Howard Goodall is an EMMY®, BRIT®, Gramophone® and BAFTA® -winning composer of choral music, stage musicals, film and TV scores, is well known as a TV and Radio broadcaster and is the leading spokesperson for music education in the UK. His best-known themes & scores include Into the Storm, The Gathering Storm, The Borrowers, Red Dwarf, The Catherine Tate Show, Q.I., Mr Bean, Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, Mr Bean's Holiday, Blackadder, and The Vicar of Dibley.

You can therefore imagine how thrilled we are that he is also a user of AIR instruments and the AIR Users Blog resources. Howard kindly agreed to give the AIR Users Blog an interview. 

Howard, welcome and thank you for giving this interview to the AIR Users Blog, firstly, I know from your story that you began composing music in the early 1980s, has the journey to success been straightforward?

It took me about 8 years between leaving college and being able to support myself from writing music and even then it was touch & go. In between I did anything and everything that came my way - session playing (on synth, usually), piecemeal unpaid gigs and writing, musically directing pantos, pro bono composing for schools etc. I don't think anyone's journey to stability and success is straight-forward and when people appear to have popped up out of the blue with a 'sudden' hit they've usually been slogging away out of the limelight for years. The key for me was establishing good relationships with one or two key contemporaries through the rough and smooth. Having a successful career lasting a few decades is as much about making and nurturing relationships as it is about music. Honest.

Many of our community are writing both music and words, do you think there is a distinct advantage concentrating mainly on one?

I do both these days but it has taken 25 years to get to the point where I feel as confident as a lyricist as a composer. Writing lyrics (if you are mainly a composer) is time-consuming and difficult, requiring great patience and application and I have learnt steadily and slowly from my (proper) lyric-writing partners, so if you choose to do both text and dots be prepared for the long haul. When I read a lyric by Paul Simon, Sting or Dylan, I realise how far there is still to go!

I know that on the journey you've also been in a few bands (I'll spare you the embarrassment of printing the photos) how useful do you find collaboration in the creative process?

Collaboration in my work - especially film, TV and the stage - is absolutely essential, whether I have liked it or not. My early days in bands were a hard lesson in how not to do it, to be honest. Egos, lack of experience and tact, a deficit of adequate performance skills and distraction from the job of making music in socialising all contribute to a bad training ground for the real business of collaboration which is all about not being a selfish twat. I was in bands to impress girls and try my hand at song-writing. I'd give myself 4/10 for both and I didn't learn about collaboration, but I did laugh a great deal and developed a love of synthesizers which I've never lost. I started learning properly about working with others in the theatre and on the live comedy stage.

A lot of your film and TV work has concentrated on comedy, although more recently you scored the brilliant 'Into the Storm' series of films, do you think comedy is a genre that is easy to write for musically, or is a funny score as hard to create as a funny script?

I treat comedy shows in exactly the same way as I do non-comedy. Who are the characters? Where are they, what is their story and when in history is it taking place? My main interest in the underscore of any scene is concerned with the emotional content of it, and this would be as much of an issue in a comedy scene as in a searing drama scene. It's best, in my view, to avoid writing music that is self-consciously 'funny' since it will probably sound cheesy and feeble, undermining rather than underlining the comedy.

We just mentioned your work on both Into the Storm, The Gathering Storm, two brilliant films about Churchill and both very much bigger films in terms of cinematic scale than comedy, how did you approach these particular scores?

Again, emotional power is what I am driving at. Big orchestras have immense power to transform a story but they are also a paintbox you don't want to go berserk in, their rich palette should be used sparingly. It's important to get the themes and shapes of the music right before thinking about unleashing the beast, because the minute you start adding in the heavy strings, brass and timps there is a danger that everything will sound brilliant for 3 days after which it all sounds the same. Both the Churchill movies were completed in super-fast time as I was erm... replacing other composers, so I had 3-4 weeks only from first spotting to final mastering. This puts enormous pressure on the composer and support team but this is nothing compared to the pressure of trying to please a group of producers/director/executives on both sides of the Atlantic all of whom have different views on the music and different levels of influence over its development. Running a coalition cabinet is probably more straight-forward. Getting the initial themes and moods right is therefore essential to act as pilots through the murky waters of the post-production knock-about. I am really proud of my work on these movies as they allowed me to do my best 'Britain in peril' style in a fascinating period, something I knew I could have a good crack at. Thrillers involving multiple gun crimes and car chases probably wouldn't be my thing in quite the same way. Always play to your strengths!

Moving on to equipment now, having been working for several decades in the recording industry when did you make the switch to computers and why?

First I switched, in 1994, to Sibelius notation from hand-written manuscripts, then a few years later I took the plunge away from hardware recording on tapes to Pro Tools, via a few happy years with a Yamaha sequencer I took with me everywhere. Actually I have always tried to keep fascination with new gear and new modes of recording under control, so that the composing is allowed to take priority, so I probably got to computers later than most for recording. I always liked electronic keyboards but there is nothing like a real bunch of players in a studio with a professional engineer doing the hands-on recording and a composer staying in charge just of the musical end result. Having said that, my two best friends are Sibelius 6 and Pro Tools 8: bloody love 'em.

Tell us about your set-up, in particular the AIR equipment you're using?

Structure, even more now I have imported the libraries of my favourite old synths from your site! Pro Tools 8 M-Powered, Sibelius 6 (heaven), Altiverb 6 (awesome, best reverb ever), Muse Research Receptor2 + Komplete, loads of plug-ins, VSTs and sample libraries and some delicious microphones (I use a Neumann M-147 to record my weekly Classic fm show and use that for vocals for music, or Brauner Valvet, depending on my mood).

Are their any particular go-to plug-ins you use again and again?

Apart from Structure: Omnisphere (gorgeous), Miroslav Philharmonik, Vienna Instruments Appasionnata Strings, V Collection, Hybrid 2, and - not strictly speaking a plug-in, but iZotope RX Audio Restoration is a life-saver.

What do you love about Pro Tools and the instruments?

Intuitive ease of use, visual clarity, flexibility, importing virtually anything, and, crucially since 8, integration with Sibelius, at last, for which many thanks Avid.

Is there anything you keep thinking 'I wish Digidesign would sort this out' about?

I wish the various Vienna instruments worked better on Pro Tools 8. I have various work-arounds but it's a pain they're not really happy together. It's an awkward marriage, let's face it. And as for Yellow Tools Independence, don't get me started...

Tell us about the blog, what do you find useful about it?

Sounds sounds sounds: thanks!

Finally, we have a lot of aspiring composers in the community, what one piece of advice do you wish you had been given when starting out?

Don't be a prima donna; composing is a personal activity but if payment is involved it is nearly always (a) collaborative and/or (b) the music is a servant of some other form - the pictures, the story, the drama, the text, the artist. Don't hang on to ideas that others have a problem with however precious they are to you. Keep them for another day and find a new solution for the current project. Something that doesn't work one day isn't likely to work miraculously the next. Be open, flexible and above all ready to cut and revise, cut and revise.

Thanks for your time...

More on Howard Goodall can be found here