Hi Steve - Thanks so much for the kind words...
In regards to the Batman Ride score: Six Flags/WB MovieWorld had paid Warner Bros. Pictures the licensing fee to use that theme long before I came aboard, (I actually replaced a composer they were not happy with), and I was initially hesitant to use it because, well, it's Danny's. But they'd paid for it, and wanted to get their money's worth, so that greatly influenced the sound of the rest of the score, because I wanted it to be cohesive. They sent me the score for 1m1 - the Main Title theme, and I used it pretty much as-is for a short section near the top of the ride. One change I made immediately, though, was to drop 2 of the Horns (it was written for 6). My engineer, Shawn Murphy, had previously helped clean up the original Batman soundtrack which had a lot of issues with it, and the horns were especially unwieldly and problematic because they were just blasting unnaturally/disproportionally. I'm not sure what motivated the 6 horns, as it was still written for 4, with doubles, but I suspect all the ff and fff and ffff markings everywhere else were wreaking havoc with the balance. In general, orchestras of that size record better about a dynamic marking to 2 dynamic markings quieter than you might think, which tends to make it more musical, gives you more dynamic headroom, and records better. We didn't miss the two horns for one second, and had no balance issues otherwise.
My training is a mixture of utterly self-taught methods, tempered later in life by academic schooling. What happened was that as a young boy, I was making up my own training regimen - just guessing, really - and by the time I got to college, the academic teaching helped organize the practical experience I already had. I had the good fortune of going to a high school wtih 4 orchestras, 4 wind ensembles, 4 jazz bands, a swing choir, a bunch of other vocal groups, two pit orchestra groups, a synth ensemble and a recording studio, so I basically wrote something every day for friends or bands to play or sing. I wrote competition pieces for soloists, or quartet/quintet stuff, or big band charts, jazz combo pieces; I wrote for the student musicals, played in rock bands, etc. Truth be told, I ditched a lot of my academic classes to hang out in the arts wing. It was really a lot of trial and error, hands on, every day.But even before that I was doing a lot of composing on my own - I was basically expelled from the conservatory I studied classical piano at for 6 years because I kept changing the music - they sent me to learn jazz, which encouraged improvisation, and thank God for that. There were a ton of other things, too... lots of experiments playing at parties and studying the ways music influenced people consciously and unconsciously.
About John Williams: he is the reason I'm a composer. His melodic sensibilites are remarkable, but you also don't have to dig very deep to hear exactly where he learned his "thing," and that's what I study. There are tons of pieces to mention, but pieces like William Schuman's Symphony No. 3 or Prokovief's Scythian Suite, or Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antartica are just dripping with higher-order manifestations of most of his favorite orchestral sounds. I study film scores for the thing that makes them truly unique: their structure. For the orchestrational study, I listen to repertoire pieces. And of course, not just listen, but absorb, study, transcribe, re-arrange, re-harmonize, etc.
In the end though, I'm just a typical Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrator, with French-School efficiency tendencies - the "less is more" philosophy. I enjoy finding that full, rich sound that somehow looks deceptively simple on paper. "That's IT?" And more importantly, good orchestration is just part of the deal - I prefer to focus on what I'm doing harmonically and melodically. Without those, it's just a lot of forgettable, pretty noise.
_Mike
