MUSIC DIRECTOR: RON BRAWER

Favorite songs?
"I love 'American Pie' and 'I Love you So.'"

Will you change the music for the summertime?
"Marginally. In the summer, we generally go with younger story lines, because the kids are out of school, so there’ more kids watching the show. So, I probably go with more current, pop. Maybe some a little more cutting edge stuff that I might not ordinarily play so much during the year."

How do you keep up with all the new trends? How do you know what’s going to work?
"A lot of it is gut instincts. Hearing the rhythm of a scene, and trying to come up with something that rhythmically and emotionally works with the scene. Maybe try to bring out some subtleties or some nuances that I think would be interesting in the scene that the actors didn’t touch on."

How far in advance do you get the script? How do you plan out the music. How does it work?
"I get a script about 2 weeks in advance. And then I just note where I think music is going to fall, and very generally what kind of music. Like, Carlino’s is a restaurant, so I know that I will play some sort of source music. Source music is music that comes from a theoretically identifiable place. A juke box, a radio, a CD player, something like that. You can also define source music as what the characters hear, as opposed to what we hear that they don’t hear."

"So I just make some notes where I think music’s going go, if there’s some sort of tension, I note on the script where I think music’s going to go and generally the direction I want it to go with it. And then the show is shot."

"Basically I look at the tape of the show, which has everything except music. And as it rolls by, they’ve made time code copy for me. So where there’s 0 hours , 9 seconds and that many frames into the show, and I view that and decide where music’s going to go, and pick out from our library what to put there. And make a stack and when I’m finished and when they have time, I go into the edit room, referring to the time code, I edit the music."

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