Creator/director Jorge R. Gutiérrez’s Maya and the Three is an animated Netflix series that tells the story of Maya (Zoe Saldana), a warrior princess in pre-colonial Mesoamerica. To save her family and humanity, she fights alongside three legendary warriors in an effort to defeat the gods of the underworld.
L-R: Tim Davies and Jorge R. Gutiérrez
While we recently spoke to the audio post team on the series, we also wanted to check in with composer Tim Davies, who along with Gustavo Santaolalla, was nominated for an Annie Award for the episode “The Sun and the Moon.”
Let’s find out more about Davies’ process…
Maya and the Three creator Jorge Gutiérrez describes the show as his “love letter to Mexican culture.” How did you support this vision with your score?
Like any media scoring, the music responds to and is inspired by the visuals and the story. It is like fusion cooking. Jorge took ingredients from all over Latin American culture: Mayan, preHispanic, Caribbean. There were no rules, and it was the same for me. I saw all of that, picked a palette of sounds to support his creation, and just wrote what I felt. I knew I did not need to overthink it because Jorge hired me with an idea of where I would go with it.
You also worked with Jorge on The Book of Life. What are some of the benefits to already having that established relationship?
I have a vivid memory from our first playback meeting on The Book of Life… Jorge said he loved the music but then added something like “but it is not my movie.” I then took the exact same material but changed the orchestration and found a combination of sounds that worked, and Jorge was happy. Then we just focused on the finer details. I knew going into Maya that I could build on that previous sound. I did some more research, made a lot of new samples and found some great players to collaborate with me to create a new sonic world, one for Maya specifically. Also, we are friends now, so that helps a lot.
When we started work on Maya, everything went through Netflix. We tried it their way, but it would take a month to set up a meeting, and every email had to go through several people. After the first episode we just went back to texting. If I had an idea or question, I just messaged him, and he would always get back quickly. It meant I could then spend more time writing music and less time writing emails to 10 people!
Gustavo Santaolalla did the show’s themes, while you provided the score for the show. Can you talk about what your working relationship looked like?
Gustavo is a genius, and he writes the most amazing tunes. He met with Jorge, and they discussed what they wanted to do — I was not involved at that stage.
Once Gustavo was done, we all jumped on a Zoom call and listened to the themes together. Jorge told me where he thought each thing would go in the show. He was very specific, and I would say we stuck to about 95% of what he had imagined back then. I then wrote the score and reviewed it with Jorge.
How do you start your writing process, and on what instrument?
Once I heard the themes, I started to imagine my palette. I made a lot of new samples. Drums, logs, boxes, bombo, shakers, guitar noises, didgeridoo and some new synth patches. Gustavo had used the quena and sikus in his demos, and I wanted to also use the ocarina.
I found some good sample libraries (synthesizer/virtual versions) for my demos, and then we had Ashley Jarmack replace them with the real thing later. I did not start putting anything together until I spotted the first episode with Jorge, but by that stage I had all the pieces, and it all fell together easily. The temp score was very good, as Jorge and Myra (Lopez, the editor) had put a lot of time into it. We would discuss his ideas and the temp, then off I would go. I doodle at the piano, then enter that into the computer and work on it in there. I would sometimes have different ideas to the temp, and Jorge loved most of those things. We never once went back and listened to the temp; we always went forward, which is always nice.
Recording Maya and the Three
You got to record the orchestra and choir for the show in Australia. Why not just do it in the US? What were the benefits of doing it in Australia?
At one stage we wanted to record it in Guadalajara, Mexico. I had done a concert there for Guillermo del Toro, and Jorge asked if we could do it there. While it would have involved a lot of work to pull it off, I was game. Unfortunately, before we even started to make arrangements, COVID hit. So we had to consider the new landscape of available scoring stages. I looked around at places where I could get what I needed for the budget I had, and Australia was perfect. Of course, it helped that I am from there, and I got a nice trip home to record
There are many different styles of music in Maya and the Three, ranging from a Caribbean vibe to a Latin American vibe. Was there a musical style in the show that you weren’t as familiar with? Something you had to research?
Gustavo set the tone with a lot of those ideas in his demos, and I just ran with it. I did some research on Mesoamerican music and cultures, adding to what I had done for The Book of Life. I am pretty good at hearing a bunch of things and then incorporating them into my writing. We did decide we weren’t going to try to be super-authentic to any particular style, which allowed us to be quite eclectic. Jorge is Mexican, Gustavo is Argentinian and I am Australian, so all of those things come through in various ways.
Were there certain instruments you found yourself using more than others in the Maya score?
For this show, I used a lot of ocarina for Maya herself. Her mother and Chimi feature solo violin, Rico gets some steel drums on occasion, and Picchu has the quena flute. For Lord Mictlan I used heavy guitars, distorted cello, the Aztec death whistle and a didgeridoo!
There is an instrument called a Mayan trumpet that is similar to a didgeridoo. I had my friend Anita Thomas send me a few notes. I processed them a lot, so you probably can’t pick what it really is. There is a track called “Esqueletos” on the OST, and you can hear it clearly right at the start.
I used log drums for a lot of the rhythms and blended all of that with traditional orchestral strings and brass.
Tim Davies (Credit for this and main image: Anna Cheffy)
What does your equipment setup look like? Which programs do you frequent?
I have a newish Mac Pro. I write scores and sketches in Finale then program in Cubase using a lot of custom samples on top of the usual orchestral ones that everyone has. My programmer, Ryan Humphrey, has a duplicate setup so we can swap files back and forth. We also would spend a lot of time on Zoom.
You are also an orchestrator and conductor working on huge titles such as Free Guy and Hotel Transylvania: Transformania. When you were going in to conduct Free Guy, what did you do to prepare?
Free Guy was an interesting one. It was the first project recorded in Los Angeles since the pandemic had halted everything. We spent a lot of time planning how we would record it. We were limited to only 44 players at a time (normally we have about 85), so we had to split it all up.
We were all masked and spaced out, which presented a few issues. First, a lot of communication on the stage relies on facial expressions! If I smile, they know they are playing well; if I frown, they know something went wrong. In the past, when I gave instructions, I could tell from their faces if they understood me, but with masks on, none of those things work anymore. It was not fun.
The players of the ensemble are also spread out, which meant playing together and listening to each other was harder. The one advantage was that they had no stand partners to talk to, so it was much quieter (smiles).
