Unlike other musicians, Jamie Laboz doesn't need to be in the spotlight. It's not like he hasn't had the opportunity to be in the public eye — in the early '90s, his "post-industrial hardcore" band Frankenorange was signed to a major label by someone who made stars out of the Spin Doctors, but Laboz left before they could release an album. Now Laboz's songs are heard on a daily basis by millions of people while he remains relatively unknown. No, he doesn't write for other bands — he writes for television. His songs have been on several long-running MTV shows, including Wildboyz, Yo Momma and Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggy Fizzle Televizzle.
First off, describe exactly what you do.
I am a musician who plays a bunch of different instruments like guitar, bass, ukulele, lap steel and keyboards. Through a friend I got to do the music for a couple of MTV shows — just some background music. That turned into 13 shows. Also, I just got a position for the Reverend Run show, Run's House, doing all the background music for the entire show — like, a composer for the series. Before, a lot of this stuff was "spec".
Spec, meaning freelance?
Meaning I wouldn't get paid a licensing fee, but I would get royalties from BMI on the back end. So it was kind of like a promise that in the future I would get something, which is cool if you're just using stuff you already have. But if you have to sit there and record stuff for them then it's a gamble, because you don't know how much money you are going to get or if you are going to get any money.
You're kidding me!
They're not known for being very generous. That's a reputation thing, but they will use your music if they like it and promise you royalties in the future.
Do you mind me asking how much you are getting from the royalties?
With royalties, it's really unpredictable. I have stuff on a lot of shows and some seasons just a couple of shows will run. That will be reflected in the check. Then some seasons a bunch of shows will run at the same time, and they usually do 30 cycles for three months for each one if the show is successful. That pays off. If it's a good quarter, it can be $15,000 to $20,000.
Daaaaamn!
But then it could be a $1000 check. The other thing is that you have to get in a cycle with royalties. You get the first royalty payment nine months after the show airs. So you have to wait. If I did music today for a show, it wouldn't air for another two months. Then nine months from that time is when you get paid. So really it's eleven months to a year when you'll get paid. You have to be in the cycle of getting old checks so that you can keep getting money and not wait for it. But in the time in between royalty checks, I'm also getting paid to write sound-a-likes. If they can't afford to use Quincy Jones or Herb Albert, if they can't afford to pay the licensing fees or they don't want spend the money on them, then they have a guy like me who writes music in his closet and who will write a sound-a-like. And they'll get a couple for a lot less than what they would pay for a license. And those [licensing] fees are a lot — if you were going to buy a licensing fee of let's say, Herb Albert, that could be $4000 without even using the real master of it. Basically what I do is make background music for these shows and I copy music in a lot of different styles. They have me doing all kinds of different stuff, but I try to maintain a thread of my style, which I think doesn't take itself too seriously. A lot of stock music is just that — stock. I try to keep it interesting. It is commercial music, so you got to crank it out, but you don't want to do it like you're going through the motions.
Name off all the equipment you use for this job.
I have a pretty old G4 with, believe it or not, only 450 MHz, that I got for $200.
And it's able to handle everything?
I don't know how, but I have the memory maxed out. It has Tiger on it and I'm running Logic 7 and Reason 3. As an interface, right now I just have an M-Audio MobilePre USB. I'm going to add a really good mic pre very soon. I sometimes use a Presonus TubePre before the M-Audio to warm and/or dirty things up, especially direct bass. I have a couple of nice condenser mics — the Audio Technica 2020 and 2021, large and small condensers. And then I have an old Sennheiser stage vocal mic that I really like for certain vocals and guitars. I have an M-Audio 61-key controller that I use for programming melodies or for Logic or whatever. I try to mix on the same speakers that the editors use for the Avid systems, these Roland speakers that are nothing to speak of.
But they're using them at a professional level?
Yeah. I got a set of them from the guy that outfits MTV with their systems. I have used those lots of times to mix the TV stuff because I know that's where they're going to be listening to it a lot. And because they are crappy speakers, if you get a really good sound out of them, it sounds really balanced. I try out a lot of different sound systems, but they are a great starting point.
They're probably mimicking what a TV speaker system is like.
Yeah, it's very close. I think it's good to try multiple speakers — like I have some iPod speakers that are really good for that because they're really small and you can't hear the stereo mix, because the speakers are so close together.
How do you do drums?
Sampled drums tend to go over well, so a lot of times I will make drum loops in Reason, or I'll take samples in Logic and make a little drum track. But a lot of the TV spots are so short — a lot of times they run for 15 seconds and they are not usually over two minutes — so you can get away with using a pretty static track and then adding fills and what not. It doesn't have to be too creative, because a lot of the time they don't want to distract from the scene.
It's crazy that you can make a living off that simple of a setup. And as budgets go, nothing seems more than $300.
All the stuff that I've done, meaning all the TV music and my record Better Late Than Never, which is maybe 200 pieces of music, I didn't pay a dollar to record it. It's music that plays all over the world on TV and it's made in a tiny walk-in closet with a very minimal setup. I don't have a maxed-out studio. You wouldn't believe it if you saw it. The reason why I have been able to do this is that I have always been recording. I started out with a Yamaha 4-track. If you have a great setup, sure, it's easier to work. You don't have to do the little "rigs" that you have to do on my system. Like before I got Logic, I was making tracks in Reason and doing a sub- mix of that and exporting into Pro Tools and adding stuff on top of that. It was just a lot of extra steps that now I don't really have to deal with as much because Logic has MIDI in it.
Was Logic the most expensive thing you bought?
It probably was. But it was well worth it. It's great — very intuitive. Getting it set up was a little tough because I'm not some super-tech, but I finally got it going, and ever since then it's been really easy to make stuff.
Is there room for creativity in your work?
It depends on how they come to you. If they come to you telling you, "I want Jamie's sound. Just do what you do," then that's one thing. But then if they're like, "I want this cover of the Jaws theme," then there's not much room for interpretation. There is sonically maybe, but it's not going to be that composition per se.
Being a musician, you must be inspired to write music. Do you find challenge in inspiring yourself to write an interpretation of the Jaws theme? What if they want you to write something you can't stand?
I try to find what I like about it. There's been many times when I've been asked to do stuff I would have never done on my own, or I might not like the kind of music. I would learn something when studying the examples I was given and make a list of the elements that are there and how I can be creative with them. Even if you don't like it, it can be fun because it's a challenge. You're disassembling something and then putting it back together. I see more of the challenge than the conflict with my taste. And a lot of the time with these background things you just won't get credit for it. If I was an artist and I was making greeting cards, that might not be my passion, but it's a way to finance what I really want to do. Doing these shows I end up doing things I don't like to do — recently I had to do "Talk to the Animals", from the movie Dr. Dolittle. I had to sing it. It was embarrassing. I don't know what my neighbors were thinking. I also had to do a bunch of hip-hop stuff. I try to avoid doing hip-hop because a lot of guys do it already and they do it well. There's an overabundance of it. But in December I had to record a bunch of tracks for this show, Yo Momma. It was all hip-hop cues and I have to say I haven't listened to too much [hip-hop]. They gave me a CD with 20 songs. He didn't say, "Recreate them." Instead he said, "These are the different vibes of hip-hop. There's a lot of different styles." So I went one by one and recreated each one, starting out with their ideas and their sounds. But I was also trying to make it totally different by the time I was done, while keeping the essence of it.
Did you have to rap?
I didn't have to rap. They're just musical tracks.
Have you ever been rejected? And if you're rejected, do you know about it?
There's a couple different scenarios. The first is when you deal directly with a musical director, who will call you directly and say, "We need this. Can you do it?" That's a more solid deal. Then the second scenario is you'll get a music library or a freelance musical director calling up or doing an open call through email saying, "If anyone has a track that sounds like '80s New Wave, send it to me and we'll see if we can use it in this commercial." And in that case, the guy probably won't get back to you because he has 50 guys sending him tracks. Unless he picks your track, he's not going to get back to you, unless you email him. But if they don't get back to you, you know what's up. Going back to the musical director: it's one-on-one, so I'll make a track and sometimes it will need a little tweaking. He'll be like, "Those claps aren't loud enough." — very general stuff, nothing crazy. It's a situation where we will work together to achieve the piece. And it's almost always in a short space of time.
Describe the process of writing a sound- a-like.
Well, first the musical director calls at 5 PM on Thursday and is like, "I need a piece that sounds like 'Panic in London' by the Smiths, and I need it by tomorrow at 3 PM." [laughs] You really got to hustle and be focused in the sense that you make sure you know what he's talking about and what he wants.
Do you take notes?
Oh yeah. I should also say that a large percentage of those (sound-a-like) cues I did in a short amount of time — I didn't even have a clip of the scene. Like he just played me the scene over the phone or he would describe it to me. You really have to feel out the person and what they want so that when you're working in a short amount of time, you're not wasting any trying to find it. So, then I get an example of the track. Hopefully I can get it on iTunes or the guy will send me the track. Then I'll import the track directly into Logic and I'll listen to it and I'll figure out the tempo, because the tempo is important — it's how they cut the scene usually. And I'll start out with the drums, first getting the actual rhythm. But a part of it is I have to get the drums to sound like the drums on the track they are looking for. Then, usually there will be some instrument that dictates what's going on. So, if I don't do the bass second, I'll probably do the instrument that plays the main progression. A lot of times it's guitar for rock music. Maybe I'll put the bass in after that, but I usually like to start with bass and drums. You just make a checklist of what's on the original track that's essential to the track. It's very much about doing stuff by ear, like being able to hear something just a couple times and being able to grab the essence of it. You don't have to do it exactly and most of the time you can't do it exactly. But it's kind of making your own interpretation that's close enough where people can hear the similarity and know that it's "that tune", but make it different enough that you're not going to get sued. And that's a big consideration — you don't want do this thing and have the show get in trouble because it's too close to the original. And they usually go through a few people when they get the tune. After I knock out the whole track, after I add all these parts, then I master it. I use T-RackS most of the time. I just try to get it so it's even and it really cuts through, so that when I listen to it at a really low volume, everything still gets through.
Does the show ever follow up with its own mastering?
No. They pretty much like to get it "as is". And another thing that I didn't mention which is really important is that you have to have definite beginnings and definite endings. A lot of times guys will have tracks that fade out and that's a huge pet peeve of TV editors, because it's hard to work with something that doesn't really transition from scene-to-scene and fades. That is, unless they wanted a fade. A lot of times they want a cap, something that just ends at a certain place. So when the show gets the finished product and it has a beginning and end and it has enough space between them, then they can cut it by a bar or a couple bars. Sometimes they do — they cut it short. I've even had them take long tracks and stretch them out. But they don't do anything with sound.
They're trusting, especially if they knew what kind of equipment you were using.
I guess it's really just about the end result. As long as you have a file that sounds like they want it to sound.
Where are you on the pay scale?
I'm probably on the lower end. Cable isn't really where it's at money-wise. Network is where it's at. I've only done a couple of network things. But they pay two times more. The MTV pay will sound kind of meager, but when something plays on air, usually it's about a dollar a second. When something runs for 60 seconds, it's 60 bucks. And that's just in the case with background music. If it's foreground music, that means that people are seeing or hearing the music, it's part of the scene — you get four or five dollars a second. So you'll get $300 for a spot that ran 60 seconds. And then you have to consider that there are reruns, it's playing in different markets — it could play around the world if it's on something like MTV. Some songs I've had, one in particular called "El Diablo" — any time someone needs a surf tune they use that song. That has been a great song for me and I would have never thought they would have picked that one. It always comes up on my BMI statement and it's usually at the top. It's probably because there are a lot of guys who do stock music who probably don't have a lot of surf. What they do is they take all the music they have and put it in two hard drives at MTV, and all the editors share that music. There will be like 10,000 songs on there. That particular song I didn't write for TV. I did it with no purpose in mind.
Knowing what kind of money is involved with this music scene, do you see music directors ordering songs having a lasting impact on music? Because in a way it is patronage, but it's more demanding.
The whole market has kind of shifted. It used to be only major label acts were getting on these shows or mid- level label acts. And then when all the downloading started and sales shifted from CDs to downloads, labels were becoming way more protective of music. And they weren't releasing music to these shows. It used to be the thing, especially with MTV, that the labels wanted to get their bands on the shows to promote them. If their video wasn't on, at least they were on this show and the band is going to make a little bread from it. But now labels are more protective of their bands, and that's where guys like me come into the picture: I'm an independent artist they don't have to pay a lot of money for. Or with the spec deals — they get the music up front from us and they take care of it on the back end with royalties from BMI — to them that's a lot sweeter deal. A lot of these shows on MTV are reality shows — there's not much of a budget and what money they do have they have to use to pay for the star power. Even with films, a lot of times music is the last thing they think about. They're like, "Oh shit, we have all these songs in here that we can't use. Now what do we do?" That's when they call up independent musicians, "Hey, do you have anything like this?" or "Jamie, can you make this? I'll pay you $500." And if they called me today, that's what they'd pay $500.
They'd want something specific.
Or they might call up and say, "Jamie, I need 'Tequila'" and I have a version of "Tequila" that I wrote. Then I can pull it out of my collection, give it to them and get $500 without having re-recorded anything. That's probably the case 20 percent of the time. You hopefully have something when they call.
Do you now just record things in anticipation of their calls?
Yeah. If I look in my little catalogue that I'm trying to develop and I'll notice that there's not as many of a certain style of tune that I might need a few more of, to round it out in order to present to someone to show, "Yes, I have electronic music," then I might add another electronic track to the file. I really go on what I feel like recording. Sometimes I feel like recording a certain type of tune and I'll just lay it down because I know some time in the future there's going to be a use for it.
Do you look back on all your work positively? Especially when you're making your music for a job at a corporation?
Some people might see MTV or Viacom as an evil empire or the anti-Christ. For me I see it as a commercial position where I am able to create within certain parameters and I'm getting paid to create stuff, and that's all I can really hope for. There's never been a moment where I did something and then regretted it. I see it as each show that I do, I'm adding to what I have and I'm learning different styles of music, learning about mixing... I'm really happy to be doing it, even if it is something as mainstream as TV. And even if it's something I might not watch, it's still very surreal.
