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Soundtrax: Episode 2009-14
December 1st, 2009By Randall D. Larson
Ron Jones conducts a scoring session for
STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATIONFreakin’ Sweet – Ron Jones and the Music for Family Guy
Ron Jones has been a veteran of television music for more than twenty years. Along with composer Dennis McCarthy, Jones defined the episode musical design for Star Trek: The Next Generation in the 1980s. He also scored episodes of the animated show, Duck Tales before becoming associated with Seth McFarland and working on episodes of Family Guy and American Dad since each animated show’s inception. Interviewed last July and updated this week, Jones speaks very candidly about his experiences behind the scenes providing music for Family Guy.
Q: How did you initially start with Family Guy?
Ron Jones: I was working on a couple shows that Seth did for Hanna Barbera. Bodie Chandler was the music director when Seth was at Hanna Barbera, and he had a list of composers, and Seth he said, “oh, Ron Jones, I grew up knowing his music, can I call him?” So I worked on shows like Larry & Steve for Seth - and then he disappeared. Months later, he calls me and says he’s working on a pilot. This was Family Guy. He says “I want you to score the pilot!” And I’m waiting and finally I forgot about it, and then he calls: “Hey, man, I‘m ready for you to do the pilot!” I said, “Oh, cool! When are we going to start?” And he says, “Well, why don’t you come over and we’ll talk about it.” I said, “When does it go?” And he says “Well, tomorrow morning!” He was not kidding me! So I had to compose a theme, input everything myself and mix it – I had to do it all virtual, there was no time to even call a session. I brought it to the dub 40 minutes before the downbeat, and they laid it in and about a week later Fox said, “Yeh, we’re going to buy it.” They had given him a seed grant to work at his kitchen table and develop the show, and that was a year before the series actually launched.
Q: So in this frantic rush to get it done in time, how did you come up with what you needed to do, and is that what stayed throughout the season?
Ron Jones: I had to come with a format. Since I knew what Seth had wanted from these past shows, when I looked at Family Guy, I surmised a bag: since he likes jazz, I’ll put it in that ballpark, but not all of the cues were jazzy. He also likes things that are classic in the sense of how Korngold approached film scoring. The show can be crazy but the music plays against that. It gives the job an extra potency, playing it straight. So that part of it was already in place, but I had a different theme. Later as the show was in production, Seth said that he wanted to submit a main title theme to Fox, which was heavily overseeing everything, in one way or another, since Seth was new to having a whole series. I did about four or five demos – ready-to-go main title options – but he calls me later and says “hey, we chose somebody, we’re going to go with Walter Murphy.” I didn’t know that Walter, who I knew as a friend and we had worked together before, had also been brought into the project by another co-executive producer, David Zuckerman. Seth didn’t know him, but he knew they needed a couple of composers, and they went with Walter’s title theme. Walter had done some of these things that were big hits in the disco era, Beethoven’s 5th and those sort of interpretations, so to Fox, when they ask, what has this guy done, it’s between somebody who has a platinum song, versus me – I’ve done a lot of things for TV but nothing that was a pop hit, so I guess that may also have tipped the scale.
Q: When you’re scoring an episode, one of the first things that comes to mind is that you’ve got to be able to turn on a dime, because there’s so many asides and little fantasy moments, all those things that need a wholly different kind of music. How do you approach scoring an episode when you initially get the script?
Ron Jones: You have to read it and digest it and break it down. Also, when you get the script, the writers are still punching up the story so there are different versions. There’s a first edit version you get, a salmon colored version of the script, and then you get another one that’s a beige one, and finally you get up to one that’s orange. And that one isn’t even locked, so even up to a week before, you think you’ve got it all figured out, and then something changes or a new joke will need a circus cue, or a Superman cue. But I’ll make a breakdown of what is needed. Usually there’s anywhere from ten to thirty different style changes within a single episode, and you have to divide off the polkas and the disco and the dance music or whatever, so you know what band to call. You don’t call the same band every time. It’s like when I scored Star Trek – if it was an emotional story there might be more strings, or more violas or something like that, and on another episode it’s more battle-heavy and you need nine percussion and twelve brass. The same thing is true with Family Guy, at least the way I do it.
Q: What’s the technique as far as you sharing episodes with Walter, do you alternate?
Ron Jones: We alternate. It used to be straight up, we’d go fifty/fifty, but now the writers and Seth have gotten to know what they think are our strong points, so they cast us for each show. It might be that Walter might be two or three shows in a row and I’m sitting out, and then I’ll have two or three, or I’ll done one and he’ll do two and then I’ll do two and he has one. Seth is the one who decides. He’ll go, “well, this is a Walter show, this is a Ron show...” That’s the way it goes.
Q: How closely do you work with Seth or the other producers in establishing the musical tone for Family Guy? How has that developed over the ten seasons?
Ron Jones: When Seth just had one series on his plate, in the first batch before they cancelled the show for a while, it was much more one-on-one. We’d sit and talk about it. Seth is a nano-producer, he’s into every frame. I mean, every frame! So he is the ultimate arbitrator of truth, justice, and the American way on Family Guy. He chooses every aspect. But when we’re spotting, there’s not that much communication. I’m often told, “if Seth wants something he’ll call you.” And then I have to try to grab his attention, and then he calls me while he’s driving to work or something, and I’ll say “yeah, that song with the Nazis, what do you want to do there?” And then I’ll get a little bit of direction. But a lot of times, if he’s really busy now, I’ll just have to go ahead and create something, send him the temp, and he’ll tell me what he likes about it or what he doesn’t like about it. Sometimes I’ll do that and he’ll tell me, “oh, the writers decided to cut that song out…” or “we’re now going to put that in another episode,” so it’s whacky!
Q: Now, aside from the underscore, when there’s a song whether it’s a satire on a Broadway song or a wholly new song, what’s the process of creating that and getting the lyrics done and the voices recorded and all of that?
Ron Jones: It varies. Of course, with animation you have to have everything recorded ahead of time – not only if there’s dancing but any kind of action, because they have to choreograph the animation. So we have to write that for specific voices, we usually create a temp track that they sing to, with a click track for the kind of tempo it’s in. Seth or whoever will sing it, or we will hire singers if it’s really alien to anybody in the cast, and record that. When it comes time for the scoring session, we will then take out those tracks and record the real orchestra or the live players underneath it. It’s like we jack it up, take the tires off, put new tires on, but it’s essentially the same vehicle, and that way we can do it. The lyrics are derived from the script. Occasionally, especially in the first two or three years,
