Splitting Long Cues

Sometimes, you have to deal with excessively long music cues in scoring projects. There might be animated short films that have music wall to wall or climax scenes in feature films where there is non stop music for sometimes 10 minutes or more. Such music cues can be massively overwhelming and it is easy to get completely lost in such cues, especially when there are a lot of hit points and different actions and emotions that need to be supported by the music.

In such cases, it helps a lot to split the cue into smaller chunks and there are several reasons why this is the best way to deal with such enormous music cues:

1. It is psychologically easier to write several 2-3 minute cues than to write one 10 minute cue. Just knowing that there are 10 minutes of music ahead of you in this cue makes it quite intimidating to get to work on this. Knowing that there is a target you're working towards in 2-3 minutes makes it a lot easier.

2. Rewrites usually are less laborous. With working on such long cues in several chunks, you can send off a portion of that scene for feedback without needing to write the entire cue and in case the client doesn't like the direction this is taking, you can go back and adjust accordingly before moving on with the cue. Rewriting big parts of a long cue can be extremely frustrating if the direction you took didn't resonate with you client.

3. You can deal better with "micro edits". Unfortunately, we all know these "Hey, I know you scored this already, but we added 1.5 more seconds to that one shot, sorry for this, can you adjust the music?" messages we get once in a while from clients. Sometimes this doesn't happen only in one place but even in several. Again, it is much easier to edit one part of a chain of cues than doing edits to one long cue.

4. When recording with real orchestras, it is absolutely common to not record chunks longer than 2-3 minutes in one take. In sight reading sessions the short term memory of musicians works much better in a confined space of a few minutes than in an endless cue. So a second take of a long cue will most likely not improve much over the first sight reading cue while a second take on a short cue will definitely improve as people can focus on specific things and have a general overview over the piece. In general, even if the orchestra is presented with a quite long cue, it is absolutely common to break it down in chunks when recording looking out for cesuras or moments where it makes sense to start a new take. So accomodating for this practice in the writing already will make things easier during the session. Of course, the length of chunks is depending on the music. Whole note string chord cues that are easy to play are different than detailed tutti action cues.

It takes a bit of planning to find the right spots to break apart a long cue and also to write transitions from one chunk to another one that do work. Best transitions are the ones that either have a cesura or a rest for everybody in the music anyway or passages where you can write a little overlap to hide the edit. For instance a woodwind run into a new dowbeat can work very well to stitch together two separate takes. Most ideal are transitions which can act as "extension gaps" in case some edits change. For instance a long sustaining string chord or note that fades out in the first cue and the next cue picks up in the same tonality but it's not really noticable if that second cue starts a second earlier or later.

Of course writing in such planned edits is not always possible. Some action cues are busy and driving all the time. In such cases it is essential to plan cues exactly. Don't let a second cue start "somewhere" but make sure that it rhythmically aligns with the first cue. It takes quite some care to write transitions that work well. It usually helps to at least sketch out the transition into the next cue to make sure it works musically.

It takes a bit of experience to anticipate where it would make sense to split a cue and where it would be better to leave it as one. There are a few additional factors to be considered: A downside of splitting is that you lose some session time in "resetting". Musicians finding the sheet for the next segment, Protools engineers opening up a new session, the usual pre-cue chatter. However if for instance by splitting a cue you can also avoid awkward page turns for musicians, that alone is worth the effort of splitting. 

Experienced session musicians, engineers and conductors will be able to work out efficient split points in any cue but especially when session time is tight, a dedicated planning of such things already in the composition stage will help a lot.