Segun Akinola Interview

Segun: Hello. Hello. Hi. Very nice to meet you. How are you?

Danny: Oh, I’m very good, thank you. Fantastic to finally meet you.

Segun: Oh, thanks for bearing with me. Sorry, it’s just schedules and madness and everything that comes with this wonderful world.

Danny: I can only imagine, and I know you must be incredibly busy, so I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. It’s fantastic to have the opportunity. It’s really a pleasure and an honor.

Segun: Oh, no, it’s really—my time on Doctor Who was filled with fun and joy and it’s really lovely that there are people who also feel the same and and just enjoy getting into nitty gritty details.

Danny: Yes, I’m very excited to dive into your creative process and some of your tools and your techniques. I’m a hobbyist audio engineer, I grew up watching classic Doctor Who. I grew up in the US, in Maryland, right outside of DC. Public television used to show it and every Saturday night at midnight, they would run a whole story, a classic Doctor Who story. And my mom was into it. She’d always record them off the TV. And so I grew up, watching all of these reruns and really like the sound and music, and the theme especially, but the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and all of that kind of was really what got me into sound and music and is what kind of sparked that interest in audio engineering, and it’s been a passion of mine for a long time. I don’t really consider myself a musician, I don’t have the confidence in writing, but I do have a good ear for sound and I enjoy the engineering side of it and the technical side, I think that is really where my strengths lie. Hugely interested and really just a huge fan of the work that you did on the show. I remember being excited when I first heard you were announced. I went and I think you had all your stuff published on SoundCloud and I just, I went and I listened to everything, literally everything you had posted. And I was like, this is the guy, this is perfect.

Segun: That’s great! Yeah! Thanks for the early support!

Danny: Yeah, I’m very excited to talk to you, and I’ve got a lot of questions and I’ll try and get through them. And, it’s fine if you don’t remember everything or if you need time to think or anything, I’m just so interested to hear whatever you can share. Just, anything and everything I will love hearing.

Segun: I will try and share as much info as I can.

Danny: That’s a little bit about me and my background, and you probably looked at the site, dwtheme.com. It was a hobby thing that I put together with a couple of friends and my brother, over 10 years ago, I think, was when it first went online. I remember it being around the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. Now we’re up to the 60th. And so it’s just sat as a resource, and originally it was really only going to cover, I think, the original theme and possibly Peter Howell’s, because his was also very interesting and very involved creatively. But yours, really, I think has been something unique, and just your approach to it and the sound design and engineering and the technical expertise that you brought to it I think was really remarkable, and I just love it. It was, I felt, a new approach—it built on everything that the original had done, but in really new ways, and coming to it with that kind of ethos of sound design, of approaching it like the Radiophonic Workshop, in the glory days, would have. So let’s dive in. Can you describe a little bit about your journey and how you became interested in not just music but sound design and engineering?

Segun: Oh, that’s a really good question. The first part was just that I grew up with music. I think my dad came home with a keyboard one day when I was very young and said, do you want to learn piano? And I was like, yeah, sure. I have no idea, first of all, why he came home with a keyboard. And I have no idea why I said yes, but I’m assuming I had just shown some kind of interest musically up until that point. And that was the beginning of it, really. From that point, I started learning piano, and church was quite a big part of music for me because it’s probably the place I went to, what, every week, and actually experienced live music, which was sometimes organ-based, which at the time I found admittedly a little bit boring, but did have an impact on me. And then occasionally it was band-based, and then it became a bit more band-based, and then I fell in love with the drums and really wanted to learn the drums, and then that kind of planted a little seed in me. And then a few years later, I started teaching myself the drums, and I really consider the drums my instrument. Even to this day if you ask me to play something on piano, I will shy away, whereas if you ask me to play something on the drums, even rusty as I am, I will jump at the chance to get some sticks and play something. Cause they’re really my instruments. And basically what happened from that point is that I had a really wonderful experience of an amazing music department at school who basically encouraged everyone to be an all-rounder, and considering I was there all the time in particular, it was very much a case of “Okay, great. You can play drums, so you should be in the big band, but you should also be in orchestra, and you should be in percussion ensemble, and wind and brass ensemble.” I think I was there every lunchtime. Eventually I just got to soak lots of stuff up, and on top of that then, every year there was, I think, a couple of school productions, and once I got to a certain point and age, I started playing in school productions, and we’re doing like West Side Story and things like that. So I also had that experience. So it was just a musical melting pot. But the expectation was that they would encourage you to do everything. And that was so important because that formed the absolute basis of everything that I do now as a composer and the people that I like and the kind of composer that I try to be is someone who can move around musically and take bits from lots of different areas, because as I say, that was my background.

And in the middle of all of this, somewhere along the line, was my introduction to the Radiophonic Workshop, because we actually studied them at school. And that was the first time that I heard anything, because it came off the back of studying, if I remember this correctly, it came off of the back of studying musique concrete and what musique concrete meant. And I think the thing that was really important about that is that when we initially studied musique concrete, it was really out there for me. It was “wow, what are my ears being played right now?” Whereas the difference is with the Radiophonic Workshop and then with Doctor Who theme and Delia Derbyshire’s work is that it became more musical, the link between, “okay it’s sound that is becoming musical” and “actually, no, it’s starting to sound more musical” very much revolves around the Radiophonic Workshop. But I think also there was probably a seed about the idea of using sounds musically to tell a story. And I think that’s really important as well, because I got to a point where I was starting to go to the cinema more. I’d always grown up reading books and I loved stories. And so what it meant is that I just started to fall in love with cinema and eventually this whole thing came together and it was like, hold on, these things I watched, there’s music in them. Why is there music in them? What’s all of this stuff? And then discovering that “hold on, the music makes me feel a certain way.” And so it was this coming together of worlds that I loved. Storytelling, stories, and music. And I basically devoured as much information as I could about films and composers and how they got to where they were and everything. It became really clear to me that the whole point of it was that you got to tell stories through music, and that for me just sounded amazing, and so I’d started to figure out that I wanted to do something musically, which was originally be a record producer, so I was really learning everything I could about studios, studio technique, and producers that I really liked as well, and again, with this whole kind of film and music thing, there was this realization that you still have the studio environment there. So everything that I was learning about record production was applicable to this world. So it really was a case of everything that I love. And for a while I thought, okay, just, you know, there are people who get to do both of these things like Quincy Jones, and he was the biggest early inspiration to me right at the very beginning because I loved his record production work. So then it was like, “great, you can do both.” But what I found is as I went through my journey and I was figuring out going to study music and all this kind of thing, I just realized that I fell more in love with the whole film/TV thing. And I think that’s because there’s never anything too weird in this world. You just have to find the right film and the right story and it can work, and the right filmmaker. Whereas I felt like, I guess I was just yearning for something that I was finding in the world of storytelling. And so that became more and more of the focus.

And so yeah, that’s where I started. When it comes to the whole sound design thing, I think the earliest seeds were planted right back when I was young and studying musique concrete. And then yeah, the Radiophonic Workshop. Really early, because what I remember is actually then being an undergrad, and we had classes where we—it was a composition course, but we had classes where we were encouraged to basically learn and try music technology, techniques, and that kind of thing. And I was already really interested in music tech and had spent years using Logic and all sorts of things, but I remember specifically, I think we used… I can’t remember what it was we used, but we just were creating bizarre sounds using some audio generator, and I remember thinking, “this would work really well in a story, like this would do something, this would turn something or change something emotionally.” And now I look back at it, it’s genuinely honestly in this conversation that I’m starting to think, “oh, the seeds were planted right then.” And so I think that’s the link, studying it as a kid, then studying again when I did my undergrad, and actually being able to play around with stuff myself that was being generated. And then things grew from there. And I think probably the next stage as well, the next part of that is when I did my post grad, because we had all these kinds of tasks where you get a short film and we’d have to score it. I’d always set myself my own personal tasks, things I hadn’t done before. And for one of them, my task was to score it without using any instruments or virtual instruments or anything. All I could use was audio. I did cheat a little bit because I remember there was one bit that was really difficult and I was like, “I’m going to take a bit of a cue and then I’m going to mess around with it and pull it and stretch it and whatnot,” to at least justify myself cheating, but again, I think that was the other key part because I realized, “wow, you really can take anything and you can do anything and you can mess around with these sounds and score something.” And that is literally part of what I do all the time now. And it’s very much a part of what I did on Doctor Who as well. I think that’s the thread tying everything together in terms of the sound design side of things.

Danny: That’s very cool. And I think that is why your work kind of resonates with me is because I think I’ve picked up on that interest in the technical background, the technical approach, and the interest in understanding the technical side as you work on the creative side, and that really resonates with me. I think I really did pick up on that influencing your work on Doctor Who, and I just I loved that that was your approach, that that was what you brought to it, and I think that was fantastic. When you were first asked to work on the theme, can you describe, what was your initial reaction, having that background in the Radiophonic Workshop and knowing the theme, not just getting the job on Doctor Who, but with the legacy of the theme, what was that kind of initial reaction to, “wow, I’m gonna have to do a version of this”?

Segun: I think it was terror, followed by fear, and then a little bit more terror. (laughs) For me, it was a case of, it was the elephant in the room when I started. So I was, I just thought, “I absolutely cannot tackle that first. No way. We need to figure some stuff out. We need to do some other things. Find out more about the direction we’re going in and then I can tackle it.” So I think by the time I was tackling it, I was probably I had done some stuff. I think I figured out character themes for Yaz and Graham and Ryan and I had the Doctor’s theme as well. And so I had some stuff already. And as part of that process, I’d also figured out what the sound world it’s going to be as well. So I felt okay, we’ve already got some stuff here, I can start to tackle the theme. I had a really good idea of at least where I wanted to start. And that’s because it was based on where I wanted to go with the series. And for me, it was very much a case of, I wanted to basically pull from lots of different areas musically. Yes, some classical music, but also popular music, popular styles, some more experimental stuff. And the experimental stuff could be with instruments, but there’s also a side of more electroacoustic type, pulling and stretching audio files, all that kind of thing. And for me, it felt like there was a direct lineage to the Radiophonic Workshop. But at the same time it felt very natural to me and it’s part of what I’ve been doing and it also felt like it was very contemporary. I think of scores like Gravity, when that came out, and yeah, although it was very natural to me, it felt right, it felt like there’s a direct lineage of the show and felt like it would fit, with maybe the difference being that, for this iteration, it was going to be a case of pulling from lots of different areas. But also being brave and not being afraid of doing really bizarre things. Because, again, it feels like that’s the lineage to the Radiophonic Workshop. So I knew, and the other thing is that I knew that I wanted to take Delia’s version as a starting point, and actually I remember that Chris Chibnall thought this as well, and it was genuinely a case of we both had the same thought, and his thought was not a rule or anything, it was just an idea. And I said, I’ve been thinking the exact same thing. I want to start from there. And that’s what I did. Got all of those files listened through and then I started playing around and messing around and then I started adding my own things to it as well. But I really did play with things. Take the original bassline, drop it down an octave, distort it, and all sorts of things like that. And I think I added another bass to it as well. I took the original elements but made sure as well that I was doing my version of it and adding my own things to it as well.

Danny: Yeah, the bassline is one of the big things that I was hoping to dive into because I am not embarrassed to admit that I’ve spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to approximate a lot of your sounds and techniques and find scraps of information and interviews of how, and it’s always very, like, high level. It’s ‘cause you’re not talking to a technical audience. So it’s just “I dropped it down an octave and I made it more aggressive,” and it’s like “okay, that’s not helpful.” (laughs)

Segun: (laughs) Yeah. Yeah. No, I get that!

Danny: Yeah, I’ve been playing and it’s funny because literally two days ago I found an interview with you that I had not seen before where you talk about some of the tools that you use, and you’d mentioned SoundToys, and I immediately went out and bought SoundToys, the whole bundle, and played with it. Yesterday I was playing with it and I’m like, “oh wow, this helps a lot.” I actually was able to start getting some of the sounds, the bassline. So I guess, could you detail your experimental process and like what went into the bassline sound? Because it’s so clearly built on the original bassline and yet it has so much more power and bass to it. And those sub bass frequencies are killer. And so I would love to hear, what went into that bassline sound?

Segun: Yeah. I guess the overall approach for everything was just, as I say, I just wanted to do it my way, and that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the original at all, it’s just a case of a new interpretation. And I felt yeah, I’d like this to be lower and beefier and more aggressive. And that, for me, feeds into this whole thing of being bold, really. That was the one thing that Chris Chibnall and Matt Strevens said to me, it was just… “be bold, go in whatever direction you want to, but just be bold.” So I felt let’s do that, and I’ll see what happens. And if it’s too far, it’s too far, but unless you push as far as you can go, you don’t know where the edge of the cliff is in that sense. I just thought, “yeah, I want it to be lower and I want it to be more punchy.” So that’s where adding more low end came about, which, if I remember correctly, I did add a synth to it. Yeah, at least one, actually, and also as I said, I did distort it. I’m trying to remember what I used because I don’t think I used SoundToys at that point, I think that came in a little bit later.

Danny: Oh, really?

Segun: I’m not sure. Oh, no, actually no I think I had SoundToys. Yeah, thinking about it, I think I had SoundToys. So yeah, what I would often do for something like that is probably use more than one distortion, because I find you can very easily get to where it just becomes too much with one, so it’s more “I want a bit of one and then a bit of another one,” you know, so it’s not too aggressive. I’m still getting enough of the notes and enough of the original sound in there as well. And of course, messing with the wet and dry signal’s part of that as well, obviously compressing it as well, making sure that it’s going to be as punchy as possible no matter how loud or quiet it is and really trying to make it in your face. So again, adding top end, making it brighter so that it really punches through.

Danny: Yeah, and pitch shifting is one thing, but it brings the frequencies down pretty low, and you end up losing—so I have a set of elements that I’ve built up over the years and, some of it has been just a lot of painstaking work trying to isolate them from the original and some I’ve gotten from semi-official places. Tiny tangent story, but I had the honor of meeting Dick Mills at one point, who worked with Delia Derbyshire on the original theme, and I had already had a collection of samples and isolations of the original theme elements at that point, and through an intermediary he reached out to me, and basically he wanted to do a theme demo for the 50th anniversary convention, and there was, I guess, just too much red tape and too many delays, and he couldn’t get his own samples from the BBC in time for the convention, and I ended up giving him my set of isolations and he actually used those at the convention. And I was like, that was just mind blowing to me that he was able to do that theme demo at the convention because of my derivations and isolations of samples that he had. I’m like, “wow, he helped make the original theme, and I had to give him his own samples for the convention.” So that came back around and I was able to meet him in person a couple years later, and he actually shared some of the demo material with me. So I have some of that stuff that I’m working with now, and just a lot of interesting observations in trying to pitch it down, because it thins out the high end. Like it is something that I think is really remarkable about your bassline is it—when you bring it down, it’s probably a side effect of it being made in 1963 and there’s not the kind of frequency range back then that we have the control to create now, but you lose a lot of the kind of mids and highs, it’s very difficult. I’ve been able to get that low end really powerful, but then you lose a lot of kind of the mids, which is really where the punchiness and the kind of transients of the notes kick in. So it’s very tricky to get it to occupy that whole range. It’s like you need it across a bunch of different octaves, and so I was curious if you—again, to the degree that you remember—I’m curious, did you split it across multiple octaves and then process each octave differently, or was it all, like, the original bassline, just run through a whole bunch of stuff on basically just one track, or did you duplicate it to two or three or four tracks of the same thing and just process each one a little bit differently to blend them all together?

Segun: That’s a really good question. And the truth is that it’s going to be a little bit of both of those, plus a little bit of, as I say, adding my own stuff in. So I did have another synth in there. And then, yeah, when you, obviously when you drop stuff down, it’s just completely different. If you want some of the original in there, you can either do the wet/dry thing, or you can actually just have the original in there as part of it. For me, I do think about that in terms of sounds. I do think about, have I got enough lower end, enough mids, enough top end for what I’m trying to achieve. If I’ve got enough low, it might be that I’m not getting enough of the frequencies that are going to punch through, particularly if you’re listening on your phone or something, or it might just be that it’s just not present enough for me. So again, that’s where I will have more than one thing going on, like a bit of the original, a bit of the dropped octave, a bit of the synth, and I, you know, I can always roll things off. You know, if I’ve got the original sound and I’ve got it also dropped an octave, I can roll off the top end from the one that’s dropped an octave and I can roll off the bottom end from the original, just so that it’s not muddying the mix in any way. And the important thing is obviously making sure that they are all absolutely in sync in time so that it sounds as one. That’s the key thing.

Danny: Yes, and that is something I’ve always noticed with yours, and not just with getting multiple basslines aligned, but also with the drums as well, really good precision on aligning all of the notes so that they exactly are hitting in sync with the bassline, and I’ve always been impressed, because knowing the bassline timings really well and you nailed every little note.

Segun: That’s it, it just takes time.

Danny: So was that the technique? Would you actually spend time manually aligning and making sure that those notes were actually lined up with the hits?

Segun: Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of the percussion that you hear, I sampled myself playing things, so I think you’ve got some—this is getting very specific and nerdy—but you’ve got flick sticks, if you know them, but they’re like hot rods but plastic. And I’ve got some, so I took them and I hit this drum that I’ve got, which is a Nigerian drum. And it’s just a very toppy sound. So I sampled that and I made a Kontakt instrument and then I used that and played it in. And then it was just a case of tightening it up, which was painstaking, absolutely. But a lot of the time if I’m doing something that’s meant to sound big, I often don’t want it to be absolutely in time because then you don’t get those little kind of flams, which actually makes something sound like an ensemble. And I think I’ve got two tracks, basically two parts, if you will, of the flick sticks running, and again, those same kind of thing, distortion, top end, brightness, because they’re not really there for lots of body. They’re just there for that kind of impact and drive throughout.

Danny: Yeah, and it works so well, cause there’s so many theme versions out there where they try to add drums and they always feel like an afterthought, or it’s just “oh, we’ll just add a drum pattern or a loop or something to just fill it out,” and I loved what you did, it’s so brilliant but people don’t do that. You had just added the drums to reinforce what the bassline is already doing and it really all comes together as one sound, and it works so well, and I thought that was so cool and clever, cause you know, especially now, there’s always that drive to “oh, we’ve got to add drums, make it bigger.” And you made it bigger by just reinforcing what was already there.

Segun: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s it. I just didn’t feel that it needed more, but it needed a little bit. It needed, first of all, something that was actually an impact. So I felt “okay, I’ve added that top end to the bass, I’ve got more low end.” It didn’t quite feel complete and it’s because it felt like it needed actually something hitting something rather than, oh, just the sound being brighter, it needed an attack, but it didn’t need lots and lots. It didn’t then need lots of body and lots of warmth and whatnot to then be this kind of big jump. And I’m sure I tried that, I’m sure the initial thought was try that and then actually no, that doesn’t work. It felt like it just needed something at the top, just to again, make you feel every single impact of the actual bass notes. And then there’s a kick, there’s a kick in there as well on every beat, which again is not very toppy, it’s low and middly low just so it’s there. That’s meant to be quite subtle as well. Again, the kind of thing that you feel, but don’t actually hear. I didn’t want it to be like, here is a bass drum, every single beat. I just wanted it to be a case of, you feel that there’s something just pushing you along. But you don’t sit there and think really obviously “here is a kick drum,” right?

Danny: And it comes together so well, if you look at it on a spectral view, you look at the drums, they reach up all the way to the top. The lows are so driving and powerful and you have the drums reaching up all the way to the top, and it covers the whole span of the theme. I love that. Cause in my mind, the bassline is the core of the theme and it’s what drives the theme. And so I love that you just fully owned the bassline’s role in the mix and just had it fill out the entire space, and I thought that was fantastic. Anything else that you remember about—I’m curious about the synth, if you remember anything about what you might have used for the synth on the bassline?

Segun: That is a very good question. Honest answer is I literally cannot remember because I just, because I use various things, often I’ll remember part of the process, but not exactly what it was. It could have been Omnisphere. It could also have just been Retro Synth in Logic, which I actually used for quite a few things I think in the first series in particular. I can say categorically it won’t have been anything like Diva or Zebra because I didn’t have those at all at that point. It was literally, I think, probably… all I really had was Omnisphere and Logic stuff, so it wouldn’t have been anything else. Maybe I had a couple more bits, but I definitely know that I didn’t have Zebra and Diva at that point, so it definitely wasn’t those.

Danny: I love that, those are all things that I use. I’ve had Omnisphere forever and all the u-he synths, I use those a lot, so I love those. Everybody uses Omnisphere, and rightly so because it’s fantastic. Cool. Yeah. I’ve just been very curious about it. It’s all so well integrated together, and it’s hard to tell where one sound starts and another ends. It’s a testament to the mixing.

Segun: Perfect, I’m really happy about that because the idea very much is that it’s its own thing. The point was to have a sound for the series and a sound also for the theme that was related to it. That’s why I wanted to do the theme after I’d done some stuff for the series. It’s all supposed to be linked. It’s all supposed to sound like one as well. So you can really clearly hear this is one series, but also that you can clearly hear this is series 11. Because the other thing that was really important to me is that every season the sound develops for the series. So hopefully, the idea is that you can hear that, oh, that’s series 12, because it sounds slightly different for 13. And I did things like change up which synths I used, and those kind of things to try and aid that. And I tweaked the theme every series. No one will notice—I’m sure no one notices—but I did, I tweaked the theme every series.

Danny: Oh, I know! I know the differences! Series 12 has a more distorted, aggressive bassline, you added an amazing filter sweep on the bassline intro in series 13…

Segun: I did do that! I’m so glad someone noticed that. Yeah, I did do that. I did. I did.

Danny: I remember getting the soundtrack for the first time and hearing that filter opening up on the bass. I was like, “oh man, this sounds so cool!” It was lost a little bit on the broadcast version, but I remember hearing it for the first time on the soundtrack, and I’m like, mind blown. That was very cool. Yeah, in series 12, I think the melody has a little bit more of a pronounced delay on it, I know the melody emphasis was louder in series 11 and then it quieted in series 12 and then it was in-between in series 13. So yeah, I’ve noticed—if no one else noticed, I guarantee I noticed!

Segun: I just always felt like it needed—I didn’t feel like it needed to be completely different or that it didn’t really work for what we were doing with the rest of the series, but it just needed some tweaks each time.

Danny: So yeah, where did those ideas come from? I mean, was it just change for the sake of change, or was it like, you had become more confident in your techniques and abilities and you had new things that you want to try? Where did the inspiration come from, or the basis for a lot of those kind of mixing changes in the theme year over year?

Segun: It really just came from the desire of wanting, as I say, the series sound to develop. So it was always the case that over time, something bugs me, so I can tweak. And I was really careful because I didn’t want to just noodle for the sake of noodling. But I did feel like it needed to just develop a little bit each time. And the filter sweep is a really good example of that because I felt like I wanted you to feel like it opened up more after the drop and everything. So it felt although that seems like a small, subtle change, I wanted it to be bigger. And so that was one way of achieving that. So that it felt like it opened up and brightened much more.

Danny: I totally get that. And especially in series 12, the bassline, it starts very raw and aggressive right from the start, so I totally get the desire for 13 to change that so that it opens as it plays and then it becomes brighter when the melody kicks in, so that makes perfect sense. And the melody itself, you largely left the sine melody pretty much like the original. Don’t mess with success, right?

Segun: Yep.

Danny: And another thing, again, I was impressed with was just your ability to fill out frequencies. Again, with it being the 1963 recordings, and I don’t want to say that they sound thin because they don’t really, but that you really filled out the frequencies. And I feel like you did a lot of octave doubling, maybe, and different tricks and techniques to fill out the range of frequencies, because the emphasis is very very high, it gets very up there in terms of frequencies, whereas the sine is in the middle, there are certain points in the second melody phrase, when it goes down there’s no emphasis at first, and in some versions you have almost like a higher octave version of the sine melody, where you’ve doubled it, I think, and tried to fill out those higher frequencies, so it’s not as much of a noticeable contrast when the emphasis comes in. Did you have any techniques to expanding the range of the melody?

Segun: Yeah, anything. My view was that anything goes and anything is possible. And I actually, when I originally did the theme, I originally did three very different versions. Very different versions. Because I wanted to play around. And I felt like I needed to give myself that time to try different things. And it was the same when it came to using the sounds. I felt like nothing is off limits, other than changing the melody. And it felt like even with the original melody that it didn’t need anything added to it to make it thicker or bigger. Maybe a couple of small things. So there’s like some volume automation on it, and yeah, it had to fit into basically my aesthetic, the sound that I was trying to achieve. So that has meant certain things when it came to like delay and reverb and compression and that kind of thing, but other than that, there was nothing else off limits. So certainly, again, that’s where it comes to playing around with making something brighter or yes, adding a bit of octave above, which might just be a little bit. It’s not always all of it, it’s sometimes just like a little bit of it to bring something out, all the other things, there’s stuff going on in the background there that I hope you can’t really hear. You know, I’ve got a synth going on that is basically rising, it’s just literally just rising throughout, which is just purely there again, like the kind of kick is there as something you feel rather than something you absolutely hear, but it’s just to make you really drive towards the end of the theme, fill it with as much excitement as possible to get you into the episode, and get you into the bit where you get the title and then into the rest of it.

Danny: Yep. Yeah. Do you remember what you used for those kind of, I was going to ask about the kind of the atmospheric effects and those sound sources?

Segun: Yeah, absolutely. So again, some of that is just original. And then I have, again, I’ve messed with it. Actually, when it comes to the atmospheric stuff, there’s a lot of it that isn’t. It’s a lot of stuff that I’ve added to give it this sense of atmosphere in the background. And I’ve used a few things there. Again, I would have taken things and pitch shifted them, or made sounds in something. Again, it could be Retro Synth or Omnisphere. Because I like to do that, and I definitely did that throughout Doctor Who, just make synth sounds. And, I’m trying to think about what else I did. It’s also possible that I did things like took a sound source and stretched it. And that, again, that could have been something original, I could have taken part of the original sound with one of the original stems and just pulled it and stretched it and then add reverb and things as well. So there’s lots of stuff going on like that. But I do know that I definitely added a number of synths for the atmos, as well as definitely used something from the original in there as well.

Danny: And one thing I’ve noticed also is you actually used the hissing tracks from the original theme, and I think that is so awesome, because many people have done derivations of the original theme and nobody ever uses the hissing, and you included that, and I just thought that was fantastic, I loved that. And it does really help the mix. Like I think you perfectly understand the role that it fills in the mix and that it can bring that sense of atmosphere. So I think it was perfect. It filled something you were looking to fill. I’m curious, do you have any other examples of sounds from the original stems that you may have repurposed or used, because that is something I can pick up on and also have heard you say in interviews, of repurposing existing sounds, like taking sounds out of the original theme and using them in maybe unexpected ways.

Segun: Yeah, sure. I think to my memory, I believe I used everything, almost everything. So there were some things that I didn’t quite use. It just didn’t really fit, but I used a bit of everything, if not most of everything. So definitely with the, with the hiss, that’s a really good example where I’ve taken and used it but also there is another example, I’m trying to remember what it is, but there’s something else which is a similar sound that I didn’t need during the run up, but it was very useful for the build up just before you get the final impact and then get the title card. So again, I took that and I moved it over and it just helps to get you into it.

Danny: Another sound source I was really curious about was that countermelody that you have at the end of the closing theme. What is the sound source for that?

Segun: Oh my goodness me. That is a very good question. And I genuinely cannot remember, but what I do remember is, adding a second, adding a countermelody to the Doctor Who theme was just, like, very scary. And again, because of the approach that I’d taken, which was very much about building from the original and doing my own thing and adding things to it, it meant that just adding an instrument that you could very clearly hear as an instrument didn’t feel right. It’s like the percussion, just adding some drums that just sound like some drums didn’t feel right. It felt like it had to be something where you don’t know what it is. Otherwise it’s just not working. I think it is some kind of piano. Or it once was, yeah. Which, many things have been done to get it to sound the way that it does, so that it’s not clear. But I felt like it needed an attack, it needed to have a clear attack to fit into everything else that was happening. So yeah, that was the original.

Danny: This could be wrong, but a friend speculated that it was actually derived from the melody emphasis, like you took a sample of the melody emphasis and manipulated that and turned it into a sample. Is that anywhere near the truth?

Segun: I can say with absolute certainty that I did not do that. Unfortunately for that person, I can confirm.

Danny: Ah, okay. I think all of us have gotten into this kind of thinking that for so much of the theme you found ways to derive from the original samples and there’s so much of it that’s just processed and cleverly manipulated original samples from the theme, so I think the brain goes “oh, maybe it’s the emphasis.” It’s like that.

Segun: Yeah. Yeah. No, it would be very cool. Yeah. You got that. Yeah.

Danny: So yeah, I guess going back to different versions of the theme, one of the versions I was curious about is actually the one that was on The Woman Who Fell to Earth, the first episode, and that is its own very unique mix of the theme. I was curious for any details you remember of the circumstances surrounding that. Was it just like an earlier demo version of the theme? Or was it actually a specific alteration or remix of it designed specifically for that episode?

Segun: Which version of it? Cause episode one’s got a theme in the episode, and it’s also got the extended version at the end of the episode. Is that the one that you mean?

Danny: Yeah, I meant the closing version, but I was also curious about the one in the episode!

Segun: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s a really, that’s a really good point. A really good question. Why was that different? Partly, it was different because it was just a different stage and part of the mix. I think when I did that, I’m trying to remember if I’d done… yeah, so I hadn’t done the mix, at least for the theme at that point. So I’d done like the demo, and then obviously I had this kind of extra long version at the end of episode one, but that was its own thing that’s gonna appear once that had a purpose of fitting at the end of episode one and introducing lots of people, you see that kind of thing. It’s not exactly the same and it’s why you don’t hear it again as well, whereas when you get the start of episode two and you actually get the theme, that is the theme. So that’s why it’s different. It was just a different part of the process and it doing something slightly different as well, yeah. Yeah, and building up to the reveal of the theme, really.

Danny: Yes, which was very effective and I do like that version, it does fit very well in that specific role. And you know, that bassline comes in for the first time you’re hearing the theme and it really hits, like the drums are very powerful. It’s very in your face and I mean, I love it. Cause it was never released, and so it was a very kind of one off and I was just curious, the backstory of that, and if it was just an early version.

Segun: Yeah, it was just a slightly different thing, so it was still mixed and everything, it wasn’t a demo. It was just a different thing. It was because it’s not the proper end credits, but we were trying to do something a bit longer.

Danny: And like back in the old days with Doctor Who themes, they’d always have the opening theme and the closing theme, but they’d also always for the records, they’d always do like an extended theme, they’d do a full length start to finish. And so it’s like that, that almost, it’s the closest we ever got, I think, with yours.

Segun: Yeah, exactly.

Danny: That’s cool. And really I enjoy that version, but one of the things that I think makes it stand out also is it was the first—it was, for a while, the only time we had actually had the bridge, or the middle eight, in the theme. And I think there was a fear for a while of “oh, that’s the only time we’re ever going to hear it.” Cause it’s just a thing, credits are short nowadays, there’s just not time for it. But it did make a reappearance in Ascension of the Cybermen and we finally got a proper mix of the theme with the bridge integrated into it. How did that come about? Did they ask for a longer closing? Was there a need for it, or did you decide “let me do a longer one that reincorporates the bridge and do a full mix”?

Segun: I think the credits were longer. So it was a case of the credits need to be longer because obviously that was episode nine that was series 12 and there was a, it wasn’t one story across the whole thing, but there was like a big story that had happened at the beginning of one of in episode one of that series and was coming at the end and it needed longer credits. So it was just a case of we need longer credits and I was like, great, that gives me another opportunity to have the bridge in there, or middle eight, depending on your opinion of what you call it.

Danny: I call it the bridge. Everyone else calls it the middle eight. And I just, I say both.

Segun: Yeah, I totally get that. But yeah, it was just that. So it was like, okay, great, here’s an opportunity to put it back in, which is going to be fun because we use it so rarely, that to then have it in unexpectedly, it’s going to be really fun for viewers.

Danny: So yeah, it blew my mind. I totally missed the trailer because I was too distracted by the fact that the bridge had reappeared in the theme suddenly.

Segun: (laughs) Yeah, it was, but it’s fun stuff like that because that’s part of the joy of Doctor Who, that people care about it and people will notice and it was out of the blue, but it also gave me a chance to do a proper version of it, within this world. Yeah, that was fun.

Danny: Exactly, and again, very small detail here, but another testament to your attention to detail, one of the things you incorporated, it’s in the original bassline that nobody ever notices is you have when it in the main melody phrase when it goes down from E to B, it’s not just a standard—forgive my terminology, but there’s a diddly-dum, and it’s not just a standard diddly-dum—we call it the duddle-uddle, because that last note is quieter, and you incorporate that into the drums. You actually skip that last note because it matches with the bassline when it goes down, and for one thing, just a million points to you for picking up on the duddle-uddle, but also, in The Woman Who Fell to Earth, in episode one, you have at the end of the bridge, you have regular diddly-dums there, but in between then and Ascension of the Cybermen, you realize it’s the same the duddle-uddle from the main melody phrase, and you changed it to the to match that, so you actually noticed that and changed it, which I thought was fantastic.

Segun: Yeah. Yeah. All of these little things in there.

Danny: I love that you kept paying attention, you didn’t rest on your laurels and just say “nope, it’s good enough as it is, we’ll just tweak it.” But you continued to think about it and give it thought, which I really appreciated and definitely noticed.

Segun: Yeah, absolutely. It deserves care and attention, and I gave it as much as I possibly could.

Danny: It really shows in the final product, and I think that is why I think that your version is such a remarkable achievement, really. And I just, I thought… such care and precision went into it and I could always tell, and I think that is just so critical for the theme. Yeah, being mindful of your time here, I don’t want to keep you for too long. But in closing, are you happy with your version of the theme overall? Is there anything you’d do differently if you went back and started over on it or, anything that you feel, based on how you’ve grown and progressed, anything you feel you could have done differently or better?

Segun: Things can always be better, but I also feel that I am happy with it because I got to make those changes as I went along. Because there really was stuff that bugged me, which is why I always had to go and tweak it and just improve it. Because I always felt that it could be better. But I think personally, I feel happy that I had that opportunity to make those tweaks, particularly to make those tweaks to a vision of it, rather than changing it every time. As I said, that just wasn’t quite right for what we were doing in this particular run of the show, but to have time to tweak it and improve it and also do the other versions like the Ascension of the Cybermen version where actually then you do get the bridge and that kind of thing, to me really felt great, so that pretty much everything I could explore with the main theme I felt like I have, and I can say that’s it. That was my version.

Danny: I think it was a tremendous success and I really think that it will go down in history as I think one of the best follow on interpretations of the theme that there’s ever been. I didn’t know Delia Derbyshire personally, but I do know that she never approved of any other version of the theme, including subsequent derivations of her own, apart from Peter Howell’s, and I can’t say this with any certainty but I really believe that she would have been proud of what you did, or at least how you approached it, certainly. And I think really just a testament to the thought and care that you brought to it. So I just, huge, huge success in my book and huge privilege to be able to sit and go through a lot of this with you, and so really I want to thank you tremendously for your time and your insights, and I’m just so appreciative of your work on the show. I really think that you brought something fantastic to Doctor Who and we were just incredibly lucky to have you, really, and beyond just the theme, so much of your music, I adored the Doctor’s theme, the Master’s theme being a spin on the Doctor’s theme. I loved your Cybermen music. That is some of my favorite, just really unique and so memorable and really fitting. Thank you so much. This is something I’ve been looking forward to—nervous about, but excited about, for a long time, and yeah, thank you.

Segun: I absolutely loved my time on Who, I really did. So much. And yeah, just had the best time possible and glad I could come in and work with the people I did and that we did our thing. So yeah, very grateful and grateful for the things I’m onto now as well.

Danny: Excellent. I am very grateful for you, not only your time today, but also all of your work on the show, and I just am really thrilled to have had those years with you on the show.

Segun: Oh, thank you. I’m genuinely really glad that you enjoyed it. And it’s really nice to know that there’s someone who appreciates all the tiny details that I really did take time on.

Danny: Thank you so much. I’ll reach out with follow-up if there’s any questions, but otherwise just from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for your time and for your generosity.

Segun: A pleasure. Real pleasure. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. You too. See you.