Creating the Time Rift Soundtrack

I first heard about "Time Rift" in March of 1994 on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.drwho, where producer Jon Blum had posted a message about his efforts to produce a fan-made Doctor Who video. I wrote to Jon asking if he was planning to use stock music (as most fan videos up to then had done) or if he was planning on commissioning a score and, if he were, that I was interested in the job. At the time Jon had Rod Hudson lined up to do the score, but when Rod became unavailable a few months later, Jon contacted me and asked if I was still interested. Of course, I was. I sent him a sampler of my work and he seemed very happy with it, feeling that my style was in keeping with the Sylvester McCoy era of the show (the period during which the video is set), especially the work of Mark Ayers and Keff McCulloch -- whose styles I would tip my hat to during the course of the next two years -- and the deal was set. My first scoring project was underway!

The first thing I did was contact my friend Darrin Snider, a Doctor Who fan and talented composer in his own right, to see if he was interested in helping out. I knew that scoring a two-hour video was going to be very difficult on my own and Darrin was always enthusiastic about the idea of us working together: it seemed like the natural project for us to collaborate on. Before we even received the first episode from Jon, we were already developing musical themes and motifs for the various scenes and characters.

A tape containing the first half of Part One arrived in early October of 1994. It was then that I realized how difficult this job would be. Lacking the proper MIDI accessories for scoring, I had to rely on manual tracking of start and stop points, as well as manual logging of action sequences and impact cues. At first it seemed an impossible task, but after a while a rhythm began to develop and the manual work became more of a joy than an effort. Within a few weeks, I had programmed five pieces, one of which, Name-Dropping, was Darrin's contribution (in addition to the running string base line of Ray's Arrival, the piano bass line of Metro Chase and the eerie choral motif for the character of Ray, which first appears at the end of Metro Chase and figures prominently throughout the rest of "Time Rift").

Finishing touches were placed on these pieces before they were recorded, then they were transferred to VHS video and sent to Jon while I was on Thanksgiving vacation in Boston. Jon managed to lay these pieces down, plus a few others from my own collection of songs which I had sent him, just in time to get to Visions '94 and premiere Part One. Jon was very pleased and the initial fan response was great. Jon and I even discussed the possibility of a soundtrack album.

I stopped work on the score while I packed up and moved from Indianapolis to Boston in the Spring of '95 (sadly leaving Darrin behind and ending his direct contribution to TR, but he never stopped supporting the project and sending me ideas). Once settled in Boston, I purchased a separate drum synthesizer for my studio and converted all the pieces I had written for TR to include this machine. That addition to my system proved invaluable. I went on to write the music for the brief fight scene between Ace and Ray in Part One, Hardwired.

It was July of '95 when events in my personal life caused me to drop out of the "Time Rift" project. Jon had managed to utilize enough of my pre-existing music to fill a lot of gaps and was confident he could find a source for the rest of the music. He was able to find another source of music for about ten minutes'-worth of scenes but, as you will see later, that didn't work out well at all.

In October '95, I wrote Jon and asked if he needed anything else done before he took TR to it's full-length premiere at Visions '95. Things had changed in my personal life and I felt like I could return to scoring if he needed me. As it turns out, Jon still needed some music for a scene in Part Two where the Doctor had to hypnotize Ray and for the big fight scene between the Doctor, General Kramer and Captain Walker in Part Four. So I worked several overtime days during the week just prior to Thanksgiving and managed to drag two cues kicking and screaming out of my head and put them on to tape, in addition to a load of sound effects, Jon needed and some crisp, clean copies of a few of my already-existing music which he was using elsewhere in the video. It was also at this time that I first saw the cuts in TR which utilized some pre-existing music from the composer Jon had contacted to replace me. I was very impressed and felt Jon had made a good choice.

So Jon went to Visions '95 and "Time Rift" was a success. I spotted review after review on Usenet and received a few personal letters from people: all praising the production and the music. Especially the music. It was surprising enough that people liked it, but to be compared to Mark Ayres, Keff McCulloch, and others who have scored Doctor Who over the years was very flattering.

I took a break after Visions, but began working on a few other cuts that Jon needed starting in late January '96. These included a new version of Desperate Measures, the music for the fight scene in Part Four. Jon had not been as impressed by the original piece as I was and he wanted a partial rewrite. Fair enough, considering he had rarely asked for more than a note or bar change in the past. If you want an idea of why Jon didn't like my original version of Desperate Measures, just take a look at the section of the Blooper Reel called: "Senseless Violence" and you'll hear the kind of fight music Jon despises (and get a pretty good idea of just how wrong my original piece was!). The other pieces I turned out for Jon were Dirty Tricks, a cue in part one for the scene where Captain Walker walks into UNIT HQ and takes the computer data on the time rift from the Doctor and company, and Resolutions revamped version of one of my pre-existing songs, which Jon used as the music for the finale: the confrontation between the Doctor and Ace.

The real challenge in my work on "Time Rift" came after I thought my part was all finished. In the last days of April '96, I received a call from a calm but obviously unhappy Jon, who informed me that he had had to cancel his contract with the other composer and desperately needed to have at least ten cues replaced before the end of May, when he was to leave for six months in Australia. As it was, Jon had to recall 30 tapes which still contained the other composer's music. So while he was busy gathering those up and erasing them, I crammed. The result was three weeks of intense work and very little sleep, not to mention several long-distance telephone calls to Jon so he could hear how I was progressing. I was grateful for having just purchased a nice mixing board and an effects processor. They made the project a lot easier.

The biggest obstacle wasn't creating new music -- once I had an idea it usually flowed and Jon helped a lot by writing a few of the motifs for me -- but the big pain was the fact that, in moving to Boston, I lost access to the video equipment I had used to send him my earlier pieces. The ones I sent him since arriving in Boston had been on audio cassette and didn't transfer well to Jon's master video because of the difference in speed between my tape machine and his. So I had to rent time at a local cable access channel and spend several hours there dumping the music from my tape machine to a studio-grade VHS/S-VHS editing deck. This solved the problem. So, in the end, I had to send Jon three videotapes over the course of three weeks, containing a total of about 20 cuts, including the new ones: Powerplay (used for the Master/Ray/Doctor scenes at the beginning of Part Two, as well as in the Master/Walker confrontation scene in Walker's office near the end of Part Three), Evasive Maneuvers (evading the guards sequence in the middle of Part Three), En Passant (Ace, Ray and Hartnell infiltrate the naval base), and Gambit (which covers the scene where the Daleks are first revealed in Walker's office in Part Three and where the Doctor explains to Hartnell and Kramer about the Daleks' plan in Part Four).

(Incidentally, Evasive Maneuvers and Desperate Measures are two pieces where I tipped my hat to DW composer Keff McCulloch. Listen for the tom-tom fills in EM, inspired by a sequence from Keff's Remembrance of the Daleks score, and the tom-tom / hand claps in DM, from another part of RotD. Mark Ayers -- composer for The Curse of Fenric, Ghost Light and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy -- also inspired me and you can hear some of that in the choral parts of Men with Guns (when the Doctor and Ace discover the bodies of the naval guards at the beginning of the story) and the latter part of Desperate Measures, where Hartnell is contemplating the use of the pulse laser. Listen for the shaker / tom hits / metal splash parts in the background. Several people have commented on how the music is really what makes TR seem like a lost episode from the series. That is the best compliment I could ever ask for.)

The most challenging aspect of this massive rescoring was that some of the scenes had actually been edited to the original stock pieces. The sequence in which the UNIT people travel from their HQ and on to the Naval Base was edited AFTER the music had been laid down, so Jon could do a lot of fancy intercutting to the beat of the music. Half of the sequence was done using my UNIT theme and half with the other composer's stock music. I had to write a new piece that fit the look and feel of Jon's editing, yet be completely different from the piece that was being replaced! I'm inclined to have (as Jon put it) my tongue stapled to a skunk before I'd do that again!

Finally, a little under two years after I started, the scoring of "Time Rift" was finished. But then I found out my work was only beginning...

Response to the music in on-line reviews and personal e-mail was such that Jon and I decided to bring our idea of a soundtrack album to the front burner. There was going to be a lot of work involved in getting the music ready for sale, but it seemed like a good next step to take in building myself a reputation. So I began work on TIME RIFT: THE SOUNDTRACK AND OTHER TEMPORAL ANOMALIES in the Fall of 1996.

In order to pay for this project, I decided to have a fundraiser. I sent several copies of a demo tape with Jon to Visions '96, which he sold. Then I began selling copies of my 1993 tape, "Tales from Ra'Hash-nir" and solicited pre-orders and direct donations from interested fans. By September 1997, I had raised nearly 3/4 of the money I would need to produce the "Time Rift" tape. If it weren't for the financial -- not to mention emotional -- support of the cast, crew and fans of TR, the album would never have been finished.

A lot of things had to be done to make the music ready for public release. I had the facilities to simply record the music make copies of tapes, but that didn't seem right. I wanted it to be more. I wanted stereo, for one. The original score was simple monaural sound -- going to VHS, there was no need for the complexities of stereo music. Adding stereo to drums, percussion and effects processing would give the music a life it lacked on video. I also wanted to extend some cuts, such as the "sting" that plays when the Master attempts to hypnotise General Kramer (which became Masterly Devices - a piece which I dedicated as a tribute to Dudley Simpson, whose 70's synth style I tried to emulate on this piece) and, especially, the popular UNIT music. So many people have commented on their love for that piece -- which was taken from a much-longer song of mine called Vortex -- that I wanted to include the full-length version on the album (as UNIT Drive). I also wanted to make a recording of quality -- even though CDs were too expensive for a project of this size, there was every advantage of recording in digital audio. But one of my primary goals was to make things up to my friend Darrin. The move to Boston had ended his direct collaboration to the scoring and I saw, in this album, a chance to publicise his talents. So, with these ideas in mind, I set to work.

By April 1997 I finished reconstructing the existing cuts into a workable collection. It was also at this time that I received Darrin's contribution to the album, Eternal Warrior, a 7 1/2 minute suite based on Darrin's 4-note motif for Amy Steele's character, the cybernetically-enhanced soldier, Ray. Because the distance between us made it impossible for Darrin to work in my studio, we decided that the best option was to have Darrin write the music on his computer at home and e-mail me the MIDI data file, then I would arrange the instrumentation on my system and fine-tune everything. It took almost a month, but the whole thing finally came together and Darrin's piece was ready to be added to the collection.

At the same time I started to acquire the equipment I would need to make the "Time Rift" soundtrack a reality. I had little familiarity with digital recording but, with the help of my friend Luis Espaillat from EU Wurlitzer Music and Sound, I was able to add some state-of-the-art systems to my studio. Most important was the Roland VS-880 EX, an 8-track hard disk recording system, which would become the centerpiece of my studio. This is the machine that I would be making the master mix of the soundtrack to. I was entering a whole new realm of technology, and it was very intimidating.

I was aided in my efforts, in large part, by the Net. I got quite a lot of good technical advice from Keff McCulloch and Mark Ayers (Doctor Who composers for the Sylvester McCoy era). I also managed to track down Dudley Simpson (thanks Bruce and Elisabeth!), probably the most famous name in science-fiction TV music, to ask permission to use the melody from his UNIT theme from The Ambassadors of Death and The Mind of Evil. It appears in the form of the little swing lick when the Doctor strong-arms the Master into working for him (called Blackmail on the album). But one of the most important projects the Net was used for was the production of the insert for the tape itself. Peter Fagan, of Theta-G Productions in San Francisco, spent months on the design. Peter also created the highly-acclaimed cover for the "Time Rift" video box and applied the same skills he used on that project to the tape j-card. The finished product even impressed the tape production company!

But the most time-consuming aspect of the project was the recording. It took me from June to October of 1997 to record 58 minutes of music. In total, I used nearly 200 tracks and 1.5 GB of hard disk space and ZIP disks to record and store the music. The last two months were the hardest, as I had started a new full-time job with a long commute by train and I was exhausted by the end of each day. I was also under increasing self-induced pressure as Visions '97 approached -- trying to get all the recording and final touches finished with time to spare for production of the tapes -- so I could have tapes to take with me to the convention. In late October I took my recording equipment to Stuart Covington at Powerhouse Studio in Ayer, Massachusetts. There we spent nearly three days mixing down the final stereo version of the album. The whole last month of the project was fraught with problems -- 90% of them caused on MY end of the project -- and I was certain, as Visions loomed closer, that all my work would be in vain. But Stuart, miracle-worker that he is, managed to solve a number of them. The rest cropped up while the master DAT tape and graphic design materials were in the hands of the production house, Superdups. If it weren't for the patient and understanding people there, I would have ripped all my hair out. So, finally, two days before leaving for Visions, a box of tapes was in my hands and my heart rate was back to normal.

That's it, the rest is -- or will be -- history. I took tapes to Chicago over Thanksgiving Day weekend. I sold a lot. I handed out a lot to investors and people who had purchased advanced orders. I met a lot of the generous and supportive souls from the Net (you know who you are, Kathy). I got to meet Amy Steele (well worth the 20-hour train ride!). A friend even managed to put a copy of the soundtrack into the hands of David Maloney (director of Genesis of the Daleks and The Talons of Weng Chiang), who reportedly said it was "really quite good." And, best of all, I got to see the look on Jonathan Blum's face when he saw the tapes for the very first time. Only then, I think, did Jon finally realize just what he had started.

For those who are interested in the kind of equipment I used to produce the soundtrack for "Time Rift", here is a list of my gear. Also included are some pieces I added after work on the video was completed, which were employed in the production of the soundtrack tape:

Neil Marsh
Neil@AudioBoy.net

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Creating theSoundtrack by Neil Marsh

Neil Marsh Neil@AudioBoy.net

Creating theSoundtrack
by Neil Marsh

Neil Marsh
Neil@AudioBoy.net