Geoff Zanelli

Geoff Zanelli has blazed quite a trail for himself, from interning straight out of Berklee College of Music to accumulating a catalog of work that is nothing short of impressive. Over the years, Geoff has received accolades and recognition for his versatile musical style with a variety of credits ranging from big feature films to TV series and even games — most notably, scoring the fifth installment in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” and “Into the West” which he won an Emmy award for in 2006. We recently caught up with Geoff and chatted about his late start with music, his approach to scoring projects, and his proudest credit to date:

How and when did you first start composing?

I started writing music when I was a teenager in a band in Westminster, California. Music came relatively late in my life. I didn’t play an instrument until I was nearly 16, but I got bit by the bug right away and within the year I was playing guitar in bands and writing gratuitously long instrumental sections.

Writing music instantly became something I loved doing and that led to what I now do, which is write music all day long for films, streaming and video games. I do still make music for records, bands and artists and I love that, but I’ll always live for the challenge of trying to say something musically without lyrics.

You may already know that two of our founders, Neil and Dave, are also Berklee alumni — we’d love to hear more about your experience when transitioning from the world of academia into the professional world. Was there anything in particular about your time at Berklee that helped you make that transition?

Interesting question! I still have a relationship with Berklee. I visit the campus to speak with students there periodically and I spend time here in LA with students and alumni when I’m able.

I was at Berklee in the 90s and the best lessons I learned there were the most direct ones. I had both film scoring and engineering teachers who would be very frank with me. The ones I gravitated toward were the ones who had a strong desire to be in the studio for long stretches of time, and I appreciated teachers who were also out in the field. Carl Beatty and Stephen Webber come to mind. Both of them were teachers when I went there, but Carl became a VP in the President’s office and Stephen heads up Berklee NYC, formerly the Power Station.

They, along with others, reinforced in me the idea that it’s worth the effort you spend on your music. Good music can become great music that way! And the process is something you can trust in as you go along.

What was the path or the turning point that landed your first major scoring gig?

My career seems more like a series of incremental steps rather than one or two big ones. There was no overnight success for me, it has just been a culmination of decades of perseverance, but I think the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which I collaborated on with Hans Zimmer, was a turning point for me. Something clicked, you could say. Not just musically, although that rock-and-roll-orchestra approach suited me, but my process and my way of relating to filmmakers changed on that movie as well. I got along with Gore Verbinski, and I emerged from that score a much more marketable composer than I was before it.

That was in part because Hans was generous in telling people what I had written. There’s no mystery with him. He just said straight to his director “you can thank Geoff for that” if they liked something I wrote. Pirates exposed my talents to Gore, to Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer, each of whom have hired me in my own right since then.

Who/what are your biggest musical influences?

I have so many influences! I’ve always been a big consumer of music, and not just media music. I started as a guitarist and my childhood was full of guitar driven music like Guns ‘n Roses, Iron Maiden and Yes so I can’t pretend that didn’t play a part. I’m an unashamed pop music fan, too, but I think you’re asking me also about scores I love.

When I saw Willy Wonka as a child, that was when it first occurred to me that there was music in a film, and that someone put it there. That blew my mind! I don’t come from a family of professional musicians, but I could see that writing music for a movie was a job and that someone somewhere had to be doing it. In retrospect, that was a big moment for me but at the time I thought it was only other people in other cities that got to do things like that with their lives. I wasn’t born into wealth, so I had to find another way in.

Some of my other influences include my mentors John Powell and Hans Zimmer of course, but also John Williams, Danny Elfman and Johan Johansson. And I listen to the fresh ideas out there. Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s score for Stranger Things is one I like, but there are countless examples.

We’d love to hear a little bit about your creative process. How do you usually get started on a piece?

By thinking. A lot! There are always too many questions to answer all at once so I try to break things down into solvable questions. What does the music need to say? Do I need to find a way to use it into many different styles or emotions? What instruments belong here? What is the sonic plan, is it acoustic, electronic, realistic, manipulated, lo-fi, distant, intimate? I don’t go through this like a checklist, but these are some of the things I think about before I put my hands anywhere near an instrument. In a way, I’m trying to put myself into a position where I have to make as few decisions as possible when I write. If I know it’s a mid tempo, major key clarinet solo it’s much easier to begin!

Do you ever encounter writer’s block; What’s your remedy to cure it?

Okay, this is going to sound facetious, but the way I beat writer’s block is by simply not believing in it. I really don’t believe in it, though. I’ve hinted at it in the last question, but what I find to be a bigger problem in writing music is that I have too many ideas and too many things I want to try. It’s the opposite of writer’s block where there aren’t enough ideas!

My whole process, I’ve come to figure out through self-discovery, is more about deciding which ideas NOT to pursue because I have too many. I don’t know which is worse between that and writer’s block. People that tell me they’re experienced writer’s block seem to have the same amount of anxiety as me so maybe it’s a tie.

As someone who has a variety of credits to their name from big feature films, TV series, and games — both live-action and animated — does your approach differ depending on the type of media you’re scoring?

Only sometimes. What I’ve found is every project eventually tells you what it wants to be musically. You have to listen to it. I’ve just scored two animated movies in a row and they were very different. One clearly wanted to be a conventional, sophisticated acoustic score, a little jazzy. The other wanted to be rowdy, and would tolerate stylistic changes and rapid mood shifts. So it’s not so much the type of media that tells me that, it’s not even the filmmaker or the game developer, it’s the project itself.

When composers are at their best, they are standing alongside their collaborators, and each of you is looking up at the project which lives up above you. It’s trying to tell you what you need to know to do your best to help it be born. Every project takes on a life of its own, and that life is independent of the people creating it. You’re there to usher it along.

Is there a particular genre that piques your interest over another? And is there a genre that you haven’t done yet but are interested in trying?

One of the main reasons I became a composer was because I knew I’d get to do many different things with my music. That’s in contrast to the bands I listened to growing up, though things have changed for the better in recent years. You used to have to commit to a style and live there even when you wanted to move on.

The luck of my career is I get to do something different each time, and I do love that about it!

I’ll always seek out the challenge of writing something alien to what I’ve ever done before. When I scored Into The West, I was a 29 year-old who hadn’t truly watched a western. I was asked if I wanted to write a demo and I had no idea how to do it. None! That combination of fear and thrill is what got me through the process of writing demos for the show. They had nothing to do with what you’d think of as music for a western, because I truly didn’t know what that was supposed to sound like! And I got the job, probably because it felt fresh to the filmmakers. So that was a scoring assignment that came my way just because the opportunity presented itself to me. I didn’t seek it out.

So the short answer is I’d like for my next project to be different from my current one.

All that said, I’d love to score more fantasy and sci-fi projects even though I already get to do them sometimes. If I’m going to go to the movies, I’m more likely I’ll want to see something adventurous, than non-fiction. I like the escapism, and real life is hard enough!

Do you have a particular credit that makes you proud? If yes, what about that job made it your proudest to-date?

Christopher Robin comes to mind because I had only 13 days from start to finish to write it! That, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales where I was able to finally show the world how much of a pirate I am at heart. The earlier Pirates scores were collaborations with Hans, but I think if you listen to my score for this one, you’ll feel how big a part of the whole franchise I was right from the beginning.

What’s your studio setup like? (DAW/Hardware systems); Do you have a favorite piece of gear (or plugin)?

I sequence in Cubase and have a separate Protools rig which is mainly just a video playback machine and a mixer although nowadays I’m mixing internally in Cubase for nearly everything. For gear, I always have guitars around even if I’m not playing them on what I’m writing. The guitar pedals get used all the time because I put synths through them. Speaking of which, there’s a Moog Matriarch and a Hydrasynth a few feet away from me, both of which I love.

That said, much of my earnest effort is inside Cubase with plugins and processing that I use all the time, including the UAD plugins and processing cards. Not many people know, but I came up as an audio engineer as well so I know how to dive into the tech and care deeply about the production and sonics of what I’m making. Processing sounds is now firmly ingrained in my writing technique.

If you could snap your fingers and have any virtual instrument custom-tailored for you, what would it be?

These days I’m especially interested in unusual ways to use an orchestra. What do 64 contrabass clarinets sound like? Or a bass drum filled with pudding? Are there any instruments which fell out of favor that we should revisit? That sort of thing would be interesting to me. It’s acoustic, or at least it starts that way but nothing stops you from putting it through a guitar amp or slowing it down to 1/8th the speed to see what happens.

I’ve been thinking there’s still a lot of ideas from our rich musical history that aren’t being explored today, but with the technology we now have, something interesting could be unearthed!

What role do Heavyocity products play in your work?

It started with Gravity and Damage for me. I’ve used those for years. Those Gravity sub hits haven’t left my template since I first heard them.

What I love about your tools is how malleable they are. Sure, they can be well behaved when you want them to, but they withstand the most vicious processing I can throw at them and that opens up so many avenues for bespoke sound design!

I find I can take these same sounds which you make available to any composer out there, but create something new with them each time. I can make them Geoff Zanelli sounds.

Remember, I came up in the late 90s when using commercially available sounds could keep you from standing out in the crowd because everyone else had them. Not so with your sounds! You’ve got tools built into them for customizing things, but even more interesting for how I write is they play nice with my own pet sounds, which often means manipulating them with external plugins or those guitar pedals I was talking about earlier.

Plus, you make something called Symphonic Destruction which means we’re thinking along the same lines… That’s got mischief built into it! You’re my kind of people.

Check out Geoff’s full list of credits and upcoming projects at: https://geoffzanelli.com/