live action, so our mockups were quite realistic and we recorded a fair amount of soloists. Just depends on the gig.



Could you post a link to that? Would love to hear that


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## Bighill (Apr 26, 2020)

I´m new here, but have been working with music all my life. I did a Norwegian kid show, "Elias, the little Rescue Boat" a while ago. 99 short tv-episodes and 3 feature films. On the films I got to use an orchestra, the tv stuff was all samples. I found a clip from the first film, music starts at 1.30


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