Tinkerbell And The Legend Of The Neverbeast Music Supervisor Brett Swain and Bleu Interview – #NeverbeastBloggers

Have you ever really thought about the music playing in the background of a movie? Have you ever thought about how they make those sounds? I can honestly say I hadn’t until we got to interview both Brett Swain and Bleu. Listening to these two gives you a whole new appreciation for the music behind the scenes. (At the end of the interview, I have included part of their talk with us, so you can see how they do what they do.)

Did you know that Tinkerbell And The Legend Of The Neverbeast was the first movie Bleu has worked on? The story of how he got involved goes a little like this:

The director of the film, Steve Loter, is a huge music nerd. He had been a big fan of my artist career for many years and had been listening to my records a lot while he was working on the film which is how I got involved in the film in the first place. He came up to me after a show and said I have this project I’m working on. I can’t really say too much about it, but I think you might like to be involved in it. You know, people come up to me after shows all the time and stuff like that, but then I walked into this building for my first meeting. I was like I think I might be making some music for a Disney film, and it’s obviously been nothing but an amazing journey since then.

Some of the music isn’t anything you’ve heard before. Here’s what Bleu told us about that:

Steve really wanted something unique for this film. I think he really wanted something that was going to be unique altogether in music. He really wanted new sounds. Obviously, there’s this huge looming figure in this film, the Neverbeast, and his world of the forest and the cave. He wanted to make sure that this was something that you hadn’t experienced before. The big challenge for me was to come up with this unique sound color palette for him and all the other characters in the film.

Brett told us that one of the things they do when discussing the music for the film is to figure out the themes.

We talked about Gruff having a theme. What’s different about this film is when we talk about themes normally it’s melodic, right? There’s a melody that accompanies each of these characters. In this case, we not only wanted something melodically different for these characters but just something that was sonically different so that the minute you heard that sound versus hearing a melody or a tune you would know that it’s associated with that character.

Bleu would also be fun to go shopping with in the hardware store. He told us:

The big goal was to get great sounds for Gruff in particular. One of the wonderful things we stumbled upon are these planters from the store. As you can see here, all have a hole in the bottom, so the water can drain, which actually makes them perfect for placing on the cymbal stands. It’s actually amazing how perfectly it kinda worked out as you can hear they all have a unique pitch to them. We got dozens of pots of all different sorts. They have a lot of overtones and they’re kind of dissonant. We ended up using a lot of these in some of the more eerie scenes for Gruff.

There was such a directive to figure out what he was all about. We knew that we were gonna need something big. Obviously, in this world, he’s a big looming character. He’s the largest animal in this world. One of the first ideas I came up with was to use these big sets of Toms. We would have big sets even more than these, four or five, and big Toms, and all kinds of things in a huge hallway along with unusual things like trash cans and these big metal vents and stuff like that. We would mic up the hallway at one end and play the toms and percussion instruments at the other end. You would get this big sound. It has a big loud impact to it. That’s something that I think is very noticeable in the film.

Ever wonder how long the music takes to create? Bleu told us:

I worked on the film all told about a year and a half. It was a slow process, because originally I was only hired to work on one song, to produce and write the opening credit song. Then they asked me to work on another song. Then they asked me to work on the score. Then they asked me to do another song and another song and so on and so forth. It wasn’t necessarily every day until about the last eight months.

As soon as I knew that I was going to be working on the score, I started thinking about what that was going to mean and developing the instruments. I did a lot of homework type of work ahead of time to find some of these instruments and figure out how they could be played and how they could be recorded and all those sorts of things before we actually got rolling on it

We did ask him if they looked at him a bit weird in the hardware store and if they asked him to quit playing on their pipes.

No, actually, it was funny. I think most of the guys got a kick out of it. Although if they’d known what was going to end up happening to their trashcans they might’ve had a different take on it.

I was able to take a little video for you guys while I was there too.