Episode 12: Eric Kalver - Understand What The Product Is YOU CAN Make a Living In The Music Industry Podcast

 
This week I'm talking with music supervisor, composer and drummer Eric Kalver.  Eric is in L.A. and stays extremely busy currently working for the video game publisher Activision. When he's not finding cool songs to put into video games, he is either composing music or playing drums in a bunch of different bands around L.A. He took time out to talk with me about his journey from being a magician's assistant (yes, you read that correctly) to being one of the top music supervisors in L.A.
Show Notes:
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Talking Points:
*Eric grew up in a family of magicians.
*Check out The Amazing Eric and Bozo on You Tube.
*I went to Berklee School of Music for drumming and began taking arranging classes.
*I realized by doing arranging that would help me stick out of the crowd.
*A “lead sheet” is a music chart that is condensed so that it’s easy to read and on just a page or two so the whole band can read off the same sheet.
*I moved to L.A. sooner than I planned because people told me that the jobs would be gone if I waited.
*My first job in L.A. came because my father knew someone who produced the Daytime Emmy Awards and got me a job as a production assistant, moving chairs and sets and getting people where they needed to be.
*That got me work doing other entertainments jobs through the same company for about 3 months while I looked for music jobs.
*I was able to email and connect with a person from Berklee who lived in L.A. and eventually got me work as a copyist.
“Copyist work” has to do with the sheet music that is being played by an orchestra or player.
*I would take the master score the orchestrator was working with and I would extract the parts from the master score using a computer program called Finale.
*In Finale I would go into each instrument part and “clean it up" once it was extracted from the main score.
“Clean it up” meaning the spacing of the notes, making sure the notes make sense when you read them, cleaning up the dynamics, making sure things aren’t all over the place.
*A “copyist” is like a proof reader for a book editor.
*Having a network of like minded people who do the same kind of work as you who, if you get along with them and they trust your work ethic, then you can be recommended for jobs in the future.
*When networking, instead of offering my card to someone, it’s best if I get a person’s business card so they are the top of my mind and I can follow up with them because I may not be on the top of their mind.
*It’s better not to talk about the thing you want to network about until the other person brings it up.
*It’s all about “the hang.”
*Because of my Berklee connections I found a composer looking for an assistant. I got hired by Brian Tyler who worked on the Fast and Furious movies and Avengers: Age of Ultron.
*I didn’t study composing in college but I needed a job and was willing to learn and since Hollywood is a film scoring town, I applied for the job and I got it.
*When you’re an assistant to a composer, it’s not necessarily a job where you’re doing music the whole time.
*My job was more of an administrative job when I started. I was picking up laundry and lunch and running errands. That’s part of the job. They don’t tell you in school how to arrange the food and do hospitality, how to treat clients who are coming into the studio, etc.
*Attention to detail is important.
*Taking care of these details can prove to your boss that you can handle bigger tasks later on.
*Now, if I’m hiring a musician and they aren’t easy to hang out with it’s just not going to work.
*I got to do some orchestrating on the movies Fast Five and Skyline.
*As an orchestrator I was taking instrument parts and deciding how to split up chords that the composer created with th