Danny Elfman

In 2005, Elfman recalled: "I compose at the keyboard and I have a work table with a big keyboard and screen with a sequencer. I'll create these huge templates and use a program called "Performer", but then I send it out to a guy who puts it into Sibelius for generating the parts. It just looks like notes with no dynamics or anything before it is put into Sibelius."

"EastWest/Quantum Leap instruments have become an important part of my sonic template. I am using EW/QL Pianos and Silk in my scores and I am using Stormdrum right now on Terminator."

The MasterClass course "Danny Elfman Teaches Music for Film" features direct insights and instruction from Danny Elfman, as showcased in the official trailer on YouTube by MasterClass.

"EastWest/Quantum Leap instruments have become an important part of my sonic template. I am using EW/QL Pianos and Silk in my scores and I am using Stormdrum right now on Terminator."

In this interview, Danny Elfman talks about using Vienna Symphonic Library.

Danny Elfman discusses his use of Omnisphere.

"The Boys Choir is amazing. We used them in Good Will Hunting. Very Impressive."

"EastWest/Quantum Leap instruments have become an important part of my sonic template. I am using EW/QL Pianos and Silk in my scores and I am using Stormdrum right now on Terminator."

"I’d also created a large sample library in Kontakt. If you look at my template right now you’ll see that I’ve got a huge library of strings, brass, woodwinds and orchestral instruments, but when it comes to all of my prepared piano, percussion and weird sounds, I was definitely using a lot of my own stuff for some of the songs. I’d record guitar, chop it up in Kontakt and turn it into an instrument by putting it through different effects and treating it as if it were a sample. When it came time to record the album, even though I used two wonderful guitarists, I still kept a lot of what I would call my ‘fucked up’ samples that I didn’t feel there was any way to replace."

"I used Guitar Rig quite a bit. If you listen to the song Insects, and to a lesser extent, True, there’s a lot of really crazy guitar effects that were all played through Guitar Rig. In fact, I did such a lot of crazy guitar shit that I’d intended to do an extended mix, so one of these days I’m going to make my own mix of Insects and you’ll hear shit tons of me working in Guitar Rig [laughs]."

"Switching over to Giga changed everything. It was one of the two biggest revolutions of the last decade - GigaStudio for my samples and digital recording right into my sequencer. Those two things, then digital video, really turned everything around. Each one of these was a major step in streamlining my setup. For the Gigas, I was accessing everything from a computer screen. It made it real easy to go, I want to try this, or this, or this. I can audition 20 sounds really quickly, having a lot more places to put them. Customizing my templates for each show became much easier, simply because once I had all my sound libraries on Giga, I felt like I had everything at my fingertips all the time. Rather than going through SCSI drives and searching through multiple folders, and having to save the entire bank again just because I made one change."