How I Wrote The Trailer Music For 'Come Away'

In this video I show you exactly how I created the music for the trailer for ‘Come Away’.

This was a really fun one to write because it was out of the normal bounds of “organic sound design” or “epic orchestral”.

This one was modern family adventure music; this is an exciting area that is often inspired by commercial artists so feels a lot more contemporary.

I hope you guys get some really useful nuggets of info from this!

How I approach feel-good family music

When I write in this contemporary, feel-good area, I think about stadium pop. Music you could almost sing along to, with a feeling of togetherness and hope. It’s essentially a band setup, with keys and guitars, but you can bring in drum machines and synths for size, and trailer-style drums for even more.

Drums are where badly produced pop gives itself away, so I treat them carefully. I like a gated, smashed sound, like a more modern cousin of 80s gated drums. I slam the ratio on a compressor, push the make-up gain right up, and set a quick attack with a slow release so the tail swells. Then I add a noise gate and set the threshold so it chops the tail off. You get weight and presence without muddying the mix, which matters when the track only has ten or twenty parts.

For the piano I do something I usually avoid in cinematic music. I keep it dry and close, brighten it with EQ and compress it heavily so the level stays nice and even. The playing can be very simple, the kind of piano part a non-pianist would write.

Then I add a trailer composer’s tools in small amounts. Reversed sounds make great transitions: bounce in place, normalise, reverse. A drop into a new section, followed by a switch to half time, gives a real sense of opening out. Under that I’ll layer stomps and claps and a big percussion ensemble for scale.

For more on this, COME AWAY - Official Trailer is the trailer itself, and #3 - Goal setting, Speed Producing, & How I Wrote the ‘Come Away’ Trailer Music is the newsletter issue where I wrote about making it. Happy Ads is Espen’s simple way to build an upbeat advertising cue. My Uplifted course on feel-good cinematic pop is part of the Composer Academy.

Happy composing!Rich