“I would have taken that job for literally any price he suggested”
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roducer and arranger Naftali Schnitzler says he will never forget his big opportunity to get his feet wet in musical arrangements. Sometimes, he says, you find yourself at the goal you always wanted, in the most unexpected time and place. His break came nine years ago, while he was at his wife’s sister’s wedding. When the phone rang from an unknown caller, Naftali debated a moment whether to take the call. He quickly made up his mind and went outside. Good instincts. It was Mordche Werdyger, asking him to arrange some songs for his upcoming album, Kisufim. (At the time, MBD publicly declared that Kisufim, released in 2011, would be his last album, but he couldn’t resist the call of the studio, and has put out two more since.)
“We had met a few times before that — the first time was probably at a Mekimi hospital call — and I guess he liked my keyboard playing as a one-man-band,” Schnitzler explains. “But although I knew the intro to almost every one of MBD’s songs, being asked to arrange music for him was a whole new level. It felt like stepping into the shoes of Suki Berry, Daniel Freiberg, Yisroel Lamm, Moshe Laufer, and the great Mona.”
Schnitzler was understandably overwhelmed, but that didn’t stop him from agreeing. “I would have taken that job for literally any price he suggested,” he says. The next day, he received the songs to arrange.
“The first song I worked on was ‘Shomrei,’ by Reb Shloime Kalish. [“Shomrei shomrei shomrei mitzvoseha, shomrei mitzvosecha yinchalu…”] I loved the ‘Shabbosdig feel of it. I came up with an intro — something chassidish but also up-to-date — and then prepared the musical scores and sent MBD what we call a sketch,” Schnitzler recalls. The sketch draws on the ability of computers to emulate “real” music. It is a realistic mock-up of the entire track, so the composer can see the arranger’s vision: style, tempo, how many times the song will repeat, as well as any additional interludes or bridges. The computer-generated instrumentals can sound so realistic that to the uninitiated, they seem real, but the sketch is produced at a tiny fraction of the cost, with no musicians and no live recordings. This gives the composer and client a window to make changes.
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