RULE: Hello everyone. Thanks for coming. It's really a treat to do this interview today. I met Klaus three or four years ago when I went to visit Media Ventures, which is the amazing film scoring community in Santa Monica run by Hans Zimmer. Klaus, let's give the crowd a quick overview before we get into some specifics about what you are doing today, and how you got into this position. Why don't you tell a quick story of what led you to Media Ventures.

BADELT: Well, it's a story I shouldn't tell, but here's the story and then I'll you why I shouldn't tell it. I was a film composer in Germany. I did commercials, movies, everything. I was on vacation here for the first time for many years and stopped by the studio of Hans Zimmer to say ‘hi,’ not knowing that you can't do that. You can't just stop by and say ‘hi, here's a CD.’ Well, I did that and somehow it happened that a few days later I met everybody there and they said, ‘hey, do you want to help on this movie?’

RULE: Certainly there must have been more to it than that! Did you pass off some demos or examples of your work?

BADELT: By coincidence, I had a CD with me and I gave that to somebody there. Hans listened to it—which is another miracle—and he invited me to the studio to hang. I remember he was working on “The Peacemaker” at the time. I was sitting there on the couch behind him. Here was George Clooney on the screen in an action scene. He would turn around from time to time and ask me, ‘C major or C minor?’ So that's how it all started. He asked me to help on that one right then and there, and he got me into this business from there.

RULE: Klaus, how important was the knowledge of music theory and composition skills versus equipment and technical knowledge? How did you balance those two worlds?

BADELT: Well, I'm a very technically oriented guy. My way of writing is not with a pencil and paper. I sit at the sequencer and I have a bunch of screens around me. I always did it like that. Unfortunately, I'm not capable of writing with pencil. I admire that, but it's very important to know technology and use it, and make it your own.

RULE: Can you tell us a couple of the highlights of the past three years of your involvement at Media Ventures? What are some of your favorite memories of working on “Gladiator,” or some of the other films you've been involved in?

BADELT: The more Hans started to trust me, the more responsibility he gave me. The first movie I scored where they actually trusted me enough to put my name on the poster was “The Pledge.” It was directed by Sean Penn, which made it a great experience because he is a very special filmmaker and actor. And from there I moved on.

Actually, since “K-19,” I haven't worked with Hans. We still talk a lot, but I started to get too busy to actually help him out on his projects. With “Gladiator,” I became more independent. We got Lisa Gerrard involved in the project. She’s a fantastic singer and writer from Australia. We basically split the work. Hans wrote all the aggressive big music while Lisa and myself wrote all the lyrical and emotional pieces.

RULE: I was at Media Ventures three or so years ago. I don't think I've ever seen so many samplers racked up anywhere else. It's widely known that the main reason for that was to facilitate Hans' sample orchestral library. So comparing that time to today, walk us through the technological evolution.

BADELT: Compared to three years ago, many things have changed. If you go into my machine room, it looks more like the computer center of Horizon than a music studio. I don't have a single sampler anymore. I don't have a console anymore. I used to have 28 EMUs, 21 Rolands, and four Kurzweils. We needed all these samplers to hold the orchestral library.

We went to London and sampled the orchestra we used to record with all the time, which was great because then the samples you use are the same sound as the guys you are going to record later. It's the same concertmaster sitting in the same seat, so you can mix the samples with the live instrument later. So it just needs lots of RAM, and lots of samplers.

But now we have switched more or less completely from the hardware samplers into software. I still have a few hardware synthesizers, especially old analog ones, but I'm probably not going to buy hardware synthesizers anymore because software synthesizers are much more flexible. In our world we have to be very fast. We have to change from one musical style to another within the minute. So the total recall is very important.

RULE: What are some of the key components to your process these days? What are the various software applications you could discuss?

BADELT: I have to say that ever since Live came out it quite changed my life. It enabled me to use our whole library of percussive loops. I’m not talking about loops in the sense of just electronic loops, but all kinds of orchestral or ethnic percussion loops. I’m finally able to use them all very quickly and try them out in tempo. It makes it possible to work much faster, especially when you only have a few days to write a whole score.

RULE: That's interesting. Some people may not associate a program like Live with a film composer's world. To hear you talk about using it may be a revelation.

BADELT: That's true. We don’t actually use it in the way it was originally intended. I'm playing it from my sequencer. I trigger the program from the other computer as Live runs on its own machine. It holds the library. I drag in the loops I'm using and trigger them from the keyboard. I use the effects in there, but basically sub-mix and then send to the mixer. I basically use it as a synthesizer.

RULE: Tell us about some of the other programs that are important to the process. I understand Reason factors into your world a bit.

BADELT: The more I switch to the software synthesizers, the more important it is that they integrate. I'm not using Reason as a stand-alone program. I have to be able to use Reason and Live at the same time. They’re always integrated.

So Reason turned out to be fantastic because it's basically a rack of synthesizers. I can plug in, load samples in it, create sounds, store them, and recall them immediately. I use a lot of these built-in synthesizers in Reason, especially the new Malstrom, which has fantastic, weird sounds.

I just did a movie called “Basic.” It's a military thriller staring John Travolta and Samuel Jackson. It was situated in Panama, so I used lots of ethnic material. At the same time, since it's a contemporary thriller, I tweaked all the sounds and made electronic techno-ish sounds with the percussive elements. The Malstrom was fantastic for manipulating these kinds of sounds to make them somehow electronic yet still organic.