Have you ever wondered what goes into recording electric guitar for a movie soundtrack – especially a big-budget one? Yvette Young has lifted the veil on exactly what that entails, as well as the level of detail and gear required to make movie soundtrack magic happen.
In a YouTube video reflecting on the opportunity and the process, Young says, “Never in my life would I have thought I would be involved with the music for the new James Gunn Superman movie. And I have the wonderful David Fleming [composer] to thank for that.”
Explaining how the opportunity came about, Young explains that the renowned composer reached out to her and “asked if I wanted to do guitar for it.”
“I was like, I'm on board with whatever you guys need,” she remembers saying. “So I was basically on retainer for a month doing cues back and forth. Every day, they'd send me one or two, sometimes three, and I would just try to send them back as quickly as possible.”
“Felt like an on-call musician, and it's interesting, because it's not like, you know, I get like feedback or anything,” Young adds. “It's kind of just like, I send it, I follow the MIDI guitar, I add some of my own ideas if I feel like it could help and hope that it ends up okay, but the whole thing just moves at such a fast pace that there's really no time to make a lot of revisions unless it's absolutely egregious.”
As Young divulges, she didn't know whether what she played would make the final cut until she watched the movie in the theater.
“One funny thing is, I feel like you spend so much time on the details – I'm over here really dialing in like a delay oscillation or something, putting in a lot of heart into it, and it's just hilarious, because in the movie, that one thing you pour your heart into is just going to be completely covered by an explosion,” she quips.
“I get it. You, as a musician, work for the film. The music isn't the main thing, right? You're supporting a director's vision – that's what the soundtrack is for.”
Young goes on to lift the lid on some of the gear she used to make sure her guitar tone fit the Superman bill. “I tracked on my P-90 [Ibanez] Talman through the ACS1 by Walrus Audio. Used a lot of the Hologram Chroma Console for some of the fuzz tones, also Collision Devices' Black Hole Symmetry for some of the heavier fuzzy stuff.”
Fittingly, Young also used her signature pedal with Walrus Audio, the Qi Etherealizer, which she had previously described in an interview with Guitar World as an “ambient machine” and an “idea generator that helps musicians get past that oftentimes tricky starting point.”
Other pedals she used were “a bunch” of Meris Mercury7 Reverb, an EBow, and the FreqOut by DigiTech.
As for the most challenging thing about working on such a fast-paced project? “We're all working on a deadline, and it's not like I have limitless time, and I want to give all these cues my all. I find it really difficult to know when to stop,” she admits.
“It's just easy to get lost in the sauce, and I had to really reel myself in, because I didn't want to just waste too much time on something that wasn't necessarily important. I feel really, really privileged to be trusted so much, to be not given too much direction.
“What I found to be really fun and rewarding about this whole thing is just learning about how this whole process works and gaining invaluable experience doing this,” she gushes. “I'm really finding a lot of joy in working on movie score sort of things. To actually be able to do that for this concrete thing that's going to exist out there for people to consume is really rewarding and nice.”
In more Yvette Young news, the virtuoso recently reflected on her pivot from touring musician to more soundtrack-adjacent work – including composing bedtime sound baths to help emo kids go to sleep.
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