David Blumberg
He started out as a trumpet player, spent some time on the road with Larry Elgart’s band, and then returned to LA, his hometown, to begin a career in the recording industry. Recent projects include arranging strings for a new Stevie Wonder song, “Passionate Raindrops,” penning four arrangements for Ray Charles’ Genius Loves Company, and a bunch more for American Idol. In between lies a road that stretches for forty years, and a journey that has put David Blumberg in the company of some of the greatest names in the history of popular music.
Blumberg recently upgraded the project studio he operates out of his Brentwood home. “More and more producers want to hear full blown sample demos these days, both in the record business and in films, which I’ve branched into as a composer,” says Blumberg. Currently running Logic 7 and Pro Tools on a dual G4, Blumberg’s is about ready to switch over to a dual 2.3 gHz G5. He also runs GigaStudio 3 on a PC. “Back in the 1950’s Aaron Copland wrote a book called The Path to The New Music, in which he predicted that the composer of the next century would also have to be an engineer and producer. He was right!”
Blumberg has a ton of stories to tell, about Stevie, Ray, Quincy, the Jackson 5, and many others. “I’ve know Stevie for 40 years, he’s a musician on the level of Mozart as far as I’m concerned. At Ray Charles’ funeral Narada Michael Walden told Stevie I was ‘the great string arranger,’ which I though was cute, given the fact that we’d never worked before. I had done some arranging for Stevie back in the 70’s, and one tune I worked on made its way onto Innervisions.
“In the old days you’d just write out an arrangement and hope it worked, but the technology of today has changed everything. I was given a two mix of “Passionate Raindrops,”which I brought into Logic. From there, I wrote a string arrangement using Sibelius, and played it into Logic using the ESX24 sampler. Everybody but Stevie seemed to have heard the completed demo before we went into the studio to track. Oh, well---he’s a hard guy to get on the telephone! No matter, the date went smoothly, and Stevie was quite pleased with the results.
“I still remember the first time I met Stevie. Mickey Stevenson, the executive vice president of Motown, and Clarence Paul, who had been the head of A&R at Motown, wrote Fingertips for Stevie. Mickey brought Stevie over to my North Hollywood house. We played croquet, and Stevie used my Revox 4 track reel to reel machine to overdub a commercial.”
Blumberg relies heavily on the East West Quantum Leap orchestral sample library, and is a big fan of Spectrasonics. “I own Stylus RMX, Atmosphere, and Trilogy, and they are all fantastic. I also own the Lounge Lizard electric piano software application, and it’s wonderful. I’m a big fan of soft synths and sampled instruments. In fact, one of the reasons that I’m moving over to the G5 is that I own Ivory, the piano that Ilio distributes, and it’s too massive to run on my G4!”
Too discrete to discuss Michael Jackson’s current troubles, Blumberg doesn’t hesitate to share memories from the days when he worked with the pre-teen star. “I wrote the arrangement for “Got To Be There,” and I can remember grown women chasing Michael into the studio, throwing underwear at him. It was unbelievable!”
By the late 60’s, Blumberg was a hot item, especially after the release of the Quincy Jones album Body Heat. “Quincy is a very gifted musician. The funny thing about working with Q though, is that he never seems to be at the session! He’s got about nine careers going, and is very skilled at putting together teams. I arranged the title track from Body Heat, plus “If I Ever Lose This Heaven” and ‘Everything Must Change.’”
He initially wondered about the caliber of talent that would be appearing on American Idol, but David Blumberg has been impressed by the singers that have risen through the ranks and appeared before national audiences over the last several years. “Of course, you’ve got to accept the fact that artists like Bob Dylan and Neil Young would never make it on the show, which demands that singers have the ability to perform in a variety of styles, and that performers sometimes choose material that’s difficult for them to shine on. Vonzell, for example, is a terrific singer. But how can you avoid comparisons with Aretha when you sing “Chain Of Fools,” and who could possibly top the queen? Still, some great singers have worked their way up the ranks.
“Things move quickly on the show, so I stayed with Logic 6 while working on it--7’s great, but the bugs hadn’t been worked out of it when I was doing the last round of arrangements. The way that show works is that the artist works with a pianist, and they create a one minute version of the song he or she will perform that week. Ricky Minor hired me and five other arrangers, and if you’re assigned a song you go to Rickey’s Imac site and download the sheet music, the piano/vocal sketch, and an mp3 of the original version of the song, the one that was a hit.
“I download these files and import them into Logic. From there, I find the tempo that works with the track and beat map it so that everything lines up. They send me blank score pages from Finale, and I write the score into them the old fashioned way, and fax the parts over to the producer. “
Blumberg’s career has a number of high points---his arrangement of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” being one of them--and his recollections of the artists and producers he’s worked with tumble out freely. “Working with Marvin Gaye was interesting in many ways, but the most remarkable thing of all was how softly he sang. He learned that if you sing softly you have greater control than if you belt out. He understood microphone singing, and his engineer was constantly riding the mic; Marvin’s vocals always sounded plenty loud in the studio. Maxwell is the only other artist I know who sings that way, and Marvin is one of his idols.
“Working with Brian and Eddie Holland was also a great thrill. It didn’t matter if the song they were working on became a hit or not. These were legendary producers, and just seeing how they worked, and having the opportunity to work with them was fabulous. Working with Quincy was also an honor. Bob Gaudio of the Four Seasons was a fabulous producers, and Lamont Dozier is a gem.”
Hollywood may be the film capitol of the world, but not every scoring session is handled in the most highly professional way. “That’s right. Just last year I was hired to write a horn chart for the song “You’re Gonna Hear From Me,” which Doctor John was recording for the film The Son Of Mask. I drove over to a club Dr. John was performing in the night before the session to pick up a CD he’d made of him playing the piano and singing the song, came home, wrote out a chart, and got to the studio early the next morning, before the players arrived. Out in the lobby, there was the producer, watching a VHS copy of the scene. They’d picked a studio that didn’t have any time code capability, and were trying to figure out how many bars long the arrangement should be!”
Working with Ray Charles on the legendary singer’s final album also provided some indelible memories. “Ray changed things around all the time, and that could make things difficult. He’d have us over to his studio, play a song on the piano, and then I’d write out a string or horn arrangement. The next day, when the players showed up, Ray might have a criticism, and would play the song again, with different chords! Of course, the parts wouldn’t work with them, so we’d have to convince him that he’d played differently the previous day!
“I wanted to record strings for “You Don’t Know Me,” which Ray sang with Diana Krall, in Studio A or B over at Capitol Records. Those rooms sound great, but Ray insisted that we track at his place. An engineer named Mark Flemming was brought in to track the strings, and I was amazed at his ability to get a great sound in that low ceilinged room. After we completed the session Ray called me up and basically said, ‘Son, you’re going about it all wrong. Here’s the way we’re going to do it.’
“For the first time in my career I had to record all of the string sections separately, to minimize leakage. I guess Ray---who was never known for his mixing ability-also wanted the most control over the mix that he could get. I chalked it up as an idiosyncrasy of the legendary prophet of music.”
When he’s not writing and arranging music, Blumberg is passionately teaching the EIS composition method of Lyle (Spud) Murphy. Like other acolytes I’ve spoken with, Blumberg is a devout follower of Murphy, now in his late 90’s. Information about Murphy and the Equal Interval System can be found at www.equalinterval.com. “The thing to grasp about this course is that it’s over 1,200 pages of musical tools that Spud lays on the student, lesson by lesson. The website has mp3 examples from many of Spud’s students, and a downloadable brochure. After all this time, I still feel that Spud is like a modern day Bach-- he’s the king of line writing!”
His love for music undiminished, David Blumberg is currently looking for more scoring work, turning out arrangements for American Idol and a host of recording artists, and expanding his personal studio. He can be reached at david1db@adelphia.net.
Appeared in Mix, July 2005
