After working intensely on the score for a couple of days, there is nothing more thrilling than hearing the musicians bringing the music to life in the recording session. As I have mentioned previously, I generally map out my initial musical ideas for the episode on a computer, and like Blair and Alexis, I produce a computer synthesised demo soundtrack in order to give Helen, Adam and Stephen a good idea of how the final recorded music would sound.

It is always my primary concern, however, to compose music that will sound good with the live musicians. Working on a computer can sometimes be a bit misleading, and one has to be careful to write music that is actually playable by real players!

The practicalities of the recording process were also at the forefront of my mind when I was composing. With modern multi-track recording techniques (like those used by Liam and the crew in the studios at Edinburgh University), it is possible to add extra parts to the musical texture in a process called ‘overdubbing’. In this technique, a musician can make a recording on top of the material they have just played, which is then played back simultaneously with the original recording, giving the effect of two musicians playing. Having a relatively small number of players to perform the score, this technique was useful in allowing me to include parts that I couldn’t have included otherwise. It was particularly useful in creating a slightly ‘denser’ sound at some important moments.

This being said, as I was composing my music, I made a conscious effort to keep the need for overdubs in the recording session to an absolute minimum. There are a couple of reasons behind my doing this: the sound created by the ensemble of musicians playing ‘live’ in the studio together is generally much tighter and more musically homogenous than that created by numerous overdubs, as the musicians can respond and tune to each other’s playing in real-time, and they gain an immediate sense of their ‘role’ in musical texture. Another reason is that the overdub process tends to significantly slow pace of the recording process. This can frustrate musicians and sound engineers alike, which obviously does not have a positive effect on the end result! In many ways, composing in a way that avoids heavy overdubbing added significantly to the challenge, and certainly contributed to a test of compositional ‘craft’, which can be no bad thing.