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So here’s what I don’t understand. This past December, John gifted us a soundtrack album that is among the best scores I’ve heard this decade. An album where each and every cue is entertaining, melodic, emotional, and containing a richness and depth of gorgeous orchestration that is just astounding. It’s a crowd pleasing score like enthusiasts lament doesn’t get written anymore. A score with four or five central melodic ideas that get developed and played with in super cool ways over the course of the album. . . . . . . . . . But nobody is talking about FERDINAND. Well, here goes. I have listened to this soundtrack at least twice a week over the past 4 months and it just has not gotten old. It’s so dense with ideas! Powell is resetting/recontextualizing melodies in ways where I don’t realize what it is until the 4th time I’ve listened to the cue. I’m going to go on record saying that I think “Flower Festival” is one of the best film score tracks of the decade. The Flower Theme (a name that Powell himself uses to describe the main melody in “Flower Festival”) is definitely the showstopper theme of the score. But I’m a bit fascinated with this other theme lately. It’s the only central theme not introduced in the opening cue, “Bees and Bulls.” I call it the Pacifist Theme and it’s first introduced in the cue “Father and Son.” I think it represents how Ferdinand (and Powell) wish the world worked, that people could live non-violently. I haven’t seen all of the movie, not really up my alley, but I think that’s what it is. It’s an aching melody that perfectly captures a reality that Powell knows is just a dream. Anyway, holy crap it’s great. It’s far from the most used theme in the movie, but when it is it’s for maximum emotional effect. Here’s where it’s quietly introduced on strings, guitar, and oboe. (0:40 - 1:06) Now this isn’t really a quote of the theme, but in my opinion it absolutely is meant to function as a grief-stricken echo of the melody as Ferdinand’s illusions are shattered by the death of his father. (0:41 - 0:56) The proper theme makes an appearance later in the same track, “Finding Home.” This rendition evokes an almost spiritual joy as Ferdinand first steps out into the idyllic field of flowers that serves as his new home. In “A New Day” the theme has a lovely quiet rendition on just guitar with backing horn before the strings join in and it transitions perfectly to the Flower Theme The theme sits out for a while before making a return for the final minute of “Ferdinand and Nina.” The cellos lead on this rendition, reflecting a deeper, more mature Ferdinand mourning for his idealized world that doesn’t exist It then sits out again until the great “Madrid Finale” where it makes two appearances. Setting up the emotional climax of the score to 6:36 - 7:04 A wonderful, triumphant setting at 9:05 And finally he closes out the score with it, at least before quick celeste rendition of the Flower Theme. Definitely an indication of the melody's importance to Powell's emotional intent for the score overall, despite it being used only sparingly. I can already tell you that this is definitely going to be one of my most listened to albums of 2018 and I cannot wait to hear what Powell (and Williams) have cooked up for Solo. I have a work in progress breakdown of all the themes in the score that I might post later.

They hired a guy to come in and physically make hissing sounds into a microphone.

This is cool

I debated whether I should start a new thread for this, figured it was alright in the end:

The Harry Potter Children's Suite is essentially Williams' take on a kind of "young person's guide to the orchestra". It is as masterful as it is colorful, and is about as far removed from a "sketch" as you can get. On the contrary, it represents ways of developing the musical material even further, all the while exploring the orchestra in delightful detail.

The Fellowship of the Ring CR What a legendary score. Hearing Parth Galen/The Departure of Borimir/The Breaking of the Fellowship live at an LTP event is an experience I never plan on forgetting. Even after listening to this illegally for years, almost knowing it inside out, hyping myself up even more when I bought Doug's book for Christmas, I'm completely overwhelmed that I can finally hold this incredible and beautiful set in my hands and put it on my shelf next to the EE DVDs, and putting a disc in whenever I want to. I do have some nitpicks with the way the music's presented across the discs, but for now I just willingly oppress them in my head. Can't wait for the next two reissues!

My 1st "playing catchup since I now have a job that pays" haul: Another one from last week:

1 War Horse 2 Empire of the Sun 3 Lincoln 4 Catch Me If You Can 5 Schindler's List 6 Memoirs of a Geisha 7 Jane Eyre 8 JFK 9 Born on the Fourth of July 10 The Book Thief

The children's suite will lie in the chamber forever!!!!

Jurassic World (Recording Session) by Michael Giacchino Better than the album presentation, it has a great action themes, great use of the old themes, and a really nice collection of new themes (I really like the raptors theme). I hope Giacchino delivers on the sequel and develops all of this themes, and also it would be great if he could create something like the Island Fanfare but for the new trilogy.

Not in any particular order: -John Williams (I just revisited his score for Indiana Jones and just with that he reminded me why he is so great) -James Newton Howard (I love a lot of his fantasy scores, specially Atlantis and Maleficent, and also his collaborations with Shyamalan, especially The Village and Lady in the Water) -Michael Giacchino (His works for Pixar are most of them fantastic, being The Incredibles one of them. Also, I recently listened to the full Jurassic World score and is not far from William's original, in my opinion) -Ramin Djawadi (Although he is not liked here a lot, I really enjoy his GoT scores and I also love what he created in Westworld) -Benjamin Wallfisch (He is probably one of the best composer to come out of Zimmer's school. His scores for A Cure for Wellness and It are in my top ten of the previous year) -Fernando Velazquez (A spanish composer similar in style to Wallfisch, he has great melodic scores, with special mention to The Orphanage, Crimson Peak and The Impossible) Honorable Mentions: John Powell (I love his score for Dragons and Pan), Hisaishi (Mononoke and Spirited Away are on my top 10 animation scores) & Abel Korzeniowski (Nocturnal Animals, A Single Man or Penny Dreadful show how much talent he has, but he hasn't been doing a lot lately) Also, I like Zimmer, but not right now. His last scores have most of them disappointing sound design that worked well inside the movie but weren't really pleasant as standalone listening experiences.

2017 saw the complete CE3K. Everything else is a footnote.

Who? Michael Collins? You'll have a long wait

Now something that sounded perfectly fine to everyone before will suddenly be inadequate..."I can TOTALLY tell the difference!"

The odds are excellent. Star Wars Episode IX is completely unreleased.

More likely it was Gelb sighing audibly in the control room, exhausted by another dissatisfactory revision of Across the Stars. "We need the new Duel of the Fates, John! Fuck! Harpischords aren't fucking marketable to our target demographic! Where's the fucking choir?!"

Danger! Danger! EARTHQUAKE!!!

Well, Jurassic World has the problem of the main themes not being that great. I love the Hoskins theme, and the theme for Owen's raptor squad, and the little silly theme for Owen and Claire. But the main theme is nothing special, neither is the family theme. They get the job done, but don't elicit any kind of excitement or interest in me... they are just kind of there. Contrast that to Star Trek Beyond, which has the great main theme, Spock theme, and Enterprise theme PLUS the AMAZING brand new Five Year Mission / Yorktown theme AND the FANTASTIC Franklin theme (used to great effect in Crash Decisions).. the Jaylay and Krall themes are just icing on the cake on of of all that. Then Spider-man Homecoming has a strong main theme with three sections that all get explored the entire score, especially in the action material, a Vulture theme that may be simple and derivative of his prirt villain themes but is EXTREMELY effective in the movie doesn't outstay its welcome on album, a nice little love them, and then a bunch of various montage and sneaking around music that really fleshes out the whole score and makes an extremely cohesive and satisfying whole. But then Doctor Strange and Rogue One and just blah. Very forgettable themes and action material. I think he was just burned out. I liked Book of Henry and War for the POTA for what they are, and I need to give Coco another listen. I'm really expecting to like Incredibles 2 and Jurassic World 2 a lot!

Just like Star Trek.

Is Star Trek better than Juno award winning RUSH?

Using each note only once, and without different values, 12! - 1 = 479,001,599 times.

Well the actual 20th anniversary of the first book was last year and we got nothing from that... Harry Potter > Indy

New music

That's because JW vetoed it.

Well, he did say in that interview from 2016 about the ROTJ SE set that it sounds perfectly fine to him... Not a good sign.

I'm not sure he's the best qualified to compare the two technologies at his age. He's probably not able to hear above 4kHz - and that's not a joke:

Airplane! Pure genius.

it's a quote from AIRPLANE! Bes. No offence meant.

The big four are the following: Equalization - In a contemporary studio this is more likely to be a parametric (either minimum phase or linear phase) rather than graphic EQ as they allow a finer adjustment of frequency bands. Dynamic range compression - Either multiband or single band. There a number of fancy techniques here like parallel compression (balancing an uncompressed mix with a compressed mix) and side-chain compression (that cheesy 'pumping' effect you hear in EDM tunes--essentially an input (usually a four-to-the-floor kick drum) triggers the mix to 'duck' whenever it hits Limiting - involves setting the maximum output gain and adjusting the input gain; attack and release, link control, gain reduction and clipping. Too much here to explain. Noise reduction - Uses noise gates and expanders to attenuate high and quiet noise artifacts respectively, and likewise low-pass and high-pass filters for high frequency and low frequency artifacts.

That's english I don't understand, sorry! It's a song?

Hurumph. Chump don't want no help, chump don't get no help. Jive ass dude don't know shit, anyhow.

I have plenty of Erich Kunzel Digital CDs with strange effects in it, I can ruin my speakers myself!

Forgot to mention this arrived last week: This week I ordered:

Who cares? We have the Ultimate Edition.

Just came across this: HP1 20th anniversary book out in June. Could that possibly mean a musical treat as well? I kind of expected HP to be a Black Friday thing, but one never knows. https://www.snitchseeker.com/harry-potter-news/harry-potter-paperback-book-covers-for-20th-anniversary-set-unveiled-by-scholastic-109621/

Same with films. Lucas switched to digital photography way too soon. AOTC and ROTS are stuck at less than 1080 resolution upscaled to a 2K DI. Their eventual 4K release will probably have better contrast and colour but there's only so much they can do with them in future. Meanwhile, studios can pull out anything shot on film from any decade and, with some work, put out a stonkingly good genuine 4K transfer. Edit: Sorry @crumbs. Didn't realise you'd basically made the same point just a couple of posts up

So...........................................................................................................................................................the smell?

I wish I had had more time to talk with him. It felt so strange to sit next to him for so long... but in silence! I only said a few words like "it's an honor" and then the music started. I was so excited but also so nervous! I can talk about his smell, the power of his bifocal lenses, the size of his hands, the unevenness of his beard, but I have no new insight on The Last Jedi!

The "transition period" from the late 70s to mid 2000s where some things were recorded analog, some digital, and some both, is a major quagmire of different recording equipment, differing bit rates, and differing sample rates to wade through. it seems for the most part, when the specialty labels are expanding anything from that era, they ignore the digital recordings if they can find and afford to get fresh transfers of the 1st gen analog tape masters, as a fresh 24/192 digital transfer of those tapes made with modern equipment is simply going to be better that digital recordings made in that era. Most of those digital recordings are 16/441 and the actual equipment to create them was still new and not as perfect as today's equipment, while the simultaneous tape recordings were perfectly fine as they had been for decades. Of course nowadays, every score is recorded directly to hard drives in super high resolution and sound perfectly fine.

Digital recording was invented 20 years earlier.

Perhaps the reference to 2018 being one for the books means this year will be notable for having the least number of releases of works by Williams

Indeed, F+B just feels...easier. More accessible. For me, at least.

You're worrying too much about both how he title the pieces and what he says before playing them in concert. The concerts arrangements are recorded (or in some cases, crafted by editing together pieces of film cues) in order to present a major theme or set of themes (or major idea for a scene) in a concise package that can be listened to without being a slave to the film it was written for. it's something he can play in concert to showcase a part of a score, something other artists can re-record for their own albums, something kids can learn in high school band class, something sheet music can be sold of. As for what he says before a piece, anything goes. He's an 86 year old man without the best memory.

On the John Powell note, I watched Chicken Run over the weekend! Great movie, great score. Very fun!

Well, he did the first Incredibles, might as well keep him around for this one!

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Hello Everybody, Here is my contribution. I have decided to make consistent covers with the most emblematic planet for each film. I hope you'll enjoy them. With a variation for VIII