Composer Jeff Rona

Composer Jeff Rona is one of the most interesting and diverse musical talents currently working in film. His music has been featured in dozens of films, television series, television movies and soundtracks, and draws from a wide range of styles. Rona was among the first musicians in the U.S. to compose and create music for films and records with computers and digital synthesizers, and also played a key role in popularizing MIDI technology.

Rona’s feature film work includes Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, and White Squall; Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, Schizopolis and Kafka; The Mothman Prophesies; Exit Wounds; The In Crowd; Mission: Impossible 2; Assassins; The Net; Thin Red Line; The Fan; Chill Factor; and numerous others.

Rona sat down at the 2003 Winter NAMM show with interviewer Gino Robair, associate editor of Electronic Musician magazine, to talk about creating music for film and video games entirely in Reason.

ROBAIR: Welcome, Jeff. When we last spoke, you were doing a remix project. How’s that going?

RONA: I've been part of some electronic compilation records with different artists. I've been doing a couple of those under the name Luxurious. My main work is doing film music, though. I’m working with grooves and different kinds of rhythms, and I'm starting to work with the kinds of tools you need to make that sort of music happen.

The tools you use change what you do. They change how you write as well as what you end up with. You're the same composer, but if you switch from one piece of software to another, you start writing something different and something fresh happens. I'm glad that there's always something new happening. It's not because I'm bored with what's there or bored with what I write—it's really a new kind of inspiration.

I have started to jettison a lot of things. My life keeps getting a lot lighter. I've stopped using a lot of keyboards and rack synthesizers, and switched to plug-ins. In the process of moving to my new studio, I abandoned all my mixing consoles. I used to have three full-blown mixers and I got rid of all of them. I'm now using my sequencer entirely for all my mixing.

ROBAIR: You jettisoned your hardware instruments. What are you using now? What are your favorite plug-in instruments and what sort of sounds are you leaning towards these days?

RONA: There are a couple things that make everything tick for me. The first thing is Reason. When I first saw it, I was totally convinced that it was a tool perfect for the bedroom hobbyist. And then once I got my hands on it, it was so crazy. This is a serious tool. I got hired about a year and a half ago to score a video game called Free Fall. I had never done a video game before, but I was really given carte blanche to do anything I wanted musically.

I decided to make it an experiment. I wanted to write it entirely in Reason and not write one note in my studio. So I did it everywhere else. I was out on a road trip, so I did it in my hotel room. When I was at home I did it on my kitchen table. I just didn't want the feeling of being in a studio.

The thing about Reason that I love is that it's a sketchpad. You can work so fast in it. You can work as fast as you can think. It's like working with clay, but you're working with your musical ideas. On Black Hawk Down, I did my part using no hardware. I decided that my music wouldn't pass through a single wire. Except for people playing into my computer, nothing ever passed through a plug. No mixer. No effects processors. No external anything.

ROBAIR: When you boot up, what does your set-up look like? You must have a big collection of customized instruments and full collections of loops you've been ReCycling for a while.

RONA: The way my studio is set up is as follows. I have two Macs. One is running Reason or Logic as my sequencer. I have another one that I just use for synths and some other things. I've started working with Ableton Live locked to the first sequencer, and passing audio live, so to speak. And then I have five GigaStudios on PCs.

There are certain plug-ins that I'm still very attracted to. Between Reason, Native Instruments and Logic, I have all the synths and samplers I need. I have a few older pieces of gear that I'm still really attracted to, but that's the bread and butter. The GigaStudios are mostly there for the orchestral sounds that I use.

ROBAIR: Do you ever do Reason file swapping with people? For example, when you are working on a project with part of your staff or other composers?

RONA: I have collaborated with other artists, so file swapping is handy. We’ll e-mail files, stereo demos, or FTP. We sometimes just burn a CD and say, ‘go out and do something and bring me something back on a CD,’ and we just swap audio files. I just did a commercial for a company in France last month and they would send me Quick Time Files by FTP. I'd send audio demos back, and then the final. It was great.

ROBAIR: As you’re massaging your pieces for a project like a film—and you've got all the different tools—are you thinking in stems, or are you thinking in terms of overall music?

RONA: Well, the thing to remember is this: When you're a musician, you should think about the music first and the tools second. That's not to say that these aren't valid things, because you come up with cool things experimenting. Half of what's interesting about these tools is that something magical might happen. You grab a loop that you never listened to before, and you shove it through a plug-in you haven't used before, and suddenly something awesome and wild happens and you go with that.

But I think it's important to step back when you're writing a song and think about what the song is trying to say. If you are writing a film score, you're thinking about what are you trying to say with the music. What is the feeling you want the audience to feel? Think about what sorts of sounds and music make you feel that way because ultimately you want to share your feelings with your audience through your music.

With that in mind, I try to have an idea about where the music is going to end up. Then I start writing and maybe I want to use certain sounds. I'll load those sounds into my samplers, or I'll start organizing some loops, and maybe build some palates. I'll do all these things, but what I end up with will be nothing like what I had in my dream. It'll end up somewhere else, but at least that dream got me started down a path that wasn't arbitrary.
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M-Audio would like to thank both Jeff Rona and Gino Robair for taking the time out of their busy schedules to stop by our booth at NAMM. For more information about Rona, please visit http://www.jeffrona.com.