Photo: Various. Montage: Mick Reilly
For the Dune movies, Hans Zimmer and his team of extraordinary musicians didn’t just create a score. They created an entire world.
“When I was a kid and I went to see a science fiction movie,” remembers Hans Zimmer, “it would be set in a galaxy far, far from here, thousands of years in the future — and then I would hear the string section start. I’d go, ‘Really? Is that it? Nothing new has happened since then?’ Why would I have a romantic Northern European orchestra? Let’s go and invent instruments. Let’s go and build things!”
Soundtrack composer and sound designer extraordinaire for the Dune movies, Hans Zimmer.Photo: Lee KirbyThe composer has done just that on his scores for the Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two movies. Based on Frank Herbert’s classic sci‑fi novels and directed by Denis Villeneuve, the second instalment is about to hit cinemas worldwide at the time of writing, with musical ambition and creativity dialled up to 11.
Other Worlds
“It starts off,” says Zimmer, “with creating a sound world. One of the things that I’ve always done is that I spend a long time looking at the colour palette and talking to the director of photography. What’s this going to look like? What colours are you going to be using? What’s the colour palette of this planet? And that seeps over into the colour palette of the music.”
Creating a sound palette for Dune meant assembling an extraordinary team. Vocalist Loire Cotler, guitarist Guthrie Govan, flautist Pedro Eustache, bassist Juan ‘Snow Owl’ Herreros and cellist Tina Guo are all long‑term collaborators and soloists in his World Of Hans Zimmer and Hans Zimmer Live spectaculars. Their sonic contributions to the first Dune movie were mostly remote, as production took place during the Covid pandemic. Much sampling took place, often with the idea of creating otherworldly or alien substitutes for conventional instruments.
Tina Guo and Guthrie Govan take a break during sessions at Remote Control.
“For Dune: Part One, our string section is Guthrie,” laughs Hans. “It starts off with an idea, and I go to the musicians with that. Like, ‘Hey Guthrie, can you sample your E‑Bow guitar so that it becomes my string section?’ or ‘Pedro, can you just go and make me the sound — in pitch, in tune — of the wind whistling through the desert?’ So there’s a lot of sampling going on, and then there’s an enormous amount of creating sounds going on.”
“Hans wanted his ‘string section’ orchestrations to sound somewhat otherworldly,” expands Guthrie Govan, “so I tracked a lot of those string parts using slide guitar, fretless guitar and E‑Bow.
“We were touring in Europe when Hans requested raw materials for an E‑Bow‑based sample instrument, so it became part of my hotel room ritual to set up a Fractal FM‑9 processor and record as many long notes as I could bear. For the sake of my sanity, I had to divide the recording process into multiple sessions! I think I must have recorded something in the region of eight passes for every alternate note on the instrument’s register, doing my best to find a balance between a touch of vibrato and the required stability of pitch — a strangely hypnotic process, as every note needed to be eight bars long! I was pleasantly surprised by the sound of the finished instrument.
“We also made more extensive use of feedback on this new score [for Dune: Part Two]. Whilst on the road, we would set up in one of the backstage areas and run my Fractal FM‑9 through a powered monitor cranked up to obscene volumes! I discovered that something fun happens if you record guitar feedback with a high‑gain overdriven tone but also capture the DI guitar signal and then reamp it through a clean amp setting… the result is a haunting noise which could never have occurred in real time.”
On The Edge
“I think what we’re going for, ultimately,” says Hans, “is the extreme of the instrument. What is it that doesn’t exist out there in the world? The one thing we have in common is, you know, how can we make a sonic world that hadn’t existed before? So by the end of it, we create an orchestral palette which is not the palette of the normal Western European orchestra.”
Key to making this work is that the musicians Hans works with are not only virtuosos in the conventional sense. They’re also sonic experimenters, who are keen to explore the outer limits of what’s possible with their instruments. “Geniuses like Hans don’t care about what’s possible or not,” says Pedro Eustache. “They have a vision, they have a mission, and it’s up to us to accomplish that.”
On Dune: Part Two, fulfilling Hans’ vision certainly required the impossible of Eustache. For the Hans Zimmer Live tour that followed Part 1, the composer decided to start the show with Loire Cotler alone on stage, singing one of the main themes. “She starts singing very quietly as she walks onto the stage and goes through the whole length of the stage,” explains Pedro. “And Hans is crazy enough that for Dune: Part Two he goes ‘Pedro. I want you to play the theme on the duduk.’ I’m like ‘Are you crazy? That’s not in the duduk’s range.’ So what am I gonna do?”
What Eustache did was to invent a new instrument: the chromatic duduk. “Thanks to Hans challenging me, I had to come up with stuff that does not exist. Which enriches me and makes me even more unique because then I have access to things other people don’t have.”
Woodwind maestro Pedro Eustache holds the chromatic duduk he created in order to play one of the main themes from Dune.
“The material I’ve been involved with for most of my musical career is considered at the extreme of vocal repertoire,” says Loire Cotler. “So I view these seemingly impossible vocal tasks that Hans is asking as an opportunity to take me farther in a direction that I’ve been passionate about for many years. When Hans’ musical ideas are on fire and he starts to give us some outrageous directions… the only course of action is to grab our instruments by the guts, and leave our bodies behind!
Loire Cotler’s extroardinary vocals have become a core part of Hans Zimmer’s live performances, as well as featuring heavily on scores like Dune.Photo: Semmel Concerts / RCI Global / Frank Embacher
“I did quite a bit of intimate, close‑miked, gentler, inside‑your‑ear whispery rhythms and breathy rhythmic hits, where I emulated a shakuhahchi hit, inspired by Pedro of course! Another impossible Hans assignment was to create some ‘white noise grooves’ using vocal percussion, and then track them up in a bunch of meters. And then of course the more traditional singing, like in the opening and closing of ‘House Atreides’ on Dune Sketchbook, where I’m practically kissing the mic.”
“Hans is always very enthusiastic about the idea of pushing an instrument’s boundaries,” agrees Guthrie Govan. “I remember seeing a little twinkle in his eye when I brought an eight‑string guitar to the rehearsals for our first tour together. The next time I saw him in his studio, he had treated himself to a nine‑string!”
Up Close
“For me, there was no organic cello,” says Tina Guo, “because we’re on an alien planet and they didn’t have cellos. So we thought, OK, maybe we’ll use the electric cello — and in addition to getting the signal from the instrument, we miked the actual electric cello. It sounds terrible, but it’s terrible in a good way, in a very weird way where it’s like ‘What is that!?’ There’s a lot of weird little sounds, because it’s not supposed to be played that way, but it actually sounds really interesting. It’s barely audible, so if anyone even breathed, we’re like, ‘Oh God, we have to start over again,’ because you could hear everything in the room.”
Electric instruments recorded acoustically played a major role in the Dune sound world.
“There was a lot of close miking on the body of instruments that would normally be amplified,” agrees Snow Owl. “They can sound pretty dead, but with the right microphone combination and the right placement we kind of discovered a secret world, different parts in the body of the instruments that resonate in a very unique way.
“Another thing that I did which Hans lost his mind about was to put magnets all over the body of the bass so that it turned the strings into oscillators. It became self‑oscillating and then I was just honing on different parts of the body. According to Hans, this captured the complete isolation of the desert vibe, and he really used a lot of that in the score.
Originally from Colombia, bassist Juan ‘Snow Owl’ Herreros now lives in Vienna, where he has his own recording studio.
“During the creation of the first Dune there was a certain bass sound that I created that became really associated with the Harkonnens. Hans really wanted to exploit that on this second part, so we did hours and hours of sampling the sound so that Hans and the rest of the team could compose with it. And then when they put all the stuff together, then I came to LA and I recorded all the ideas that they had, kind of like building the bridge between the samples and the real person performing it. It was hundreds of hours of sampling, creating the craziest sounds on multiple basses, and using different microphone techniques and everything to sound like we’re not on Earth any more.
“It was always about: how can we tell a story and how can we attach it to certain characters? These sounds ended up becoming sound design for characters and for parts of the world, even some of the spaceships. It’s not just meant to be the low‑end fundamental. it’s a melodic element and a thematic element. I used specific Mongolian bows on very hard strings and it sounds very rough. It was very difficult to bow notes out of it. But it fits so well to the darkness of the black and white monochrome world of the Harkonnens.”
Guthrie Govan’s approach was equally unconventional: “My entire toolkit for the Dune movies was essentially a Fractal FM‑9 processor, my signature Charvel guitar and a Vigier fretless electric, coupled with a slide, an E‑Bow and a volume pedal. The Fractal gear is perhaps best known for its amp‑modelling algorithms, but its effects processing capabilities are also hugely flexible — pretty much anything can be used to modulate anything else, and the signal chain lets you run up to six chains in parallel, so its uses go way beyond the obvious ‘virtual pedalboard’ applications. One of the more fun things I concocted for this score was a patch using microtonal clusters, with the pitches spread out in increments of 0.75 semitones. A patch like that forces you to think more in terms of pure texture and sound design — it’s basically impossible to sound melodic when all of the notes available to you sound so disgusting and disorientating!”
Hans Zimmer: It’s not every movie where you get to unleash the synthesizers and the electronics in such a way!
Free Expression
For Dune: Part Two, remote sessions were followed up with a whirlwind five‑week period at Zimmer’s Remote Control facility in Santa Monica — where the composer added an extra dimension. Fascinated by the possibilities of the Eagan Matrix synth engine and the instruments that use it, such as the Expressive E Osmose and Haken Continuum, he decided to go straight to the top, bringing in its inventor Edmund Eagan and sound designers Guillaume Bonneau and Christophe Duquesne. “It’s not just about: you go and buy that thing and play it,” explains Hans. “I always try to get the person who built it or the guy who understands it the best to come in.”
The Eagan Matrix team at Remote Control. From left: Christophe Duquesne, Edmund Eagan, Hans Zimmer and Guillaume Bonneau.
“Hans’ original idea was to use the Osmose with his synths,” says Guillaume, “but then he discovered that with the internal sound engine you have much more interaction and much more of an ‘acoustic’ feeling to the sound. So he asked Christophe and myself to be involved directly in the project.”
Involving the Eagan Matrix experts allowed the score to exploit a forthcoming feature that is, as yet, unfinished and unreleased: resynthesis. “Basically you take a recording and make an analysis of it, meaning you’re not going to replay it as a sample, but recreate the sound with a bank of sine oscillators,” explains Christophe. “That’s a technique that was already used in the old Synclavier and Fairlight, but that was kind of lost in between. And the technology’s a bit more mature these days, so we pushed it a step higher. I personally did use a lot of analysis for the movie based on the voice of Molly Rogers, who is the violinist for Hans, and Loire Cotler who did the famous banshee cry in Dune: Part One.”
“Hans and Christophe Duquesne asked me to give them a track in character with some of the Dune‑inspired language chants I was writing,” recalls Loire. “There were specific parameters of pitch and tempo. Plus, I was in great company with the amazing Molly Rogers, who was also put to the task. When Hans and Christophe shared demos with me, I remember exactly what I said in my reply after hearing it: ‘I am officially bewitched! The Voice I hear in this demo, I’ll do anything she tells me to do!’”
Voices Of The Future
Guillaume: “Voices have a very strong presence in the film. So the idea is how we can change those voices that we already recorded to have another kind of feeling — more in the future, more spatial, something that could be something human but that we never heard. Resynthesis is a new part of the DSP that is currently in development, and so it was the best opportunity to try to use these new tools for this movie. You can keep the formant of the voice intact when you play with it, so you have a more human aspect.
A feast of Eagan Matrices: from top, Haken Continuum Mini, Continuum Fingerboard and Expressive‑E Osmose.
“On the Osmose or the Continuum you can change the volume of the voice directly with the pressure of your finger. Your finger is the envelope — you don’t need any ADSR — and you can change the shape of the sound, so you can change the volume, or create a small or huge vibrato. You can also change different parts of a single performance. For instance, you can travel to different parts of a word directly with your finger on the Continuum using a gesture, and on the Osmose by the aftertouch or any user parameter. So you can form real words directly with your gesture, but keeping the intention and human performance you get in a real voice.”
It wasn’t only the sound design skills of the Expressive-E team that Hans Zimmer drew on for Dune: Part Two; they were also deeply involved as performers. “They were played on the Osmose and the Continuum, and really using the full expression of the instruments takes time,” says Christophe. “The Osmose was quite new, and there was not enough time for Hans and his team to learn and practice the instrument. so he asked us to perform the sounds we were designing. We were creating the sounds, having an idea of what could work for a cue, recording it, submitting it to the team. Then the team would say ‘Yeah, that’s good’ or not.”
Although Zimmer’s goal was to create an otherworldly sound palette, he nevertheless didn’t want it to be overtly electronic.
Although Zimmer’s goal was to create an otherworldly sound palette, he nevertheless didn’t want it to be overtly electronic. Many of the sound sources were thus originally acoustic, albeit heavily processed. And many of the sounds produced by synthesizers were recorded acoustically, often using physical resonators to modify sound in the live room at Remote Control.
“We had every single instrument with an Eagan Matrix inside,” explains Christophe, “the Osmose, the Continuums and the Eagan Matrix Eurorack module. They were all generating sound that could be sent to the resonators, so to Onde and Pyramids from Le Voix de Luthier, also some Metallik resonators we’re doing with Eowave, another French brand. So the Eagan Matrix was played through these resonators and then recorded.”
Synths and other sound sources were re‑amplified through a variety of resonators, including the Pyramid and Onde from Le Voix De Luthier.
“The goal with those kind of new resonators or amplifiers is to keep the real acoustic behaviour of an instrument,” says Guillaume. “Because it resonates through wood or metal, and then you can capture it with different kind of mics, you have a very huge stereo image. It’s like being in front of someone playing the guitar, or something like that. It preserves the acoustic and organic aspect of the sound, so you don’t think it’s a synth, because it’s the same kind of experience as listening to a cello or something like that.”
Working Together
Hans Zimmer’s approach to composition has always been a collaborative one. Involving top‑level musicians and sound designers helps to keep his work fresh. “I’m not being elitist about it,” he says, “but it’s really important to me that I don’t want to hear our sound in somebody else’s movie.”
Hans Zimmer: It’s not like the technology is driving us. I think it’s more that the stuff I’ve been hearing in my head, I can now do. The imagination is limitless, and the people who’ve been writing good software are great imagineers.
The Dune movies, however, took this collaborative approach to new heights. “It was a score which consisted entirely of virtuosos! And because they’re all in the room or they’re all connected, everybody knows the drill. Everybody knows what we’re going for. We have the luxury of going, ‘Hang on, we get to invent a world here.’ A sonic world. It’s wonderful, because once you get everybody into the room, there’s no stopping them.”
Nor, it seems, is there any stopping Hollywood’s most daring composer.
The Synths Of Dune
Hans Zimmer’s London studio is crammed with analogue synths, including this Roland System 700 and EMS VCS3 — Zimmer’s first ever synth, which he sold many years ago and recently tracked down and bought back.
“It’s not every movie where you get to unleash the synthesizers and the electronics in such a way!” laughs Hans Zimmer. Both Remote Control in Santa Monica and his home from home in London are chock full of enormous modular synths. In practice, though, time usually dictates that even on a largely electronic score like Dune, they play a secondary role to software instruments.
“I’d love to have all the time in the world and go back to modular, but the big difference about doing a film score now, as opposed to doing a film score 20 years ago, is the edit. There is never a locked picture. The picture’s always in flux. So you need to always be able to go back to the sound, which is a little difficult when somebody tidied up your patch cords!
“The main synth I use, the synth I have never gotten bored with, is Urs Heckmann’s Zebra HZ, the dark Zebra, and then I use a thing called Legend, which is basically a recreation — no, it’s more than a recreation — of a Minimoog.
“And the virtual world is really good. Things sound really good. You know how important, for instance, film is to Christopher Nolan? He’s never said to me that I have to go and record on tape. The last movie I recorded on tape was Gladiator. And I lost years of my life while the tape was winding back.
“We need to embrace the technology, and it’s great. I think the advances in film music are partly the advances in technology. And it’s not like the technology is driving us. I think it’s more that the stuff I’ve been hearing in my head, I can now do. The imagination is limitless, and the people who’ve been writing good software are great imagineers.”
Ryan Rubin: Music Editor
The role of Music Editor is underappreciated, sometimes undervalued, but vital to the production of any film score. That’s especially so with a project like Dune, where the score is created collaboratively and is constantly changing. It’s a unique job that is in equal parts administrative, technical and creative.
Ryan Rubin with engineer Eva Reistad at Remote Control.Ryan Rubin has been Hans Zimmer’s editor for more than a decade. It’s his job to distil order from chaos, ensuring that the maelstrom of ideas floating around Remote Control coalesce into functional cues, and that everything gets completed on time. He’s also responsible for the huge organisational challenge of managing all the files that are associated with such a mammoth project. Avoiding leaks, in particular, is a crucial issue when cues and parts are being constantly sent around the world to be worked on remotely. But it’s also part of Rubin’s remit to spot that a particular composition might work better in a different part of the movie, or to rebalance the stems and give it a totally different feel.
“We’re doing everything kind of all at the same time,” says Hans. “People are making instruments, we’re writing cues. There are times where we’ve done a bunch of recording before we’ve even played a cue to the director. And then, if then we play it for them and they like it, then we go one step further. So there’s this very iterative process where we keep adding and adding. We’re working with people from all over the world. The only people who are gonna be there for all the time zones to have a chat with everybody are myself and Ryan, you know? So we don’t get a lot of sleep.”
“It’s great that we’re international in that regard, but it’s not good organisationally speaking, because we’re all dealing with people in different time zones constantly,” agrees Ryan. “We’re all over the place. But also we can have a meeting in Los Angeles at noon and then by the next day things will have gone out to everybody all over the world and they will come back and we can present them. I remember there was something on Dune: Part One that we played for Denis [Villeneuve] and he said, ‘Where did this come together from?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. This literally just came in 10 minutes ago. We’re all hearing this for the first time.’”
“I don’t ever look at my watch and I don’t ever look at my calendar,” laughs Hans. “And there comes a point where Ryan gets very, very pale. And he goes, ‘The dub is starting. And if we don’t have music on the stage for the dubbing crew, we will all never, ever, ever work again. And our careers will be in the toilet.’”
Pipe Dreams
“What you hear,” says Hans Zimmer, “is not necessarily what you see! One of the fabulously cool things in the first Dune movie was that instead of having fanfares for the arrival of the royal family on the new planet, Denis [Villeneuve, the director] had bagpipes. And I thought ‘That actually works, because it’s timeless.’ Then, at a screening in New York with a Q&A from the audience, Denis was sitting next to me, and somebody asked me about the bagpipes. I said, ‘Actually they’re not bagpipes. It’s Guthrie Govan imitating the bagpipes on his guitar.’ And Denis goes, ‘My beautiful bagpipes are not bagpipes? They’re guitar?’ I’m going, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you. But, you know, it sounds good, doesn’t it?’
“We carry on with the Q&A thing and he stops and he goes, ‘Are there any other things you need to tell me?…’“
Asked how he faked the bagpipes so convincingly, Govan explains: “My solution for the bagpipe challenge was to use the monophonic synth block in the Fractal FM‑9 and to layer the parts pretty extensively, varying the EQ, waveform and, subtly, the tuning for each pass… I also discovered that there was a specific way to strike the string which seemed to add an extra layer of authenticity, whereby the initial attack of the note would ‘confuse’ the synth’s pitch tracking and add a little high‑pitched warble before settling into the desired note. That all happened during the lockdown, so I had plenty of time to experiment! I remember actually fooling myself when I finally went to see the film: when that section of the film happened, I initially assumed that what I was hearing was real bagpipes!”
Everyone’s An Engineer
Pedro Eustache’s home studio is crammed full of synthesizers and other experimental audio equipment — as well as flutes from every part of the world!
All of the soloists who work regularly with Hans are also notable for being fascinated by the possibilities of studio recording and electronic processing. Snow Owl, for example, has a well equipped studio in Vienna, whilst Pedro Eustache’s house in California is home to an extraordinary array of equipment. As well as wind instruments from every corner of the globe, he has a large collection of synths and is a devotee of wind controllers, especially the original Lyricon from the 1970s. “One of the flutes I use to this day, I bought in 1978. On the same trip, I bought my first analogue synth, a Korg MS20, which is still here in my studio. It’s never been serviced and it works perfectly. Controversially, I’m a big follower of Behringer, so I’ve got a lot of equipment by them, but incredibly modified so my machines are not normal!”
Pedro Eustache and Edmund Eagan at work on Dune: Part Two with a wind controller — and a lot of patch cables!
Tina Guo’s electric cello rig, meanwhile, has evolved continuously. “At the start of my career, I had every pedal you could imagine, because I thought it looked impressive, even though I only used probably four of them. And I had giant Engl amps, multiple ones. And it started getting out of hand because I couldn’t even lift anything myself. My front of house guy for my last solo band project worked for Line 6, and he was one of the guys that engineered and created the Helix.
“I had tried all kinds of digital processors before and I didn’t like them, but I soon realised this was because I just didn’t know what I was doing. So he helped me, and showed me how to customise the sound. For the first Dune and the second movie, I created custom patches: Dune Fantasy, Dune Aggression, Dune Sex, like all kinds of weird things that felt like they belonged in the musical atmosphere.”
“The bulk of my recording and creative work has been remote,” says Loire Cotler. “I’ve experimented with many studio mics over the years, but I always come back to the Neumann M149, more specifically the 75th Jubilee edition. I came to know this mic when I first started working with my engineer of 18 years, Kostadin Kamcev. It has such a silky, warm, organic, midrange fullness and captures all of my extended techniques like overtone singing, just as it can translate the crisp precision of vocal percussion, and sounds really gorgeous for all the more unusual hybridised expressions.”