Stranger Things Composers Break Down the Show's Music

I'm Kyle Dixon. And I'm Michael Stein.

We do music, we've done a show called Stranger Things.

We're gonna talk a little bit about what we do

and how we do it. (electronic music)

When we were first approached to do

the music for Stranger Things,

it was a very exciting, random email from the directors,

just kind of telling us they like the music of our band

and they had been using it in a mock trailer for the show.

They sent us the trailer that had one of our songs

called Dirge, it's the last track on our first LP.

And they decided who was gonna do the score

to this TV show we're gonna work on,

let's ask these guys who we're using their music currently.

Basically, they just wanted to know if we had any interest

in being a part of a sci-fi drama

with Winona Ryder on Netflix.

We wrote 'em back saying of course we were interested

in doing this, here's a bunch of music.

When you do stuff conceptually for a library

or just stuff that you think sounds cinematic,

actually seeing that stuff fit to picture,

almost all the music we submitted from the library

is not stuff that crossed over being able

to be used in the show.

The things that are effective in score

are generally a lot different than a pop song.

And I'm using the term pop song,

pretty loosely. Structured.

This many bars, A, B, A, B, C,

which is not how a score is.

Score is like, woo, what is this digging up?

(exclaiming) And then it's like, oh,

and then it's like, cute, and then it's like,

this music's super weird.

It's almost like... It's like it's...

Some form of abstract prog. Schizophrenia, yeah.

But it works to picture.

(electronic music)

We have tons of influences. (laughing)

I mean, we grew up listening to Aphex Twin and Autechre

and Bogdan Raczynski, all the experimental side

of pop electronic stuff.

I probably watched Big Trouble in Little China

100000 times, and The Keep, which Tangerine Dream

did the score and it's early Michael Mansfield.

The music in that movie is incredible.

Ex Machina was really cool, same with Annihilation.

I don't think, as an artist, you can try to ignore

or act like you're not influenced by stuff,

but all art takes things and you absorb and adapt it

and it becomes some new thing.

Everything evolves from things you've experienced.

When we approach music, we obviously have all the influences

and inspirations, but you get in the studio

and you experiment and that's where we come from,

so it's always about finding new things

and that's what keeps me excited.

It's very fun to make your own sounds,

and in doing that, you're going to create

something that's more unique to yourself.

When you're using things like modulator synths,

it's even hard for you to recreate the same sound twice,

so in that way, it's unique, even to that specific session.

(electronic music)

Season one allowed us to approach some of the horror,

like the mysterious scenes where like,

Nancy's going to look for Barb out in the woods

and there's these cooler, experimental

ambient pieces of music I just think are really unique.

(eerie music)

The jump scare sound (intense music)

was actually a combination of a broken piano

we recorded on a field recorder

the first time we visited the set.

(eerie music) (grunting)

When Mike and Dustin are being chased to the quarry

by the bullies, and then Eleven saves them

is one of the themes from season one

that got reused and reinterpreted.

(intense music)

This actually got reused when Joyce

was axing through the wall.

(screaming) (smashing)

The end of episode eight, it starts

when Eleven comes back and then goes through the credits

and kind of plays out the more epic version of that.

(electronic music)

We defined a handful of themes early on in Stranger Things

because there's definitely different little worlds

that exist and there's different characters,

so there's some specific themes,

and then just kind of general moods and sonic soundscapes

that represent different parts of the show

that creates rules and boundaries you can work within.

(eerie music)

One of the challenges for us was to figure out

how we were gonna do action music in our own way.

(intense music)

We did that with the use of just kind of atonal percussive

elements with a brooding kind of base underneath it.

(intense music)

Steve!

Steve, abort, abort!

When Steve is trying to lure the demodogs-

It goes through just a lot of like,

ambient kind of eerie, suspenseful stuff.

(eerie music)

It'll build to a big rise and then drop

and like, have a jump scare. (intense music)

Because of the action, the higher energy stuff,

we got to revisit a little more of the themes

of where we come from with the band, stuff with drums.

(electronic music)

Just these bigger, more epic pieces that are driving.

(electronic music)

We've made music in just about every way

that you could possibly make music.

We've made music together,

we've made entire pieces separately.

We've swapped sessions. We started an idea,

sent it over to him, had him work on it,

sent it back to me, we've done the back and forth thing.

Yeah. We've done just about

every combination of collaboration that exists.

We're fortunate we've been working together so long

that basically, we're able to create music

that we know could come from either of us.

(electronic music)

This better be good, stalker.

So, this is my workspace with most of my equipment.

I guess you guys wanted to know a bit about the theme song.

(electronic music)

Misconception, everyone thinks that the little arpeggio

was written on a Juno, which I don't even own.

And it wasn't an arpeggio, it was played by hand.

And it was this guy.

That's doing the main sequence.

(electronic music)

This is what played the baseline, the SH2,

very good, aggressive kind of baseline.

(electronic music)

Doing a little self-resonating filter

The heartbeat. to the heartbeat,

the like thump, thump, thump.

(electronic music)

Five by five is in there doing some kind of

Like a little pad. little pad.

Little piano kind of tone.

Taybecho is like, all over everything, we love Taybecho.

There is 2600 doing a lot of sound effects.

The day that he bought that synthesizer,

he brought it over to my house like,

let's make a big drum sound, so we did that,

and then we had that recording way before

Stranger Things was happening, and then

it ended up making it into the score

and we ended up recreating it to make it fit

with the scene, Yeah.

but it's funny that literally the first thing

ever recorded once you bought that

made it into the soundtrack. The monster,

like the Upside Down, (singing)

that was actually just sequenced

on one of these step sequencers.

The notes are weird, because it's analog,

so you can fine tune between notes.

It's kind of hard. Stuff you couldn't

play on the keys, because the tuning is micro-tonal.

[Boy] (eerie music) I don't understand.

Hiding.

This one has this piece of tape on it,

because that had the monster theme on it.

I was scared to change the knobs,

so put this piece of tape on it

and didn't touch it for like a year,

(laughing) which sucks, because...

It's a really good thing. 'Cause I don't wanna use it.

It's a really good thing to use.

(eerie music)

When scary things are happening,

there's that kind of like, a big (exclaims),

like a big kind of tuba sounding hit, and that's the 2600.

(eerie music)

If you're making music or doing any kind of art or whatever

and you're enjoying it, just keep doing it,

because we were in a band for like 10 years,

we didn't expect anything to happen.

We were gonna keep making music anyway,

because we like doing it, and then one day,

we got this random email that changed our lives completely.

So if you like something and it makes you happy,

somebody else probably does, too,

they just need to find it. (electronic music)