202,897 users have contributed to 43,311 threads and 259,534 posts.
In the past 24 hours, we have 1 new thread(s), 10 new post(s) and 79 new user(s).
EW=all your music is confined to their space.
VSL=you build the room.
I have a very important part from EW, namely the choirs, but I can't imagine using them for orchestra. I have Ra and Dark side, great stuff, but I'm not building a room in my mix because the samples aren't tight. VSL rocks in that regard, and software, too...
I have to make EW SC the first point in my mix because of the noise. Never happens with VSL. I'm sure Hollywood is the same, I would guess.
Shawn
@William said:
Well I see you brought back this assinine thread from the cybernetic abyss it richly deserves.
Yeah, I am the one responsible for this unfortunate event :-)
With that Berlioz Strings crack I meant that he was the original Hollywood sound, conducting thousands of musicians with a sword. Now that is one of the rare conductors I would respect.
[/quote]Did he really do this or is this a legend? (I mean the sword part, not the thousand musicians part (that one, crazy as it is, is actually true)).
No one needs 1,000 musicians. You could get the same effect putting a Stylophone through a chorus pedal.
Well I read the Memoirs where he talks about conducting huge forces in an outdoor concert, though maybe not a full thousand. It is probably an overstatement like calling Mahler's 8th "Symphony of a Thousand."
btw people here seem to hate Berlioz. Why? I love the Symphonie Fantastique and Harold in Italy to name a just a couple. Is Berlioz out of fashion or something? That is probably why I like him. Nowadays it's all Mahler. Forget Bruckner, forget Berlioz. Well not me! I like all Romantic musical maniacs. Bruckner with his maniacal counting echoed in the frenzied repetitions of his symphonic fortissimos, Berlioz with his luridly programmatic, hallucinatory depictions of morbid artists. How could anyone not LOVE that?
@dagmarpiano said:
No one needs 1,000 musicians. You could get the same effect putting a Stylophone through a chorus pedal.
Indeed you don't, but it is an adrenaline high. I have done a little conducting in my time, and I would be in great awe of having 120 instrumentalists and two choirs and soloists following my sword... Well, I am now in preliminary discussions on being commissioned to write a huge oratorio; I don't altogether envy whomever will have to conduct the thing if it ever materializes...
@William said:
Well I read the Memoirs where he talks about conducting huge forces in an outdoor concert, though maybe not a full thousand. It is probably an overstatement like calling Mahler's 8th "Symphony of a Thousand."
btw people here seem to hate Berlioz. Why? I love the Symphonie Fantastique and Harold in Italy to name a just a couple. Is Berlioz out of fashion or something? That is probably why I like him. Nowadays it's all Mahler. Forget Bruckner, forget Berlioz. Well not me! I like all Romantic musical maniacs. Bruckner with his maniacal counting echoed in the frenzied repetitions of his symphonic fortissimos, Berlioz with his luridly programmatic, hallucinatory depictions of morbid artists. How could anyone not LOVE that?
Who hates Berlioz? Don't one dare heap abuse on Berlioz here. The man had to suffer enough of this nonsense when he was alive.
If someone even starts with this, I'll do the best Berlioz mockup yet just to make them angry. And yes, that's a threat...
If someone even starts with this, I'll do the best Berlioz mockup yet just to make them angry. And yes, that's a threat...
Ok ... If i "abuse" Hector in this forum, may i choose the piece for the mockup?
Sorry, you and William are excluded due to not being genuine Berlioz abusers :-)
Yes, and I think of the orchestration of Symphonie Fantastique. Truly fantastic. For example at the Witch's Sabbath, the way he doubled the bassoons an octave BELOW the tubas creates a unique sound. Also the rolling bass drums, crazy col legnos, massed field drum rolls, you name it. Also Harold in Italy - a great viola concerto blended with symphonic poem.
And don't forget, the Tuba Mirum from his requiem, for huge male choir and percussion, was used in the original Conan's trailer. Yep, I was sitting right there in the theater and heard it. Then it was replaced by that excellent score by Basil Polidourus. But Berlioz had the honor of underscoring Schwarzenegger in full pecs, even if only very briefly. He would have been proud...
I must confess I haven't heard Lelio. My two favorites of his are Romeo et Juliette and Les Troyens. Two relatively unknown jewels are the orchestra songs Le Captive and Zaide (Bolero), which contain some of his most inspired and technically polished music (although one could say the last for any of his major works).
After the whining on this thread about one finger patterns and phrases, it was pretty amusing to get an email saying the next version of VI Pro will have exactly that. Can't wait for the torches and pitchforks.
Yeah, I got that too; I'm waiting to see what it's about before I offer comment... However, the analogy of the "torches and pitchforks" goes the other way around with me: All the orks and mutants are squirming thusly armed outside the badly beaten - once majestic - fortress of Music; and maybe, with this release, some of the best remaining knights that defended it, are sadly joining the ranks of droning/looping/cut-pasting unicellular trolls against it...
I find nothing amusing about this; quite the contrary. There's another post here today about the 100th anniversary of Bernard Herrmann's birthday. How far have we proudly come in all this time, perfecting the art of film-scoring ever since. How fortunate Herrmann is to have passed on, having been spared the embarrassment of having heard such superior soundtracks to his own these days: Inception, TRON 2, Harry Potter IV-VII, Star Trek XI, Batman Begins, The Grudge, The RIng, Battlestar Galactica, X-Men prequel, etc., etc., etc.... What watersheds!!
So well done to all developers who have contributed to this glorious pinnacle of affairs, and continue to rise over the aforementioned musical Everest, soaring into heights where finally DJs and finger-pianists can be contracted to score larger than life orchestral epics, by buffet-like picking lego phrases and loops, and laying them over pedal points of their braincell patterns... Two hours worth of "music" that can be notated on a single page with a repeat sign (ad absurdum)...
Well, Errikos, do you think you are the only one, that is musically educated? I studied piano and after that composition for film. I am very sad, that most of the time my skills in counter point, harmony and melody don't matter at all when it comes to getting a job. My interest in avantgard techniques of the orchestra can be emulated in a fraction of the time by Symphobia by the push of a button. The more complex harmonic or melodic material tends to get rejected due to the need for simpler material. Of course would I prefer to have more jobs available, that meet my skill set.
What is completely useless is you constant whining about the Zeitgeist today. It is what it is! Your crying want change a bit! So, please grow up and deal with it. When the current taste for music of the film industry is so unbearable for you, then please quit the film business!
Another thing, you should consider: Your view of the state of film music is disrespectfull to the talents of other composers that you dislike. It takes a great skill set to get a Hans Zimmer sound together. This music is of course not complex in terms of traditional musical skills. But consider this: those are part of musical "handcraft", they are not the art of composing, just skills that can be learned by anyone. As is sound design, the creative use of samples, synthesizer and mixing, etc.. a craft, that can be learned. In the end it doesn't matter what you use to achieve the art. All are just learnable skills, the art is something else (and most of the time its value a matter of point of view).
My bottom line: Your point of view is rather narrow. I don't want to offend you (or any other member of the constant Zimmer whining clan), but I cannot bear your uncountable hate/whine - posts any more! You have that typical naive point of view, that in the (golden) old times, everything was better. That is most certainly not true! Some things might have been better, but some might have been worse. Sometimes I would very much like to have no VSL and music could only be written by people, that have been educated to write a score. But, man, you cannot turn back the wheel of time, so it is completely pointless to wish for that.
Bernard Herrmann himself got fired by Alfred Hitchcock on the Torn Curtain for not writing a "popular tune" for the opening titles. Bear that in mind, when you think of your golden times of music in the film business. There was definately no music technology that was the reason for Hitchcock's musical dumbness ...
Or take Shostakovich: Stalin prefered a popular folk singers compositions over his and said, they had more cultural value than his compositions. There they are, your good ol' times!
Cheer up! Don't take yoursef to serious!
@fritzflotow said:
Bernard Herrmann himself got fired by Alfred Hitchcock on the Torn Curtain for not writing a "popular tune" for the opening titles. Bear that in mind, when you think of your golden times of music in the film business. There was definately no music technology that was the reason for Hitchcock's musical dumbness ...
Or take Shostakovich: Stalin prefered a popular folk singers compositions over his and said, they had more cultural value than his compositions. There they are, your good ol' times!
Those are great examples and it's completely true what you're saying. In the Golden Age of Hollywood studios, music was ground out like hamburger, just like the Zimmer stuff today, only in those days it was all pseudo Rachmaninoff-Tchaikovsky cliches instead of the current parallel minor chords in brass with taiko accents, choir shouts and chugga chugga strings. Not better or more complex, just a different set of cliches.
btw that Herrmann score has now been recorded several times. It is awesome! 12 flutes, huge brass section of horns, trombones tubas only, huge percussion ensemble. But it's a little weird how it just peters out at the end - when Herrmann was fired. Here is a great site that talks about that -
Touched a raw nerve there, did I?... Let's tear it apart piece by piece then, shall we?
Cheer up! Don't take yoursef to serious!
This I cannot help you with. I take myself pretty seriously, but not anywhere near how seriously I take the continuous on-going damage to our civilization, one that brilliant people gave their lives for and lifted us to where we have found ourselves, only for us worthless heirs to hand it back to the Australopithici...
@William: Only if I had to pick between the two, I would take the "pseudo Rachmaninov-Tchaikovsky" any day against the Borgian half-software-half-"human" soundtracks of today. After all, film-music has almost in every case been half-something from the greats of the past. IF I can't have mostly original, give me half-fillet-mignon with bone-marrow sauce, than half-cheeseburger.
@fritzflotow said:
The more complex harmonic or melodic material tends to get rejected due to the need for simpler material.
Sorry, I forgot about the second most important bit: Resistance to what is happening by those who can resist. I'm not saying stay out of a job. But I am saying, if one is capable, one should really strive to educate the musical ignorami that pass for directors and producers today. Always fight to the acceptable point for good music, for characteristic music as opposed to cannned/standardized crap. I'm sure most of them want to make a film that stands out (in a positive way) than the rest, and personal music will really help achieve that.
Also, I'm a slow writer so I really know about time constraints. However, I also know that Williams claims to have composed the original Star Wars in short hand (6-12 staves) in 6 weeks! I don't expect the same quality from any of us for so much music in 6 weeks, and I know that we also have to orchestrate and mix on top of everything else. If that wasn't enough, I know we are not getting paid millions for our work. Still I say, and I'm addressing those that can actually do the writing even without electricity - do as much of the best that you can, fight for as much of the best that you can. It's only a few years ago that directors and producers had at least better taste than today. It is worth turning back the clock in this case as far as I'm concerned.
@Dietz: Sorry also to have apparently treated the forum as my personal blog sometimes (I don't even have one), I'm just too passionate about this.
Errikos,
You're something of a maniac. Quite admirable as long as it is channeled peacefully. I think your rebuttal is inarguable. However I would add that although it was certainly more difficult to write pseudo-romantic stuff in the 40s for a live studio orchestra than it is to press a Symphobia key, they both result in worthless music, so it doesn't end up making much difference if you do it the hard way or the easy way.
Essentially its a matter of fiber content. Soluble fiber supplements such as Zimmermucil will aid digestion and the quick passing of soft musical stools. Post Pomantic turds are much harder to excrete.
