In this lecture segment, J. Anthony Allen explains what a "temp cue" is in the context of film scoring and how composers should approach them. He defines a temp cue as placeholder music inserted by a director, editor, or music supervisor—often sourced from existing tracks—to convey the desired emotional and rhythmic feel of a scene before a custom score is written. Allen outlines the advantages of temp cues, such as providing clear emotional direction and reducing guesswork, and the disadvantages, notably the risk that directors become attached to the temporary track, creating pressure to either mimic it closely (raising legal concerns) or diverge significantly. He shares his experience that temp cues appear in roughly half of low‑budget projects. The core of the lesson focuses on practical strategies for replacing a temp cue: extracting its essential qualities (ambient texture, rhythmic motion, and a steel‑drum‑like timbre), then selecting alternative instruments (vibes, Rhodes, synthetic textures) that capture the same vibe without copying the original. Allen emphasizes balancing fidelity to the temp cue’s intent with originality, and advises composers to manage director expectations by communicating their approach and delivering music that satisfies the scene’s needs while avoiding infringement.
Chapters
Okay, in this section, we're going to talk about the process. So taking a little break from music theory and just kind of what you can expect once you get a gig. Once you get a gig writing a film. Now we're going to talk about the last thing or one of the last things we're going to talk about in this class is how to go about getting some gigs. I have a couple tricks that I've talked to students about and gotten some. Some decent work for some students using a couple techniques. So we'll talk about that later. But for now, what to do, what to expect when you're working on a project like this. So the first thing that I want to talk about is temp cues. Temp cues can be a blessing and a curse. What a temp cue means is that in the film. Let me go back to this project that I have open here. Okay, so look at this cue at this spot in this film for just a second. I want to show you something. So let's just listen to it for just a second. Okay, so what's happening here? Everyone is talking about this one kind of thing, and it's kind of silly, and they're just kind of rushing through an explanation of it. So I wanted music that was just really like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. You know, like just like really hitting it over and over and over. But what the director gave me was actually some music in this spot. This is called a temp cue. It means the director or the editor or some. Or the music director put some music into the film already before you got it. Then they just grabbed anything off the shelf that they thought kind of fit what they wanted, so they put music in it. And your job is to replace that music. Because the music they put in it, they don't have the rights to use. They may have grabbed it from another movie. They might have just grabbed it off a song that's on the radio. They grabbed it off anywhere. So it's temporary. So a temporary queue. We call it a temp queue. So it's good because when you have temp cues to work with, you have something from the director that tells you exactly what they want. So it makes. It takes some of the guesswork out of it, right? You're kind of like, okay, they want that. I just need to make something that kind of fills that similar emotion and similar message that that music is providing. Piece of cake, right? So there's a bad side to temp cues, too. The bad side is that often, very often in my Experience. The director will fall in love with the temp cue. Like they want that cue. So you have to make something that sounds kind of exactly like that cue, but yet doesn't sound enough like that cue that anyone's gonna get sued. So you need to make something that is totally different and yet completely the same. It's really frustrating. It can be hard. If the director has fallen in love with that temp cue, then it can turn into kind of a battle to get something that works. You can expect that some of the time directors will, will put in temp cues and want you to replace that music with something that sounds really similar to it or completely different. It's not a sure thing that you get temp cues. I'd say about 50% of the time in smaller budget films I get temp cues. I want to show you another one. This is. I had a number of projects that used this piece of music as a temp cue. Like right in a row, there was like three projects that were using this piece of music as the temp cue. Let's just hear it. Okay, so how would you work with this kind of attempt cue? What you're going to want to do is kind of extract kind of the essence of it. So for this I would say it's actually pretty ambient. So that's something I'd think about. But it's also got a lot of rhythm to it. So there's a. There's a quick rhythm going, there's going throughout the whole thing. So I'd want something with a lot of rhythmic motion, but nothing really aggressive. Something really kind of muted. So not like xylophones or anything like that. Something a little softer. It's using steel drums is kind of that sound that it's getting. So I could use steel drums. However, that's probably going to put me too close to sounding just like this. So I'm going to want to find an instrument that sounds like steel drums but is not steel drums. Something like maybe vibes, maybe a Rhodes organ, if you could do a synthetic one to play fast enough. Something like, maybe even something synthetic that has a similar sound but isn't the same. So that's kind of what I take away from this. I take away ambient, rhythmic and steel drumish. So something that sounds like steel drums. So I think about that and then get rid of the music and start writing and just kind of hope that you find something that the director likes. So those are tem cues.
