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What's your job? Mark Domitric, jingle maker

mark domitric, jingle maker

Chances are you’ve had a Mark Domitric’s original stuck in your head. You know, one of those infectious television commercial jingles that seem to run on an endless loop, played over and over while you beg your brain to make it stop.

Domitric doesn’t mind, after all that’s how the 33-year-old music producer at Toronto-based music house Grayson Matthews makes his living – the more infectious, the happier the client.

In a lot of ways, he lives a musician’s dream. Spending his days and the occasional weekend, noodling on instruments in his personal writing room at Grayson Matthews, helping to create songs like the pseudo Harlem Shake club banger for Tim Horton’s Chill to Win commercial and CBC’s World Cup intro and outro music. When he’s not writing, he’s meeting with the other artists in the Grayson Matthews collective to talk shop over ping-pong.

Although he’s only been at Grayson Matthews for a couple months, Domitric’s dream job is a derivative of his teenaged rock star aspirations, a way to make a good living playing music every day.

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We chatted with him to see what makes his job so stellar.

How’d you get into producing?

When I was 16, I decided I wanted a career in the music industry. I started out with a band and got into the Toronto music scene. I ended up working with Saukrates, Choclair and Drake, playing guitar both live and in the studio and then got into producing and writing for them shortly after. That was my total immersion in music where the goal is to write songs that would end up on the radio and be sold in record stores. Before I knew it I ended up working as floor director at City TV's Breakfast Television Toronto and I met a few people who turned me on to this application of music.

So that was the start to jingle making?

Every now and then a request for music for a TV show or commercial would come up and I always thought that was a really fun aside for me because the demands were all across the board. One day you'd be doing a classical piece a scoring piece for a TV show, the next they’d be asking for a big hip hop club banger or heavy rock song for a commercial spot. The jobs kept coming to the point where I had a reel and I got thinking I could make a go at this and make it my every day.

Could you shed some light into the anatomy of a 'hit'?

I think it comes down to recognizing something special when you stumble upon it. I rely heavily on the creative collective here and that’s why co-writing is so powerful. We have about a dozen passionate songwriting producers here, across many genres and we’re constantly bouncing ideas off each other. My greatest writing tool is being able to go down the hall and talk to my fellow writers about how to start or finish once I’ve gotten so deep into a piece that I start to lose objectivity. The benchmark is great music that I myself would want to buy. Once we’ve written or listened to something like that together we then go about fitting it to picture to enhance and underscore the product, brand or TV show/film that we’re working on.

What’s your role in creating the song?

Sometimes I start off with a guitar lick, add some drums and then start passing around the composition to see who can add some magic to it in the form of vocals, artful edits or piano…. who knows how it gets done at the end of the day? It just needs to be great and there seems to be a different route to that end every time we write.

It is must be surreal hearing your stuff on TV. Do you recognize it instantly?

It always catches me surprise. You don’t notice until after the first bar but when you do you feel great that something you worked on, something that came out of your brain is out there. Sometimes you work on it so much, you aren’t even sure if it was good and then you hear it in the real world and it’s just so satisfying.

How annoying is hearing the jingles on repeat while you work?

We do a wide range of stuff from TV to film. When it comes to the ad stuff, you’re concentrating a lot of great stuff into 30 seconds – it’s all bells and whistles, no fat or filler. It doesn’t drive me nuts. And there’s a quick turnaround so you’re probably only living with it for a week at the most.

How’s the pay?

My salary certainly wouldn't impress an investment banker but I feel like the luckiest kid in school being paid for making great music professionally. There's an infinite amount of companies out there and an infinite amount of product in terms of shows, movies and ads and there's a budget for it still to this day – thank god. I'm not sure about the regular music industry, I think there is a much smaller amount of people making money there but it feels good to be in an industry that's still thriving.

One last thing, weirdest request from a client?

An opening theme title the other day was requested and they wanted something in the vein of punk rock and James Bond, which I thought was a really wild marriage. You can imagine the loss of B vitamins I felt stressing out trying to figure out how to stick those together. That’s why I say the job is the hardest thing I've ever done and the best I’ve ever had. Every time you sit down to write a song it feels like the first time, like you've never done it before. You go through so much mental and emotionally anguish in the creative process because you really care how good it is. That’s the common thread here. We're not just making cookie cutter stuff for commercials; we're making real music that works in commercials.