Meet Silke Matzpohl

Today we’d like to introduce you to Silke Matzpohl.

Music is a gift that will always be there for me and I am very thankful for that gift

Hi Silke, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I fell into film music by accident. I first started playing piano when I was five years old, and when I was thirteen I received a scholarship to study piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich. But after graduating, I stopped playing the piano. I just couldn’t practice 10 hours every day anymore. Since I had good technical skills, I decided to become a sound engineer and work in television. I landed a job at the German public TV station ARD. There, I met the head of the film music department, who was looking for composers. From that moment on, I had the feeling that I could combine my technical skills and my musical skills,  would come together. I knew, “This is for me.”

In 2008, I met the film composer Chris Young in Los Angeles, and he made me an offer to move to the U.S. and work for him. Besides working for Chris, I also became an accompanist for the Ballet, Modern Dance, and Contemporary Dance programs at the University of Southern California (USC), as well as the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA), a private college conservatory for the performing arts.

I began studying the best movie trailer tracks, and artists like Junkie XL, Generdyn etc., and started creating my own trailer sounds.

My sounds were discovered by trailer editors, and you can hear them in trailers for “Mortal Engines,” “Cats”, “The Invisible Man”, “Fast and Furious 8”, “Candyman”, and others.

Besides my composing work, I became a mom. My daughter was born in 2019. I am very thankful for this gift.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It wasn’t easy starting out, and I did lose jobs at first from people who backgrounds and perspectives were different from my own. But I’m strong, and I didn’t give up.

In L.A., the studios mostly reach out to just a handful of composers they’ve already worked with. I wasn’t part of that group, and I didn’t want to spend years as an assistant composer. I felt that the trailer industry was easier to break into, and that’s what I focused on.

The lesson I learned: Be patient, and trust that the universe will bring the right things at the right time.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I do all sounds from scratch. When I started out, I used sound libraries, but that bored me after a while, because everyone uses them. Now I am creating epic sounds from scratch. 

I go around the house and try to catch wild sounds in the kitchen or the living room or the yard. I just hit stuff. Then going through the recordings, I find one sound I stick with and do something with it. Adding delays, compression, reverbs, pitching, etc. I try to find a raw sample that has a potential and do some processing with it. 

Sometimes I have a vague idea of what I want, sometimes I have no idea, and sometimes I follow the editor’s idea. Mostly, it’s trial and error.

Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
When I was ten years old, I played Beethoven’s “Waldstein Sonata” in a piano competition. Suddenly, although I had it memorized, I forgot what I had to play next and stopped in the middle of the piece. I looked right at the audience, smiled, and started playing something that I just felt like playing. 

Although I “failed,” I won first prize!

I learned that failure is part of success.

Contact Info:

• Email: silke@silkematzpohl.com
• Website: www.silkematzpohl.com