[smd80]

It's not in the slightest bit true about Danny Elfman -- in fact, it's farther from the truth in his case than any other film composer I can think of. With the amount of synth and guitar that Danny performs himself, he actually has up to half his tracks laid down by the time the cue is getting approved by the director. Not only is he not outsourcing the composing, he's not even outsourcing the performance except where he needs to. And he's certainly not fiddling around with a tape recorder when he has a $100k+ Pro Tools rig in his studio.

All film composers have different processes, and it's true that few of them take on the details of notation, and all of them have teams that they work with. But you're absolutely right that that's a good thing, because that's how film music works: Turnover is extremely short (sometimes as little as a couple weeks to write an hour of music), notes on the page are not the product, and specialization allows the process to move forward and the job to get done.

This blog post irks me in part because it's an unkind rumor, and in part because it's a completely inept metaphor.