Scoring Apple TV+’s ‘The Studio’

Barcelona, Spain (January 5, 2026)—When it came time to send an episode of The Studio for Emmy Awards consideration, composer Antonio Sanchez chose the season’s most complex work, episode 4, titled “The Missing Reel.” It earned him one of the show’s 23 nominations for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Original Dramatic Score).

From the moment he saw the movie Amadeus as a young boy, composing was on Sanchez’s mind. After first studying at the National Conservatory in Mexico City in the early 1990s, he went on to graduate from Berklee College of Music in 1997, and soon after carved out a notable career in drums and recording. In 2007, he began writing for his own records. Migration was the first of eight, through 2022’s Shift (Bad Hombre, Vol. II).

However, it was while playing with Pat Metheny in 2005 that a chance encounter with Alejandro G. Inarritu turned into ongoing correspondence, and when the filmmaker asked him to score his Academy Award-winning Birdman, it put Sanchez on the map as a composer.

Hailed as unique and innovative, the Birdman score was dominated by Sanchez’s improvisational jazz solo drumming, and The Studio creator/producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg loved it. From the inception of their Apple TV+ show, they began using Sanchez’s score as the temp. In fact, Sanchez says, they originally thought about just licensing the score to use in their series, but ultimately realized hiring Sanchez would be better.

The Studio allowed Sanchez to go beyond Birdman, and “The Missing Reel” offered the composer an opportunity to display his range to the public at large. “I’ve been carrying this ‘drum thing’ with me this whole time,” Sanchez says, “so I wanted to submit an episode that has so much more than just drums, because I wanted them to notice that I can also do all these other things that I haven’t been able to do under other circumstances.”

From the get-go, “The Missing Reel” was different. They told Sanchez the episode would be shot differently, and they wanted the music to be different, explaining it was a film noir episode. When they sent him the temp music, it was Jerry Goldsmith with a full orchestra.

Music editor Lorena Perez Batista superimposed Sanchez’s drums over the Goldsmith music, and it gave the composer a starting point. He was working from his home in Barcelona, without access to an orchestra, but the producers told him to do his own version, directing him to score the second half and to leave the beginning portion naked.

“I started listening to the elements that I thought they liked from the temp, which was a lot of strings, brass, keyboards and harp, because it was a mystery score,” he explains. “Then I started going through all my Native Instruments libraries. I have an amazing cello from Spitfire, but I had all the drums recorded already. I improvise the drums, but I do it all to a click, so the drums give me kind of the form, the blueprint, for what I’m gonna put on top of that.”

With the structure in place, he started filling in with actual musical notes. He typically begins with the bass line, experimenting with different chords, harmony, melody and motifs. “I came up with two things,” he says. “It was like a big band (motif) with a lot of brass and a lot of hits and piano and bass, acoustic bass. For bass, I used Trillian. I used Omnisphere, too, for weird sounds. Native Instruments has a great variety of libraries for brass, and for piano, I use (Synthogy) Ivory. Velvet has a great piano sound for Fender Rhodes, and then I have a few different libraries of things like Afro-Cuban instruments, and libraries of Indian instruments, and I have a very cool Hans Zimmer drum library with orchestral drums that sound huge.

“One thing that I like doing is I do one drum pass, and then I start doubling and tripling what I did with another pass of drums,” he continues. “Then I will add some extra Hans Zimmer drums on top of that. Then it starts sounding like a monstrous kit—glorious, huge and thick. Then on top of that, of course, I put all the other instruments, and when you have a very primal instrument, which in this case, would be the drums, and you put a lot of very good-sounding libraries on top of that, I think there’s a lot more of a chance for it to sound real and for it to sound authentic, because you have the real sound and the feel of the drums.”

After hearing what Sanchez gave them for the second half of the episode, the producers decided that the first half sounded too naked, so they asked him to go back and fill in that space.

“The episode starts with Seth Rogen watching the dailies from the movie that they’re making that Olivia Wilde is directing,” Sanchez says. “They wanted something very swingy, very casual, just kind of groovy. I recorded that, and then I put the same melodies and the same motifs from the rest of the episode in the blues. Because it’s a very swingy blues, you don’t even notice that it is exactly the same melody that you’ll hear in the rest of the episode. That’s why it’s so much fun to find the thing that defines the episode, which is maybe you just coming up with two or three different little melodies, and then you can do magic with those.”

Aside from his Yamaha drum set, Sanchez says the one thing he couldn’t live without in his process is Pro Tools. “I can do a lot of things faster with it,” he says simply. “I knew I had to have a very good template on Pro Tools right off the bat, so I created a template especially for the series. When I open it, I have maybe 16 tracks for my drums. I have four full drum sets, like one under the other for overdubs. One has more reverb, one has more compression, one is super raw, and one is perfectly tuned. So then when I do overdubs, it’s very easy. Under that, I have all my electronic percussion, then under that, I have all my arpeggiators. Under that, I have all my brasses, all my basses, all my keyboards, and then you open the session and you’re ready to go. That allows for your workflow to actually become a workflow and not take forever trying to find sounds. That’s super important.”

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The biggest challenge for Sanchez inevitably turns out to be his packed schedule. Unlike many composers, he’s a full-time player, and his demands as a musician are immense. When he’s not composing, he’s playing—and even when he is playing, he’s composing. This particular episode took two weeks.

“I would be on tour for a couple of weeks, and then I would come back and I maybe had a week to work,” he says. “We were working on this specific episode, and it was like, okay, I really need to work like 15-, 16-hour days. I would take my laptop with me in case we needed revisions. My laptop is basically a mirror of my desktop, I have the same library, same everything, so I can open the session on the road and then mess around, edit and do what I need to do. I just bring a three-octave, little MIDI keyboard, and I can do magic on the road.”

As soon as he’s sent a piece in, the assignment for the next has already come. Sometimes he’s still working on the notes from the previous episode, but that’s when he says a great music editor is important; he stresses that he is fortunate to have Batista.

“It’s been quite a ride,” he says. “When I think back on my life in Mexico, where I used to dream of playing with my heroes, recording albums and making a living making creative and inspiring music, it all seemed so far away. I feel so privileged to have been able to fulfill so many of my dreams and to keep finding new challenges and opportunities within this crazy life I’ve chosen.”