Justin Krol and Quinn Scharber are Milwaukee-based composers and business partners who have written music for film, TV, and high-profile advertisements, all of which they do with the help of DISCO.
Today, their score for the parody film “The People’s Joker,” aka director Vera Drew’s “queer coming-of-age” reimagining of the Batman villain’s backstory, is out on all streaming platforms.
“For a feature-length film, we’ll have a DISCO playlist that is dedicated to each cue,” Justin outlines. “I can very easily grab the stems. With “The People’s Joker,” I don’t even know how many playlists we had.”
“‘The People’s Joker’ was all back and forth via DISCO,” Quinn confirms. “DISCO just streamlines everything, to be honest… It keeps things organized for people that are not too detail-oriented like myself.”
You might have also heard the duo’s work on multiple seasons of the PBS documentary series “Wisconsin Foodie”, Questlove’s Academy Award–winning documentary “Summer of Soul”, and Super Bowl ads for Busch Light, which featured musical cameos from Kenny G and Sarah McLachlan.
Early Adopters Of DISCO — And Proud Of It
Quinn and Justin have been using DISCO for “years and years — before there was a mobile app,” Justin says, noting how he and Quinn used to send out music as clunky email attachments. “It was one of those things where at the time the couple of music houses we were working with — it was instantaneous. They all just started using DISCO.”
Quinn adds, “I will say DISCO came at the perfect time. Right before that, Justin and I were like, ‘We need to get a web person to host all of our tracks and figure out ways to make a playlist. Right after that was like, ‘Oh, we can just use DISCO.’”
Justin also reflects on how music houses used to request playlist submissions pre-DISCO. “Man, what a bad process that was. It was so sloppy. Sometimes you’d send them the wrong version, or you’d send a WAV file by accident…”
“It just seems like a no-brainer now to have a service like DISCO,” Quinn concludes. “I always have a DISCO screen open”
DISCO is such an integral part of Justin and Quinn’s day to day, they always have the platform open on their work computers along with Logic Pro. “I think the only thing we’re on more so than Logic Pro is probably DISCO,” Justin says. “I always have a DISCO screen open. I always have the app on my phone. Because we get prompted for playlists so much that we’re just always on there firing off playlists.”
Linking To DISCO Catalogs On Their Website
One of the DISCO features Justin and Quinn are most fond of is Catalogs, which lets them present their licensing works (“featuring hundreds of customizable tracks”), and is linked from their personal website. “When DISCO started to have the Catalog option, that was a big thing for us to have a public-facing catalog. We were early adopters for that feature as well,’ Justin says, adding that the duo also are big users of DISCO’s Nesting feature, which allows you to group track versions and keep things organized.
“We just use all of it,” Justin adds. “We’re on DISCO all day long. We have hundreds and hundreds of tracks on there. Even beyond music: At this point, it’s just kind of become an FTP server. We’ll throw PDFs on there, we’ll throw ZIPs on there. We’ll throw images on there to send to people. Basically, any time that we need to share any files, we just use DISCO for everything.”
