Antonio Sanchez knows how Hollywood sees him. In an industry that can focus too much on replicating the successes of the past, he — thanks to his improvisation-heavy work on Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s Best Picture winner Birdman — is “the drum guy.”
“I think that has been a little bit of my crux since I did Birdman,” Sanchez tells Gold Derby. “That if you want drums, I’m the drum guy.”
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That kind of association has its pros and cons. What may sound pigeon-holing can also lead directly to jobs.
Such was the case with Sanchez landing the job on The Studio, Seth Rogen and Seth Goldberg‘s industry send-up, that landed the drummer his first Emmy nomination for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series.
Word had reached Sanchez through his agent that Rogen and Goldberg had been using his score from Birdman as temp music for The Studio. And when the two camps eventually met, Sanchez saw an opportunity to expand on the percussion-heavy sound that inspired the TV creators.
The next step was for Sanchez to see the version of the pilot that used the Birdman score, and once he did, he knew that he could tailor the series’ new score to it, making for a more complex sound all its own.
“With The Studio, the main difference is that I know how to get in there, how to make the drums — and the music in general — have a conversation with the dialog and the movement,” Sanchez says. “If there’s a dialog between two, three, four people, I like to punctuate things that they say, which is hard to do with another instrument. Drums are perfect for that, because it doesn’t really get in the way, and I can leave space. As a jazz drummer, I learned that space is one of the best things, best resources you can use to highlight something.”
In addition to a different approach to the drums, Sanchez brought in a wider variety of instrumentation, including bass, keyboard, and — in the case of his Emmy submission episode, the noir-tinged “The Missing Reel” — a full orchestra.
And the sound evolved throughout the season, hitting on a music theme in the last two episodes of the season that Sanchez believes could carry into a second season. “I think we found something really cool there,” he says. “I would see if I could build from those, because I feel like it’s very important for a series to have a theme, like a sound. It could be really cool if it was permeated by this theme that could come and go throughout the whole thing.”
But anyone familiar with Continental Studios knows that plans can go awry. “I’m really excited about the second season, but I have no idea what it’s going to be like,” Sanchez says. “So we’ll have to improvise, like we always do.”
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
