"...Despite his extensive experience of working with real orchestras, Mark does all the X-Files music at home, in his private studio. "First of all, there isn't the time to do a live orchestra score with this show. The copying, orchestrating, getting the musicians and so on, would be just impossible." Mark's equipment of choice is a Synclavier system: "About six or seven years ago, I got into the Synclavier (with Direct-to-Disk module). That's still my main piece of gear, and I find it the most elegant, fast, best-sounding thing available. People think that it has a 'sound', and it doesn't! It's just a storage device, an architecture and a digital sampler that's so fast and immediate. The sound is what's in the library, what's on the disks. People talk about all of these samplers that cost nothing compared to the Synclavier; well, that's fine, but this is still by far the best. Actually, even if there were months to do each score live, working from here is still preferable, because the Synclavier provides a marvellous collection of regular acoustic instrument sounds, in combination with all the atmospheric, textural things."
But, of course, New England Digital, the company behind the Synclavier, is now no more: "It was unfortunate, but I've had very good luck with my machine: it hasn't broken down too much at all. And now there's a company called Demas, based near the original NED site in New Hampshire, that is offering Synclavier support and software updates. Demas even employs some ex-Synclavier people."
Despite having a Mac in his studio, Mark actually also sequences with the Synclavier, in a linear fashion: "It's not a hugely powerful sequencer, but luckily I don't have to do a lot of dance arrangements or pop things, so it's just fine."
The Synclavier system may be at the heart of the studio, patched through a Soundcraft Sapphyre LC mixer, but that's not it for "MIDI boxes", as Mark refers to them: the studio also accommodates a Roland S760 sampler, Kurzweil MicroPiano module, an Emu Proteus 1, 2 (source of the famous X-Files whistle, in combination, apparently, with a sample of Snow's wife whistling!) and 3, Emu Morpheus, Korg M1R and Wavestation SR. But these are adjuncts to the core sound produced by the Synclavier and its large library: "I have all these great samples on the Synclavier's magneto drives." Mark doesn't do much sampling of his own: "There are so many sample disks available that I have people transfer them onto Synclavier format." And is there anything else he'd like to add to the studio? "Well, the only thing that means anything to me is new sounds or new combinations of sounds. All I care about is if somebody has a great new sound library. That's what I'm looking for. Since my background is music, rather than electronics and technology, I just know as much as I have to. There are so many other composers who know about sampling rates and all that technical stuff, but none of that really interests me. So apart from new sounds, I could maybe upgrade the RAM and the number of voices on the Synclavier..."
THE FINAL SCORE
I wondered if Mark's classical background helps him to create more convincing electronic simulations -- anyone who has listened to an X-Files soundtrack will vouch for its organic feel, even at its most impressionistic. "That's a really astute question, because in this day and age where these machines are so widely available, anybody can be a composer. But coming from an acoustic background, I tend to hear things in a very human, emotional, real way, and I strive for that in the samples and my electronic mock-up of the orchestra. It's a very important thing for me: the music has to have a sense of life to it."
When it comes to the final music mix, analogue two-track is definitely a thing of the past: "We use Tascam's DA88 8-track digital recorder -- I actually have Sony's PCM800 version. The music editor stripes a tape with timecode, and we mix down to that. We just drop the cassette into another machine at the mixing stage."
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_articles/feb97/xfiles.html
