I’d like to be thought of as a sound spelunker, diving into dark caves in search of sonic gems. Sometimes I feel like a curator of strange sounds, almost like a painter who only does charcoal portraits with burnt sticks or something.

I had played piano and drums since childhood and went on to study electronic music in college, and from there the die was cast.

The first synth I played was a Sequential Circuits Pro-1 lent to me by the keyboard player in my terrible band in high school, but the first synth I owned was an Arp Solus mono-synth.

I’m always looking for a sound I’ve never heard before.  Whether it’s a mean bass line, a scary ambience, or just a strange combination of elements, I’m just trying to find something I haven’t heard yet.

The very first thing I do on a new scoring project is to create a batch of new sounds, inspired by the visuals and the story, that I can use as raw material for the music to come.  Then I try to create a wire-frame structure of the entire project, with skeletal structures to indicate tempo, key, and rhythmic elements.  I jump around in the timeline until every moment has at least been touched upon briefly before diving in to finishing any one portion.  It’s sort of like drawing the outlines in a child’s coloring book, once those are done all that’s left is to decide if the clown’s nose should be orange or green!

I start with very simple sounds for sketching, just semi-ordinary piano and strings, as well as the custom sounds made for that project, and once the “normal” music elements are sketched I can then move on to making things weird.

I am definitely a night owl.  I work best once the world has quieted down and I can get a long chunk of uninterrupted time to make a mess out of the sounds.

The first thing I do is to read every single page of the manual with the synth at my side, just to make sure I know how to use every single feature.  That way I don’t get into trouble when I have a precious sound half-finished, and I’m trying to save a patch or export a wavetable or whatever.  Then I go through all the factory patches and ruthlessly delete most of them, keeping only the ones that use a cool programming technique or novel use of a feature.  I don’t use factory presets, not even as a template for further modification, but I keep a few in the synth if they might remind me of a programming technique or feature that’s unique to that synth.

When it comes to synths, I’m always making my own sounds from scratch.  After forty years I’ve almost figured out what all the knobs do!

Mostly, the sound.  Even a simple synth is a winner if it just sounds good to me. Beyond that I look for synths that push the envelope of modern features, like tempo-synced LFOs and envelopes, step sequencers for parameter changes, etc., and of course anything that can import a sample and wreck it will get my attention.  That’s why I jumped on the Waldorf Quantum right away – to me, that synth represents the sum total of 50 years of synthesizer history.  It’s amazing – and it sounds great!

I’d be lost without a pair of good, characterful mic preamps, like my Neve 1084s or the new Overstayer Modular Channel Stereo, which can deliver hi-fi signals but can also wreck stuff on the way in.

I had a few PPG synths back in the 1980s, when the idea of wavetables was completely new and unique.  They sounded great but were a bit fragile, so when PPG went away, and Waldorf began to improve upon the concept I was very excited.  I had the first MicroWave rack synth, and Trent Reznor used it quite a bit on early Nine Inch Nails records.  When I joined the band, Waldorf synths were a little hard to find, and we used to get them from an importer named Geoff Farr, who brought boutique synths into the USA, and from there I formed a relationship with the Waldorf team.

Now that I’m concentrating mostly on scoring for picture, the Waldorf Quantum mk2 is my primary weapon.  It allows me to take audio samples that I’ve created from my custom acoustic instruments, or wild orchestral effects sounds, and manipulate them with unmatched flexibility, stretching and granulating and filtering to my heart’s content.  That way I can preserve some of the organic sonic footprint of the sounds I like, but create entirely new textures that don’t sound like a normal oscillator+filter synth, and that’s key to my whole way of working.  I use the Quantum to create many of the standout sounds that are at the front of a piece of music, sometimes entire film cues at once.  The poly-aftertouch on the mk2 has really opened up the possibilities for expressive use of these custom sounds and I love the thing.  It’s front and center in my setup.

The common thread through all of my musical adventures has been looking for the darkness and heaviness.  The music of NIN was heavy at times, but it was also quite atmospheric and unique sound design was always a big part of the picture.  I think that’s why I was a good fit at the time, because I’ve always been into really heavy, dirty sounds full of destructive force, but I also enjoyed exploring darkness in more atmospheric textures.  As I moved more into scoring for horror films, those same elements played a big part.  Perhaps less on the destructive side and more on the atmospheric side, but still originating from the scope of what I had done with NIN.

There are always going to be new sounds to discover, so the thirst to discover them will never be satisfied. With the amazing tools we have these days to manipulate sound, I get excited on a daily basis about what I might find. It seems that every week I get excited about some new processing plugin or guitar pedal, and call all my friends to say, “Have you heard this thing yet? It’s amazing!” I still feel like a kid in a candy store.

If I’m scoring a new film, I’ll watch it a few times through, and then put it on a loop so it’s playing on the wall while I mess about with sounds.  I’m always hoping that the visual style, the cinematography, and the settings in the film will influence the direction I’m going in with the sounds.  I definitely picture sounds as belonging to a place, as sounding “outdoors” or “underground” or “forest” or “city”, and it’s really easy for me to hear something and think, “No, that’s wrong for this scene because it sounds like it’s outdoors, it reminds me of a winter landscape” or whatever.  Maybe I have a touch of synesthesia, I don’t know what it is, but I form those opinions almost instantly upon hearing a sound, and I try to use that to guide me as I’m spelunking, in the hopes that the sounds I use will be appropriate for the places depicted on screen.

Again, I’m heavily influenced by wanting a sense of place for the sounds, so they seem like they belong in the frame of the image we’re seeing.  For the SAW movies this is usually pretty easy, since most of the scenes take place in some dank dungeon, or some other unlit room.  So, darkness, reverb, and a rusty patina to the sounds usually feels right.  I use a lot of bowed metal sound sources and rusty-pipe percussion type sounds, inspired by the machinery that our villain builds for his traps, so those choices kind of jump off the screen and into the keyboard it seems.

I do have a few custom metal instruments built by an amazing musician and instrument builder named Chas Smith, who sadly passed away recently, and I guess those are unusual since they are truly one-of-a-kind creations, but some of my favorite oddball sounds are recordings I made in the NYC subway about 35 years ago on a cassette recorder. They’re the sounds of the train’s brakes squealing as the train pulls into the station, sort of a nails-on-chalkboard sound that will be familiar to any city dweller. Drenched in the natural reverb of the subway tunnel, these recordings are surprisingly tonal and have a fairly stable pitch. When they’re slowed down and pitched down in a sampler, they begin to sound like a wobbly, murky, distant string section, and I have used bits and pieces of these recordings on dozens of projects over the years. Those subway-tunnel sounds were the first samples I imported into the Quantum, they’re the perfect raw material to be transformed inside the Quantum.

All of the weird twists and turns I’ve been lucky enough to follow, all the opportunities that I’ve been able to capitalize on, came to me because I didn’t want to do anything that other people were already doing very well, I didn’t want to be a beginner among experts.  So, whenever I discovered something that others were doing very well, I’d try to steer a little off to the side, if not drive off the road entirely.  So instead of cruising down the well-travelled path at highway speeds, watching other people’s tail lights receding into the distance as I tried to keep up with them, I often found myself crashing through the bushes, trying not to get stuck in the mud.  This made my progress slower in some spots, but meant that I often had the trail to myself.  In terms of advice, this all boils down to that old chestnut: find your own sound, your own path.  As corny as it seems, that’s what is at the core of all the things I’ve been involved in – trying to avoid doing what others are already doing well.

One of my favorite film scores that I’ve done was to a small movie that few, if any, people saw.  It was my second score, for a movie called Deepwater, and I’m not even sure if it ever was released.  I had the time and the freedom to experiment, and I managed to create some long, intense, rhythmic passages by tapping guitars with pencils into a looper pedal and then processing the results, as well as some dissonant brass-like chords made by reversing and layering acoustic guitar chords.  I also used some circuit-bent toy instruments for scenes where the main character was having a mental break, and these really worked well – it sounded like what was going through his fractured mind as he struggled with reality.  I was really just experimenting and finding new sounds and it worked out great, even if nobody saw the film.  I did some things on that score that I’m still trying to recreate for other projects to this day!

Weirdly, I wouldn’t want to go back to the early NIN albums with more modern tech, since it was the limitations of the machinery that pushed us towards certain results, and the analog tape recording and all-analog mixing that gave those records a certain sound.  So, I wouldn’t touch those records with any gear, for any price.  But I wouldn’t mind having the faster computers and more advanced tools for tricky projects like the albums and remixes I worked on with Rob Zombie, Helmet, and other heavy bands. I was always hitting the limits of what I could do with X number of ProTools tracks or Y amount of sample memory.

While I’m waiting to see if and when an eleventh movie in the SAW franchise gets made, I’m actually returning to the road and playing keyboards live with the band Ministry, who are industrial music pioneers and were a big influence on NIN in the early years.  Their keyboardist and synth programmer for the last 20 years or so is one of my oldest friends in the world, John Bechdel.  We were buddies in college in the early 1980s, roommates in NYC after college, and both worked at the same music store in Manhattan where we’d buy used PPG synths for pennies on the dollar, back when people wanted to trade them in for a DX-7 or whatever!  So, it’s a bit like coming full circle since it was more than 40 years since we’d been in the same band at the same time.  Crazy how things work out sometimes.