Recently I was able to catch up with composer/Underoath keyboardist, Chris Dudley, to discuss his recent scores for films like the Screambox exclusive, Night of the Missing, that is currently available for streaming. In this interview, I asked Chris about some of his favorite scores of all time, his process for making his scores for films he’s assigned to, how music can feel different when listening to it in different environments, and he also offered up some news about Underoath’s new album progress.
Thank you, Chris, for your time today. I understand that you just put together the score for Night of the Missing. Can you tell me about what went into that, and what was it like working with director Sam Gonzalez Jr., too?
Yeah, the whole project came together in a really, really cool way. Because Night of the Missing was in a really unique way, a collaboration by a lot of different creatives. Matthew Hirsch is involved and Sam, and there were just a lot of creators from different avenues that came together to be able to get that done. And for me, my contribution ended up coming together really quickly. I was actually working with Sam on another film, and he had asked me about working on Night of the Missing, and he was like, “Hey, we’re looking for a particular type of score, and we think it would be really good for it.” I was tasked with creating the score for the wraparound story, everything that’s going on in the police station, and everything that kind of ties the film together. So it was really cool to be able to work with some source material that was already there and be able to bring my own spin on it. Overall, it was one of the most seamless processes I’ve ever had working on a film. As films go, it was a pretty quick process. Everyone involved was just super collaborative, which I love. Coming from a band environment, that’s really all that I’ve ever known until I got into film was just being able to work with other people and being able to bounce ideas off people. So yeah, I love that.
That’s awesome. And about how many scores have you done now?
I think, right now, I’m working on my seventh feature.
Oh, wow! That’s pretty good.
It’s been a lot in a short period, which is just kind of the way I do stuff in general. I like to dive in headfirst and just go for it. When I got started doing this, my only goal was to just score one feature film, and the fact that I’m still able to do it is awesome. I’m super stoked on it.
Awesome. I don’t interview too many composers, usually. It’s typically bands, artists, comedians, and stuff like that. So can you walk me through the process of when you are tasked with making a score, how much of that process goes into the visual part of that?
At the end of the day, film is a visual medium. First and foremost, it’s all about telling a character’s story, getting across a feeling that you want to get across with the visuals and with music. Normally the way that my process will start is just talking to the director and getting a feel, as far as if we’re on the same page, as far as where we think the music should go. I’ll get a script or I’ll get a general idea given to me, and I’ll pitch my idea for where I think the music should go. I think that, generally, I tend to be contacted for things on the darker spectrum. More dramas, thrillers, horror, things like that. I think they kind of already know that I like to live in that area. But for me, it’s just really just all about emotion. I love just being able to bring about a particular emotion with a particular set of chords and instruments. I just nerd out really hard on it. So I’ll talk to the director initially, and if I’m brought in early enough to the process, I like to bounce stuff back and forth with the director. Sounds, motifs, ideas, etc. Then we can determine what’s working and what’s not, and find compromises there. And then a lot of my writing tends to be to picture. Depending on when I get brought into the film, I’ll get dailies or I’ll get a rough edit of the film or a section of the film. I can kind of see if what I have in my head is gonna work. There was one film that I worked on where I wrote 18 or so cues, but it was also before I’d seen a rough cut of the film. And when I saw it, and I saw what the visuals looked like, the color palette, what they were going for, the two just didn’t match the way that I thought they would.
Is that frustrating? That process of kind of going back through it when you have a near finished product?
No, it wasn’t frustrating at all. Because I always look at things like that, where I’m like, “Okay, well, I wrote all these cues that I now know are not going to work for this film.” But it’s not like I have to throw them away. I can just put them on a hard drive, and if something comes up in the future, I’m like, “Oh, I like I wrote a bunch of stuff that kind of sounds like that! Maybe I can just pick back up from there.” So it’s all about trying to see the silver lining in all of it.
Definitely! Based on the directors you have worked with, has anyone told you if you have a certain “scoring style,” or can you speak to that from your own perspective?
I have had directors that I’ve worked with that just comment on them liking the way that my brain works, musically. I don’t know if anybody has said anything in particular that would match one film versus another, but I think that my style tends to be just a little off-center. I really like taking something that sounds a particular way, whether it’s a string or some sort of woodwind or electronic instrument or whatever, and just twisting it a little bit. Making it sound just a little out of tune or maybe a little odd. I like making stuff sound a little sad as well, sometimes I think that’s cool. If you have a piece that you’re working on, and it’s 20 tracks, and one of those tracks in there is just kind of steadily going in and out of tune, you can have this like subliminal uneasiness. I think, generally, my stuff tends to be uneasy, tends to be sad, tends to be as Netflix closed captions would say as, “ominous tones.” <Laughter>
Yeah, I think it’s funny when they put that in there, too. <Laughter>
It depends on the piece, but I tend to go darker, for sure.
Nice, and to that same point, what are some of the scores you’ve noticed, either growing up or even just today ,that you’ve really appreciated. That you felt they either nailed a scene, or the entire movie just feels very well-scored?
Oh, man, there’s so many. Jurassic Park is a huge one. Anything John Williams does is just amazing. The Titanic score is one of the best of all time I think. It’s interesting though, because I don’t tend to mirror my style after those composers, like that just doesn’t seem to be what I write. But those are just undeniably great scores. It speaks to me creatively. Everything that John Murphy has done with Danny Boyle. The 28 Weeks Later soundtrack is one of my favorites.
I love that film and score!
The score that John Murphy did for Sunshine, that’s the most important score I think to me. I just walked out of that film opening night and I said, “That’s what I want to do.” He’s amazing. Almost anything that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross do, I love. I could go and on, but those are some of my favorites.
So many of my favorites that you threw out there, too. So I think Titanic actually just got a 4k release. So I’m looking forward to watching that again.
Yeah, I didn’t get to see that on the big screen when they had a re-release, which I was bummed on. But they just did The Abyss, and I went and saw that on the big screen. The score sounded amazing!
Yeah, so you talked about the directors that you’ve worked with, but do you have a trusted friend in your inner circle that you work with to test out, either things for Underoath, or a score?
Yeah, I have a couple of my friends that are composers as well that I will sometimes send stuff to. It’s a very small circle, because you never want to get feedback on something that is not done from somebody who doesn’t understand at what point in the process you are. I’ve got probably only two or three people that I will send stuff to and be like, “Hey, this sounds like it’s working, is it not working? What would you think to do?” That’s helpful because, like I said, coming from a band environment my entire creative career up until five years ago or so was always bouncing stuff off other people and getting used to hearing like, “Hey, that doesn’t work. What if you did this instead?” So it’s been an adjustment, but I think a good one. It’s helped with being confident in what it is that I’m doing, while also recognizing I do still want somebody, whether it’s directors that I work with, they understand music, they know what I’m doing, and so I can just send them stuff and be like, “Hey, is this working?” I can trust that. If it’s not, they’ll just straight up say it’s not. So that’s always a good thing, too.
That’s awesome. And then for the Underoath piece of that, are there certain band members that are more vocal within your department of keys?
No, I think that it’s probably an equal amount. Spencer, Tim and Aaron. They all have really good ways of communicating what it is that they want. That’s always good. And we’ve been in a band together for so long. There’s no what I call compliment sandwiches. Where you say, “Oh, this is really good. I really liked this. But what if we change this part?” And then putting another compliment on the end. It’s very blunt. It’s just like, “Hey, that doesn’t work.” And in general, I’m always of the mindset of, if it’s a work in progress, don’t tell me what you like, don’t tell me what’s working, just tell me what’s not working so that I can make it better. Those guys, they’re really good at that. And me with them as well, it’s a big circle.
That’s awesome. And I have the vinyl over here of Digital Ghost because I was going to ask you about that. When you play live, I noticed that Underoath have been no strangers to changing variations up and stuff like that. Do you do that consciously when you’re playing?
To clarify, do you mean changing stuff in songs that we’re playing live?
Exactly, like song structures or tempo changes.
Well, we used to change tempos a lot more, but we found that by the time a song is in the studio and we’re recording it, we have determined what speed it needs to be at to feel good. So we tend to stick to those these days. As far as arrangement or changing things from what’s on the record, a lot of times it’s just on the fly. Like we’ll hit a chord or a sound that wasn’t necessarily on the record, but we think it sounds good. But I would say more often than not, those things that you might hear that sound different from the record are things that were probably on the record, if it’s electronics or guitars, but it’s just mixed in a way on the record to where maybe something that you’re hearing upfront live was something that was buried on the record. So a lot of times it’s not that you’re hearing anything new or different. It’s just that “Oh, I hear that same thing differently, sonically.” We’ve always been a live band. If changing something for the live show makes it cooler at that moment, we’re always going to do that, because first and foremost, it’s about how the song is perceived for the people in the room at the time. We’re not really necessarily thinking about, “Oh well, if this is on video, what will it sound like.” If you’re in the room and it feels exciting, that’s what we’re going to do.
And to that same point when Underoath put out the two singles for the new new record, if they’re going to make the cut of the final cut of the new LP, how do you get a feel for if the audience is digging them or not?
Depending on how long the song has been out, I would say that it’s almost an immediate… We would just call it a vibe check live. There are songs that we thought would go over really well live that people might just want to stand and watch, and it’s not as exciting of a thing as we would have thought. And then there’s other songs, where we’re like, “Oh, this is an awesome song, but it just probably won’t translate live.” But when we all are on stage playing it and the crowd’s there, it just comes alive. It’s weird, because that’s not something that you can ever know. It just is more so something that you have to discover, when you get the songs out in front of a crowd. There were some songs from Voyeurist that we didn’t all play together until after we were coming out of the studio. So we’re getting more so now that we’re working on new music, we’re wanting to get in a room earlier all together and just jamming on ideas, because that’s a litmus test that you can’t really duplicate anywhere else. Something can feel great when you’re listening to it on headphones, it can feel great when you’re sitting in the studio, but then when you’re actually playing it together, it’s like, “Oh, there’s something missing. What is it?” And then you can only really find it in that place. So we’re trying to be mindful of that.
Yeah. And I kind of look at music the same way like I’ll when I first get a new album, let’s say I put it on either vinyl first or CD. Let’s say I put a CD on in my car, and it sounds different in different situations. You know what I mean? If you have a good pair of headphones, you can hear the nuances to the music itself, and things like that. So it sounds like you have that same type of musical brain that maybe a lot of people do in bands.
I wish, selfishly, that there was only one way that everybody listened to music. That way, you will know for sure how it’s coming across sonically. That’s just not the case. Sometimes people will have really good headphones, sometimes people listen to stuff on vinyl with good speakers, sometimes they’re listening to it on their iPhones speaker. It’s not possible to control that. But what I found is if you can get something to sound big or good on a set of AirPods…because AirPods I feel like are this interesting middle ground between a good headphone but then also very consumer grade, if you will. It’s similar to the “car test” that a lot of mixers will do. Like, “Okay, it sounds great in the studio, but how’s the sound in the car?” I mean, everybody has a different a different gauge for what that is, but personally, if I’m gonna sit down and listen to something, I like to get a good pair of headphones, like over the ear headphones, because there is stuff you can hear that you just can’t hear otherwise, unless you’re using in-ear monitors, like the ones that we use when we play live. Nothing sounds better than those. Those are just literally the best sounding things you can have. I like going and listening to stuff later on those, because the amount of detail you can pick out is insane. I just nerd out about that stuff.
Same here! So, the last question I have for you is how is the new record coming for Underoath, and are there any other projects you’re currently working on?
Progress is coming along really good for the new Underoath stuff. We actually went and went to an Airbnb in the mountains for about a little over a week and wrote a lot while we were there, which was really, really cool. We kind of gave ourselves a limitation of not being allowed to bring any music there, as far as ideas. So we went up, and it was just like, “Well, what’s gonna come out of this when we’re in this cabin?” And we wrote off a whole lot, and we’re gonna keep a lot of that. We’re actually doing another one of those trips coming up within the next couple of months, so I’m very stoked on that. As far as what the record is going to look like, that’s still up in the air. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this or not, but with the amount of good stuff that we’re that we currently have, it’s not looking like either of the two singles that we released, “Lifeline” or “Let Go,” I don’t think either of those are going to end up being on the record, just because what we’re doing now is just a totally different vibe. But I think that’s a good thing.
I think it’s a sign of a true artist, for sure.
I’m super stoked on that. On the score end, I am finishing up the score actually for Sam Gonzalez’s next movie. I don’t know if he’s announced what the title of that is yet or not, so I won’t do that. I’m working on his next film right now. I’m actually in my studio currently trying to hit a deadline. And then I am scoring a film toward the beginning of next year, I think this spring, called Hacked that has Chandler Riggs from The Walking Dead starring in it. Then I’m also once I get done with Sam Gonzalez’s next movie, I’m about halfway done with another film called Night of Violence. It’s almost like a horror take on a Die Hard premise: a big building with bad people and you have to get out. I’m stoked on that. And other than that, my next year is looking to be, particularly in the last half of that year, lots and lots of Underoath stuff. We haven’t announced anything yet, but we’re gonna be doing a ton soon.
That’s so awesome to hear! It was great to connect with you today. Chris, and it sounds like you got a lot on your plate so I will let you get back to whatever you were doing before this. Have a great one!
Thanks, Adam!
