EDITORIAL
INTERVIEW
Composer Conversations: Simon Franglen’s journey from synth programmer to scoring Avatar
Simon Franglen's route into film scoring began behind the desk, not in front of an orchestra.
Long before he became the composer entrusted with carrying the Avatar franchise forward, he was a synth programmer scrambling between sessions in 1980s London — patching a Synclavier for Trevor Horn one week, mocking up cues for James Horner the next. In 2026, his instinct remains the same as those early sessions: find the emotion underneath the picture, then get out of its way.
In this episode of Composer Conversations, Franglen sits down with Paul to trace that journey - from Synclavier programmer to the composer that helped shape the sound of Avatar's sequels, and to talk about how virtual libraries changed the way he builds a demo.
Composer Conversations | Simon Franglen
48:14
"James Horner's agent phones me up and says, would you go and meet James? He has a film, they have no money,"
Franglen recalls getting the call for Titanic. "The budget was astonishing, eye-wateringly low." The setup on the scoring stage tells its own story: three keyboard rigs, Ian Underwood on one side, Franglen on the other, James Horner in the middle, and a small gap where a deck chair sat, James Cameron's seat, where he'd drop in periodically to listen to a cue. Two-thirds of the score was built there, on synths, because there wasn't the budget for much else. The choral sound underpinning the film's most famous cues was layered from a Synclavier patch, E4 samples, a JV-2080, a handful of Roland patches and an M1.
Hymn to the Sea - Titanic (music from the motion picture) | James Horner
06:27
That instinct for building a sound out of whatever raw material is on hand followed Franglen all the way to Pandora — and it's central to how he approached Avatar: Fire and Ash. Rather than lean on the same organic, tribal percussion established for the Na'vi, Franglen made a deliberate choice to score the Ash people electronically. "I would be using more organic sounds for the Na'vi... but for the Ash, it's electronic drums, much more of an edge," he explains.
“Suddenly I was able to use pure, really overt synthetic textures in a way that I couldn't before”
The score's texture becomes a piece of world-building — you can hear a character's relationship to Pandora before you know anything else about them.
The clearest example is the instrument Franglen settled on for the Ash theme itself. Electric guitar didn't work, "it just felt earthy", until he remembered the morin khuur, a Mongolian string instrument he'd recorded years earlier, which he layered with a touch of electric cello for bite. "That texture became the Ash," he says. "That was the thing that Jim immediately went, 'That's it.'
Avatar: Fire and Ash | The Score
03:14
It's a reminder that some of film scoring's most iconic sounds started as compromises, and that with Cameron, there's room for the score to keep evolving even after a cue is locked. As Franglen puts it, the job is "rewriting, almost, rather than writing."
Discover the full story in episode two of Composer Conversations.
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