Composer Cribs: Heavy Melody Music – New York City

Who ain’t kiddin? These 10-ton gorillas of music for picture: Heavy Melody Music.

Founded over a decade ago by Dave Fraser and Neil Goldberg, this is a made-in-Manhattan musical lovefest that just keeps on producing. HM has its hands in some of everything – movies, TV, ads, trailers, video games…they’ll eat it all.

But since they keep crazy busy, they’re also the proud papas of Heavyocity, which makes some of the most inspiring virtual instruments to be found by composers and producers. That includes the HEAVILY (get it!!) used Evolve, AEON and the new Damage.

But fear not, these are giants are gentle. And you’re invited into their lair…

Weight up: Neil Goldberg of Heavy Melody Music/Heavyocity

Composer Name: Heavy Melody Music | Heavyocity Media

Website: http://www.heavymelodymusic.com | http://www.heavyocity.com

Location: Chelsea – Manhattan, NY

Soundtracks Served: We compose for all media types: Video Game, Motion Picture and Television advertising, TV underscores, with a major portion of our work appearing in film trailers.

In addition to Composition, we also develop award-winning virtual instruments (Damage, The AEON Collection, DM-307, Evolve, Evolve Mutations Bundle) with our sister company, Heavyocity Media.

Clients/Credits: Trailer music and sound design elements for Godzilla, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Oz The Great & Powerful, Pacific Rim, The Lone Ranger, Zero Dark Thirty, and many others.

Big Premiere: Heavy Melody Music was founded in 2003 by Neil Goldberg and Dave Fraser.

Room Inspiration: When we built the facility, the location was based on the type of space available, the rent, and proximity to the ad agencies and game companies we worked with.

Space is limited in Manhattan so we set up three main composing/mixing rooms, two of which share a central live room.

We also used a good amount of the overall space for a lounge and kitchen area for clients to hang out in.

Key Personnel: Neil Goldberg (Co-founder/Composer/Sound Designer), Dave Fraser (Co-founder/Composer/Sound Designer), Ari Winters (Partner/Composer/Sound Designer), George Valavanis (Senior Product Manager/Composer/Sound Designer).

Yes, Dave Fraser is always this elated.

Workflow Requirements: Each room needed a lot of space for 88 key controllers, mixers, a lot of hardware synths and guitars in my case.

A composing room’s setup presents different challenges over just mixing: like being able to perform on the keyboard, edit in your DAW and have access to a mixer. We’re on our third set of Argosy desks since 2001 (currently the Argosy Dual 15K desk)!

When we moved in to HM from Sunday Productions (our former jingle house gig) back in 2003, we were already using Mackie D8B’s fully loaded with option cards to bring in all of the synths as well as three custom PC’s with gigastudio. We had custom-built desks to hold our workstations and controllers, but the workflow was never great.

Moving the keyboard controllers to be central made more sense than the mixer. We were doing most of the mixing in the DAW, and just managing small moves and all the inputs on the console.

About seven or eight years ago the D8B’s went away and we started mixing in the box with summing mixers and bus compressors on the 2 bus.

In the last 3-4 years we shifted to 12 core macs running the Main DAW (Digital Performer), plus Vienna’s VE Pro for additional virtual instrument management. We also run two Mac Pro 8-core’s as slaves for additional sample libraries.

It’s a lot of inputs and overhead to manage on big trailer music tracks, so we recently upgraded three of the four rooms to API’s “The Box” consoles. It has been great to get back to having a physical mixer with program and channel inserts, nice mic pre/EQ and faders on the 16 summing channels, plus the sonic character is great.

We’re all using a lot of plugins for mixing but I’ve got a pair of Neve 33122’s, Wunder PEQ-1’s, the UA 2-1176, Dangerous Music Bax EQ, Grace Design M201 stereo pre and Dramastic Audio’s Obsidian Compressor. It’s nice to have the Obsidian and the API 2500 series stereo compressors for different applications.

We also have some extensive Eurorack Synth outboard rigs. We can route the audio from our systems into those rigs to process the sounds, or perform some beefy synth modules via MIDI.

We’re using Genelec 8040’s and Focal Subs.

Picture This: We used to run PCI video Cards to TV monitors but we’ve simplified to QuickTime running full screen on a second 27” monitor.

Audience Accommodations: Our rooms are tuned using Auralex’s consulting/design, three 27” monitors (one for video playback) and the Genelec’s and subs.

Complex Cue: A few years back, we did some remixes for Electronic Arts’ Need For Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed.

The gig required us to create some pretty aggressive but consumable tracks out of the original sessions. We got stems from bands like The Stone Temple Pilots, 30 Seconds To Mars, Hollywood Undead, and a bunch more.

It was a blast to work on, but we were literally building tracks from the ground up. For the most part we just used the lead vocal or a guitar line and everything else was produced by us.

Priceless Advice: If you want to stay busy as a composer you need to take all of the opportunities you can find, and YOU need to find them.

You’ve got to be very proactive, working with young directors, composing library music and assisting others. When we started in the industry we wore a lot of hats and composed in many styles for long form TV, independent film, video games and regional, then national TV spots.

Aspire to be the best you can, and continually improve your skills through listening, learning and experience.

— Neil Goldberg, C0-Founder, Heavy Melody Music & Heavyocity

Who dat? Ari Winters!

George Valavanis made a massive impression on the Heavy Melody men.

Take Two, no Heavy Humans: Neil’s suite.

Dave’s room.

Ari’s space…with space.

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