Music, Arts & Entertainment
Sound Palettes
Lesson time 17:31 min
Hans is known for creating unique sound palettes. Learn how and why he does it, and how to do it on your own.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Creating a World • Light, Color & Sound • Samples
Teaches Film Scoring
From collaborating to scoring, Hans Zimmer teaches you how to tell a story with music in 31 exclusive video lessons.
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I really try, on each score, to find-- to create a palette that A, I haven't used before and B, if possible, nobody else has used before. So there's a lot of experimenting going on. There's a lot of what happens if you play the violin behind the bridge and stuff like this? What would that sound like? And that's sort of happening. And every day I get a new idea. And there's, like, a team of engineers running around just trying to keep up with me. And some of it is just, quite frankly, it's just me procrastinating, trying to avoid having to write the next note and going, I can't possibly write this next note unless I have the gong and the water played with-- I don't know-- three snorkels or something like this, some hideous thing I make people go through to do this. When we were working on the Batman movies, I mean, Gotham City doesn't exist. But it was very important that Gotham City had its own sound. So working with Richard King, for instance, the sound designer, and my friend Mel Weston, we really tried to figure out how the music could seep, dissolve, metamorphosize into a more abstract sound, into atmospheres, into room tones, could dissolve into the proper hard real sound effects which could then, at the same time, be reflected in the images that you saw. And very much the light-- I mean, the stylized lighting and the sound had to make sense. I think a very bright ditty across Gotham City wouldn't have worked. And at the same time, I remember, because I did Batman Begins with my friend James Newton Howard, who is a far more elegant composer. So I kept forever making him do the grandeur and the architectural wonderfulness of the shiny glass and steel of that city, while I became a specialist of grubby night scenes. But James used a very different sound to describe those colors. And in a funny way, we never talked about it, but it was fairly obvious that there was a different instrumentation called for to show the hope of the beauty of the city before it got destroyed. As soon as you say a very loose shot, as soon as you say it, I hear a sound. And look, I don't think it's a particular talent I have. I think it's just how I hear the world maybe more than I see the world. Just like I think the DP spends a lot of time figuring out how to light something and how to use certain colors, or the set designer, how to create an environment in which it is possible that the story can unfold, I need to know what the is DP is doing. I need to know how this thing is going to look. And so the colors are really important because music and image, it's all the same thing. It's light. It's frequency. Light goes into-- when you slow it down enough, it becomes sound. So we need to coexist, and we need to complement each other. If you look at Vittorio Storaro's book, , Writing With Light, and he just shows you the paintings he's looked at and the way he uses light. These ar...
About the Instructor
Hans Zimmer didn’t see a film until he was 12 years old. Since then, he’s scored over 150 films, including Inception, The Lion King, and The Dark Knight. In his MasterClass, the self-taught Academy Award-winner teaches how he creates sounds from nothing, composes compelling character themes, and scores a movie before ever seeing it. By the end, you’ll have everything you need to start film scoring.
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Hans Zimmer
From collaborating to scoring, Hans Zimmer teaches you how to tell a story with music in 31 exclusive video lessons.
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