This was quiet a surprise. I bought a new macbook alumnium yesterday
and got it connected to internet just few minutes ago.. i opened Safari
and the first thing in their front page is this interview with AR
Rahman. I am so glad to know that rahman too use a mac laptop :)
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Scoring "Slumdog Millionaire" with Logic: An Interview with A.
R. Rahman
By Joe Cellini
If you haven't yet heard at least some of the score from this
year's Oscar-winning best film "Slumdog Millionaire," you
must be trying very hard not to.
Even before it won two Oscars for best score and best song ("Jai
Ho), as well as the Golden Globe and BAFTA awards for best score, A. R.
Rahman's soundtrackwritten on a Mac in Logic Studiohad
registered with any reasonably alert listener during the film's
much-reported rise from Indian-flavored indie longshot to runaway
worldwide hit.
If the soundtrack's audio reach is in part attributable to the
film's sweeping success, its musical grasp is strictly the result of
Rahman's unforgettable melodies and rhythms. In fact, It would be as
hard to imagine "Slumdog" without its script or cinematography
as without Rahman's score.
One of the world's most prolific and celebrated cinematic composers
and top-selling recording artists, Rahman has scored more than 110
films, starting with Roja (1993), which was named by Time magazine as
one of the 100 best movie soundtracks. He is an equally avid student of
cutting edge music and technology, and he uses both to turn out scores
and songs that seamlessly combine classical Indian and Western sounds
with modern vocal and instrumental styles.
For "Slumdog Millionaire," Rahman blends Bollywood, hip-hop,
world music and more to not only complement but significantly carry the
film's energetic plot and audience-pleasing themes. In a recent
phone interview, Rahman spoke about how he used Logic and other tools to
create his eclectic, ambitious score against unforgiving
deadlines.â¨
How did you come to work with director Danny Boyle on "Slumdog
Millionaire"?
Well, I was really busy last year. I was doing about eight films, too
many really. And I had this email saying "Hey I'm Danny Boyle, I
like your work, and it would be great for us to have you on our
film." I didn't know what to answer. But after exchanging
several more emails, I met him personally in Mumbai. And when I talked
to him, I had some interest and I wanted to see the film. He had a first
cut of the film already, and when I saw that I was really interested and
wanted to do it. So I left another film to do this one. I made time for
it.
Was your work on this film different than on other films?
In some ways it was different, because it didn't require as much
work as I sometimes do for other films, but it required high-quality
work. Danny usually uses many composers for a film because he wants
different feels in the music. When you go to just one composer, it
usually has one feel. So I took a clue from that and tried to think
about what he might get from different writers with different
sensibilities, always keeping something of mine in everything I wrote.
He thought I wouldn't have time to do that, so he was just going to have
me do a few songs, but I feel you have a responsibility to the whole
movie.
Each track in this film is completely different from the other. The film
needed that, because it follows one person's life, but in many
different situations and moments from that life. And for the same
reason, there are different cultural elements: some are very strong
Indian influences, and some are very pop influences. If you take all the
good things from ten different soundtracks and put it together, it can
make a beautiful soundtrack of its own.
How long did it take to compose the "Slumdog Millionaire" score?
The initial ideas were all done on this very basic idea of me singing or
playing keyboards and vocals. I'd send Danny a scratch of each idea
over email, several for each cue he'd given me. Danny would listen
and tell me which of the numbers he liked, and he'd start placing
them. That was done a couple of months back. When I had collected all of
these ideas, I went to England, and we spent three weeks together and
finished the score. We'd originally scheduled four weeks, but
because Danny decided to mix the film early, we had that much less time
to do it.
Any disagreement about the kind of score you wanted?
Normally when I work with a director I work through his eyes, and
through his vision, and that's how I worked with Danny. Ideally, he
gets excited when he hears the sound I've delivered. At the same
time, he challenges me to produce other sounds and ideas. It made the
job so much easier for me than if I'd done something radically
different on my own and then tried to fit it into the film's
conception and convince people.
Do you typically write both the songs and the score for a film?
Back in the day, it was common in India to be a composer and songwriter;
it was always that way. You would finish the songs in four days, then
the background music in four days. Today that is changing a little in
India.
Describe your method for scoring a film.
I mostly don't write to specifically defined cues. I just watch the film
a couple of times, stop watching it, then write something that comes to
my mind from the film. This way, when I try to sync the music, the
results are that much more wholesome. You get something extra that you
don't get when you're looking at specific points in the timeline. The
music is much more organic this way, not jumping cue to cue. It's more
about counterpointing and, sometimes, walking hand-in-hand. Most of the
time it works out. If you watch the picture and try to have a specific
chord change here, a tempo change there, when the director comes back
and wants to move picture, you find that you've wasted time. I think
this way is more appealing to me and to the people watching the film.
Click tracks and following the SMPTE are necessary for some things, but
once you have everything in Logic, then afterwards you can edit and make
minor changes.
Pages 1 2
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Bio
An artist who has redefined contemporary Indian music, A.R. Rahman is an
icon in the world of cinematic scoring and one of the world's top 25
all-time selling recording artists.
Rahman's score for "Slumdog Millionaire," which was
critically praised by Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, The Los Angeles
Times, and The New York Times has sold more than 100,000 copies and was
the #1 downloaded album on iTunes.
Widely considered the man who single-handedly revived public interest in
Indian film music in the 1990s, Rahman scored the runaway hit,
"Roja," directed by noted Indian filmmaker Mani Ratnam. The
soundtrack earned Rahman the Indian National Award for Best Music
Composer, and was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best movie
soundtracks in the world.
Rahman obtained a degree in western classical music from the Trinity
College of Music, London, and set up his own in-house studio called
Panchathan Record-Inn at Chennai, arguably one of Asia's most
sophisticated and high-tech studios.
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