From its Georgia and Hollywood headquarters, a high-end music maker team talks media and melody
By Carol Badaracco Padgett
A blink of the human eye takes just one-third of a second, or a microsecond. It’s an act that is functionally critical and artfully brief.
Atlanta/Hollywood-based Pitch Hammer Music offers a service that’s actually quite similar in both execution and effect — the creation of music used in premium high-end marketing trailers for film, television, video games, streaming, and other content.
“It’s essentially marketing music to knock you over the head,” says Brian Brasher, Pitch Hammer Music’s co-founder and the original lead guitarist with rock band Creed. His business partner and co-founder, classically trained composer Veigar Margeirsson, agrees and notes, “It’s kind of like having a little bucket of steroids that you dip everything into to hype it up.”
Since they formed Pitch Hammer Music in 2012, Brasher and Margeirsson’s Pitch Hammer team has provided custom scores and library music for some of the best known around the globe — for feature films like “Jurassic World Dominion,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “A Quiet Place,” the “Star Wars” franchise, and video games such as “Call of Duty” among them.
Georgia Entertainment sat down with Brasher and Margeirsson to hear more about Pitch Hammer’s quick-sizzle marketing music, their Georgia-based-combo-West-Coast business, and where they’re headed next.
GE: As the media industry evolves, how is Pitch Hammer maneuvering and growing to continually create music for the top film trailers and marketing campaigns around?
Brasher: Our work ranges from big blockbuster movies and big budgets to broadcast TV, streaming, and other types of trailers. There is much more custom music work now, and it usually starts with a cover song, which our team really enjoys.
Today, clients say, “What song are we gonna use?” They want custom covers that we create from scratch or songs we take and customize — or remakes where we use the actual master from the record label and remix them with artists for TV shows and other types of media.
We actually own the trademark to the name and label “Trailerized®” which is a commonly used term in the industry for popular cover songs that have been created for marketing campaigns — and anything that needs a good cover song. Films actually set that trend of using cover songs, and now we get more and more of these requests.
So we keep proactively building the trademarked “Trailerized” cover label to service the ongoing demand for great unique cover song versions.
We also have the trademarked label “Vocalized®,” that is also a cover song label suited more towards TV shows and advertising, [since] it is not so over-the-top and doesn’t compete with dialogue.
Margeirsson: Technology has changed so much in recent years, even more so when Covid hit, and now it’s constantly evolving — there’s cable TV and streaming alongside feature films.
When we started in 2012, we were dealing predominantly with movie studios and video game companies, which are still loyal clients. But now, we often work with technology companies like Amazon that also have film studios. So the structure [of the media we are serving]is always changing so fast.
In terms of Trailerized [and how it’s been such a successful catalogue within the changing media landscape], it largely comes down to the phenomenon of people wanting to subconsciously hear something they know, like a Morgan Freeman-type of familiar voice, or a James Earl Jones-voice — people want the familiarity of a voice that draws them in. And it’s similar with famous songs that you recognize.
[Knowing this,] when we worked with “Jurassic World Dominion” and the new “Star Wars” franchise, we used the original John Williams themes from the movie franchises, and did our own trailer action-adventure-impact kind [of sound]for the marketing campaigns.
Brasher: For films like “Joker” and “Ready Player One” we used the “Pure Imagination” song and didn’t use vocals, but we teased it with the music — and the melody is recognizable. It’s like on TikTok with Fleetwood Mac, and now all the young kids love Fleetwood Mac — but it’s in a different context and it’s a new generation.
Our marketing is also for video games today (Modern Warfare 3, for instance) where we worked with Eminem on a reveal trailer. The trend to cover songs is not going away.
GE: Within the changing media landscape, you’re able to serve a tremendous client pool. How do the two of you operate, and who’s the talent creating the music and helping run the business alongside you?
Brasher: I’m Georgia-based but in LA at least once a month visiting clients with Reece Tennery, our director of creative sync and licensing, and maintaining our clients’ needs. Then we have a team of writers and producers all over the West Coast and across the globe.
Reece Tennery is based in Nashville and is our liaison with clients for licensing needs from our libraries, as well as producing custom work and servicing any custom music needs.
We’re a team of musicians first and it serves us well. I’ve always been a play-by-ear rock musician. But our Pitch Hammer roster of writers and producers has a wide variety of styles and strengths.
Margeirsson: It’s a small enough company that each of us has to be able to wear a lot of hats. Reece has an ear for what works and what doesn’t — a great natural musical ear.
I’m trained in classical music and theory, but it’s hard to turn it off and listen like a non-musician. I can hear a wrong note out of a big crowd and say which note in the chord is off.
We also have Tony Olla who handles everything non-trailer, as far as broadcast clients, advertising, human resources-type videos, and he’s on the sales and licensing side.
Then, Elvar Juliusson helps me with technical items and programming, day-to-day studio duties, mixing and mastering.
Brasher: We also have Laura Andrews, our production manager, behind the scenes who handles registrations, copyrights, backend operations, and manages everything else.
Then, we have two top writers that have been with us since Day 1, Tony Fiala and Ryan Andrews, and they are likely our top composers and producers. They create their own labels under Pitch Hammer — Vanguard and Upper Cut, which are also very in-demand marketing and trailer labels under the Pitch Hammer brand.
We have a roster of 100+ songwriters we use when needed. But there are 10-15 that we use nearly all the time.
Margeirsson: Huston Singletary, a composer from the Atlanta area, just scored a short film with us. As a veteran studio guy, he’s extremely adept at synthesizers and working in-studio.
We also get a lot of submissions from aspiring composers. And every now and then there’s something amazing there, or there’s potential. If we’re too busy to help them out, we refer them to someone who might.
Brasher: The talent pool here in Atlanta is incredible — hip hop and pop, of course, but there’s everything and all genres here. There’s also Patrick Avard and his team at Level 77 Music that we collaborate with in hosting a regular networking event in Buckhead called “Sync South.”
GE: It’s only fitting we close this discussion with a split-second thought. Veigar first, then Brian. GO!
Margeirsson: Movie trailers and marketing campaigns are all about maximizing every second of the experience.
Brasher: Watch the “Call of Duty Modern Warfare III” trailer here for an example of our team’s remix and collaboration with Eminem and the Activision marketing teams.
