Bringing Sound to Life: How The Futz Butler’s SONAL is Changing Music Briefing for Good
For too long, briefing music and sound has been an industry-wide headache – rife with miscommunication, endless revisions, and a reliance on reference tracks that limit creativity. But what if there was a way to streamline the process, cut through the subjectivity, and arrive at a bespoke soundtrack that resonates? Enter SONAL, a revolutionary new methodology from London-based music and sound house, The Futz Butler.
Founded by Paul Sumpter, The Futz Butler has spent two decades crafting soundtracks for top-tier brands, filmmakers, and agencies. But with every project came the same challenge – clients struggled to articulate their vision, resulting in drawn-out feedback loops and escalating costs. SONAL changes this by acting as a "creative translation service," helping teams unlock their true sonic intent through a seamless, intuitive framework.
Tested over an 18-month beta phase, SONAL has already delivered staggering results, reducing project timelines by nearly three weeks and increasing approval rates at version one or two by 78%. More than just a tool, SONAL rethinks how music is briefed, turning a historically frustrating process into an engaging, collaborative experience.
LBB’s Zoe Antonov sat down with Paul Sumpter to find out more about SONAL’s development, the pitfalls of traditional briefing, and how this innovation is reshaping the way brands and creatives think about music.
LBB> What inspired the creation of SONAL? Was there a particular moment or challenge that made you realize a new briefing methodology was necessary?
Paul> There wasn’t one specific moment or incident. It’s been more of a ‘death by a thousand cuts’!
For some unknown reason, the industry has accepted that to get great music for your project, it has to be a slog. Over 20 years (and some 2500 briefs later), I've seen first-hand the challenges filmmakers, creatives and brand teams have had to endure just to get something vaguely resembling the soundtrack they want.
And the reason for this was simple, and yet no-one was doing anything about it): briefing is broken.
I’d seen it happen over and over again – clients chasing original, standout music, only to get bogged down in a frustrating, drawn-out process. And more often than not, it was all due to how the things were communicated both at the beginning and during development.
I could see there was a better way for clients to get a truly standout bespoke soundtrack – one that eliminates endless rounds of revisions, gets stakeholders fully on board, and delivers all that in half the time and budget.
That’s why I built SONAL. Not just to fix the process, but to make briefing actually work for our clients. It was about recognising that briefing was as important as the production in many ways.
Without really getting inside the heads of the people you’re collaborating with, you’re being creative in a vacuum, unsure as to whether or not they’ll feel authentically represented by the work, or whether it delivers on what’s actually meaningfully important for them.
That’s what SONAL does.
I firmly believe it should be easier for good people to make awesome work. So I made this goal my absolute focus, one project at a time.
LBB> Can you walk us through the development process of SONAL? How did the idea evolve from concept to a fully functioning framework?
Paul> After doing this as long as I have, you get a good sense of what will set you up to be productive and plain-sailing, and what is going to send you down a dead end.
When I first began to think about how I could structure the briefing process to harness the good things and weed out the stuff that derails projects, at the start it was very instinctive. It began as a series of the questions I knew helped me understand my client best and get inside their head. It soon became clear to me that packaging this up in a way that felt visually engaging and intuitive as the recipient would further help make the process feel even smoother, more inspiring and collaborative.
After doing some initial wireframing, UX, and journey mapping, we commissioned Berlin-based digital developers Forward Creative, to build the app. The process took nearly a year of development and milestones, but the guys there have been great and have done a fantastic job. Kayvan (our head of strategy) has invaluable experience in web-based development from his time previously working with Spotify and was crucial in being a conduit between the functionality and creative I was looking for and the app development itself.
LBB> You mention that traditional briefing methods hinder creativity. What are some common pitfalls you've seen in the industry, and how does SONAL address them?
Paul> Most briefs rely too heavily on reference tracks. Usually used as a shorthand substitute for being able to accurately get across an idea or ballpark in someone’s mind. Unfortunately, these are often as much a red herring as they are useful. Not only do they typically cap creativity by representing more of an end goal – as opposed to starting jumping off point – but the over emphasis on reference tracks nearly always leads to work that’s derivative. It rarely gets to the root of what it is that brands, creatives and filmmakers are really trying to achieve and communicate to their audience.
Likewise, most briefs tend to come from one party or person involved on a project. As such, they are unknowingly written through a specific lens in terms of an agenda.
Let’s address the elephant in the room – everyone on a project has their own unique hopes and aspirations for it, and if we don’t recognise that they’re all valid, be they creative, strategic, or financial, we end up with issues, polarised feedback, and ego-driven decisions.
We’ve all been there.
By opening up a way for everyone to be heard at the outset, without the briefing taking an eternity, we align everyone early, bypassing friction and impasses later on in the project. This means stuff just gets signed off sooner, which saves budget. It’s a no-brainer really, if you just care enough.
LBB> How does the SONAL app work in practice? Can you describe the experience from a client’s perspective?
Paul> Absolutely. SONAL is not just a tool – it’s a rethinking of how music and sound is briefed. Traditionally, audio decisions are based on subjective language, scattered references, and multiple rounds of revisions. SONAL changes that.
At its core, it’s a collaborative, 40-minute workshop designed to extract the most unignorable way to tell your story through sound, all while saving you time, budget, and creative energy.
From a client’s perspective, the process is seamless. We can offer SONAL in person, or run it remotely. Once a session is booked, clients receive a calendar invite with a video call link. There’s no software to install – just log in on your computer, scan a QR code with your phone, and you’re in. Your phone becomes an intuitive input device while we guide the discussion.
What’s different about SONAL is how it captures insights. Some elements of the brief are discussed verbally, while others are explored using interactive visual tools and anonymous responses – ensuring every voice is heard without groupthink.
We often kick things off with a quick calibration exercise – five minutes to unlock how the team naturally hears and interprets music. No right or wrong answers, just insight. And suddenly, describing sound isn’t some mystical, impossible task. It’s instinctive.
Instead of fixating on musical genres or instruments, we focus on what the soundtrack must do, how it should serve the story. SONAL refines these ideas through simple, tactile sliders, aligning all stakeholders early and eliminating costly back-and-forth later.
By the end, everything is distilled into a clear ‘Statement of Intent and Tonality Map’ – a short summary that allows our clients the assurance we’ve understood their vision accurately before we move forward. This also becomes the blueprint for what they can hold us to account to deliver against.
The result? A creative process that’s faster, sharper, and more effective. Clients like ITV, adidas, and Meta have seen the difference – where sign-off used to take five or six versions, with SONAL, they’re often ready by version one or two.
LBB> During the 18-month beta phase, what were some of the biggest lessons you learned? Did anything unexpected arise that shaped the final version of SONAL?
Paul> The thing that we learnt is that clients actually enjoyed the briefing process. It became engaging and, dare I say, even fun (clients’ words, not mine)! A place where ideas and creativity were welcomed, knowing we’re all pulling towards the same objective.
Before SONAL, they would say they felt a lack of confidence as to being able to convey the idea they had in mind. Or that the composers they’d commissioned just didn’t get them. Commissioning a bespoke soundtrack felt like a gamble.
The sliders we use have also been a massive hit. It's a really simple idea – and it’s all about dialling things in specifically to whoever we’re working with. One client’s fast and impactful is another’s frantic and over the top. This simple device removes the subjectivity to a good degree and allows us to really understand each participant's nuances, so we can be super creative on their behalf.
LBB> The data shows SONAL significantly reduces revisions and approval times. Can you share a success story where it made a real impact for a client?
Paul> We’ve recently partnered with META, working with a range of brands to help them deliver campaigns in new exciting ways. Of the half dozen clients we collaborated with in the last two quarters of 2024, every single project got signed off at version one or two – some without any feedback rounds at all.
Similarly, in an engaging project for Elvie last year, SONAL helped keep the project on rails by making sure we were true to the goal we’d all set out to achieve, when it would’ve been easy to disappear off at tangents.
LBB> How does SONAL foster deeper creative collaboration? What kind of feedback have you received from agencies and filmmakers who have used it?
Paul> One of the key tenets of SONAL is that we're not trying to narrowly pin down what the music has to sound like in an executional way. Instead we focus on what the music should do, how it should make the audience feel.
By establishing what success looks like early on and defining what we're all setting out to do from the get go, it allows a safe space for all voices on a project to actually bring their unique perspective and ideas to the table and be genuinely collaborative without fear or groupthink. Knowing that we're all pulling towards the same goal breeds more interesting, unexpected ways of achieving the desired outcome.
Likewise the simple, human-led approach inherent in SONAL gives clients the green light to just be themselves and express their ideas in whichever way they find most natural - free of the pressure of feeling they have to use some sort of musical jargon for the musicians to be able to understand them.
Most clients we work with are visual thinkers. When it comes to communicating an idea or story, most think primarily in visual languages – colour, cinematography, typography, motion, etc. Very few natively think about storytelling or brand building through the abstract, slightly ephemeral medium of sound.
I knew there had to be a better way – one that didn’t involve clients settling for ‘good enough’ because no one worked hard enough to understand what they really wanted. That’s where SONAL steps in. It’s specifically designed to be an ‘ideas-to-audio’ translation tool.
We don’t believe a client should have to speak music to get their ambitions across, yet this is what our clients repeatedly tell us other companies make them feel like they have to do.
We encourage our clients to speak to us in their own words, not try and use the cloudy world of metaphorical musical jargon. We also employ some groundbreaking tools that surface the subconscious tools people have and use everyday to decode sound, so they can actively use them. Lots of clients find this part super liberating.
LBB> Looking ahead, what’s next for SONAL? Do you see potential for it to evolve beyond its current application?
Paul> The initial response has been pretty astonishing. A lot of people seem to be fairly staggered that something like this hasn’t been done before, which I take to be a very encouraging sign. The things we use the most are the things that seem obvious once you see them. It’s also a source of mild frustration, because I didn’t think to do it sooner!
Incidentally, there have been a number of other professions who experience issues when collaborating with paying clients who’ve expressed a strong interest in using SONAL in their respective lines of work. Editors, film makers, digital and graphic designers, even architects and hairdressers have said a tool like SONAL would be invaluable in helping them do their jobs better. So I guess we’ll see!
