BY CHRISTOPHER LEON WITH LEVEL AND GAIN
You may not have heard of Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, but you would undoubtedly know their music.
The Primetime Emmy Award winners and Grammy nominees are the brains behind the iconic soundtrack for Netflix’s smash-hit show Stranger Things.
Michael and Kyle took some time out of their busy schedules to chat about all things Stranger Things, the Duffer brothers, synths, and their production workflow.
Hey, Kyle and Michael. How does it feel to have composed the most famous theme in modern television?
KYLE: You know, when you put it like that, it’s pretty cool. We don’t sit around thinking about it, necessarily. But, sometimes, something will happen on TV or somebody will be walking around with a shirt, and I’ll be like, ‘Holy shit, this is massive! This is crazy! I can’t believe that we are a part of this thing’.
How did the main theme come about? Was the music created before or after the main title visuals, or was it a parallel process?
MICHAEL: It was a bit of both. There was a rough demo initially that was not related to having any picture to go along with it. Once [Stranger Things creators the Duffer brothers] kind of picked out a piece of music they liked, we started building it up into various versions of 30 seconds up to a minute-and-a-half, because we didn’t have a video yet.
Basically, when they started doing the graphics, they knew a BPM count, but the duration of the music was all to be sorted out. When we got that graphic work, we realised that piece of music was, to us, a perfect fit. So we were like, ‘let’s keep going with this piece of music’, and they kept making changes.
It was probably two-and-a-half months of back and forwards, because we were scoring the show, and we weren’t even sure if we were doing the theme. It was all kind of up in the air, but we wanted to do a really good job on it just to have it ready.
KYLE: I think once we wrote that first version, with the idea of being the title sequence, we knew it was supposed to be the theme song. I think that the Duffers were probably on board, but at the same time, nothing is real until it’s real. But I guess it worked.
MICHAEL: It worked.
The Oberheim Two-Voice synth was used to create the arpeggio in the title theme. How did you end up settling on that synth, and what others did you try before deciding that was the sound you wanted to go with?
KYLE: I think that was an arbitrary decision. Some of the stuff was very intentional, like the [Roland] SH-2 for the bass.
MICHAEL: I mean, it probably had to do with the fact that my sequencer was here [starts pointing around his work desk]. The SH-2 was here, I knew I wanted bass, and the Oberheim Two-Voice was sitting right here. If you are going to do a simple sound, it’s going to sound good on that, and it had to be a synth that could be sequenced. So that’s the reason.
How has scoring Stranger Things affected your musical careers? What doors has it opened?
KYLE: Well, now we have a musical career. That’s the big one [laughs].
Yeah, we had jobs. Michael worked at a synth job, so he worked in music, but he wasn’t getting paid for writing music and neither was I. So, in that respect, it changed everything. It gave us the option to get paid a living wage to make music.
Read the full interview with this composer right here on Level and Gain, the new screen music publication from the creative team behind CutCommon.
Images supplied.
