Hans Zimmer is responsible for some of the most iconic film scores of the last 35 years. So how does one person create so much amazing music? It turns out, he doesn’t do it alone. In this episode, Hans Zimmer’s incredible team pulls back the curtain to reveal their extraordinary creative process, and uncover the secrets behind the otherworldly music of Dune. Featuring Raul Vega, Taurees Habib, Suzanne Waters, Tina Guo, and Steve Mazarro.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Original music by Wesley Slover
Pioneers by melodysheep
Aura by melodysheep
In Search of Giants by melodysheep
Upward by melodysheep
A Shout Into the Void by melodysheep
Wither Away by melodysheep
Becoming GIants by melodysheep
Ghost Particles by melodysheep
Distant Worlds by melodysheep
Adélie (Re-Imagined) by kïngpinguïn
Formation by Dario Lupo
Over the Fence by Roots and Recognition
Waikitschy Beat by Rune Dale
Impulse by Hampus Naeselius
Opodiphthera Eucalypti by Guy Copeland
Filters by Marten Moses
Cx2 Brainwash by Dissidence

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View Transcript ▶︎

[music in: melodysheep - Pioneers]

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor.

Off the top of your head, how many film composers can you name? Unless you’re a big movie buff, or you work in the film industry, I'm guessing it’s around three or four. And chances are, one of them is Hans Zimmer.

Hans has scored some of the most iconic movies of the last few decades, from The Lion King…

[clip: The Lion King - This Land]

to Gladiator...

[clip: Gladiator - The Battle]

to Pirates of the Caribbean...

[clip: Pirates of the Caribbean - Jack Sparrow]

But for me, some of his most interesting work has come from his collaborations with Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve. Whether it’s Inception...

[clip: Inception - Dream Within a Dream]

Interstellar…

[clip: Interstellar - First Step]

or Blade Runner 2049…

[clip: Blade Runner 2049 - 2049]

These scores are jam packed with sounds that have never been heard before.

So how does one person create so much amazing music? Well it turns out, he doesn’t do it alone.

[music in: Wesley Slover - Into the Dark]

Hans actually runs an entire film score company, called Remote Control Productions. Their studio is inside of a huge, seven building complex in Santa Monica, California. Now, Remote Control has about eighty five people on staff. But on that same property, there are at least fifteen other composers with their own independent studios, along with musicians and staff from all over the world. When I visited, I was blown away by the sheer magnitude of it.

At Remote Control, each person provides something unique and crucial to the final sound of these movies.

Raul Vega: Everything that we do, it's about collaboration.

That's Raul Vega.

Raul Vega: I am a Sample Developer, or a Digital Instrument Designer.

Explaining Raul's exact role can be a bit tricky, even for him.

Raul Vega: I feel like my job title has changed with every project we work on, so your guess is as good as mine as to what to call me.

To understand what Raul does, you need to understand the unique way that Hans composes music. Traditionally, the director of a movie will meet with the composer and talk about the styles and moods that they have in mind for the score. Then, the composer reads the script, and starts writing. Later, when the edit of the movie is farther along, they'll often bring in a live orchestra, to bring that music to life.

But for Hans, much of this is in reverse. He adds a whole other stage at the beginning. It all starts with choosing the kinds of sounds and sonic textures he wants to highlight in the score.

For example, Hans scored the twenty thirteen Superman movie Man of Steel.

Raul Vega: When you think of Man of Steel, you think of Superman, you think of brass trumpets, percussion. All these big, cinematic swells of beef and sound.

[clip: Superman 1978 theme]

This is the classic Superman theme from the 1978 film, which was scored by the legendary John Williams.

Raul Vega: But Hans had another idea. He thought, "What is the sound of America? What's the sound of a true Americana? What are some of those instruments that could clearly represent Superman?"

Raul Vega: And so his thought was a pedal steel guitar. Of course typically, we hear that in country music.

[clip: Roots and Recognition - Over the Fence]

Raul Vega: And if you play it just right, it's played pretty well in Hawaiian music.

[clip: Rune Dale - Waikitschy Beat]

Raul Vega: But that's not what we were going for for this particular score.

Instead, before he wrote a single note, Hans assembled eight pedal steel guitarists, and brought them into a recording studio.

Raul Vega: And he had them play notes, different dynamics, different slides, but most importantly different intervals. Very specific intervals that he already knew what he was gonna be doing with them.

Some of the things that Hans had them record sound nothing like traditional, rootsy steel guitar. Here's a clip of those recording sessions, from Warner Brothers. First, you'll hear the musicians.

[clip: Man of Steel recordings]

Steel Guitarist: No vibrato? Oh, more vibrato. I don’t know if I’ve got more vibrato.

Then, Hans talks to the camera.

Hans: I’m sort of creating my own little string section. They are strings. They are a section. It just so happens they are pedal steel guitars.

These musicians aren't playing written out score music. They're basically recording as many different sounds as possible, for Hans to use later on.

Hans: I’m building a library of single notes. I’m gathering ammunition for my writing process.

This process of gathering sonic ammunition is known as sampling. Each note or bend or slide that gets recorded is a sample. And recording all of the samples they want from a particular instrument can take days, or even weeks.

[music in: Wesley Slover - Breach of Trust]

Think about a piano for example. To capture all of the nuance of a real piano, you need to play every key softly, [sfx] and a little harder [sfx] and a little harder. [sfx] You'll record long notes, [sfx] and short notes, [sfx] and really short notes. [sfx]

If that sounds tiring, imagine a violin. Now, for every note, you've got slow vibrato [sfx] and fast vibrato [sfx] and different types of slides [sfx] and trills [sfx] and plucks...

[sfx]

For a musician, these recording sessions are like a marathon of stamina and precision.

Raul Vega: Every musician we work with is insanely talented and hardworking. And they will push themselves, but sometimes we have to tell 'em, "Hey, we have to take a break."

[music transition into melodysheep - Upward]

Once these recordings are finished, Raul and his team have to edit them. [sound design] They'll chop the recordings up, and make each sound start and end exactly where it should. They'll make sure there's no unwanted noise, and add different types of effects. And all of that material has to be organized and programmed in a very specific way.

Raul Vega: After a while it does get pretty exhausting.

Taurees Habib: Some of these things can be massive. I mean, we've built stuff which have over 10,000 little puzzle pieces that have to be assembled.

That's Taurees Habib, who works with Raul on the sampling process. At one point, Taurees mapped his computer keys to an Xbox controller, so he could edit ten thousand plus samples more comfortably.

Taurees Habib: And I just remember thinking like, "Man, if like me from elementary school got a glimpse into my future, but saw it from the other side where they're not seeing what's on the screen, they'd think, 'Wow, I'm getting paid to like play video games!' " And it's like I was, but it's maybe the worst video game ever made.

But the result of all that work is a unique, fully-crafted digital instrument that Hans can play on his keyboard. So whenever he presses a key, it triggers a specific sample from their recordings. And if he presses it harder or softer or turns a knob, it'll trigger a different sample. The result is a digital instrument that feels intuitive and expressive to play.

Taurees Habib: That's the way that we always approach it. It's not like we're making a computer program, it's like we're making a digital Stradivarius or like, something that, even though it lives entirely in zeros and ones, should feel organic and alive when you put your hands on the thing that's gonna control it.

For Man of Steel, the digital instrument they made from those steel guitars allowed Hans to play sounds like this.

[clip: Man of Steel steel guitar stem]

Hans then sprinkled these slide sounds all over the soundtrack. For instance, here's a track called "Sent Here for a Reason."

[clip: Man of Steel - Sent Here For a Reason]

And here's another clip from the original recording sessions, where one of the guitarists asks Hans what interval he wants.

[clip - Man of Steel Sessions]

Steel Guitarist: What would you want, C to a G or a…?

Hans: C to G. Quite lazily.

Steel Guitarist: Like a…

And here's a track from the film.

[clip: Man of Steel - Flight]

[music in: melodysheep - Ghost Particles]

Now, taking a traditional instrument like the steel guitar, and transforming it to fit within a sweeping superhero score is pretty mind boggling. But creative decisions like these are part of what makes Hans such a singular composer. You could say that he paints with unique colors. And it's the team at Remote Control that allows him to do that.

Raul Vega: If you look at the composer as a painter, well the painter needs paint, so it's then my job to go out and fetch the paint from a very specific sound source.

Taurees Habib: We spend a lot of time creating the paint for the master painter, in this case, Hans, to paint his masterpieces with.

And crafting that sonic paint takes an incredible amount of work. For every movie they work on, they'll make dozens or even hundreds of these digital instruments.

Taurees Habib: I think our record is about 300 instruments for a film.

This process costs a ton of money, and requires months of work. So why doesn't Hans just use the thousands of digital instruments that are already available?

Raul Vega: If you're pulling samples from library packs that are kind of available to everybody and everybody can use 'em, at some point, everything's gonna start sounding the same. But this beginning stage of it, capturing very specific sounds, makes it that much easier for Hans to craft a score that's gonna be entirely unique and specific to whatever the project is.

Sometimes, Hans will have them sample things that aren't even instruments. Or as Raul puts it...

Raul Vega: Anything can be an instrument. You know, if you're looking at a pocket watch, or you're listening to it.

[watch 1 in]

Raul Vega: By itself, it doesn't really sound incredibly interesting. But you throw in another one of a different size, a different weight, playing at a different speed, a different rate, It's getting a little bit more interesting. You add 3, 4, 5 of them on top of each other. Now you've got some really cool colors.

Raul Vega: Now by itself, that sounds pretty cool. There's a lot of chaos and stuff that's happening around that. But what's really more interesting is when you can actually take those sounds and chop up every single little tick by the smallest increment.

[Watch Tick Sample]

Raul Vega: Taking that control and being able to make them short and small, you can really build out whatever kind of groove you want.

[Dunkirk scene sneaks in]

Hans used these pocket watch ticks as a key component for the score of Dunkirk. The movie is a tense World War II epic, and whenever these ticking sounds play in the film, it really ratchets up the anxiety.

For instance, there's one scene where a group of soldiers are floating in water that's filled with oil from a sinking ship. When a plane crashes into the water, the oil catches fire. So the soldiers have to dive underwater to avoid the flames.

[music in: melodysheep - Wither Away]

Sounds like these pocket watch ticks really start to blur the line between music and sound design.

Taurees Habib: I think we tend to kind of think of music as, "Well, I have these 12 notes, what can I do with them?" But when you start to think in the broader term of just sound and how it elicits an emotional response, there isn't really a line.

Raul Vega: It truly is building out the sonic landscape in times where you don't know is this score or is this sound design? And the answer is, it's a little bit of both.

Ultimately, sound designers and composers have the same goal: to elicit emotion from a viewer, and propel the story forward.

Taurees Habib: Sure, like you can get certain emotional responses from like a C major chord [C maj chord] versus like a b diminished chord, [B dim chord] but you could also get an emotional response from like the sound of a chainsaw, [sfx] And then adding some processing to make it even more jarring. [sfx] I mean, it might not be easy listening to music, but that's not always what you're trying to do when you're telling a story.

Sometimes, the story itself will explicitly call for a certain sound. For example, the Inception soundtrack is known for its low bwaah sounds. They happen throughout the movie, and most famously appeared in the first trailer.

[clip: Inception trailer]

For a few years after that, the Inception bwaah was copied in countless movie trailers. There was Transformers 3…

[clip: Transformers trailer]

Battleship…

[clip: Battleship trailer]

Smiley…

[clip: Smiley trailer]

The Avengers…

[clip: Avengers trailer]

And a bunch more. In an interview with the Youtube channel Gold Derby, Hans explained how his original bwaah sound came directly from Christopher Nolan's script.

Hans: There's a story point written in the script about these low braams, the brass sounds. It's a story point. Suddenly it turns up in everybody's trailer.

[music in: Hampus Naeselius - Impulse]

The screenplay to Inception includes descriptions like...

AD Voice: In the distant background, strange MASSIVE low-end MUSICAL start, sounding like DISTANT HORNS.

AD Voice: Arthur STOPS, hearing something... MASSIVE LOW-END MUSICAL TONES.

AD Voice: Eames races back in. In the relative quiet, he notices MASSIVE LOW-E MUSICAL TONES.

To create these low-end tones, Hans brought ten brass players to AIR Studios in London. The studio is inside of a beautiful Victorian church with high, vaulted ceilings.

Hans had these brass players stand around a piano, and used a heavy book to hold down the sustain pedal. Then, the musicians would play loud, cacophonous notes into the piano, so that all of the strings would vibrate.

[sfx]

Once he had that recorded, he added a bit of quote "electronic nonsense." The result was the OG bwaah.

[clip: Inception - 528491]

[music in: melodysheep - In Search of Giants]

By that point, Hans had scored dozens of amazing movies. He had won an Oscar, and been nominated for ten others. But throughout his life, there was one project that he had always dreamed of doing. It was a story that he had fallen in love with as a boy, and had never stopped thinking about.

Then a few years ago, that dream came true. And for that score, Hans and the team at Remote Control would have to bring an entire alien world to life through sound... It was a distant desert planet called Arrakis.

That's coming up, after the break.

MIDROLL 1

[music in: melodysheep - In Search of Giants]

When Hans Zimmer was a teenager, he came across a sci-fi book called Dune. The story captivated him. In his head, Dune had a certain exotic sound to it, and it sounded very different from the sci-fi movies that were popular at the time. Here's Hans in an interview with Vanity Fair.

Hans: I remember as a 13 year old going and seeing science fiction movies and going, "Why do all these science fiction movies have European orchestra, orchestral sounds, Romantic period tonalities?..."

For instance, the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey featured lots of famous classical pieces...

[clip: 2001 - Blue Danube]

And this trend of orchestral sci-fi music continued for a long time. There was Star Wars...

[clip: Star Wars - The Return Home]

There was Alien…

[clip: Alien - Main Theme]

And there were the Star Trek movies…

[clip: Star Trek II - Main Title]

Even back then, Hans didn't want to taint his vision of how Dune should sound. So he never saw the version by David Lynch that came out in the mid 80s. That soundtrack was mainly done by the rock band Toto, though one track was written by ambient composer Brian Eno.

[clip: Dune 1984 - Prophecy Theme]

In the year 2000, there was a Dune miniseries that aired on the Sci-Fi channel. Here's a piece from its soundtrack, called Dreamscape.

[clip: Dune Miniseries - Dreamscape]

But Hans made a point not to see that version, either. So when director Denis Villenueve asked him to score his adaptation of Dune, Hans could finally bring the sounds that he'd been hearing in his head for over forty years to life.

[music in: melodysheep - A Shout Into the Void]

Dune is set roughly 20,000 years in the future, in a different part of the galaxy. Because of this, Hans wanted to use sounds that felt totally unfamiliar, with one exception. He figured that no matter how far into the future you went, the one thing that would remain at the center of our culture and our music would be the human voice.

This idea tied in well with one of the main concepts in Dune.

Taurees Habib: In Dune, you have these female characters who use this technique called The Voice to kind of control people, sort of instantaneously hypnotize people and get them to do certain things.

In one scene early on, a character called The Reverend Mother uses The Voice on the main character, Paul.

[Dune clip]

Reverend Mother: Come here. Kneel.

Paul: How dare you use the voice on me.

[music in: melodysheep - Becoming GIants]

Hans wanted Dune’s soundtrack to be based around female voices that sounded enchanting and mysterious. So he brought in three singers who were regular collaborators with Remote Control.

Raul Vega: Suzanne Waters, Loire Cotler and Edie Lehmann Boddicker. Three of some of the most versatile and interesting vocalists I've had the honor and pleasure to work with for years.

Suzanne Waters first worked with Hans on the soundtrack for the X-Men film Dark Phoenix.

Suzanne Waters: The movie didn't do so well, but Hans' music for it is incredible.

That's Suzanne. For Dark Phoenix, Hans wanted a digital instrument made entirely out of her voice.

[music transition to: Dark Phoenix - Insertion]

To create this, Suzanne recorded over twenty one thousand bits of audio in about three weeks.

Suzanne Waters: And I sang basically every note in my range. It was like different vowels, different volumes, different pitch bending. Like sometimes it would be like, "Well, I want you to rise a quarter tone and sink a quarter tone." And they would have me start softly, crescendo and decrescendo and hold out each of these notes.

Suzanne Waters: And then Raul and team had to digitize all of these things and put them into the instrument itself, so that at the end of the day, Hans could have it all on a keyboard.

Hans called this instrument the Suzie Synthesizer. And Suzanne still remembers the day she came in and heard him playing it.

Suzanne Waters: It, it was in—what an incredible, humbling experience to walk into Hans's like… his lair, and him presenting this instrument, and it was like a massive orchestra of Suzanne.

Suzanne Waters: That was a whole new level of "Wow."

[laughs]

[Suzie Synthesizer in]

Here's a bit of the Suzie Synthesizer on its own.

[Suzie Synthesizer into Dark Phoenix Xperiments - X-HZT]

On Dark Phoenix, Suzanne's ethereal voice was often paired with a very different style of singing, recorded by vocalist Loire Cotler.

Suzanne Waters: She was all of the percussion, and she's a master at it. Like, Hans was like, "Can you whisper all of it?" And so literally she just does this like [whispers] all whispered, and it's fantastic.

When it came time to score Dune, Hans wanted to use this same combination of vocal sounds.

Suzanne Waters: When Dune came around, he called and was like, "We wanna bring the band back together and get you and Loire and make these sounds together." And yeah, I love that Hans really wanted to go female with both of these films.

[music in: Dune Sketchbook - I See You In My Dreams]

For Dune, Suzanne recorded a huge range of new vocal performances. Some of these recordings were added into the Suzie Synth, so Hans could create more dreamy vocal soundscapes.

Then later on, Suzanne came back to record live takes on top of these vocal pads. At Remote Control, this is how it usually works. Because no matter how well you sample something, it's never quite the same as an organic, human performance.

Raul Vega: And in all the years that I've been doing this, every single musician that we've sampled and that we've recorded, they have then come back in and become a massive part of the actual live orchestral sessions as well.

On Dune, Suzanne wasn't sure what kind of tone her singing should have. But then, Hans gave her some direction.

Suzanne Waters: He said, "Susie, I want you to get really, really sad. Like so, so sad. I need sorrow and tears and the lament. Just dig, dig deep into those places." So Dune, all I was thinking was sorrow when I made these sounds, and it changed everything.

For this next track, Suzanne recorded five different vocal lines. We'll start with one, and slowly stack them together.

[clip: Suzanne’s Vocal tracks]

And here's what the final version sounds like in the soundtrack.

[clip: Dune - Stranded]

In addition to these sorrowful vocal tones, Hans also wanted chanting... but to chant, you need words to say.

Raul Vega: So in the preliminary stages, we literally just pulled text from the book, from the glossary from Dune.

Dune is full of exotic-sounding words that were invented by author Frank Herbert. Words like…

Reverend Mother: Gom Babbar… poison needle.

Jessica: Lisan Al Gaib. It’s their name for messiah.

Chani: Shai Hulud. The Great Sandworm.

Using these words as inspiration, vocalist Edie Lemon Boddicker recorded this.

[Dune chant raw]

Raul Vega: Still to this day, I have no idea what she was saying, but it sounded so cool. We had to make an instrument out of it.

By making this chant into an instrument, Hans could speed it up to unnatural levels.

[clip: Dune Sketchbook - Grains of Sand]

From there, the vocalists created a kind of improvised language, which Raul and his team turned into more digital instruments.

Raul Vega: Every single note in their range, I think it was three or four different dynamics of this made up language that they had constructed.

[clip: Dune - Bene Gesserit]

Hans used these chanted, fictional words throughout the score. Here's a track that almost sounds like it comes from a demonic horror movie.

But there was one final piece to this vocal puzzle. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Hans explained that one of the reasons he called Loire Cotler back for Dune was her experience with rhythmic singing. Here she is demonstrating it alongside him.

Loir: [Singing]

Hans: We were talking about that Dune has its own rhythm. So it's obvious that I would find a woman who should know everything about rhythm, and then give you the cry of a banshee.

Loir: [Singing]

[clip: Dune - Gom Jabbar]

Suzanne Waters: Loire Cotler is the lead female vocalist in Dune, and she does all of the warrior cries...

That vocal performance might be the most iconic moment on the entire soundtrack. But there's another really gripping melody that happens in a track called “Leaving Caladan.”

[music in: Dune - Leaving Caladan]

Tina Guo: So the main riff, there's electric guitar, electric cello, mushed together.

That's cellist Tina Guo, who recorded over ninety hours of material for Dune.

Tina Guo: There was no acoustic cello, ‘cuz he was saying since it's in space, we don't want any normal instruments. We want everything to sound a little strange, a little off. And that's one of the things that I love about playing the electric cello, because you can actually change the tone and the quality of the sound.

Hans and Tina first met back in 2009.

[music in: kïngpinguïn - Adélie(Re-Imagined)]

Tina Guo: Hans, the way that he's found a lot of musicians that we work with, is through YouTube.

At the time, Tina was a struggling musician living in L.A. She'd been playing classical cello since she was seven years old. But her dream was to make a career out of the electric cello.

Tina Guo: So I thought, “Okay, as my last hurrah, I'm going to take all the money that I have left in my savings account, which was a little over 2000, and I'm gonna put it into a music video.”

Tina Guo: I thought, “Okay, if I put this on YouTube, maybe someone from Metallica or Rammstein, my favorite band, or System of a Down, or somebody's gonna see it and whisk me away on tour and then I'll be saved and then I can play the electric cello.” [laughs]

The song Tina recorded was a metal version of a classical piece called The Flight of the Bumblebee. In the video, a group of edgy-looking musicians rock out in a warehouse. Tina is front and center, absolutely shredding the electric cello.

[clip: Tina Guo - Queen Bee]

At one point, the song has a breakdown where she switches on a wah pedal.

[clip: Tina Guo - Queen Bee wah]

After she posted the video, Tina didn’t hear from her favorite bands. But instead, she started hearing from film composers. One of them was Hans Zimmer, who fell in love with these heavy, exotic cello tones.

Tina Guo: And when Hans called, I didn't even know who he was, ‘cuz my focus was not on soundtrack music.

Hans asked Tina to play on the soundtrack for Sherlock Holmes.

[music in: Sherlock Holmes - Discombobulate]

And they’ve been working together ever since.

Tina Guo: I think he appreciates artists with a particular sound or their own personality. So I really appreciate that Hans always gives me so much freedom in what I play. He welcomes the aggression, the stuff that I do on the electric cello. And of course, I also still play classical cello, which I’ve also done for a lot of the soundtracks.

Here's some of that aggressive cello on Hans Zimmer's Wonder Woman theme.

[clip: Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice - Is She With You?]

For Dune, Hans had a specific idea in mind for the tone of her electric cello. Here's Hans with Vanity Fair.

Hans: I remember saying to Tina Guo, my cellist, “I want your cello to sound like a Tibetan war horn.”

[clip: Dune - Leaving Caladan]

Hans: I don't even know if there's a Tibetan war horn, but she got the image.

[music in: melodysheep - Distant Worlds]

But of course, the score for Dune includes much more than just vocals and cello. Creating this alien soundscape required all kinds of surprising things, including bagpipes, giant woodwinds made from PVC pipe, and even...

Raul Vega: The ultimate sound of destruction.

That's all coming up, after the break.

MIDROLL 2

[music in: melodysheep - Distant Worlds]

For Hans Zimmer's team at Remote Control, scoring a film is all about finding the right sonic textures.

Steve Mazzaro: We're forever trying to not only write music to the film, but create a world, create a sonic palette for the film.

That's Steve Mazzaro, a composer at Remote Control.

Steve Mazzaro: A film like Dune, you want to work as hard as you can to draw them in without having the viewer go, “Oh, I know that instrument!” Or, “I know that sound!" You want it to be completely alien.

At Remote Control, even the writing process is a team effort. Because, when Hans scores a film, he usually has several composers working under him.

Steve Mazzaro: I think Dune had, I wanna say it was four or five of us?

[music in: Guy Copeland - Opodiphthera Eucalypti]

The exact division of labor varies from film to film.

Steve Mazzaro: It's always different. Sometimes I'll just grab a cue that I want to do, or sometimes Hans will ask me to do a specific cue. What we'll generally do is, we'll take bits here and there, score it, and then we'll all come into a room and play it together, and go over notes, thoughts, ideas, with Hans and Denis.

On Dune, the process went something like this: First, musicians like Tina and Suzanne recorded all kinds of samples. Then, Raul and Taurees built those samples into digital instruments. Next, Hans used these instruments to write themes that Steve and the other composers could expand on.

Steve Mazzaro: So the theme is like the melody. You know, the notes that you would hear when Superman shows up and you hear Superman's theme.

In Man of Steel, the main Superman theme goes like this.

[music under into clip: Man of Steel - Flight]

Throughout a film, the themes get adapted to fit the mood of the individual scenes. So when Superman meets the bad guy for the first time, they might play an ominous, minor key version of the theme.

[clip: Man of Steel - Terraforming]

Steve Mazzaro: If it's a heroic moment, you're gonna hear the heroic action version of the Superman theme.

[clip: Man of Steel - What Are You Going to Do When You Are Not Saving The World]

[music in: Marten Moses - Filters]

In the writing stage, these variations on a theme are called suites.

Steve Mazzaro: And a suite is basically like a piece of music that isn't set to picture.

Steve Mazzaro: So a lot of our writing the suites is experimentation. You know, I can take like a little motif that Hans did, and then go, “Oh, well what if I change this note and then make this longer? And then what if I double it or make this a whole theme in itself?”

Steve Mazzaro: We are just seeing what these themes are capable of, what moods they can evoke and, you know, write all this material that then could possibly be used for the film itself.

If the themes are strong enough, you really only need a few of them to score the entire film.

[music under into music in: Dune - Visions of Chani]

Steve Mazzaro: If you look at something like Dune for instance, there's three themes, maybe four themes in the whole movie.

But unlike many of Hans' other scores, the themes in Dune are intentionally subtle.

Steve Mazzaro: A lot of them are very subliminal. You might not necessarily notice them.

That's because Dune isn't about a heroic gladiator, or a superhero, or a swashbuckling pirate. It's about a distant, mysterious world... A world with its own lore and customs and wildlife and language… Here’s Raul Vega.

Raul Vega: So when you listen to the score, you may not be getting something that is so motif-heavy in a vein of, "Here's our theme, and this is exactly what it is. This is the orchestra." You're getting so many different layers of texture that are representing all these different elements and grains of sand.

Raul Vega: This whole thing is comprised of that as well. The samples are the sand.

Raul Vega: And how they move apart and move up and down and every which way you can think of in the score, there's something really beautiful about that.

From the beginning, Hans wanted the score to evoke the literal sound of that sand. But rather than sampling a desert storm, he decided to use flutes. As Hans explained to Vanity Fair...

Hans: I kept saying to Pedro Eustache, my flautist, "Don't play it like a flute. Play it as if it was the wind whistling through the desert dunes."

To achieve this, Pedro would blow air through various woodwind instruments, making vowel shapes with his mouth to alter the sound. Here he is demonstrating the technique in that same interview.

[clip: Pedro Flute Vowel Demo]

Pedro recorded this on everything from a tiny piccolo to a giant contrabass flute. He even attached a small reed instrument called the duduk to a long piece of PVC pipe, in order to make it bassy and resonant. Hans then layered these breathy wind sounds throughout the soundtrack. Here's the piece that plays when the evil Harkonnens break into Paul's bedroom.

[clip: Dune - Armada]

For another track, Hans found a use for a group of sounds that Raul and Taurees recorded years ago.

[music in: Dario Lupo - Formation]

Raul Vega: I think it was a few years into working at Remote, Hans wanted to beef up his percussive library. So he called us in and he said, "Hey, I want you to build me a drum kit. So we said, "Okay, do you have a preferred drummer or set of toms you want us to use?”

Raul Vega: He said, "No, no, no, no, no, no. Let me rephrase this. I want you to build a drum kit out of found sound. Take anything that's in the yard, take anything that's in the alley, go to Home Depot and just play."

Taurees Habib: So we went to Home Depot, we bought some two by fours and some bricks and some chains and a sledgehammer. And we set a bunch of microphones in the live room and just took turns breaking stuff.

[sound design + punk music in: Dissidence - Cx2 Brainwash]

Raul Vega: We just beat it to death.

Taurees Habib: Just smashing things to bits.

Raul Vega: Capturing just the ultimate sound of destruction.

[punk music + sound design out]

Once they had those recordings cleaned up, organized and processed, it sounded like this.

[destructive Sounds sample]

Raul Vega: Those are sounds of axes on two by fours, broken piano lids, chains, clay bricks… Now, for the longest time, we had no idea what this was for, and I don't even think he knew what it was for. And so we kept it in our library of sounds for a very, very long time.

But years later, as they were working on Dune...

Raul Vega: He called us and said, "Hey, do we still have that?" I said, "I think so." "Great. Send it over." So we built it, he mixed it, and then it became a very, very popular march for a theme for Dune.

[music sneaks in: Dune Sketchbook - House Atreides]

Hans used these sounds in a version of the track that plays when Paul and his family arrive on Arrakis.

As you can hear, these percussive sounds are paired with bagpipes, which might seem like an odd choice for a sci-fi movie. But director Denis Villeneuve said that he always saw House Atreides as a kind of Celtic people. So he decided to add a group of bagpipers to the scene.

To record this, Hans Zimmer brought thirty bagpipers into a church in England, to make what he called a fabulous noise.

[music in: Wesley Slover - Astral Anomaly]

Now, if you added up all the layers in the soundtrack of Dune, the number would be in the tens of thousands. And that’s just one out of the fifty plus scores this team has created. Each one takes many months or even years of work, and involves dozens of people. But the result is some of the most gripping and immersive music ever created.

As a musician and a huge Hans Zimmer fan, I've often wondered what it would take to do this kind of work, at this level. And after getting to know some of the key people from Remote Control, I've narrowed it down to three things. The first is an obsessive attention to detail.

Taurees Habib: At the end of the day, you're trying to tell a computer how to pick between 10,000 different audio events. And you have to have cataloged those in a way that makes sense. And if you’re not consistent with that, it becomes quite cumbersome to build something.

The second thing it takes is a willingness to experiment.

Raul Vega: It's not just about creating a cool sonic landscape, but how do you create something the world has never heard before? The only way you can do it is if you use your imagination and start playing.

Tina Guo: When we're creating a sound, it's not about like, “Oh, should we use this or use that, or the EQ levels.” It has nothing to do with that. It's like, “What visceral feeling, or what scene, or what emotion?” And then you just kind of like experiment. [laughs] Like there's no rhyme or reason to it, you experiment until you can capture that feeling.

Above all, the one thing that everyone kept hammering home was collaboration.

Steve Mazzaro: It's all a very collaborative spirit.

Raul Vega: It's about this collaborative effort and this excitement and wanting to inspire and encourage each other.

Tina Guo: I enjoy the creative freedom, the collaboration, and the people. It's really, really nice that there is a sense of family and community there.

And according to everyone I spoke to, Hans leads by example.

Raul Vega: I don't think I've ever met somebody so collaborative and so curious about everything. Suzanne Waters: You don't feel like you're with somebody who's like superhuman and that you're not worthy. You feel like you are part of a team and you're every bit as important to the process. And I think you get the best results artistically.

And that curious, collaborative spirit comes through loud and clear in the music they make.

Raul Vega: It really is about connecting. That's why we like movies. We wanna connect, we wanna feel seen, we wanna empathize. And a great place for us to start doing that is in sound.

[music in: melodysheep - Aura]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. To hear more of our work, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram.

Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling, and Andrew Anderson, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyter.

Thanks to our guests, Taurees Habib, Tina Guo, Suzanne Waters and Steve Mazarro. And an extra special thanks to Raul Vega. I met Raul by happenstance, and he graciously invited me into Remote Control Studios. It was one of the most inspiring days of my life, and Raul really went above and beyond with how much time and creative input he invested into this episode.

I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.