The insatiable appetite of modern media for original music is satisfied by either specially-commissioned music, or by off-the-shelf tunes from production music libraries. One of the most successful composers in these fields, Mark Thomas, talks to Rob Green about both sides of the coin.

After studying music at university in his native Wales, Mark Thomas came to London and set about building a reputation. Starting as a session violinist, he rose to the rank of co-leader of the Royal Ballet Orchestra, from which flowed freelance work with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic, among others. A few years of session work, and a little careful observation later, and Mark had gleaned the rudiments of composing.

One thing led to another, and the chance arose to compose some music for a documentary series on America's PBS channel. It was a low-budget break, but enough to establish a foothold in TV and spark wider interest. Mark's experience prompts him to recommend the library/production field for aspiring composers.

"It's a good way of getting into the music business for young writers. It certainly was for me. It gives you the opportunity to work to a brief, and a deadline. To a certain extent it also gave me the chance to experiment a little, which is always useful."

Gradually, the library work snowballed to the extent where he has now completed about 14 CDs of material. He describes the latest as "the mother of them all" – the culmination of years of work. Mark attributes the grand scale of this project to his producer, Jez who had given him the kind of brief (and budget) needed to conceive a big orchestral CD.

Orchestral scores may have become Mark's bread and butter, but are there other strings to his bow? Well, there's always the two albums he's made with ex-Eurythmics guitarist, Dave Stewart.

"We did a couple of albums together. Although it was piano-orientated with an orchestra, we also did a rock pastiche – for library, of course."

He made one album, The Jazz Detective which was an entire score using jazz musicians. He also regularly works with Guy Barker, the well known jazz trumpeter, with whom he collaborated on a library album.

"I'm quite happy to work in different areas. I know that people from the orchestral world tend to be portrayed as being incredibly serious, but nothing could be further from the truth. Those years as a violinist were like an apprenticeship to what I'm doing now, you see."

Mark doesn't really mind what sort of music he does, as long as there's a modicum of good taste to it. However, it is in film and drama-composing that he is most at home – working to picture.

Among his current commissions is the Sky One series A Mind To Kill. In the summer he did another film for HTV called Wild Justice, in which he used players from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, from where he frequently draws personnel. With so much full-time composing, Mark has all but hung up his violin.

"I'd rather get someone who's absolutely fantastic to play it, to allow myself an overview of the music. It's nice to get involved 'though, and I sometimes perform in my own studio in Swansea, where I have 24 tracks of ADAT and everything locked to picture using my Atari with C-Lab Notator."

Notator is the lynchpin of his composing set-up, and essential to his current project. He still finds computer notation as labour-intensive as hand notation, even 'though you can achieve more, more quickly. Mark swears by Notator, which he uses to print up miniaturised orchestral scores, so he can read everything on one page.

"On the screen you have to click onto the relevant box and pull out a little symbol. This is where it really comes into its own, because on C-Lab you can click onto the 32 track mode, where each adjacent pattern becomes tracks 17-32. The good thing about it is that you can get a full orchestral score, which is amazing, really. Everything can be easily transposed. The clarinets transpose the same as trumpets in B flat, trombones are in concert pitch anyway, and the horns are in F usually. The percussion, however I usually leave blank, and write it in afterwards."

In his Swansea studio, Mark has Proteus units, of which he uses the Orchestral, the 2XR, the 1XR and the World modules. He finds that they do a satisfactory job for demos, but doesn't believe that they could ever replace an orchestra. But he does complement the real orchestral artistry with samples, which is an increasingly popular way of working in his field. Mark appreciates MIDI equipment and synthesizers, and sees their benefits, but firmly believes in the human orchestra.

"What performers do is bring a musicality to the phrasing and gesture, which is something very difficult and time-consuming to emulate. With a string section you get slight variations in pitch and timbre, which makes it actually sound like a big section as opposed to a single instrument."

In this computer age, and with all the useful software available, producers like Jez Poole are expecting higher quality demonstrations of composers' work. Jez explains: "You're going through the process twice really, because you're having to try to recreate real sounds with MIDI and synths, to satisfy the producer that it's going to work. Mark knows it's going to work anyway, but producers need to be satisfied."

Mark has been working in studios in and around London for many years now, and with his own studio at home he is pretty well up on production techniques himself. Of all the programmes, Mark finds drama the most stimulating.

"If you've got four guys sitting in a small room together for that amount of time, you've got to get on"

"Drama is more interesting in a way, because the director will give you a brief for the specific film, so when we get to the final cutting of the film. I'll sit down with the director and we'll go through the film, spotting it for potential places where music will enhance the drama – incidentals and featured things."

The film he is working on at present is a good example of a challenging brief. To cut a long story short, the (female) baddie is a pianist who's involved in a murder, and when it was filmed they needed a certain amount of music to film to. There's a concert sequence early on, where the music has been cut into the film, as well as being intercut.

"That was quite a difficult brief, in a way," says Mark. "Because on the one hand, it had to be a contemporary piece of music. However, while the ensemble is performing, we cut away to a domestic scene where a nasty murder takes place simultaneously, and the music also has to be incidental to what the murderer is doing."

But the beauty of Mark's system is that he can re-write the score or change it's length relatively simply using Notator and his ADATs.

"When you see it working, it's phenomenal really," he enthuses. "When the director is finally happy, we'll lay down a metronome click track that corresponds exactly to the duration of the track, for the orchestra to follow."

Mark's producer, Jez Poole is as unusual as he is successful, setting up his first studio at the age of 16. He had begun as a session bass player, eventually becoming involved in library album production. Now he's doing 30 to 40 albums a year, which means he's in the studio almost every waking hour. When I asked Jez if he had done any engineering, it set him off on another tack.

"The sound engineer has the worst job of the lot of us, because he has to mic things up. I think a good producer is someone who knows what the engineer is required to do, and knows how to get the best out of him."

Mark is constantly amazed by the sheer stamina of sound engineers. Paul Golding engineered Mark's latest album, and was previously a house engineer at Landsdown studios and CPS, before going freelance. Mark had worked with him a lot in the past on orchestral film work, and when Jez invited suggestions for an engineer, he suggested Paul, for his iron constitution. But that wasn't his only qualification:

"He's also a musician, and it's important to have an engineer who really gets involved in the project with you."

Jez believes it's very important to have an engineer of an equal standard of knowledge to bounce ideas off. On the last album, they found they were a very efficient team, and even ended up having a bit of fun along the way.

"It's fun anyway," says Mark. "I always get an enormous kick out of recording the music, because it's the fruition of 18 months of work."

On the recording of the latest album, it still meant a 140 hour week for the two of them.

"We were getting roughly two hours sleep a night," says Jez. "If you've got four guys sitting in a small room together for that amount of time, you've got to get on. It worked really well – like one big happy family!"

Jez generally works at Battery studios on an SSL. For orchestral recording, he finds the large plate in the studio invaluable. The only alternative that he uses from time to time is a Lexicon 480. It's one of the few extra bits of gear they require periodically. During an orchestral recording, every separate section is mic'd up, and Jez simply balances them up as the session goes along. They have a certain amount of leeway between the first and second strings, but they can never actually get rid of anything, as the overheads balance everything pretty fairly in the mix.

"All the channels are stereo pairs, so we're using 16 tracks." Jez explains. "We'll set a balance for the performance, and when we come to mix we can push things around a bit, but we haven't got much leeway."

"What performers do is bring a musicality to the phrasing and gesture, which is something very difficult and time-consuming to emulate"

The sort of composing that Mark Thomas is involved in is very functional, and requires a diverse range of compositional talent. Sometimes he'll write atmospheric music for a film, incidentals or the punchier, more rhythmical newsreel tunes. In a way, the 'gesture' of the music is as important as its content.

When they're mixing, they always refer to small monitors just to make sure everything is there. Of course, it must also be remembered that the music will probably be delivered to the public through speakers two inches wide, so compromises are required. At the final stage before broadcast it is all heavily compressed, of course.

Every single piece is a direct response to the brief that Jez gave Mark. Basically, they aim to cover the diverse styles broadcasters require for media applications. As for players, Mark has the best in the business. They amount to a MIDI orchestra of his own, who will play his scores intelligently, and add something extra.

"Basically, they'll play exactly what's on the score. So the more specific you can be, the better they'll understand you, and bring something to it themselves."

My final question to Mark was on the subject of musical ideas. The question being, does he run out of them? On this point, he had some advice to give.

"When you set yourself up to be a composer, you take on a job and you have to do it. My philosophy is – start on it, and even if you've only got two notes, you've made a start and you can always change it. I always say, never throw anything away. There's a quote that I love by Nelson Riddle, who has a great book on orchestration and arranging. It goes: 'Never fall in love with every note of music that you write, because somewhere along the line someone is going to want you to change something.'"

That's in the nature of broadcasting and film. It's in the nature of providing a commodity that has to accommodate itself to the visual image. At the end of the day, Mark has to provide the music to the specifications that are dictated by the person sitting in the library suite. On his present album, of course, Mark used the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with a massive 65 players. This is the biggest orchestra that he has ever composed for, and he must certainly be in his element with a set-up of this calibre.

"I'm happy in any field," said Mark, "But I'm deliriously happy when I've got a big symphony orchestra."

For a taste of the music on Mark's latest CD, part of the Chappell Recorded Music Library, flip on this month's Re:Mix CD. As far as library music goes, this production is about as big as they come!