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Russell Emanuel
Born	London, England
Citizenship	English
Occupation(s)	CEO, Extreme Music
Years active	1980 - present
Website	extrememusic.com

Russ Emmanuel is a British-American entreprenuer, songwriter, and producer. He is the CEO of Sticky Fingers/Extreme Music, a Santa Monica-based production music library.

Early life

Emanuel was born in London to Maureen Emanuel and Edward Potok, a Polish survivor of World War II. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in North London, and began to play the guitar when he was a child. As a teenager, Emanuel played in bands and worked as a paperboy, eventually saving enough money to buy an electric guitar. He left high school at 15 and remained in London, where he became involved in the English punk scene of the late 1970s.

Career

After leaving secondary school, in addition to working in the mailroom at the BBC, Emanuel was a session musician, sound engineer, and tape operator. He also played bass in the punk band Class Ties, who released a record on EMI in 1980.

uitar an electric guitar through working a peper route, and 5. He let high school at 15, worked a paper route, and saved enough money to buy an eletric guitar. saving enough money to buy an electric guitar, and left high school at 15.

Still, Emmanuel managed to get a scholarship to two posh London boarding schools. He dropped out at the age of 15, but not before saving enough money working a paper route to buy an electric guitar and teach himself to play it. Emmanuel was born to X and X.

The industry could be facing an overhaul at the hands of none other than Mr. Zimmer, the Academy-award winning composer known for scoring director Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” movies and a laundry list of blockbuster films.

Two years ago, Mr. Zimmer joined with Russell Emanuel, a former punk rock band manager, to create The Bleeding Fingers Custom Music Shop. It is a production company focused primarily on unscripted television and based in a state-of-the-art facility in Santa Monica that includes 21 recording studios. It has produced music for shows ranging from the Discovery Channel’s “Alaskan Bush People” to the History Channel’s “Sons of Liberty.”

Mr. Emanuel, 53, previously upended the library music industry, when he recruited A-list musicians like Snoop Dogg, George Martin and Quincy Jones to work in a genre long considered a backwater for musicians. Now he is hoping to do the same with reality TV.

“I think it’s been pedestrian for a while,” he said. “There’s been a history of people in this area doing it in bedrooms and on laptops. We’re producing in state-of-the art studios, we just don’t spare the horses when it comes to production value.”

. "I first came across it years ago when I worked in the post room of Bruton Music, while I was trying to get my band away with a friend, Warren Bennett, who's now a successful library music composer. Bruton was one of the first production music libraries, and it was all on vinyl back then, and with a few exceptions tended to be full of people knocking out soundalikes of current hits. They'd change the chord structure round a bit and that would be it."

"It was a bit like those old Top Of The Pops albums that used to exist, before K-Tel came along and actually re-released the original recordings," says Dolph.

"Because it seemed to solve all the complicated licensing issues and permissions, it's an area of the industry that grew up very fast, and that was my first experience of it," continues Russell. "While we were working packing records in the post room, Warren's dad, who got us the job, had his own studio and he was writing in his spare time when he wasn't on tour. Brian produced an album with us for Bruton which was soundalikes of Ultravox and The Police and bands of that time, which was a great experience, but looking back it was completely dreadful! Years later, when I hooked up with Dolph in 1986, I was still getting cheques from that. We were doing other things at the time, Dolph was playing drums in Stiff Little Fingers and I was managing artists, but the cheques continued to drop through the door and I thought 'There's something in this, we should keep this going.' So we set up our own MIDI suite and started composing when we weren't on tour, or managing other people.

"We wrote for some music libraries that we were able to get into at the time, eventually writing for a small company called Match Music which we ended up running in the UK. It was a fantastic lesson for us in 'This is how we don't want to do it;' traditional old-school emulations which were not very sexy at all. What we wanted to do was use our commercial record experience and create a music library that had the same high production values as any major label, not only in the music but also in the presentation and marketing." "There was a very good case for making it a lot cooler," agrees Dolph. "We were forever knocking our heads against old-school attitudes and being told that 'This is what the marketplace likes.' But we were seeing a new generation of editors coming into the industry and going to clubs like The End and Home, hearing all these thumping records, and they wanted to know why production music didn't sound like that. So we decided that the best thing to do was to approach commercial artists, some of whom we knew, some of whom we found, and some who were up and coming, and say 'Right. Make some library music.' Everyone was going 'Oooh, I don't know about that,' because those guys had always thought that library music was a second-division way of making music."

"It was a chicken-and-egg situation," explains Russell, "because we needed to create a library that felt cool enough for them, but we needed to get someone to actually produce something for us to get the ball rolling! Fortunately, we're in a position now where all that work's done, we've done the 'heavy lifting' and now composers usually approach us. Sometimes they have material already done that they haven't used, but most of the time we'll commission new material. We're always looking for new composers. Although a lot of them are well known, we also look for specialised or emerging talent as well. Historically, what libraries tended to do was gather a stable of composers, and they would just keep revisiting them, so one guy might have been producing drum & bass, but he might also have been doing a rock album, and then some jazz at the same time. So essentially, that's why the editors were wondering why their production music didn't sound great, because in order for it to be the real deal you should only create the sound that you live and breathe."

Title Stiff Little Fingers: Song by Song Authors Jake Burns, Alan Parker Edition illustrated Publisher Sanctuary, 2003 ISBN 186074513X, 9781860745133 Length 190 pages Subjects Music › Genres & Styles › Punk