What do we do when we need to make present-day music sound “retro?”
That’s the question I faced when having to write a romantic theme in the style of a 1950s Hollywood film (think a Douglas Sirk style picture). The solution I came up with was to start in a very classic, golden-age place and then build out the melody and production so it sounded a little bit more modern while still staying true to those old Hollywood scores.
Take a listen to what I came up with here:
The main structure of the piece is built around four chords - a progression that’s used pretty often in both older and more contemporary pieces of music. In fact, this chord progression has found its way into a lot of modern Japanese pop pieces.
It’s typically referred to as the “Royal Road” progression, and - to me - it has a nostalgic and bittersweet feel to it that worked particularly well for a romantic theme.
The progression goes: IV△7–V7–iii7–vi. I made some color substitutions in the seventh degrees of some of these chords, but overall, that gave me a good framework to build a melody from. I think one of the things that marks these classic romantic theme from this era of Hollywood is a lot of tension and release in both the melody and the chords. Both of these points come into play notably at about 43 seconds into the piece during a large buildup in upwards motion and a few diminished chords that feel dangerously close to D major before finally, FINALLY, arriving back at D - our root chord.
This of course resulted in a lot of MIDI programing to get the slow down, rise, and romantic bowing of the cello and violins to match the style in my head. You can see that programing at work in this video, showcasing the MIDI in Logic - my digital audio workstation:
It’s still a tiny miracle to me that we can make something as lush as this in a PC or laptop. And with a little bit of work and attention to detail, we can get these modern-day samples to sound like a romantic, 1950s film theme.
If you’d like to collaborate on a project or just reach out and ask a question, you can reach me here.
As always, happy listening!
- Matthew