I’m excited to announce that on October 15th I’ll be featured at the EMP SFM series Exposed: Inside Film.  This is a new film series that looks at new films, cult favorites and classic sci fi and music films followed by an interview with people who worked on them.  It will take place at the stunning Experience Music Project / Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington.

Exposed: Inside Film

An Evening with Composer Bear McCreary

Wednesday, October 15th 2008 at 7:00pm

Click here for all the details

During my interview, we will present clips from Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Wrong Turn 2, and some snippets of the Music of Battlestar Galactica documentary that premiered at my BG concerts in April.  

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Concerts / Performances | 3 Comments »

This entry is the first in what I hope will become a continuing series of interviews with industry professionals.  Rather than comprehensive, career-spanning interviews, I will focus on one project or aspect of a person’s career that relates to an experience of my own.  Loyal readers can enjoy in-depth detail, and I have the chance to learn something professionally valuable.  The format will be unusual, since half the blog will be interview and the rest my own experiences and inevitable opinions.  But the interviews will be easy to spot if you want to scan ahead to the pearls of wisdom from people far more knowledgeable than myself.

For this first interview, I’m thrilled to have spoken with renowned composer Bruce Broughton.  I’ve loved Bruce’s work ever since I was a kid, when I first heard his knock-out scores for Young Sherlock Holmes and Silverado.  The latter project, combined with his brilliant work for Tombstone, instigated my life-long love affair with classic Westerns and their scores. 

My interview focuses on one of his most under-appreciated credits: Tiny Toons Adventures.  I always adored his ­Looney-Tunes-inspired score for this now-classic series, but my admiration grew tenfold when I had a brief opportunity to follow in his footsteps, writing a full-fledged orchestral animation score for this loveable little scamp, Atomic Al:

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Interviews, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles | 12 Comments »

LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD: I don’t know if my brutal schedule will allow for me to write about every episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles this season, but tonight’s Automatic for the People features outstanding pieces I can’t resist sharing.  This week, I wrote lovely score cues for new plot lines and characters, but it was actually the “source” music I had the most fun with.  (This term refers to music heard by characters in the film, as opposed to score only experienced by the viewing audience).

Several scenes took place in a bar.  Typically, there will be music at bars in film and tv, but Automatic for the People presented a unique opportunity.  Sarah and Cameron infiltrate a bar and Cameron’s job is to get close enough to the security guards playing pool to visually scan their badges.  So, Cameron plays the “helpless girl who can’t play pool” trick.  Of course, it would have been just as easy for her to kill them all, but not quite as subtle.

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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles | 19 Comments »

Bear and Shirley in the studio, recording vocals for “Samson and Delilah” 

• “If I had my way…
• I’d burn this whole building down” 

The second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles began with a bang tonight.  As the series composer, I returned to the smashing metal percussion and electric string quartet textures of the Sarah Connor musical soundscape.  However, Samson and Delilah also allowed me to once again stretch from the confines of underscore composer into song producer and arranger, and gave me the opportunity to work with Garbage lead singer and songwriter Shirley Manson.  

The song I produced for her was featured prominently in the opening moments of the episode.  And it will be the first track of the forthcoming Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles soundtrack CD that I’m thrilled to announce will be released by La La Land Records as early as next month!

The evolution of the song began last spring, long before scoring or even production began, in fact before the second season was officially picked up by Fox.

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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles | 34 Comments »

My soundtrack CD for Sci Fi Channel’s Eureka ships today!  After a long wait, it is finally available from La La Land Records, the label that also released my Battlestar Galactica albums.

Whether or not you’ve seen Eureka, this CD is worth checking out.  The music is a totally unique and twisted blend of folk, blues and zydeco with 80s New Wave synths, 8-bit and 16-bit video-game-inspired FM synthesis, 70’s keyboards, accordions, dobros, didgeridoo and a little Spanish Flamenco.  

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Albums, Eureka | 25 Comments »

Getting any series from script to air is a complex process, and along the way, people make little mistakes, ideas change and sometimes we lose track of things.  After all, we’re only human (or are we Cylons?).  

Here’s an amusing mistake that no one noticed for years:  a pivotal scene in Season 1 has been floating around with two distinctly different scores!  After all, we had multiple Main Titles and multiple DVD releases.  Why not have multiple scores?

If you live in the United States, pull out your Season 1 DVD set and cue up Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part I.  The episode’s climax is where Kara disobeys direct orders and jumps away in the Cylon raider, heading back to Caprica.  As you can hear, the score for this moment is a bed of drums lifted from the miniseries soundtrack (click on the screenshots for video, you’ll need Quicktime):

However, this is not how the scene was originally broadcast.  Indeed, the US broadcast version and all foreign DVD releases, were subtly different.  I also found the score was different on the Season 1 box set that Best Buy sold in the States as “The UK Version,” released prior to the official Season 1 set.   Read the rest of this entry »

Battlestar Galactica | 20 Comments »

I know, I know… I’ve hardly updated this thing all summer.  Well, I’ve had good excuses, writing music you’ll hear very soon.  I finished the next four episodes of Battlestar Galactica (HOLY FRAK! THEY ARE AWESOME!), and I am in the process of scoring Eureka, which has been airing for a couple weeks (also an outstanding season, with some amazing twists coming up).  I recently began scoring my second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  I can’t say much about that, but you guys are in for a special musical treat in the first episode!  >:)    More on that later… 

I’ve been getting some great press lately, especially for the last round of Battlestar Galactica concerts last spring.  Here are some of the ones worth checking out.  Click on the logos or links to read the whole article.

I was honored to make the July cover of International Musician!  It’s a very glowing article.  You don’t get much better than the opening paragraph: “[McCreary] has the potential to become a true composer rock-star, complete with screaming fans and sold out concerts in addition to a top-notch talent”   

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Battlestar Galactica | 17 Comments »

Anyone going to Comic Con this year?  

I’ll be among the 100,000 that take the pilgrimage to the Geek Mecca that is San Diego this July.  On Thursday July 24, I’ll be appearing on the Battlestar Galactica 30th Anniversary Panel (11:15 - 12:15, Room 6B), hosted by original Apollo / Tom Zarek himself, Richard Hatch!  The panel will also include Tom DeSanto and science advisor Kevin Grazier.  If you haven’t been to any of our recent Comic Con panels, you should definitely check it out.  Richard has some great footage to show, and we may screen some selections from my recent Music of Battlestar Galactica documentary.

And stick around until Sunday night, July 27th.  I will perform at an exclusive double-bill concert, featuring the Singers of Battlestar Galactica.  I’m playing with Raya Yarbrough and Brendan McCreary, in two sets of their own original material.  These artists frequently sing on my scores, but you can’t truly appreciate their talent until you’ve heard them perform their original songs (although, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few Galactica songs popped up in there as well… perhaps a Dylan cover?).  Other Galactica musicians, such as violin maestro Paul Cartwright and guitarist Steve Bartek will also share the stage.  And we’ll have some surprise Galactica guests as well!

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Battlestar Galactica, Concerts / Performances | 37 Comments »

SPOILERS ABOUND:  My journey scoring Battlestar Galactica has been long and arduous, but intensely rewarding.  I’m only now realizing how deeply it has affected me, on both musical and personal levels.  Many experiences stand out as having an incredible impact on me: scoring the destruction of the Olympic Carrier as my first cue on my first professional credit, composing endless drafts of “Passacaglia,” scoring Kara’s literal and figurative self-destruction in Maelstrom.

When I first watched the rough cut of Revelations months ago, I suspected that scoring it would be another such experience.  But I had no idea what I was in store for.

Throughout my life, I’ve written only four pieces that redefined what I’m capable of, compositions that stand above everything else I’ve ever done: works that changes the way I approach my craft.  While these transformations are often painful, they are the growth that all artists strive for.

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Battlestar Galactica | 103 Comments »

Great news!  Warner Bros. and La La Land Records have come together to release my soundtrack album for “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Season One.”  This will include all the best musical moments from the first season, featuring all the metal-smashing-percussion and electric-string-quartet you can handle!  The album release date has not yet been announced, but expect it before the end of the year.

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Albums, Eureka, Films, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles | 19 Comments »