Composer Joseph Trapanese On Film Scoring, Collaborations, And More

Composer Joseph Trapanese sitting in his studio.

Joseph Trapanese is an accomplished composer known for crafting evocative scores for The Witcher, Tron: Legacy, Straight Outta Compton, and many other popular movies, series, and games. Armed with classical training as well as technical chops, Trapanese is equally at home conducting an orchestra on the scoring stage, combining synths and sampled instruments to create intricate cues, or overseeing recording sessions in his personal studio.

Trapanese recently sat down with Vintage King to talk about the process of making a modern Hollywood score, collaborating with other artists, and all the tools in his new studio that help bring the music to life.

For starters, can you give us a high-level overview of how a film score is made?

I always try to start the scoring process as soon as I can. The traditional way of scoring at the very end has always seemed odd to me. You're usually taught that the film's already made, there’s a temp score, and it’s like, “Follow the temp for this, but do your own thing here.” I still do it that way from time to time, but I've tried to make it so that I'm a really trusted collaborator for the filmmakers I work with, meaning they’ll call me as soon as they start thinking about a film or they have a script or a lookbook to send me.

I try to get involved really early so that I can be a creative part of the process and have conversations with the filmmaker about characters, emotions, what type of lenses they're using—anything that I feel will impact the nuance of the music. You don't hire the cinematographer the day before you start shooting; you bring someone in to start planning the look of the film alongside you. I feel very strongly that filmmakers should start with the sound of film early on, as well.

Once we get into it, there's a lot of back and forth. I'm sharing stuff with the filmmaker, I might be bringing in musicians, or I might be working with an arranger who specializes in a certain genre. Ideally the filmmaker is sitting here on my couch and we’re designing the score together. At a certain point, the producer gets involved, listening to the work we've done and helping to make the final little tweaks, all under the hand of the director.

And that guides us to scoring, meaning recording. Everything is piece by piece, whether it's recorded in my studio, at another studio, or at the musician's home. And then at the end, we might have enough that I don't need to record an orchestra. Or it might be the type of score and budget where we’ll go to the scoring stage across town, or to London or Budapest. A lot of time it’s virtual now, so I'm up at four in the morning recording an orchestra in Australia or somewhere.

Several of your scores have involved collaborations with other artists, such as your work with Daft Punk on Tron Legacy, Joey Batey’s performances in The Witcher, and Anamanaguchi’s songs in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. What are those collaborations like?

The logistics for each production depend on the artist, but I think that might be why I get asked to do it a lot. I know the technology fairly well, I know the process, and I'm classically trained so I have a lot of tools I can help an artist with. But I also try to be really easy to work with. I find out what the artist wants to achieve and how I can benefit them, and I try to adjust myself to that. That's one reason why I work in Pro Tools; it really allows me to stay fluid with the recording process.

Some artists I’ve worked with just want to jam and make cool music and then let me take it and put it to picture. Other artists—for instance, Daft Punk—are very technical. They said, “We're film composers now,” and sat beside me in the studio. Other times, it's like, “Hey, we have the bare bones of the track. We've already scored it to picture. Can you add orchestra?” Or, “Can you add some electronics?” Or, “Can you punch this up a bit with some more production?”

Working with Joey on The Witcher is perhaps one of the most fun things I've done. It’s great having someone in the studio who understands their character so well. And thankfully, he's a super-talented and smart musician, so he has great taste. He’s always adding stuff to the role. They film in the UK and I can't be there most of the time, so it’s great to have someone on set who can represent the music.

We won't start scoring Witcher season four for quite a long time, and they haven't even started filming, but we already have to be thinking about what's going to be on screen because we need to prepare assets for playback on set. After filming, we often record vocals at an ADR session to pick up a few lines. Generally, we record two mics at once: We bring in the lapel mic that they used on set, plus a standard vocal mic like a Neumann U 87 or C 12—whatever works best for the vocalist. That way, when we do little tuning corrections in Melodyne, we can treat it as a phase-aligned stereo pair.

Tell me about the new studio. How did you end up there?

From around 2016 through 2024, I was leasing a lovely studio in Santa Monica. I made a number of improvements and I was really happy while we were there. But then, my lease was coming to an end and I started looking for something closer to my house because after COVID, everyone's used to either only coming over a few times or doing everything remotely. So now we’re in Hollywood, just about 10 minutes from my house.

This facility was built from the ground up as a studio, so I was really lucky to wander into this space. We just finished putting up these lovely new fabric walls and beautiful new floors. Carl Yanchar did the acoustic design of the space, including the baffling, the fabric decisions, and whatnot. The speaker setup was made in conjunction with a gentleman named Rich Avrach of Sunset Audio Solutions who helped me design these rooms. He’s really attuned to what I like.

A wide shot of Joseph Trapanese's Bonsai studios, showing his console, studio monitors, and outboard gear. Three racks of gear in Joseph Trapanese's Bonsai studios.

Your previous studio had several rooms for writing, tracking, and mixing. What’s the layout of the new place?

It's somewhat similar. We have a bigger tracking room that we can fit about six musicians in. We have a movable Drumbrella-type thing in there, which is really great for giving you a tighter or wider perspective. There are two writing rooms that are mirrored to each other on either side, and a third writing suite that has an isolation booth in it. We also have a couple of editing suites for music editors, collaborators, and that sort of thing, and a common area in the kitchen.

How is the tracking room equipped?

My goal is to have a little bit of every flavor; so we have some Neve, we have some Universal Audio, we have some Manley, and I have a cool LaChappell preamp, too. I don't have a million channels, but if an engineer comes in here and says, “I want an LA-2A vibe,” I have an Avalon in the other room with that type of compression. I have some Distressors too.

In terms of mics, it’s very similar. I have stereo-matched pairs of U 87s and DPAs. I have several SM57s, which are incredible mics even though they're super cheap. I’ve got an old Bock mic that's kind of a U 47 style, which is great for tracking demo vocals. I have an SM69, which is basically a stereo 67. It's an old-school tube mic and you can make it mono so it basically becomes a 67 with a different capsule. And then I also have some ribbons. I have an AEA R88 stereo mic and an R44: the big, beefy mono one.

Since my main focus is the music, I don't have tons and tons of gear, but I have enough gear that the decisions can be driven by the music. If I want a darker, warmer sound, I have a ribbon; or if I want a really wide-open stereo sound, I have a pair of DPAs that we can hang from the Drumbrella. Those are the kinds of musical factors that drive my technical decision-making.

How involved are you in the mixing process?

I'm very passionate about mixing in this room as much as I can. That's why we set up this room in 7.1.4 for Atmos. I don't need 7.1.4 to write—I'm more or less writing in stereo and the last thing I want to be thinking about is what’s going to be in the ceiling. But when we approach a mix, I definitely have ideas and thoughts about how immersive I want something to be. I've also done a number of VR and gaming projects, and I wanted to be able to understand what the player might experience in a virtual world. That's where Atmos is really powerful.

Thankfully I have a great engineer, John Chapman. And if John's not available, I'm very lucky to have a number of other talented engineers I could call on. I've done some mixing on my own, but there's an art that they understand and spend every day crafting that I don't, so they're just going to achieve something beyond what I could achieve.

Kind of like how I need a filmmaker here to communicate their vision to me, I’m very passionate about communicating my vision to the engineer. I try to give them plenty of space to make the decisions they want to make, but within the framework of what I'm envisioning. And because I know Pro Tools, I can put my fingers on a fader and say, “Hey, let's try this,” but I’ll do it in a very respectful way and not just bump my engineer out of the chair.

Part of my writing process is determining how close the music should sound. If an actor’s really close to the camera, sometimes I want the music to feel really close as well. Or if it’s something really wide-angle, I want the orchestra to sound really wide and deep. That’s a really simple thing, but if an engineer doesn't understand what I want, it can lead to something really different. That's another reason why I like mixing here: I understand this environment. If I hear it in this environment, I can make the best decisions, versus going to a different studio and not knowing the speakers or the room and trying to reverse-engineer the sound I'm trying to get to.

You’ve used JBLs as your main monitors for a long time, but you’ve switched to Kali for your surrounds and overheads. What was behind that choice?

This older generation of JBLs really speaks to me. Not only do I feel I'm hearing my music how I want to hear it, but more importantly, I'm hearing it how other people are going to hear it. When I go to a dub stage or a theater, when I watch on my TV at home, at a friend's house, or on an iPad, these speakers are giving me an idea of what it's going to sound like there. One of my top goals is to make sure that what I hear in this room is representing what goes out into the world, and these speakers have gotten me closer than anything else.

And from what I understand, Charles Sprinkle—the gentleman who oversaw this generation of JBLs—went off and joined Kali, so Kali is kind of the natural continuation of that technology. The sides and the rears are the Kali IN-8 V2, and the ceilings are the IN-5s.

We’re still a week or two from tuning the room and we have yet to deliver a finished mix from here, but from everything I've heard, it sounds fantastic and I think it's going to translate really well. For me, the purpose of speakers is to understand how your music is going to sound—period. When you think about what we do as an art, we’re delivering emotion and experiences for people; and if you don't understand how they’re hearing and interacting with that emotion, then nothing else matters.

How’s your synth collection looking these days? Has it grown or shrunk?

It's kind of shrinking. After spending quite a bit of money between 2010 and 2015, I realized I wasn’t getting my bang for my buck because we work so quickly and the deadlines are so crazy that the majority of what you hear is coming out of the computer. That's just the reality of it. And for something like The Witcher where we're spending a year or year and a half on one season, I can't keep recalling synth patches. So having a computer with the plugins on it where everything can be recalled is key to my workflow.

That being said, I have this thing called the Expressive E, which is a collaboration between Osmose and Haken Audio. It's on some of my new stuff. The keys are in three dimensions; it's really fantastic. I love the expressivity because I used to play trombone, but as a keyboard player, I can't bend notes like I could on the trombone. So you can do that in a really organic way.

And then I have a rack of these tiny little Moogs, like the DFAM and the Mother 32. Those are super fun to play with and get a sound really quick. I have a Moog modular, a Prophet-5, an Oberheim Xpander, and a SEM. We do pull that stuff out from time to time for something specific, but rather than keep it all racked up and ready to go, I store it and just pull stuff out when I'm inspired to do something.

A close-up the desk at Joseph Trapanese's Bonsai studios, showcasing a large screen displaying a composition in a DAW, a MIDI keyboard, and various controllers.

How do you decide when to use real instruments and when to use samples?

Like every other decision, ideally, it comes from a creative standpoint. When I did The Greatest Showman, I brought in an incredible drummer named Quinn Smith who literally brought circus kits from the twenties that would fold so they could fit on the circus train. They’re incredible instruments and he has an incredible sense of groove which brought so much life to the music in that film.

So that was driven by a creative decision, but the elephant in the room is budget. I count my blessings that we had the budget to say, “Hey, we need to hire this drummer,” and the next day he's in the studio. That's certainly a luxury that I have on some projects, but there are some projects where we don't have that luxury, and that's a really important thing to discuss because it has to be part of the creative decision-making process.

Say I have a really tight budget and I want a string orchestra. Ideally, you find a way to do it, but if you can’t, samples are starting to sound really great. But if I want a solo violin, I have to call up 15 different articulation patches to achieve something like that, so ideally I just bring in my violinist. That’s where it'll be really interesting to see how samples and DAWs evolve over the next 5 or 10 years. Everyone talks about AI, but I think the greatest potential for our software is to become smarter and understand what we're trying to do.

I think the reason why a lot of scores over the last 10 to 20 years are all “chikkida-chikkida-boom” [imitates typical action music] is because the samples just sound really good like that. You’ve got your short strings, your low brass, your drama, your power. But so much of the art of what musicians do is in between the notes; how the notes are connected. There's no substitute for that direct human connection.

What’s your favorite aspect of being a film composer?

The two things that I derive the most pleasure from speak to the two sides of the film composer brain. One is when I have my baton in hand, I'm conducting an orchestra, and they're bringing the music alive. There's nothing like that. The other thing that makes me really happy is when I’m at a screening and the filmmaker comes up to me and says, “That played great,” or “I loved how that sounded.” Or if a writer or producer comes to me and says, “Hey, thank you for helping me achieve that.”

As a film composer, to have a filmmaker say, “Thank you for making my film better,” is kind of the ultimate testament. Obviously, you want the film to make money, you want people to see it, and you want people to be moved by it. That brings a certain amount of joy as well; when you see something have a life of its own. But ultimately, for me, it is such a filmmaker-driven art that I really aim for my filmmakers to enjoy working with me and to love what I bring to their movies.

At the end of the day, it is a service industry. “Thank you for my latte,” “Thank you for my hamburger,” “Thank you for my score.” There's a service about it, and I love that. My family is all teachers and my wife does a lot of nonprofit work, so I'm thankful to have people around me who've instilled in me that we are here to serve others and make the world better.

Something I've learned that has really impacted me is that filmmakers, studios, and producers don't remember every note of music. They don't remember every little thing you did throughout the process, but they remember how you made them feel. I want my filmmakers and collaborators to feel like I've been with them every step of the journey, crafting a beautiful score that matches their vision.

A wide shot of Joseph Trapanese's Bonsai studios, showing his console, studio monitors, and outboard gear. A black and white photo of Joseph Trapanese conducting.

If you’re interested in purchasing any of the gear mentioned in this blog, contact a Vintage King Audio Consultant via email or by phone at 866.644.0160.

Composer Joseph Trapanese On Film Scoring, Collaborations, And His New Studio