Photograph by George Sakkestad
Christy Coobatis shows a double bass to Robert Brooks, a student in his "Fundamentals of Music" class at Mission College in Santa Clara.
Sitting in his studio filled with synthesizers, recording equipment, sound mixers, computers and speakers, Christy Coobatis flips a few switches, and the room comes alive with electronically generated sound and multi-colored digital displays.
Looking more like the cockpit of an airplane than a room tucked inside a weathered garage, his small Los Gatos home recording studio contains the expensive, extensive equipment of a professional in the music and entertainment industry.
"A studio like this is usually run by four people: a musician, composer, recording engineer and technician. I've got a sea of manuals that I have to study constantly to get all these instruments to speak together," explains Coobatis, who is equally comfortable with the decidedly low-tech experience of walking through the woods playing simple, organic instruments, such as his three-stringed, wooden strumstick.
Swiveling in his seat, he types on a laptop computer plugged into synthesizers and other "banks of instruments" that can create musical sounds from a peeping piccolo to a resounding symphony and special effects from gunshots to quavery choir singers. One of his most recent projects is creating the soundtrack for Ground Rules, a suspense/action movie by Bottom Line Studios of Los Gatos.
"It's kind of like being an interior designer--coming up with what's appropriate. It all has to do with taste; any musician can just sit down and play instruments," Coobatis says of the intuitive task of music composition. When he watches scenes from an unfinished movie on his overhead TV, his fingers dance along the keyboard and among the switches and controls on his other studio equipment.
"It's kind of hard to do a soundtrack with organic [acoustic] instruments because people don't pay attention. So you have to come up with all this sensationalism with synthesizers and orchestras," he says, adding that one of the reasons he pursued a master's degree in music composition was to learn how to write for a whole orchestra. He completed the degree in 1994.
"If you can't play an instrument, it's not going to do it for you. I try to stay away from sounds that play themselves--that's kind of like having a motorized pen. I have to think like a violinist or a trumpet player," he says, explaining how he sometimes closes his eyes and imagines his lips on an instrument's mouthpiece or his hands on its strings or keys.
"Christy's great to work with. He's very creative, and he thinks real quick," says Pat Donahue of Bottom Line Studios, who with his son, Sean, is working with Coobatis to finish Ground Rules. "He looks at a scene and kind of gets a feeling for it. He sits there and says, 'How about this?' and then he does it."
And Coobatis, 41, knows what he's doing.
A composer of background and theme music for more movies and commercials than he can recall, Coobatis rubs elbows with music industry celebrities as a producer and fellow musician.
He holds four academic degrees and has taught at several colleges and universities, including current positions as music department chair and instructor at Santa Clara's Mission College. He is also on staff at West Valley College in Saratoga, where he is involved in developing a multimedia music program and will be teaching an electronic music class next semester.
"I'm one of the lucky ones to be able to teach what I do, rather than what I know only," he says with a smile. "I don't want to end up being a lonely composer, because I'm such a 'people person.' Teaching is really part of my being an extrovert."
Although busy fixing up a garage-turned-studio in his home backdropped by the Santa Cruz Mountains, Coobatis finds time for hobbies, too, including surfing ("the only sport with its own music!" he says), swimming, vegetarian cooking and digging into genealogy and history. He plays an ever-growing melange of instruments--strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion--and can create a melody with just about any instrument he picks up.
The first instrument the Dearborn, Mich., native ever placed his hands upon was a drum. At age 4 or 5, Coobatis says, his mother "volunteered" him to play the bongos in a dance class. Using the rhythm he had already discovered from banging on pots and pans with his father and brother, Coobatis drummed out the beat for "Downtown Strutters' Ball."
"I was forced against my will to dance and cried the whole time," Coobatis recalls, adding that his mother always encouraged him to be active in numerous activities, including Cub Scouts, church choir, and dance and gymnastics classes. The common thread was that they all involved performance in one way or another.
Juggling so many different activities at a young age was not always easy for Coobatis, but he says as an adult he is thankful to his mother because he learned how to stay focused and follow through on many levels.
Protesting over a performance was actually an uncommon occurrence for the young Coobatis; he says he has always been outgoing and comes from "a long line of extroverts." These extroverts also happened to be very musically inclined.
At family gatherings, he recalls, there was always music in the house, everyone played some instrument and everyone sang. He and the other youngsters would join in the music and often put on skits and plays as well.
Coobatis was playing guitar in his first band by the age of 8 and continued to jam with friends throughout his youth. When he was 18, he passed an audition to play bass with Stevie Wonder's band but decided to stay in Michigan and pursue his education first.
Ironically, the bachelor's degree he earned in the late 1970s from Wayne State University at Detroit was in psychology. He says that course of study helped him to think logically and discriminatingly, which he says is important to him as a composer.
He says he also gained further insight into how and why people behave and feel as they do--also important for a composer who may need to create the right background music to underscore the thoughts of a character in a movie.
Following some post-baccalaureate work in physiological psychology, also at Wayne State, Coobatis moved to California, where he earned two more bachelor's degrees in the early 1980s in interdisciplinary studies--to learn how all the arts related to one another--and composition/classical guitar.
While at UC-Irvine, which he calls a "hotbed for the arts," Coobatis composed and played music for some of the university's dance programs and began making connections in the music and entertainment industry that would carry him far.
His first break came soon after he finished his third bachelor's degree, when a piece he composed was used in For Love and Honor, an NBC Movie of the Week. One of his most memorable endeavors in the mid-1980s was writing both the music and lyrics for "I Need You to Be So Close," part of the Thorn-EMI film They're Playing With Fire.
This earned Coobatis enough recognition to be considered for an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. Although he did not become one of the final five nominees, Coobatis says: "Seeing my name on the same sheet of paper as Phil Collins, Prince and the Eagles was one of the most exciting moments of my life."
Although he hasn't met these celebrities, Coobatis has worked with many others: sometimes as a composer, producer or technical adviser, sometimes simply as someone to jam with. Among his compeers, past and present, are Oingo Boingo drummer Johnny "Vatos" Hernandez, Level 42 guitarist Allan Holdsworth, Eagles bassist and guitarist Randy Miesner, country singers Tanya Tucker and Freddie Fender, jazz artist Don Cherry and sounds effects specialist Frank Seraphine.
Coobatis credits his connections, networking efforts and perseverance with helping him break into the industry. "Being able to sit there and take insults and criticism from people, and still stay together." He also emphasizes the importance of following up with phone calls and visits, being on time, meeting deadlines and not making excuses.
Following that formula over the years has helped Coobatis fill many pages' worth of résumé material. Included among his musical credits are the films Until Death, While We Lay Sleeping and Wager of Love; TV series Matlock, Jessie and GLOW; and more than a dozen commercial advertisements, including Canon BubbleJet Printers, General Motors and Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers 3 game.
Dennis Anderson, assistant professor of music at Cal-State Fullerton--where Coobatis received his master's degree--worked and performed with Coobatis on several projects and calls him "terribly innovative."
One of Anderson's favorite collaborations with Coobatis involved the Ready-Made Improvisational Orchestra, a small ensemble of composers and performers who did gigs together and provided music for several modern dance companies in Southern California.
"As a musician and composer, Christy is a very well-adapted and talented person. He incorporates many musical styles into his own performances and gives his own interpretations. And he's got great technique as a guitarist. You never even think about the enormous event that's happening when he's playing," adds Anderson, also a composer.
On the side, Coobatis still finds time to play live gigs in Southern California on a regular basis and supply music for performance art at museums and art galleries. One of his favorite special projects was an Anaheim Auto Show in the 1980s, for which he created musical motifs to match the different personalities of robots "hosting" the show.
He currently sings and plays solo guitar at Borders Books in Milpitas and is looking into other local performances as well--when he's not back in his secluded studio, of course, pulling music from the air to breathe life into other productions.
"Having this type of life seems more glamourous than it is. It takes total involvement. Whether you're working or relaxing, you have to assemble communications into some logical order," he says.
"[Music] is a give and take. You create a relationship with the listener, but you have to allow them space."
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 21, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved