Leo Birenberg & Zach Robinson - Cobra Kai : Music for the Show, the Soundtrack, and the Game!
Composers Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson are a force to be reckoned with on the mats. For the entirety of the Netflix show Cobra Kai, the duo has created magnificent musical scores that contain retro synths, a seventy-piece orchestra, electric guitars, and strong sensibilities in the worlds of melody and harmony. A hot new video game on the shelves, Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues, features an original score by Birenberg and Robinson. The highly-anticipated game is inspired by and based on the popular Netflix Original Series. The game will be available for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One. Concurrent with the game’s debut, an accompanying soundtrack album will be released by Madison Gate Records. The game and the soundtrack album will give fans added excitement as they get ready for Cobra Kai’s third season, which premieres exclusively on Netflix on January 8th. 2020
Made in collaboration with the series show-runners, the game delivers an original two-fold story from dueling perspectives complete with character-driven cut-scenes and a classic 80’s inspired score from Birenberg and Robinson. I had the chance to speak with Leo and Zach about how they write their music, what instruments they use, the process of working on the show, and much more.
Cobra Kai Video Game Soundtrack Cover Art
“Whenever you start a project that's in an existing universe, especially a really famous one, there is some pressure. Are you going to let it inspire you, or are you going to let it haunt you?”
Vinny - When it comes to writing music for Cobra Kai, what’s the beginning of the process like?
Zach - When you're starting, it's a lot of trial and error. There’s a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what people like. Generally we have ideas going into a project, and it's rare that those ideas get to stick because at some point along the way things change. But with Cobra Kai, we had this vision for the music and the show-runners happened to be really into that vision. Once you're a couple of seasons deep, it's a lot easier to keep going. You've got your palette, you've got your themes. You've got all the ingredients that you know work. It's smooth sailing from there, scoring in its best form.
Leo - The deeper you get into the show, the more material you have to work with and reinterpret and re-imagine. A show like this is highly thematic, it also has a few specific palates that it's always living in. There are a lot of variables on the chart. Do this theme this way, do this theme with this other theme underneath, do this theme this other way. It's really fun for us because in every episode there is at least one, sometimes five, new interpretations of something that we haven't gotten to do before.
Vinny - Between when you first jumped on back in season one, and now at season three going into season four, did you know that your work would take on a life of its own as music for the show, music as soundtrack release, and finally music for the video game?
Leo - When you do a show, you're always hoping to do a soundtrack release, although the logistics of it are surprisingly complicated. Luckily for us, Sony is very organized and they have a great department that makes it happen for all of their shows, which is especially important with music being a major part of Cobra Kai. We and the show-runners are all on the same page as far as wanting to give the music life outside of the show because then it feeds back in. It's nice to be able to put all of the energy out there. This show could be its own cinematic universe and as new opportunities pop up, we’ll jump at the possibility to claim and conquer them. The video game was a really fun extension of the process for us.
Vinny - What is the workflow like between yourselves and the editorial department? Is there a lot of back and forth? Do they temp material in or do you score directly to the episodes?
Leo - For every episode we have a spotting session with the show-runners John, Josh, and Hayden, and the editors. We sit together to discuss every single scene and what the musical needs might be, or things we want to try.
Sometimes the editorial team will temp music in as they're cutting the episode. Now that we're a few seasons in, they frequently temp it with music from the show that we have written, but we don't always use whatever their idea is. They might put a theme in a scene, and we’ll say, "No, we're going to do something different,” and use a different theme for a different emotion.
After the spotting session, Zach and I both independently have some ideas ticking, so we naturally divvy it up to start and say "Hey, I've got something for this fight scene. Let me go play with it. Hey, I've got an idea for this scene in this episode." Then we'll go and do our own thing, on the phone five times a day, sending videos on iMessage of ideas we have to picture. We'll either give input and finish things or get things to a certain spot and start trading files.
We’ve set up our systems to be pretty friendly to each other if we want to trade files, which we do very often and more often the deeper we get into a season. One of us may start a cue, and then the other will finish. It's a very collaborative process.
Zach - We generally divvy out which scenes based on our enthusiasm for the scene. There’s a lot of "Oh, I really want to do this fight scene. I know exactly what I want to do." Or, "Oh, this is Daniel talking to Sam, his daughter. I know the exact type of ocarina I would put in." That's generally where it starts. By now, of course, going into season four, we have such a clear idea of what we each like, and what we're good at.
Two dojos. One epic rivalry. The Cobra Kai legacy continues only on Netflix. Season 3 enters the tournament in 2021....
Vinny - How much creative rein do the show-runners give you?
Zach - They give us a lot of leeway. There are so many themes in the show and they know them very well, they can identify the themes easily. There have been times where we used a theme of a certain character, and they said, "No, we actually want this theme," but they generally trust us and trust our instincts. Most of the time, our notes revolve around accentuating a certain moment that we didn't think about. Many times it's a small spotting note like, "Oh, you hit this, but can you hit that as well?" Or, "We want to raise the bar a little bit more. Let's add a little more tension". Those are the types of notes we get. The show-runners also give us a lot of free rein to explore with different instruments and different sounds. Every year we go a little further into who knows what. It's not necessarily cheese territory, even though we love cheese territory; it's more, “I can't believe they're letting us do this” territory. I can't believe we're actually getting away with this. We're listening to the season three album now as it's getting mastered and we're like, “Wow, are you kidding me? Why did they let us do that?”
Vinny - The '80s guitars and synths are very fitting for the show.
Leo - To say the least. Those are the seeds. Let's plant.
Vinny - When you guys first were on during season one, was there pressure to live up to the soundtrack to the original Karate Kid? Did you draw a lot of inspiration from it and try to follow it?
Leo - Whenever you start a project that's in an existing universe, especially a really famous one, there is some pressure. Are you going to let it inspire you, or are you going to let it haunt you?
I think we handled The Karate Kid palate extremely well. Jumping into season one you're looking at The Karate Kid mythology from the other lens, Johnny’s lens, so there's already a perspective shift to hit there. One way we really wanted to achieve that was taking the sound of The Karate Kid holistically, not just the Bill Conti score, but listening to all of the needle drops that are in the movie. Like most people when you're thinking about the music of The Karate Kid, you tend to think of the songs more than you do the score. We co-opted part of that palate into the score. We wanted it to feel really at home there without necessarily needing to license songs to get there. We wanted that to be part of the score, so that was our philosophy to start, and I think it all just blossomed from there.
Zach - The story takes place in the same universe. It's the same characters, but it's a different perspective, and that gave us a lot of leeway to explore different sounds for the show and for the characters that we weren't used to from The Karate Kid. The Karate Kid, for as famous a movie as it is, the score is not necessarily the most outstanding in terms of being easily recognizable or famous. It's not that type of score. There's not a major theme that everyone can hum, but there is an ethos to it, especially with the soundtrack. It’s arguably more famous than Bill Conti's score, so we wanted to incorporate a lot of both, the Bill Conti essence and the '80s soundtrack part of it, which if you listen to our score, you can hear that pretty easily.
“The demo guitars are good for presentation, but when you wipe all the gook off and get this very pristine, clean, professional guitar player playing, it feels like taking a bath.”
Vinny - What instruments (real or virtual) do you two like to use?
Leo - Zach's got a Roland D-50 that's pretty sweet. We love the M1, it has a lot of great sounds.
I play a lot of material on an EWI, which is an electronic wind instrument. It's a MIDI controller that's run through a Yamaha effects rack which has a bunch of custom sounds specifically for wind controllers on it that are modeled after some really famous retro pan flute sounds. I end up playing a lot of synth sounds on that too.
Zach - I have a Kemper amp profiler, which I use a lot. I feel like composers don't talk about it enough. It's such a good plug and play type of tool. We have the Roland JX-3P, which season one was mostly done on. I think we started going into M1 territory in season two.
In terms of VSTs, we use a lot of the Arturia collection. The Legacy sounds play exactly the same as the hardware synths. Sometimes there's no point in using the physical hardware if you have the software.
Leo - It can be a pain to record hardware synths sometimes when we have to work quickly. There's a lot of really good resampled hardware synths. Spectrasonics and Omnisphere are fantastic, we grab a lot of Juno sounds out of them. We have a lot of fun in the gear department and then we get a whole orchestra on top of that.
Vinny - For guitars, what's your philosophy as far as recording amps or going DI and then using simulators?
Zach - I'm not recording amps. I'm working out of a second bedroom, and I live in a duplex. I just don't need to turn the amp on. I've modeled my sound using the Kemper Profiler, and it works very well. Regardless of that, we replace a lot of the guitars. I’m okay on guitar, but I'd rather get it replaced by a professional. We have a few guitar players that we use on the show and they crush it. The demo guitars are good for presentation, but when you wipe all the gook off and get this very pristine, clean, professional guitar player playing, it feels like taking a bath. That's my philosophy.
Vinny - How involved are you in the recording process for the orchestras?
Leo - We record everything in Eastern Europe. Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, it’s a smorgasbord, so to speak. That being said, we’re super involved. We're on Source-Connect with them the entire time, giving feedback in real-time. We have a lot of opinions about the orchestra, we don't just hand it off and see what comes back. Everything is written, orchestrated, and recorded very deliberately.
Our orchestrator, Vincent Oppido, takes a MIDI file from our Cubase system which contains the score and uses that as his basis for the orchestra. Our recording templates are pretty big, hundreds of tracks when it comes to the orchestra stuff. We use a lot of libraries, most of which run in Kontakt, and we have a computer that runs all the samples in the background. You could name a VST maker and we probably use something of theirs.
Still Photo from Cobra Kai featuring Ralph Macchio and Billy Zabka
Vinny - Once you get the live orchestra recordings, how much of implementing them is plug and play versus going through an editorial process?
Leo - There's a little bit of editing, it depends on how we record. Sometimes we stripe when we record. We'll record the strings and brass separately, if it really needs to be precise, like a hybrid action cue. If there are a lot of drum and bass parts, you really want to make sure everything's locked in, so if you stripe you have a lot more control. Another example is if the horns are playing the melody, but the strings are performing rhythmically. We'll do a little cleanup sometimes, or our engineer will do some cleanup.
We usually record the rhythm section first, although it all just depends on whatever our individual schedule and availability is. It all gets collected on our engineer's rig once everything has been individually recorded, and then he mixes it all together.
Zach - One of the difficulties of doing long distance recording, is that when you're watching through Source-Connect, it's hard to hear exactly what the orchestra is playing on a minute level. Sometimes we'll get something back from the orchestra... By the way, of course, we always have to move fast. There are always too many cues. There's not enough money. There's not enough time. They like to take their cigarette breaks in Eastern Europe all the time, so we do run into hurdles from time to time.
Leo - They love to cough. There are lots of coughing takes.
Zach - Sometimes we don't notice that until we get to mixing, and that's when we would have to dive deeper into editing. Sometimes it proves to be a challenge. Sometimes the string players will be swinging a little bit, and it makes the process difficult. That's the kind of thing you can't hear really over the internet, it's really the type of thing you need to be hearing either in person or on a recording, but that's just one of the challenges that we've had. Sometimes Source-Connect breaks down and we've had to do it through Skype. We've done it enough times now that we can handle anything. We are also confident enough in the score itself that we can take any of those challenges in stride.
Vinny - After three seasons, are there any favorite cues? Or pieces that you’re particularly proud of?
Leo - We've got some major highlights in season three that we cannot yet share…
“Like A Dance” is a pretty rad one, it really gives off blood sport vibes, which has been a day one topic of conversation with us in Cobra Kai.
Zach - I like to think of the ones that shaped the ethos of Cobra Kai, which I feel are “Strike First” (the end credits on Netflix), “Slither”, which is McDonald's training montage, “Quiver”, with the transformation of Hawk. I think “The Wrong Path”, which is Daniel and Robbie talking in the locker room in the finale, is one of our most earnest Karate Kid moments.
Leo - Someone tweeted two days ago that “Time Out” from season one is their go-to track right now which was cool to read. “All Valley Tournament” is one of my all-time favorites, which is the four-minute early montage in the finale of season one, showing the tournament going from the beginning to the semi-finals.
Vinny - What’s the most difficult part of the whole process?
Leo - The schedule is pretty relentless. Working in TV, in 2018, 2019, 2020, schedules have become a lot different, because shows are being released in bingeable formats. You're not working on one episode at a time anymore, we’re usually working on four episodes at a time. There's usually one point in every season where there are eight episodes in play at once for us. We'll be mixing the first three while we're doing the final notes on the second three, or we're getting ready to record the second three, and we're writing the next three. The show has a lot of music in it that's pretty involved, and it's a lot of writing in a short amount of time for each season.
Vinny - How long is the typical season?
Zach - Two to three months.
Leo - It's usually straddling the holidays, too, which breaks up the flow a little bit. Part of the challenge is there's a lot of work to get done, but you also need to look at the calendar and find ways to acknowledge, these are those days when I'm really going to be able to focus my creative energy on this really big scene that we've got to do. It's not just a punch in, punch out; you have to do that to make sure everything's getting done, but then you also need to find that time to be really inspired within that schedule.
“You never know when it's going to end, so you've really got to… leave it all on the mat.”
Vinny - What’s the biggest takeaway from the Cobra Kai experience? What are you looking forward to going into season four?
Zach - I think the biggest takeaway is that it blew up twice, and that's a testament to the show and to the creators and to everyone involved. They were able to create something that was super successful within the first couple of years, and then just completely went beyond successful and turned it into a zeitgeist show when it went to Netflix. Our careers have changed because of that. We never take it for granted and we always pinch ourselves. The fact that we get to write this type of music, as I said earlier, the fact that we actually were able to get away with it, it's rare. You don't often get a show where you really feel like it's your voice, that you work with people who are incredible collaborators, who you have a shared vision, and on top of that, is successful. It's a very rare combination of things.
Vinny - Is there a modal shift in switching from one show to another? Say, after you’re done with Cobra Kai?
Leo - We both have our own stuff going on in parallel that we're always working on. I find that actually, it is... I will use the same metaphor Zach used with the guitar, like taking a bath. When you switch projects, it's really easy to slip into a new mindset, because it's a fresh creative space. I think Zach and I are both really lucky in that we are super not pigeonholed in the styles we get hired to do. One thing that I think people reach out to both of us about is that we can do every style. That's not to say Jack of all trades, master of none, which can be the artistic hellscape. We’ve worked hard at being able to compose diverse styles of music.
There are composers who get hired to do the same thing over and over, and I would probably smash my head into a table if that were my existence. Instead, I get to work on Cobra Kai for a few months, and then I get to work on PEN15 for a few months, and they are totally freaking different artistic experiences. That makes both of them better for me because I'm fresh when I sit down.
Zach - By the time we're done with Cobra Kai, I'm ready to never touch a guitar again.
Leo - In every season there’s a peak, and then you really let it all out in the finale. Afterward, you’re exhausted. I think most people would say you leave it all on the mat at the end of the season. There's nothing left.
Zach - You also don't know if there's going to be another season, even with successful shows. We've had projects that we were hired on that just didn't happen. You never know when it's going to end, so you've really got to, what Leo said… You've got to leave it all on the mat, which I feel is appropriate for a karate themed show.