About

We start at
the edit, not
the piano

We are a two-person studio that writes music for picture. We take on four or five projects a year, which is fewer than we could and about as many as we should.

The method is consistent enough to describe. We ask for the roughest cut you are willing to show us — ideally one you are embarrassed by. We watch it once without taking notes, then again with a stopwatch. Almost every edit has a pulse hiding in it already; the job is to find that and not fight it.

Then we write on paper, badly, and take it to players. We record close — close enough that the instrument sounds like an object in a room rather than a section in a mix. Rosin, breath, the click of a key. Those are not artefacts to be removed. They are the reason you believe it.

We do not deliver stems that sound finished on their own. A cue that sounds great in isolation is usually a cue that will fight the dialogue.

A dark studio interior, light from a single window
Studio 2 — the good corner

How we work

  1. 01

    Rough cut

    You send the assembly. We watch it twice and send back one page.

  2. 02

    Spotting

    Two hours in a room together with a timecode window and no instruments.

  3. 03

    Sketches

    Piano-and-voice demos inside ten days. Deliberately ugly, deliberately fast.

  4. 04

    Players

    Two or three sessions. Small forces, close mics, minimal editing.

  5. 05

    Mix & dub

    We come to the dub stage. Cues get cut there, not defended there.

Room

  • Two rooms — one dead, one very much not
  • 1961 upright, prepared with felt, bulldog clips, blu-tack
  • Two ¼-inch tape machines, one of which works
  • Ribbon pair, a valve pair, and one very cheap dynamic we keep using by accident
  • No orchestral sample library. On purpose.

Available — Q1 2027

Two slots open. We read everything that comes in.

—
0:00 / —:—