Cereal Offenders Music Production Research: Trevor Horn

Trevor Horn was born 15th July 1949 and is a singer, song writer, composer and music producer. He is known for various different works, though probably best known for producing various chart topping songs from the early 1980s up until the 2010s.

Trevor Horn (with fellow 'Buggles' member, Geoff Downes) in the late 1970s.

Trevor Horn was originally one of a duo (previously a trio) known as The Buggles a band that were thematically supposed to resemble an alternative version of The Beatles. The Buggles came to fame after the ground-breaking creation of the music for their hit single 'Video Killed The Radio Star'. This was the first music video to be shown on MTV and popularised music videos, effectively 'killing the radio star' as the song had appeared to have predicted. Their album 'The Age Of Plastic' gained a few more less successful hits.

The Buggles then teamed up with the progressive rock band, Yes, in 1980 who had lost their lead vocalist Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman. The duo filled in these rolls with Horn taking vocals and the band released the album 'Drama' which was a moderate success. After some backlash from Yes fans, Horn left the band and The Buggles made one more album which did not perform well.

After disbanding The Buggles, Trevor Horn turned to producing music. This started a successful career in producing hit records for various artists, some of which include:

-'Owner Of A Lonely Heart' by Yes (1983)
-'Relax' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood (1984)
-'Kiss From A Rose' by Seal (1995)

I felt is was important to look at a music producer such as Trevor Horn in order to gain a better understanding as to how to create a professional soundtrack for a production that we are trying to make as professional as possible. As many of my ideas for the soundtrack involve rock orientated instrumentals, I wanted to look at how these were produced by someone in the music industry in the hopes of emulating them and integrating this into the production itself.

Trevor Horn's music production involves much experimentation with sound, something which our own production can do with to a great degree. Here is a video of Trevor Horn explaining the art of sound production, his techniques and his incorporation of experimentation (with some history as to how it was done several years ago):

The instrumentation always feels clean and in rhythm. He uses compression on the drums in many of the songs he has produced, with a gated reverb that had become popular during the 1980s. This reverberated sound makes the production of the music sound much bigger. Ive already spoken in a previous research post how the opening to The Breakfast Club features instrumentation which automatically lifts the scale of the entire production from the very start which also happens to use a gated reverb. This is the kind of production I want to include the soundtrack along with the experimentation used in order to help lift our production from its current state and also make it stand out from other projects to help give the production its own identity.