Hi Jerry,
thanks for sharing this episode of Gumby. I was born in 1985 and I didn't know this series at all, as far as I remember.
I enjoyed both the episode and your soundtrack, I really enjoyed the composition. I can only imagine how difficult it was to produce orchestral music with the available technology back then. I watched an episode from the previous series also, because I wanted to hear the original orchestral scores. I can understand that the audience preferred the real orchestra, I also prefer real orchestral soundtracks even compared to latest MIDI mock-ups (mine included).
William, you and Jerry are excellent composers, people like you pioneered MIDI orchestration and I sincerely admire that. Today we have really great plug-ins, that's because of decades of research, and composers demanding for better samples all the time played a huge role in such research. I enjoy listening to first MIDI attempts and I wouldn't mind listening to yours......whenever you should wish to share them. π
Jerry, would you mind sharing some details about the process, please? For example you said you had to match the guitar playing by sight........how did it work? Nowadays we import videos in our DAWs, did you have the footage playing on a separate screen while you were recording guitars on a tape multitrack? Or was it a digital multitrack recorder?
Francesco
I watched video from TV, there were no DAWS back then. I would use a metronome to choose a tempo, and use a little software program I had written for me to convert SMPTE time into measures, beats and clocks, and calculate hit points from that information. Much easier to do today with DAWs, no doubt. I recorded the sequence to a 1/4" 2 track, SMPTE locked (to video machine) Fostex tape recorder. Back then, tape noise was always a problem, so I had Dolby S, the best noise reduction at the time to deal with that.