From overcoming dyslexia with early synths to navigating AI, remote recording, and spatial audio, the blockbuster composer reveals how technology shapes his scores.
“I’ve got jet lag—just got in from Hong Kong. I’ve been awake since four o’clock this morning,” Scottish movie-score composer Lorne Balfe tells me as soon as we connect over Zoom. It’s early in Los Angeles, where Balfe has just touched down ahead of conducting a live orchestral performance of Top Gun: Maverick at the legendary Hollywood Bowl. For a fighter pilot, survival depends on trusting the wingman flying beside you. For Balfe, translating massive blockbuster scores from the studio to the live stage — and overcoming hurdles throughout his career — relies on a trusty wingman of his own: cutting-edge technology.
With films performed live in concert an increasingly popular phenomenon, Balfe says that Top Gun:Maverick, for which he was a co-composer (alongside Hans Zimmer, Harold Faltermeyer and Lady Gaga), and producer, was something of a passion project for him.
“Top Gun was something that we all really fought hard for because I don’t think there’s many films where you get cross-generation. My 85-year-old mother has seen it as many times as my 12-year-old son.”
Balfe has a long string of music score credits to his name, from Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Black Widow (2021) and TV shows such as His Dark Materials. He has also created music for video games such as Assassin’s Creed III and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
Defeating Dyslexia With Synths
He relates how, as a young man, he was immediately drawn to technology due to the creative possibilities it presented him, even without formal musical training.
“From a young age, I was into synths. I was programming. I knew how to sample and program a Fairlight by the age of 15. I just loved technology.”
Indeed, it was fundamental to his creative process, he says. “I have dyslexia and technology to me was the only way I could get music out of my head.”
The Zimmer School Of Musical Storytelling
Balfe says that when he was 16, he was very taken with the music for Wall Street (Stewart Copeland, 1987) and Rain Man (Hans Zimmer, 1988) and took it upon himself to write to them – and received answers back from back, with Zimmer providing 15 pages of notes. He later moved to L.A. and says he started working for Zimmer and stayed for 18 years, describing it as “the best training anybody could ever get”.
His love of tech also played well with Zimmer’s approach, describing him as “a pioneer of technology,” though never for its own sake, but to serve the film. “I learned about storytelling and how music can help hold the hand of an audience member.”
Accessing Global Talent Remotely
Balfe also explained how he was a fan of how fast internet connections had helped him capture performances from musicians wherever they are in the world.
“If we’d been discussing 10 years ago, about remote recording, one would find it kind of revolutionary. And now, all I ever do is wonder why we never did it all the time!”
As expected, he says that the COVID-19 pandemic normalized this and everyone has stuck to it as it’s more efficient.
Another positive to come out of this is that instead of exclusively relying on musicians located in traditional musical epicenters, such as London and LA, more “authentic” talents could be showcased.
“I think it woke everybody up to the fact that you can discover traditional musicians from where they are, where their homes are. Instead of us trying to pretend that just because you know the instrument, it doesn’t mean that you know the heritage of it.”
Balfe then caveats this, claiming that not being in the same room together does reduce the capacity to create the personal relationships that are important to the creative process. This is why, he says, he continues to travel between the UK and L.A. “I find I work better in that process of being with somebody, getting to know them.”
This lack of personal touch is why A.I. “won’t win”, he says.
Why A.I. Is Just The Next Synthesizer
“Part of my job as a composer is to try to understand what a director is thinking. They may not, musically, be able to describe what they want, but they have ideas, and I have to get those ideas out of them. And by having lunch and by discussing current affairs, you start to know somebody, and you start kind of figuring out their tastes.”
He’s not totally opposed to A.I. for music creation, however, saying he sees it no differently than when the Musicians’ Union tried to ban the synthesizer 50 years ago.
“They said it was replacing musicians—and you can argue that it has. But it’s allowed people to create. And the same with samplers; it allowed us to create. And AI is simply going to allow those that may not be able to proficiently play a piano to write a piano piece.
“Now, is it a good piano piece? That’s debatable. That’s, down to taste. But if you’re the person creating that and you have taste, you’ll be able to select what you think has got taste. And maybe that’ll connect with the audience.”
Bringing Blockbusters To The Live Stage
His comfort with technology explains why he has no qualms using stems (pre-recorded elements such as synths or backing vocals) to bring his soundtracks to life on stage in a similar way to the original recording.
“Sometimes also it’s impossible to replicate the exact same sound,” he explains. “I think as an audience member, I want things to sound great. Yes. And that, to me, is more important than if there is a stem there”.
The Long Game
Top Gun: Maverick’s blend of cinematic, orchestral arrangements, atmospheric synths and propulsive percussion is classic Balfe, representing his philosophy of treating all sounds as valid instruments without genre restrictions. As he said to me, “I love Depeche Mode and I love Kraftwerk. I love them as much as I love Vaughan Williams.”
Perhaps this is why he is at home working on games as he is on TV or in movies. A challenge he does have with writing music for games is how long they are compared to movies.
“You can’t necessarily write enough. Because with something like a Call of Duty or an Assassin’s Creed, you’ll be asked to write an hour’s worth of music, and you’ve got a gameplay of 28 hours. So that one hour somehow has got to kind of get milked. So anytime I’ve worked on a game, I’ve always broken the rule of an hour, because I’ve always sat there and I just thought, this is crazy. You can’t—there’s no way you can do this. They do. And it’s amazing how audio engineers do it”.
The Spatial Audio Battle
Balfe’s enthusiasm for embracing technology does present challenges, however. All movies these days are supplied with surround mixes and Balfe says he likes to spend time optimizing how the music sounds in the mix at the composing stage.
“You’re sonically producing it and writing at the same time so that it is as impressive as possible. Now, the tricky thing sometimes is with that fact of how you’re going to mix it — in surround or in stereo?
I find it difficult. You may be writing in Atmos, and we may think that everything sonically sounds great, but then you take it to a dub stage, and where You have your French horns, that’s where all of a sudden, that’s where the spaceship is!”
He says that because of this, dubbing mixers want the music to be provided to them in stereo, allowing them to take charge of creating the sound mix.
“It’s a fight! It’s a fight with dialogue and it’s a fight with sound effects.”
The solution, as ever, is collaboration and aptly, Balfe sums it up with an 80’s movie reference.
“You’ve just got to have a good relationship with the dubbing mixer. And follow their lead sometimes. You know, back to the worlds of Highlander — ‘there can only be one!’”
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