Dave Porter is the man behind Breaking Bada intoxicating music.
Photo: Julio Moreno
Breaking Bad is as addictive as Walter White’s blue meth, even to people who work on the show.
Before the pilot aired, composer Dave Porter saw it at a colleague’s house and knew he was going to need more than one fix of AMC’s nervy drama that stars Bryan Cranston as a chemistry teacher who makes a fascinating descent into the drug trade.
“I was absolutely hooked,” Porter told Wired in an e-mail. “After that, I was as persistent as I could be until I was hired.”
Since then, Porter has scored every episode of the show, including the creepy opening title sequence. The fact that the show wavers between drama, suspense, black humor and mild insanity gives Porter a lot to work with — and presents huge challenges.
In advance of the show’s midseason finale, which airs Sunday, Wired asked Porter what the secret is to scoring one of the most complicated shows on television. What we got was an earful (metaphorically speaking) on what vintage synthesizers make the best soundtracks, which instrument is used for the Walter White “Heisenberg” hat, and exactly how Porter scored what will (presumably) be the show’s pre-break cliffhanger.
Wired: What’s your process when you score an episode? There are some freaky-sounding instruments in there.
Dave Porter: My goal right from the beginning of Breaking Bad was to create a soundtrack that captured the unique world of the series. I decided to avoid traditional Western orchestral instruments, but most anything else has been fair game. I employ a lot of ethnic instruments, found sounds and recordings, vintage and modern synthesizers, and a fair bit of electric guitar. All of these sounds get recorded into Pro Tools and then usually processed by plug-in programs or external processors to morph them into something new.
A few of the more interesting world instruments I’ve recorded for the show include a Japanese koto (sometimes used when Walt dons his black “Heisenberg” hat), reproductions of traditional Aztec war whistles (for the Mexican assassins) and an Andean flute called a quena (for Gus Fring).
I have a large collection of vintage synthesizers that have all seen action to some degree. A few that I used this past season include my Oberheim Matrix-12 and OB-Mx, Roland Jupiter-8, Octave-Plateau Voyetra-8, Sequential Prophet VS and ARP 2600. I also incorporate snippets of recordings that I’ve made, and even sounds that appear in the show itself.
(Spoiler alert: Major and minor plot points follow.)
