Composer Profile: Kusiak Music

Feb 18, 2010 1:13 PM, By Sarah Benzuly

           
 

DOCUMENTARY WORK KEEPS STUDIO HUMMING

John Kusiak in his studio

Photo: Laura Barrett

Eds. Note: Welcome to the next edition of our monthly online-only series in which we talk to composers about their latest works, the gear they depend on, the business, and the fun that goes behind creating music for picture. Interested in being profiled? E-mail us at emeditorial@emusician.com and register at sister site Reel-Exchange.com to set up your own user profile. Enjoy!

It all starts with a love for music—and John Kusiak, owner of Kusiak Music (Arlington, Mass.; kusiakmusic.com) is no exception. He began his foray into the music world as a performer, playing in rock and jazz bands. Gradually, he transitioned to being on the other side of the glass as a recording engineer. A friendship with Northern Light Productions’ owner, independent filmmaker Bestor Cram, landed him his first gig composing for film. “He got me started. I was developing a family at the same time, [and] it seemed like an appealing way to get off the road and work more in the studio,” Kusiak recalls.

EM phoned Kusiak a little more than a week ago to talk about his home studio setup, his composition chops, and his latest work composing music for the soon-to-be-released PBS documentary The Fall of the Wall.

Have you always worked out of your house?
For the last 15 years I’ve had a studio in my house. Prior to that I had worked in other studios in the Boston area, one of them Silver Linings Inc., an audio production studio. But at this point I’m working in my home, so it’s great.

How is your studio set up?
It’s a walk-in basement, which makes it appealing in that I don’t have to have clients going through the house; I have a separate entrance. There’s a full bath down here, and I have a recording area and a separate control room. What’s interesting about the house and one of the reasons why we bought it was that the ceilings in the basement are eight feet, which is unusual sometimes for basements in the area; often they have very low ceilings. So it makes it easier to build a control room and recording area if you have height. I had a sound room designer, Michael Blackmer, help me in the design and construction of the room.

The main area is a 13x21-foot control room; that’s where I have all my keyboards, synthesizers, sampling units, and it’s conceived on a live end/dead end setup where the speakers [Dynaudio BM15P with a Bryston 2B power amp] are up in the front—it’s very dead up in the front—and then in the back it’s live, and I can record instrumentalists right in the control room if I want to. I have a small recording room where I’ve had string quartets, woodwind groups, and bands; if I need to record something larger like an orchestra, I’ll go to an external facility.

What sort of audio goodies do you have in the control room?
I have a Yamaha DM1000 56-input digital mixer—it’s really fantastic—and I have a Kurzweil 2600XS full 88-keys keyboard. I have all of my computers in a separate machine room outside of the control room so there’s no noise in here. What I’m doing is a modular setup: I use Digital Performer for the most part, along with Kontakt, Vienna Ensemble, Gigastudio. I have multiple computers that handle a lot of the sounds. I do mixing inside the box to a certain extent with plug-ins, and then it’s routed through a couple of standing effects racks, where I have a Lexicon reverb and some actual boxes, like a Roland 5080 and various other processors—a Crane Song HEDD 192, a TC Electronic Finalizer, an Aphex Trac 2 mic preamp/converter—these all sit in these racks on the side. I can send signal out to them and back into the board and then back into the computer. I still work in a somewhat combination “in the box” and “out of the box,” and I find that the most flexible. I don’t really like to work totally inside the box.

Is your hybrid way of composing based on the types of projects you work on?
I would say that it’s a combination of the way that I like to work and the way [the gear has] developed over the last 20 years because, obviously, 20 years ago there was little inside-the-box type of gear. I was using Performer 20 years ago, but mostly the sound was coming from hardware samplers and modules outside of the computer. As technology has developed, I have gotten a more balanced hybrid setup. I use Digital Performer, which [lets me record] live instruments and MIDI samplers and combine them. A lot of the soundtracks that I do are usually a combination of live and sampled instruments.

You also have an associate, P. Andrew Willis, and an assistant, Robert Jaret. How does workflow occur between the three of you?
They sometimes work in the studio, but they also live in the area and they have their own home studios, so we collaborate. They’re not direct employees; they’re more like subcontractors. Andrew and I have been working closely together for 10 years now; he’s a very competent and qualified composer on his own.

The work comes in through me. For example, right now I’m working on two or three projects simultaneously, and it’s more work than I can handle myself, so I organize a certain number of cues for a film that I can sub out to the guys to help me. Rob is also quite good at orchestration and score preparation, so when we have musicians coming in—from the Boston Symphony Orchestra or various other musicians—he puts together the scores for them.