‘If you think about sync it’s game over’: Tony Anderson on the art of composing

Ambient and neoclassical composer Tony Anderson joins Headliner for an insightful chat about his unconventional route to global success, the art of composition, the world of sync, and how Augspurger Monitors have shaped his career.

Tony Anderson is both an enigma and an open book. There’s a candid affability about him that is simultaneously offset by a sense of unpredictability. His manner is charmingly familiar, yet it’s impossible to guess at what his answer to any given question will be. He’s a hugely successful composer – his work has notched up over seven billion streams per month across Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, and on TikTok his music has received 1.3 million views in the last year – who is generally indifferent to music. He’s an ambient and neoclassical specialist whose core influences are the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy. As a budding musician he hated playing piano and instead opted to flex his creative chops via an illegally pirated version of Fruity Loops. He describes sync as a distraction, despite having countless works licensed across film, TV.

“I didn't grow up with a lot of music in my life, and to this day it's not a huge part of my life,” he tells Headliner from his L.A. home. “I don't listen to playlists and when I’m writing an album I don't listen to music because I don't want to regurgitate it. I made that mistake back in 2016 when I scored a film and used the chords of Hello from Adele on one of the main songs and completely ripped it [laughs].

“When I was a kid there were piano lessons, but I hated them,” he continues. “It wasn't until I heard the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy in the late ‘90s that I really got into it. And then I heard the trance movement coming out of Europe, which at that point was 140 bpm or something like that. It was like giving a mouse cocaine! I loved it because it wasn’t this boring classical stuff I attempted to learn on the piano as a kid.”

It was around this time that Anderson would start toying with his own musical ideas. As well as the electronic music he was devouring, he also became increasingly drawn to the compositions of Hans Zimmer.

“I started producing music on a family computer using Fruity Loops,” he recalls. “I had an illegally cracked pirated version of Fruity Loops. That’s what set me on fire! And then there was Hans Zimmer, who is such a master of melding genres. It was that mixture of electronic and classical that blew my mind.”

So how did he navigate his way from the family computer to a fully-fledged career as a composer?

“It was in college,” he says. “Friends would stop by the hall and hear what I was doing, and they'd ask what it was. That was their mistake because I'd make them sit for 20 minutes and show them [laughs]. I had no emotional intelligence to know that my stuff was pretty bad and no one wanted to hear it! Thankfully a friend of mine was a filmmaker, and he was making small documentaries for non-profits. They were humanitarian stories, and he gave me an opportunity in 2008 to write music for a film.

“By 2009 I decided I wanted to intern for Hans Zimmer in L.A.,” he continues. “One night around 2am a friend said they knew someone who worked for Hans and that he's at his studio right now. So, I drove to Santa Monica and at 3am I got led into Zimmer's lair [laughs]. It ended up not working out. The last I heard from his team was to stop calling. They said if I kept calling, they’d blacklist me, and that my stuff sounds like shit!

“By 2010 I’d tried to make it work but it didn’t feel like the career for me. So, I quit and founded a non-profit with a friend. I thought it was over.”

Like so much of Anderson’s life up to that point, an unexpected turn would get his career back on track.

“It was 2012 and I was staying with my brother,” he says. “One day I was at a conference learning how to make films better - we were making humanitarian films - and I met a group who licensed music to filmmakers. I didn't know what that was, and it wasn't until the last day that I talked to them and understood what they did, and it blew my mind. I said I’d given up on music but gave them a Dropbox link with all my work. They sent a contract to me the next week and I didn't even read it [laughs]. Thankfully it was highly equitable and allowed me to maintain ownership of all my music, and my life changed dramatically after that.

“It was mind-blowing to have Hans Zimmer, or his team, say, ‘We don't like your stuff’, and then a few years later have the marketplace reward me for work that I thought was total shit. I had so much insecurity around my work - I still struggle with that. I thought I was done. And I've been with the same licensing group for 12 years now. They're called Music Bed.”

Having enjoyed major success releasing music as an artist, as well as via all manner of licensed applications of his work, Anderson insists that writing specifically to attract sync deals is a significant misstep.

“The album I'm on now, which is about growing up in Nebraska in the ‘90s, I am not considering sync licensing for,” he says. “I want the music to sound like a time capsule, so I'm not listening to music. It's kind of weird, but I broke into my childhood home that had been abandoned for 20 years to take pictures. It’s on a farm, and it was unbelievable. This is a microcosm of how I write now when I do an album. I'm all in.

“As for sync, let me address this quickly. It is a distraction. If you think about sync, it's game over, because you're constantly trying to anticipate the needs of a marketplace instead of writing what comes from the heart. If you can find a lane as an artist and write from that internal north star, you'll have sync agencies that want to hit you up. You'll have directors that want to hit you up. It does not work in the reverse order. If I were to listen to advice on what's selling I’d have been 35 different artists with 35 different monikers. My career would be shambles and I would be filled with anxiety. I'd just be thinking about money. Honestly, I've not checked my financial statements with licensing in eight years because it started messing with me psychologically.”

One of the most important tools Anderson has come to rely on is Augspurger Monitors. Though commonly associated with hip-hop on account of their notoriously powerful low-end, Anderson explains that it is a misconception that they lend themselves more to one genre than any other.

“People ask me about them a lot,” he says. “It's because I need something extremely accurate for the frequency range I'm writing in. I've been able to find a way to craft layers together and these speakers are my north star. I have the Duo 8s and there's a 12-inch sub beneath each. My sound is the way it is because I've been hearing it on these speakers for so many years. If I were to move to other systems, my stuff would sound dynamically different.”

Anderson also elaborates on the specific qualities he seeks when at the mix stage.

“My music does not have percussion very frequently,” he explains before our time together runs out. “It functions mostly in the mid-range. I remember hearing Augspurgers for the first time and they were not flattering to my sound, as they exposed how bad the music had been mixed - all the mid-range had been jammed on top of it itself and layered and layered and layered.

“I remember cringing and thinking, if I can ever afford to buy a pair of speakers that tell me the truth about my music and help me get it dialed in, I'm getting them,” he concludes. “It wasn't until 2016 that I was able to afford a pair. Now I hear everything. And I love them.”