Prime Time Players: The Acoustic Guitar in TV and Film Scoring
From Wood&Steel's "Behind The Scenery" Series
by Bryan Beller
Published Winter, 2001

Conjure up images of a professional freelance guitarist's lifestyle and you might envision late nights, unkempt studio apartments, Ramen noodles, and tours with bare-knuckle travel conditions. Almost inexplicably, many energetic, youthful souls find that this sort of sensory deprivation/overload only heightens the allure of such a career choice.

But there is another way. A way to wake up in the same bed every morning and actually know what city you're in and what day it is. A way to leave behind the cutthroat, maddening world of gigging for a living and still make the daily bread by picking up a guitar. An acoustic guitar, even. It's the world of composing and/or performing music for television and film.

In Los Angeles, where the overwhelming majority of this highly desired work is based, cracking the scene is tough. One would think that in this Age of Digital Everything, a primarily acoustic guitarist would have an even more difficult road to this musical and financial promised land. But it can be done, and in the event that the aspirant is fortunate enough to land a gig on a successful TV show--with a run of, say, at least five years--it is, in the words of one successful veteran, "the gift that keeps on giving."

In this first installment of a Wood&Steel series on guitarists-for-hire in the arts-and-entertainment world, we bring you the inside story on four working pros--how they got where they are, and how they operate behind the scenes to bring home the bacon by bringing you music through the tube and screen. Improbable as it sounds, one got his big break by way of a producer's curiosity about his nickname; one flew into the scene on the Wings of a Beatle; and the other two teamed up to take over an entire network's session work by using arcane Russian technology.

W.G. "Snuffy" Walden

If there were a gold standard for guitarists working in the TV/film scoring industry, W.G. "Snuffy" Walden just might be it. It's not enough that he's doing one of the highest-rated (and certainly most-respected) network television shows, NBC's The West Wing (he won an Emmy for composing its main title theme). Most telling about Snuffy's state of evolution in the business is that the music on The West Wing is purely orchestral. There's not a lick of acoustic guitar in the whole show. Not that the eight-time veteran nominee is giving the award back.

"I've done it both ways and winning is way more fun," he admits. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime kind of show. Such remarkable characters and storytelling. I'm blessed to be with it. It's just such a great team. I don't think it was the melody I wrote that won an Emmy; I really feel like it was the show that won it."

Walden's history is unlikely. A son of the Sun Belt, weaned on Texas blues, and having already spent some time in England, Snuffy was having a good run as a Los Angeles-based freelance electric guitarist, touring with top artists like Chaka Khan and Donna Summer. But he saw the handwriting on the wall about the "touring life" early--"a Holiday Inn at age 60"--and decided to change course.

As it turned out, a producer at ABC wanted to meet a guy who would willfully call himself "Snuffy," and arranged for an interview to see if he might be the right musician to work on a new series called thirtysomething. The erstwhile electric player had to borrow an acoustic guitar to track one of the most identifiable themes of '80s television. The resulting, Emmy-nominated music did more to open the door for acoustic guitar in prime time than any TV tune since the days of M*A*S*H's immortal "Suicide is Painless".

Snuffy went on to become ABC's go-to guy, working on hits like The Wonder Years, Roseanne, The Drew Carey Show, and Ellen, among many others. Over time, he developed a grounding philosophy: to write the music that's best for the project. "It's not about being clever," Walden explains, "it's not about writing the newest thing, the newest inversion, or the newest guitar lick. It's about serving the film."

It's also about staying fresh, not the easiest thing to do when you've been scoring for more than 15 years. "The work I do is so varied, because I do so many different shows," Walden says. "There are only so many ways you can play an acoustic guitar. You can play it with a slide bar, you can play it with a fingerpick. I try to create a new fabric, a new pallette for each show, and I try not to repeat it. That way, I can switch, and I don't have to worry, 'Am I writing what I wrote this morning for some other show?'"

For Walden, the days of having to borrow an acoustic guitar are long gone. Admittedly more a fingerpicker than a strummer, he now sports a 912c and an 812c as his main Taylor tracking axes, though he now owns "six or seven" that meet his requirements for a proper acoustic sound, something "really responsive, that I can play super-light on and still has a pure tone." The acoustics have pickups on them and go straight into Pro Tools and Digital Performer platforms. At that point, the film rolls, the red light goes on, and the creative process begins with a "scratch track" that often becomes a keeper.

"It's never thought out," Walden happily admits. "What I do is go ahead and play, and as I'm writing, I'm performing the score. Those performances, for the most part, I keep. As an acoustic guitar composer, I love to look at film and just play. I'm dodging dialogue, being as expressive as I can be, and I'm much more connected with the film."

As if he's not busy enough scoring for both small ensemble and full-scale orchestra, Walden has a deal with Windham Hill Records and several solo releases under his belt. His track, "Who Lives Up There", was featured on Taylor/Windham Hill's Sounds of Wood & Steel CD, and a new solo release is due in early 2001 (excerpts of which can be sampled at Walden's official website, www.wgsnuffywalden.com). The CD will contain a suite from the soundtrack of The West Wing, as well as the main title theme, a crowning achievement that's apparently satisfying for reasons other than just collecting gold hardware.

"I'm really proud of the work," he says before establishing a standard no musician should have to live up to. "I really feel like I'm a part of something that's giving TV a good name again."

* * * * *

Laurence Juber

Asked the essential question about his prime directive during a TV session, Laurence Juber replies with typical English precision and brevity: "Get the job done."

The London native has been getting the job done in the studio for more than 20 years. After his raucous, Grammy-winning, three-year stint as lead guitarist for Paul McCartney's Wings, Juber settled in Los Angeles in 1981with an eye on studio work. One could say he found it.

Here are 10 TV shows he's worked on: The Fall Guy, Facts Of Life, Head Of The Class, 9 to 5, Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days, Soul Man, Roseanne, Seventh Heaven, and his "signature" show, Home Improvement. There are at least 30 more, and that's only the TV work; the pages required to properly list all of his credits would jam a fax machine.

"There are two different perspectives on this," Juber states. "One is what happens when I'm a studio musician. The other is what happens when I'm a composer. I like doing it as a composer because you make more money. I did a MIDI score for a show called Tarzan that wasn't shown much in the U.S. market--actually, it was used in a lot of foreign syndication. I completed the last episode of that six or seven years ago, and I'm still getting royalties for it."

More often than not, Juber plays the role of session ace, a title befitting someone who admits to "enjoying" fingerpicking a 12-string. He dismisses the technical challenge of playing the 12-string as, simply, something "that takes a certain amount of concentration." He's a virtuoso acoustic player/composer in his own right, with nine solo recordings to date. But for TV session work, he primarily executes the compositions of his longtime collaborator/producer, guitarist Dan Foliart.

"Dan and I have been working together for nearly 20 years. I can kind of anticipate where he's going," says Juber. "For example, Home Improvement. Dan composed the show and pretty much established the style of it in the pilot. It opened with the altered-tuning 12-string with percussion and bass clarinet, for example. It was a very characteristic sound with that show."

To say the least. Juber made the 12-string theme a personal calling card, and viewers of Improvement's eight-year run (and subsequent immortalization in syndication) grew to associate the sound of his Taylor 555c with the entrance of Tim Allen's character. Juber chose that 12-string because "it's a very identifiable sound. You get great texture out of it."

Juber should know. He was a Taylor clinician for several years (primarily as an 812 user), has a cut on the Sounds of Wood & Steel CD ("Liquid Amber"), and could probably tell you more about the construction of an acoustic guitar than most luthiers. He also experiments heavily with altered tunings, both in his solo work and with Foliart in a most unique way--by playing standard-tuning fingerings on an altered-tuning guitar. Confused?

"We've worked out a system where he'll write stuff in standard notation, and I will play it as though I was in standard tuning. I'll see the 'E' on top of the treble clef and I will play the 'E' as though I was playing in standard tuning, but the guitar actually may be tuned to an 'F', or a 'D', or an 'E' flat, or something different. So what I hear isn't the same as what I'm looking at. It works," he adds, as if to punctuate for those who can't fathom the concept.

With such technical ability at his disposal, one might assume that there is nothing that Juber actually has to struggle to get right in the studio. But there is--cartoon music.

"I played on some of the Mouseworks cartoons for Disney, and those are scary because the click tracks [used to set and maintain tempo, and usually audible only to the session musicians, engineer, and producer] can be at breakneck tempos, and they're never stable, they're always changing. Just think about cartoon music, and imagine what it's like trying to sight-read when you're flailing around on a ukulele or a banjo at 260 beats per minute.

"But I think it's very important to remember that it's not just about the technique or reading what's on the page, or matching some particular compositional thing to what's on the screen," Juber adds. "When I first started scoring, I used to try and catch every single thing. Now, I'd rather have it feel like a decent piece of music, and capture the mood of the scene."

In what approaches a "summit" of TV session titans, Juber and Walden currently are composing and performing together on a new NBC series called Three Sisters. And though Juber realizes more than most the potential financial advantages of composing, his current preference is clear.

"I've made a conscious choice really to work on being an artist, and to develop my own voice and my own sensibility as a guitar player, with the goal of convincing the community at large that I have something different to offer. That's really what happened with this show I'm doing with Snuffy--he brought me into it because he likes my style of playing and convinced the producers that that was the right kind of sound for the show. So, I can sit down and be in DADGAD tuning or open-C tuning and do a lot more of my thing, which is really what I always wanted to do anyway."

* * * * *

Andrew Rollins and Jon Butcher

Not everyone working this angle of the music business has been at it for two decades. Take Brothers West, for example--a partnership comprising Andrew Rollins and Jon Butcher. At this writing, they've existed as a team for a mere 10 months. But that's not to say they don't have experience--quite the contrary.

The two guitarists converged from wildly different directions and backgrounds. Rollins did it the hard way, working a day gig at Guitar Center before traveling to the Philippines, where he produced music and TV. When he returned to L.A., he found work as a record producer and independent scorer for TV and film.

Butcher first achieved notoriety in the 1980s as the leader of the Jon Butcher Axis, a critically acclaimed power-trio whose searing blues/rock earned them a Grammy nomination. After roughing it on the road for 15 years, Butcher felt a not uncommon sentiment creeping into his thoughts.

"I toured around the world I don't know how many times," Jon recalls. "I got burned out, and my right ear started giving me trouble, and I started thinking, 'well, let's try something different.'"

Something different was a total de-electrification of his sound, style, and writing habits, which Butcher attributes to the heavy influence of one artist--Leo Kottke. "I picked up a Leo Kottke [Signature Model] because of Leo Kottke. Specifically. I love him, and I love what he did. And the guitar's deep. One thing led to another, and it turned out that for a couple of years, I didn't play electric guitar at all."

Rollins had his own Taylor insights along the way; at one point he was the leading Guitar Center salesman of Taylors in the country, and he remains a devoted user of several models, including a limited-edition maple 915, an 855 12-string, and a 910. While Butcher was undergoing his metamorphosis, Rollins was busy doubling as On-Set Music Performance Supervisor and audio-track session guitarist for the CBS miniseries Shake, Rattle & Roll, a project that enabled him to work with the likes of B.B. King, Terence Trent D'Arby, and Graham Nash.

Because Rollins had made other inroads into TV scoring for several projects at HBO, perhaps it was preordained that his and Butcher's stars would cross when both were called to work on Showtime's bio-pic, The Jimi Hendrix Story. As Rollins recalls, something magical happened when they recorded tracks together.

"It was kind of strange," he admits, "because I've always liked what he's done. We hit it off right away. I played Eric Clapton's parts and he was doing the Hendrix stuff." Butcher finishes Rollins' thought. "At one point, we went out and talked in the parking lot, behind the studio, and made an instant connection that would last longer than the session."

The riffing begins.

Rollins: "So Jon called me the next day, and I said, 'Let's get together.' Because I had a really good feeling."

Butcher: "Without really knowing why! It wasn't like there was a plan."

Soon, there was. They named themselves Brothers West, and decided to pool their musical and networking resources into obtaining TV and film scoring work. It didn't take long.

"We got our first gig within two or three weeks, and that was a spot for UPN's series, Freedom," Rollins explains. "Then, we took a meeting with a guy over there who Jon knew. And we approached him and said, 'Give us all the stuff you have for UPN. We want to be your in-house guys." The aggressiveness paid off in the form of two more shows--Star Trek Voyager and The Hughleys, for which Brothers West wrote the theme.

Also on the current working slate for the Brothers is a full-length film, a horror movie called The Dollhouse, which begs the question of whether they prefer TV or film.

"In my mind," says Butcher, "I see us doing film, because the possibility for expression is much wider. Television pays great, but with film, you get to be who you want to be."

"In a lot of ways," Rollins adds, "the hardest thing is when someone gives you 30 seconds to create something for film. Promo spots sometimes are the hardest, because you've got to get everybody hot, excited, and--"

"Close that bad boy out," Butcher interjects, "on the thirtieth second."

The interplay and occasional good-natured ribbing between Rollins and Butcher is a key element to their creative process and "comfort zone," as they call it. When Rollins offers, "As cliché as it is, practice makes perfect. You can always learn new stuff," Butcher quickly adds, "I try and teach him as much as possible. I do everything that I can."

But more than anything, the two guitarists with similar CD collections, a shared passion for the Beatles, and a strong sense of melody are on a joint mission to reintroduce real music into a medium where sampled guitar sounds rule the day. And they're doing it together, as partners.

"It's great," Rollins gushes, smiling contently. "I've never been happier working with someone as with Jon."

"It's a band," Butcher adds. "We've got our band. Brothers West."

Asked how Brothers West tracks those great acoustic guitar sounds producers keep calling for, the duo has a somewhat surprising answer.

"We've been using this little Russian mic," Rollins says before pausing to gather his thoughts. "I hate to tell anybody, because . . . it's just a small . . . it's a condenser mike. And then we run it through . . . I'm not telling. I'm not going to!" Butcher laughs. "It's a big secret, man."

Some things, apparently, stay inside the family.

* * * * *

There's a lot to consider in the world of scoring for television and film--making the right connections, befriending producers, and possessing the technical ability, studio experience, an almost indefinable creative intelligence, and a sense of what works and what doesn't for different scenes, moods, and formats.

But it's refreshing to know that an instrument as classic as the acoustic guitar still is considered an essential element in the composition of many of today's top network shows and studio releases, and that there are professionals out there working to keep that authenticity alive in an age of samples, dance-pop divas, and re-re-remixes. And for those who achieve success, the ultimate reward is the same as for anyone who picks up an instrument in the first place.

As Laurence Juber puts it, "The thing never to forget is, you're playing music."

This copyrighted article first appeared in the Winter 2001 issue of Taylor Guitars' quarterly publication, Wood&Steel. It is reproduced here by permission of Taylor Guitars for the sole discretionary use of Bryan Beller and cannot be reproduced or reprinted anywhere else without the express permission and consent of Taylor Guitars.