Inside the Lives of Composers for Hire

Commercial composer Matt Filler’s workstation at Pralaya.

You can’t really sing. Your 12-tone concept album about incidental “Game of Thrones” characters doesn’t have quite the audience you thought it would. Every year, it seems musicians less talented, yet more attractive than you are “making it”, while 19 year-old NPR interns are aiding in the collapse of the music industry.

Pick any of these harsh “realities” of being a musician today and it will lead you to the same conclusion: You can’t make a living creating and selling your own music anymore. Frank Ciampi and Matt Filler would beg to differ. They are the composers for hire behind that upbeat 30-second TV ad for jeans, behind the flourishing zing of a corporate logo on your computer screen, behind the soundtrack to a whimsical montage in an animated show. Commercial composition may lack the fame, fortune, or prestige that the young musician dreams of, but it provides something many musicians want even more: a reasonable playbook for succeeding in a music business that so often appears to have no rules.

7 Songs About Shampoo in 36 Hours or Less

“When we pick up a guitar at age 12, we don’t say ‘Hey, I wanna write songs for cat food commercials when I grow up,’” says Matt Filler, the driving force behind Brooklyn’s Pralaya Productions. “But [until I started doing commercial work] I don’t think I honestly ever considered how I could possibly make a dime from doing what I love the most.”

When SonicScoop first profiled Filler and Pralaya in May of 2013, the newly minted freelancer had just completed a round of seven demos for a “super-sexy shampoo / hair product commercial”. Since then, Filler’s business has grown in leaps and bounds. He now composes for a number of music houses in the U.S., and works closely with Haus International, and Music and Strategy, a partner of the Downtown Music Group.

“You just get better because you spend so many hours doing it,” Filler says of commercial composing. “There’s also those things that an engineer friend might show you, that change the way you work and allow you to make a leap forward overnight… and you have to keep educating yourself when you have the time.”

While interning for the music house Audiobrain in 2011, Filler contributed sound design for small projects, including interactive software sounds (think of an instant message sound or Brian Eno’s theme for Windows) eventually working up to projects like TV spots, and only getting paid when his work was actually used.

“I was totally green, but I got some nice opportunities because they had nothing to lose by throwing projects my way. If they didn’t like my work, they didn’t have to submit it. They had other composers working on the stuff, too.”

The idea of several different composers in competition to create a ‘better’ piece of music than the next guy may seem like the antithesis of the artistry and singular vision we often associate with creative music, but it’s common practice in the commercial music world. “We usually try to pull in 6-8 composers for a spot, depending on the demo budget,” says Amanda Fink, a music producer for Mophonics, a music house with offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Music houses like Mophonics work with ad agencies to create “briefs” of the preferred sound and style for an ad’s music. They then send those briefs out to both in-house composers and freelancers like Filler, soliciting demo submissions, often on incredibly tight deadlines.

“It can be anywhere from 24 hours to a week, but usually around 2-3 days on average,” says Fink. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen longer than a week. A week is like a cakewalk.” The music house’s demo budget for the commercial can range anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000, depending on the spot. The music house splits the demo budget among its pool of submitting composers, ensuring some compensation for their work even if it doesn’t win the bid. The winning composer, however, can bank a payday that’s anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $15,000 and up. “It’s like baseball,” says Filler. “Batting .300 seems like a great place to be.”

A winning bid isn’t always the end of the story. Clients often come back with a host of revisions, sometimes on even more unforgiving deadlines. “If you’re doing revisions, it means they like your work, which is great,” says Filler. “But it’s often hard to [decide] exactly what changes they want without making so many changes that you compromise what they liked about your track(s) in the first place.” “Also, revisions often have insane deadlines, like late at night. And audio work becomes very challenging after 12 consecutive hours! The major challenge is keeping things simple and working objectively—not letting your anxieties take over.”

Matt Filler

Earning a big payday for your original music certainly helps: “It feels incredible,” says Filler. “It’s highly competitive, and there’s a lot at stake, so I put my heart fully into every project. Honestly, win or lose, it’s always a winning situation, and I always stand to gain. This is a job where one learns something new and valuable almost everyday.”

Amanda Fink says that composing commercial music is a great way for songwriters to hone their skills so that their own music stands a better chance in the commercial market. She mentions former Mophonics in-house composer Mark Foster, the man behind Foster the People and the insanely-catchy-no-really-please-get-it-out-of-my-head “Pumped Up Kicks”.

“During the day, Mark was writing commercial music, and at night we gave him the keys to the studio and he was writing his own stuff and recording himself. He wrote ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ and the rest of the first EP in our Mophonics office.”

“I think it’s a great story because, as a musician, if you start writing music for commercials full-time, you start to know what people want to hear and what is radio-friendly.”

Filler believes that commercial work forces composers to stretch toward genres and production-styles that they might not have tried on their own, ultimately making them more well-rounded. “I did the typical Ukulele indie-pop with female vocals thing last week. That was all analog. The next day I was making ‘trap music’, all heavy, trashy synths with a ton of editing and slicing, and ‘stings’ or big hitting moments everywhere, and that was all soft-synths and samples.”

“Writing and producing for commercials has made me a much better songwriter in general. The devices one might employ when writing a commercial track are the same devices that might make a regular old song really good. I get the same satisfaction and I’m challenged in the same way regardless.”

The Limbo Artist

Commercial composer Frank Ciampi at his home studio.

“I was that Jaco bass guy,” says Frank Ciampi, chuckling. “I still am.” As a four-year bass student at Berklee, Ciampi had the talent to be a New York jazzbo, but lacked the mindset. A deep dive into The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds in his senior year provided Ciampi with the final nail for his bass virtuoso coffin.

“It brought me full circle: from trying to write songs when I was a kid, to just trying to play as fast as I could at Berklee. I started writing songs again. I probably hadn’t written anything in four years. For my senior recital, I did a bass duet of ‘God Only Knows’ with my teacher. I think the chair of the music department walked out on it.”

After graduation, Ciampi wrote songs for his Berklee friends, power-pop band The Click Five. In the process, he forged a relationship with the band’s producer, Mike Denneen, and later recorded his solo debut, Big Top Woman, at Denneen and co-owner Jon Lupfer’s Q Division Studios in Boston.

By the time Ciampi had an inkling to try composing for commercials, he had earned the studio management’s trust and attention. “‘Can you do it?’ [studio manager Ed Valauskas] asked me, and I was like ‘Yeah, I can do it’. I downloaded two YouTube videos that night and did some stuff I had never done before. At the time, I had one orchestra sample library that I thought sounded super-real.

We put together a presentation for the two owners of Q Division. They had two studios and a back room that wasn’t being used, and the idea was to open up a commercial house there. We pitched it, and they said ‘If you can get the clients and you can get the work, then let’s do it’.”

Ciampi was given a salary, his own desk, and what he considered his “dream job”. I ask about the first commercial music he sold: “Spinmaster Havoc Heli Laser Battle Air Hogs R/C Helicopters,” he fires off after a second’s thought. “I remember the name because it was the most ridiculous commercial I had ever seen in my life—toy helicopters with these CGI lasers and this super-epic music I put behind it.”

Business was uneven during Ciampi’s few years as head of Q Division’s “Music Services” department. He won bids, mostly with Canadian ad firms, bringing money into the studio at a break-even pace, matching his outgoing salary. In hindsight, he believes being his own middleman hurt his chances with American firms. Other music houses could offer music from pools of composers; Ciampi could only offer his own.

When Ciampi launched his freelance commercial composing career, he hooked up with his old high school friend, Amanda Fink of Mophonics, and began winning bids at a much higher rate through the music house. Ciampi’s reel now includes ads for carmakers Honda, Mitsubishi, and Nissan; Taylor Made Golf Clubs and Walmart, to name a few.

In his home studio, Ciampi takes me through a tour of some of the sample libraries and plug-ins that he constantly purchases with his reinvested profits. He loads up an orchestral library in ProjectSAM, with crashing cymbals, tympani drums, and tense orchestral hits, and in a few seconds is thumping out what sounds like a cut-rate version of the “Jaws” theme on his keyboard. Ciampi loads a string sound and pattern in a Sonokinetic library, which can play orchestral chord loops, then holds down a chord. The back-and-forth string movement conjures up images from a scene in some dog-and-cat buddy movie where they cross Middle America wheat fields on an epic journey home. He loads Soundiron’s Requiem Light (a program that creates choral bursts of various Latin syllables) and plays some heavy minor chords, unleashing a demonic chorus for another sequel to “The Omen”.

Outboard racks at Ciampi’s studio.

“I found out when I was doing commercials that most of us have the same sample libraries and the same access to them,” Ciampi says. “If you watch reality TV, you can hear this stuff all the time. So what separates us is the music, obviously, but also the quality, and that’s where my hardware comes in to play.”

Ciampi uses Vienna Ensemble Pro 5 as a host to trigger his various library sounds while synced with Pro Tools. He then sends his sounds to his outboard gear—a Shadow Hills Industries Mastering Compressor, a Pendulum Audio PL-2 Limiter, an SPL MK2-T Vitalizer—where he can manipulate the stock sounds and print them back to a new track.

“It gives me a slight sonic advantage,” Ciampi says. “It’s subtle, but it’s there. People are scared to use outboard gear like this because you have revisions, but if you take notes, the minutes you lose in set-up are worth it with what you gain back in quality. People say ‘this sounds a little different from the last three other guys we heard’, even though I’m using a lot of the same stuff.”

“I honestly think 50% of the job is getting the mix right,” he adds. “It’s something I understood from my time at Q Division. You’re putting a string section sampled in one hall with a bunch of other instruments sampled in other halls, and the mix can get really muddy—a sonic mess.”

Commercial work has led to a new passion, and one that has brought Ciampi equal parts joy and anguish: Composing for animated television. In 2010, a mutual friend introduced Ciampi to Jason Ruiz, one of 10 aspiring animators developing projects for 20th Century Fox TV’s Inkubation program. Ciampi created music for Ruiz’s project “Fathers and Son”, then watched it become a finalist for a potential slot as a new show on Fox, alongside “Allen Gregory” and “Napoleon Dynamite”.

In the end, Fox picked up the latter two for six episodes each and passed on Ruiz’s show. (Both shows that were ordered were later cancelled. That’s how the business goes.) Despite the strikeout on a promising pitch, Fox signed Ruiz to develop another series along with respected animation producer David A. Goodman, “Murder Police”, eventually ordering a full 13-episode season. Ruiz kept Ciampi on for the ride. Soon Ciampi was rapping a theme-song in a style he calls “Full House meets Dirty South”, which millions of people would hear during Fox’s primetime Sunday night animation block.

“I made the mistake of putting all my eggs in one basket, which my wife even warned me about,” Ciampi says. “I pushed all my commercial work off on my friends, and was like ‘See you guys later, I’m outta here’.” In a nearly unprecedented move, Fox—perhaps still reeling from the failures of “Allen Gregory” and “Napoleon Dynamite”—told the show’s creators that the fully-ordered series would not make it to air. They were still paid and obligated to create a full run of the series, even though no one might ever see it. Ciampi hadn’t even started on the music yet.

“I was supposed to be all psyched to work on this show that’s going air next to The Simpsons. I sat in on an Alf Clausen scoring session in LA. It was this whole new world, and just like that, it’s gone, the whole thing. It was devastating, especially since I had to sit here and be funny and try and joke around when I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. I’ve made a career out of shit that doesn’t air,” he adds. Ciampi’s next project may fare better. On the strength of his “Murder Police” work, the composer was hired to score an animated movie version of “Madea” for the unsinkable Tyler Perry. The only bad news? The producers wanted 150 pieces of music in two weeks.

“It was insane,” Ciampi says of the workload and schedule. “I flew down to LA to do a spotting session, sitting down with producers and watching and talking about what they wanted and where they wanted it. I flew back the next day and got to work. I woke up at 6am, went to bed at maybe 11 or 12 and got four or five hours of sleep, and just kept doing it, all day and night.”

Ciampi at work.

“I knew it was a lot but I like working fast. In the end, I delivered 133 pieces of music. I would do one act, writing and recording everything, with each cue as a separate session. Once I finished the last cue of the act, I went back and mixed it all. Then I could create templates for mixing and other themes, and bring those back into the next act.”

Ciampi shows me a longer action sequence from the Madea movie on his monitor, playing it first without music. Then he adds in his score: a funky groove made up of slashing breakbeats and sampled baritone saxophone solos Ciampi has tweaked, along with his own live guitar and bass.

“You have to ‘hit’ things,” Ciampi says, and points to the screen just as Madea vaults a ramp on a skateboard and flies into the air, using her purse as a helicopter. The music changes as she floats through the air, returning to the previously established groove as she lands, now with additional embellishments.

“I love the fact that with animation, you’re not just putting music to a show, you’re creating a world of music that didn’t previously exist,” Ciampi says. “You have to create a sonic landscape that defines a series.”

“With commercial work,” he says, “you have to be very creative, but that kind of creativity you have in high school is gone. I really like doing music that doesn’t take itself too seriously. With animation, I can do over-the-top. I can do simple. I can do whatever. But I couldn’t write something like this if there was no picture—that’s the coolest thing to me.”

Ciampi expects an early 2015 release for the Madea film. In the interim, he’s seeking out more pilots to work on for another shot at primetime. “It’s a slow process. It doesn’t move as fast as you’re led to believe, but that’s a good thing. What if I had a show on Fox in primetime as my first thing? There’s nowhere else to go. For animation, that’s like the Super Bowl. When we were doing Murder Police, I was really nervous and couldn’t sleep at night thinking of it. I felt like we earned it and deserved it, but it was kind of like living in a dream. Now I feel more grounded.”

Ciampi solos out his bass in the Madea action sequence and smiles. His inner-Jaco is still there, slickly sliding up and down the fretboard. “I got to slap,” he says, “so I’m in 8th grade heaven.” Not bad work if you can get it.

Blake Madden is a musician and author who lives in Seattle.

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