I just came back from a recording session for the TV show, “Desperate Housewives.” (Walt Disney Studios.) I get hired to play bass for their episodes when they use “incidental music.” If you’re not already acquainted with the process, you might find this interesting.

In a nutshell, this is how these things go:

The arranger gets the script and a video of the section of the episode needing music. This episode used a jazz standard as background music, hence “incidental music.” The music is timed to the dialogue, but isn’t the main focus of the scene.

We gathered in the studio and got set-up: drums, bass, keyboard, trombone, trumpet, alto sax and tenor sax. The drummer arrived much earlier since he had his whole “kit” to set up. All I did was plug in. The musicians are in the “main tracking room,” which is separate from everything else for sound separation.

We ran through the charts a few times to straighten up anything not clear, then ran the song down a few times.

At this point, the producer of the show was in the “control room,” which is the room that the recording engineer and recording equipment are. As we played the song a number of times, he was comparing the music to the video of the episode. Everything is “synced up,” so a certain part of the music was played as a certain actor did or said something. (How everything is synced-up is a little technical so I’ll skip those details.)

With the producer watching the video and having the script in front of him, we fine-tuned the music: added two bars here, took away two bars there. We continued with this process until he had all the variation he wanted then we started tracking (recording).

First we tracked the drums, bass and keyboard. Once we had all the variations the producer wanted we tracked all the horns. We continued on until we were finished a few hours later.

Being on a Disney session is always cool, and interesting. We sign the regular tax forms and, interestingly enough, an “I9″ immigration form to show that we are a citizen of the United States. Also, these type of sessions are run strictly by the clock and there’s a person in charge of breaks and the time that everyone is “on the clock.” She let everyone know when we needed to take our ten-minute breaks and when the session was either going to end or go into overtime.

Then the check is in the mail.

And when the series is put on DVD…, the check is in the mail.

Gotta love it.

Tags: Desperate Housewives, recording session, TV