Four tools The Newton Brothers have been using in their compositions

Words by Joe Williams

With the release of Netflix’s The Midnight Club and Amazon Prime’s The Devil’s Hour, as well as ongoing work on the scores for Season 2 of Paramount+’s Joe Pickett and Disney+’s X-Men ‘97 (a return to the 90’s classic cartoon series, nearly thirty years in the making), last year yielded a huge musical output from The Newton Brothers.

Whilst their process of experimentation and composition often involves the weird and wonderful, including the Citole — “a mountain-y, folk-y sounding mediaeval instrument that we used a lot for Joe Pickett” — and the Theravox — “theramin-ish meets violin-ish”, there are a few staple ingredients that have proved consistently crucial to their music-making.

PIANO

Andy Grush: I mean… it’s so boring as a choice, but it's always so crucial: the piano. It’s basic, but there’s just so much to it. I think it’s technically a percussive instrument. When I think about The Midnight Club or The Devil’s Hour – on both of those projects in particular, there was a lot of sketching out of ideas on the piano. I know it’s not very sexy - we have a lot of other, much sexier instruments lying around - but I know I’d be doing my soul wrong if I didn’t put the piano first and foremost.

Taylor Newton: For a lot of our stuff – for example with Mike [Flanaghan] – he loves the piano, so we’ll end up either doing orchestral elements or sticking with piano, because he loves the sound of that.

AG: There’s so many weird things we use, but the idea of starting on the piano with ideas, chords, melodies, rhythm etc, is almost always where I begin. Then there’s the exploration of weird sounds, which is what Taylor and I love to do, but it’s after working on the piano that we begin exploring that.

PEDALS

TN: Another interesting thing we’ve been using a lot, and something I’ve really got Andy into recently, is pedals. I’ve been using pedals for years, but the way I use pedals now, as opposed to when I started, is very different. Most people just process a synth or sound, then run it through the pedals then record it — that’s not how I do it anymore. I have it all as stems in Logic, then I can route anything through these pedals and I can just pick and choose which ones. Then I take a photo with my phone to record the settings of the session.

I’ve always been using pedals since the day I was in bands back in the 90s, and begging college students to let me score their short films. I have an MS20, and a MOOG, and I’ll route it through different delays and modulation effects, and I’ll just record it, which is how it’s always been done. I come from a background of a lot of synths, I know that world really really well, but using it as a send, that was a new change we decided to make in the studio — fairly recently, certainly within the last year.

AG: I kept all my guitar pedals in my garage - original pedals from all the bands I played in when I was younger. All these old pedals that do interesting things, then I bought new pedals – what I found out was that I love this approach of using pedals and synths, but I don’t wanna get held up when I’m writing. So what I found to be a good process was to write, then at the end or beginning of the day, I’ll spend like an hour working on this one sound and not worry about having the cue written, or the main melody or theme written. I’ll be diving in with my producer’s cap.

SYNTHS

AG: Since Midnight Mass – Taylor’s got me into synthesisers in a huge way. It’s become a problem where I have to tell Taylor “Oh, no, I can’t buy another synth.” It’s like a fidgeting of time, but it yields very excellent results – as Taylor has known for years, but I’m only just getting hip to it.

TN: I love this aspect of writing music: synths, or organic sounds, where it's been manipulated so much that you don’t know what it is. Is it voices, is it a synth, is it an animal howling? I love blending synth manipulation with traditional elements, because it’s really where you can separate yourself as a writer and define yourself a little more; because everyone has mostly the same sample sets, everyone has either an orchestra, or can at least go get a guitar or a piano – it’s all within arms reach. What’s great about adding hybrid elements is that they can really distinguish you if used in the right aspect and way.

MELODY

T&A: We prefer melody over noise. I think you want it to be memorable, but still have that defining, weird sound - something that’s distinct to that film. Typically, in the midst of writing, we are coming up with melodic and harmonic ideas with the story in mind — there's a feeling to the story / character / setting, and we're trying to find an emotional companion. Sometimes that companion is an attentive listener and sometimes that companion is a violent juxtaposition. "Noise" is INCREDIBLY effective when used in the right way – I feel like we're doing a disservice calling it "noise" because I do know that a lot of composers are incredibly diligent about the use of atonal mayhem — but melody will always carry the emotion and the attitude.

T&A:The Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Sleep both had a lot of score where we employed the concept of "noise production" from the standpoint of a melodic piece as well as treating a melodic piece with the execution of a "noise piece."  All of this to say that one cannot exist without the other, but — for us — the soul of the emotion exists in the melody.