When I bought my first instrument, it was with every intention of being a rock star. Like most of us, that didn’t happen to me. Somewhere in the process, though, the music became more important than that fevered dream. With that in mind, I wanted to take a look at some of the other ways people are making a living in music. I decided to start by taking a trip to talk with an old friend at Brass Coffee Sound, the studio where Scott Bucsis does music for commercials, series and shorts as well as editing and sound design. We talked about the process of ending up with his own studio.
That process started when he was an assistant editor for Disney. “I did a thing for a Goofy short but it was just for scratch audio. I think it was kind of a surfy thing. But what was cool about that is it was the first way I could kind of sneak in music.”
The only time unpaid work turned into something
Later when an assortment of ex-pats from Disney ended up together at a company called Red Rover, they started working on an animated short to showcase the skills of the studio. “There was no budget so I said, ‘I’ll do the music for it.’ So that was kind of the first thing I did that actually got broadcast and won awards and that sort of thing. I kind of just did it as a staff editor. I was totally doing it for fun. I had the VS1680, the old Roland and recorded it in my living room.”
“Then a friend of mine was doing a series of shorts for Nelvana and they asked me to cut it but to also do the music for it and that was the first time I actually got paid to do music. It was super low budget and everything but it was quite cool to be specifically paid for music. There was a separate cheque for the editing and a separate cheque for the music.”
“I did that in my bedroom. I just had the tapes and I didn’t have any system to actually even watch the video on my computer of score to it. I would just watch it with timecode on my TV on VHS and just write down the timecode and say, ‘Okay, this cue needs to be about three seconds,’ so I’d write something that I’d think would fit then I’d bring it into Avid and edit or rewrite it if I had to. So it was done very piecemeal like that. That was a real learning experience.”
A career goes by the Wayside
The director from those shorts was directing one-off that would eventually become the series Wayside High and Scott got the chance to pitch for the music on it.
“The way you pitch on the series was to get X number of composers to score the same scene or scenes and then put it into a blind taste test and get everybody who needs to make the decision to listen with no names, you know, A B C D, and choose which one and I got super-fortunate and got chosen to do the show.”
He’d taken time off his regular job to do the first direct to video installment then go on a short tour with Mind of a Squid. It turns out he never went back to the staff job. Instead he moved his gear out of his bedroom where it would take over the other seventy-five percent of his apartment.
“It’s funny how it felt so 'pro' at the time. Obviously, I knew it wasn’t. That’s when I got Giga-Studio, which was, at the time, the big orchestral sampler. And then I got Sonar so I started using Giga and Sonar together, still use Sonar, still basically use a variation of that original setup.”
He did the whole series from that apartment but eventually the business had to grow. A friend of his needed somebody to share space in his small studio. “Honestly, it was just a big risk because I had no guarantee. It wasn’t like I had a big series lined up or anything like that. I had nothing lined up.”
He built a little 4’x6’ sound booth and started booking in commercial voice-overs, which in turn led to more related work. “I’ve always had a little bit of everything. It’s all related stuff but it’s all different. I’ve definitely found that if there’s not a music job coming in there’ll be a VO job and if there’s not a VO job there might be an editing job. And sometimes it’ll be all three which is great, to be able to offer that sort of one stop package. There’s never been a year where I’ve done one thing only.”
Eventually his partner in that studio left and he found himself wanting more room. He got together with a loose affiliation of other people across the industry and made the space in these pictures. “Between us we could get a much bigger space, share resources, share reception… The three of us all do very different things so there have definitely been times when I’d pick up a little bit on somebody else’s jobs or get somebody to help me on mine.”
So what now?
“I could see it going a few different ways and I could see me being happy with it going a few different ways. Do you maintain what you have or do you grow? The more it grows the less I do in terms of the actual work which is not necessarily something I want. My goal is not just to be the business guy but at the same time you have to start thinking that way a little bit. There’s a whole other level of responsibility that takes away from… sitting and playing guitar, you know, doing the work that is the reason that I did any of this in the first place.”
Personally, I think he did it all just to be able to sing on Japanese television.
“After doing two seasons of music for the anime Beyblade, I was pitching on one of the spin-offs, no pun intended. It was a closing theme song. You could do it as rough as you wanted but with the assumption that if it’s chosen then I’ll hire a proper singer. So I did a scratch track. And then it got chosen and they were like, ‘No, it’s good,’ and it went to air like that.”
It’s not necessarily the spotlight any of us would have thought of but it certainly has its own odd appeal.
