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Do you still think Williams involvement improved LLL's Hook release?


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34 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you still think Williams involvement improved LLL's Hook release?

    • Yes
      9
    • No
      16
    • I don't care
      9


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An album producer is not like a painter.

An album producer is the person who decides what frame the painting will have.

I don't agree with that assessment. Album production is an artform in itself -- whether it's Phil Spector, George Martin, John Williams, Douglas Fake, Alan Parsons or whoever.

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An album producer is not like a painter.

An album producer is the person who decides what frame the painting will have.

And the obsessive soundtrack collector is the person who wants the brush the painting was painted with, the painter's board that mixed the paint, the fourteen canvasses the painter scrapped before he finally settled on the final version, the cans of unused paint, the clothes the painter wiped his hands on, the breakfast that inspired the painter that morning, the bird that sang in the window to calm the painter as he painted, and the thinner he used to clean his brushes.

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I am sure an album producer's role is not set in stone! You can't compare Phil Spector to John WIlliams! :rolleyes:

It depends on the project/genre.

And yes. I agree with this:

An album producer is not like a painter.

An album producer is the person who decides what frame the painting will have.

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If it depends on the project/genre, then you most certainly compare them.

~*~

Remove the mickey mousing from The Ultimate War and then it's not The Ultimate War. Period.

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I am sure an album producer's role is not set in stone! You can't compare Phil Spector to John WIlliams! :rolleyes:

Yes, you can. It's the same basic, artistic role. Then the level of involvement, the modes of production etc. obviously vary by genre, style and so on. Stock, Aitken and Waterman obviously work in a different way than John Williams, which again works differently from Alan Parsons. But none of that undermines album production as an ART FORM.

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I don't agree with that assessment. Album production is an artform in itself -- whether it's Phil Spector, George Martin, John Williams, Douglas Fake, Alan Parsons or whoever.

True, but an album producer needs something to work with. It's not an art onto itself. Like film music is not an art onto it self.. You can't really write film music without a film, you can't really produce an album without having music.

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But none of that undermines album production as an ART FORM.

If album production is an art form, then (for example) deciding which merchandise is displayed in the show windows of a department store is an art form too!

In other words, it's not really an art form. ;)

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So when recording say a complete opera, does the producer then reimagine the whole piece by restructuring the music, taking e.g. music from the overture and putting at the end of the production, shift 1st act material to the last act and vice versa? Even though you can argue that film music is not the same as opera since music is the only and main concern in operas and ballets etc., there is a lot of that same musical story telling logic there, passing musically from point A to point B to point C. Is it a bad thing to expect and hope such things from a complete score release when it is produced?

The composer can do what ever he wants with his music. No argument there. But no one can say that you can't argue against his arranging logic or be disappointed by it. Of course you can always try to look things from a positive angle and not dwell on it and enjoy the music you have gotten. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. I heartily recommend that.

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I don't agree with that assessment. Album production is an artform in itself -- whether it's Phil Spector, George Martin, John Williams, Douglas Fake, Alan Parsons or whoever.

True, but an album producer needs something to work with. It's not an art onto itself. Like film music is not an art onto it self.. You can't really write film music without a film, you can't really produce an album without having music.

All artforms have raw materials to work from. In the case of album producers, the film's music (or any kind of composition, really) is the raw material. So yes...I think it is an artform onto itself, just as composing the actual music also is.

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Still, you never know how the whole act got together. If Williams produces in a hurry (or just doesn't remember, as he usually claims) and doesn't notice wrong takes or whatever, the dedicated fanboy still would be a better preservator of his work.

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Still, you never know how the whole act got together. If Williams produces in a hurry (or just doesn't remember, as he usually claims) and doesn't notice wrong takes or whatever, the dedicated fanboy still would be a better preservator of his work.

Getting the right takes, make sure the sound quality on the album passes inspection, etc. is probably (certainly!) not JW's job!

JW gets producer credit, sure, but that doesn't mean he involves himself with every little minor detail that any technician can do. It just means he gets to have some input regarding which music is included on the album, too.

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Obviously he did involve himself with minor little details or we wouldn't have gotten this release the way it is.

And that's where you're simple-minded, sorry. That's called a logical fallacy, an error in reasoning that renders an argument invalid.

What you say is basically:

There are minor details that you don't like. JW did things in the past on his albums that you don't like. --> Hence: The minor details are all (or mostly) JW's fault.

It could be, of course, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. To be sure, we need more info or evidence, one way or the other.

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Never assume that other people are as devoted to this stuff as you so obviously are. There are no minor details i don't like, the only thing i absolutely don't like is the film stem stuff, but that's just unfortunate.

But i'm still able to count 1 and 1 together and LLL's release habits are of the 'stuff 'em chronological' variety so i just know that JW must have at least listened to the mammoth selection of available HOOK music to make certain decisions.

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Never assume that other people are as devoted to this stuff as you so obviously are.

You know, I am really not. Remember, I am the one who keeps telling others to be thankful for the release we got.

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Still, you never know how the whole act got together. If Williams produces in a hurry (or just doesn't remember, as he usually claims) and doesn't notice wrong takes or whatever, the dedicated fanboy still would be a better preservator of his work.

The 'preservator' aspect doesn't interest me at all. If that had been important to me, I'd probably be interested in archeology and not soundtracks. The artist is the artist. I can like or dislike a work he's done (or a presentation of that work), but I will defend his right to present it any which way he wants to the public.

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Still, you never know how the whole act got together. If Williams produces in a hurry (or just doesn't remember, as he usually claims) and doesn't notice wrong takes or whatever, the dedicated fanboy still would be a better preservator of his work.

The 'preservator' aspect doesn't interest me at all. If that had been important to me, I'd probably be interested in archeology and not soundtracks. The artist is the artist. I can like or dislike a work he's done (or a presentation of that work), but I will defend his right to present it any which way he wants to the public.

This.

Although that doesn't mean I will be unhappy with a COMPLETE album (with the cues presented in chronologial order) either! :mrgreen:

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Still, you never know how the whole act got together. If Williams produces in a hurry (or just doesn't remember, as he usually claims) and doesn't notice wrong takes or whatever, the dedicated fanboy still would be a better preservator of his work.

The 'preservator' aspect doesn't interest me at all. If that had been important to me, I'd probably be interested in archeology and not soundtracks. The artist is the artist. I can like or dislike a work he's done (or a presentation of that work), but I will defend his right to present it any which way he wants to the public.

This.

Although that doesn't mean I will be unhappy with a COMPLETE album (with the cues presented in chronologial order) either! :mrgreen:

That's fair. To each their own.

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I voted YES. It makes perfectly sense and and great listening experience. Much better than the OST. The complete score with all inserts are an abruption. He really knows how to produce albums.

(...) but I will defend his right to present it any which way he wants to the public.

The new Hook release IS the way Williams wants to the public.

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I voted YES. It makes perfectly sense and and great listening experience. Much better than the OST. The complete score with all inserts are an abruption. He really knows how to produce albums.

(...) but I will defend his right to present it any which way he wants to the public.

The new Hook release IS the way Williams wants to the public.

Well, we won't know that for sure untill we've asked him, will we? I'm guessing he was already pleased with the old release, but then did what he thought was best for this when he was asked to 'supervise' an expansion, the best under the circumstances, in other words.

Either way, while this isn't for me, it was definitely better than the old boots (which is probably what it would have looked like, presentation-wise, if C&C enthusiasts had made it).

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Sorry, Thor that is not ture. If he does not want to expand it, then he would block it, like Sugarland Express. And he was asked, so your argumentation is not stable.

Besides, this release is not 100% C&C.

Again, we cannot really speculate on things we don't know. Remember that the initiative for this release didn't come from Williams himself, it came from LaLaLandRecords. That they got Williams to supervise it is all nice and well, but knowing his track record, I doubt Willliams has been going around wishing for a HOOK expansion all these years. Maybe the liner notes contain a Williams interview that explains his relationship to the album etc. Otherwise, there' s no way of knowing. But in the game of 'speculation', I think mine is more likely than yours. Williams made the best of the situation when he was asked to participate in the release.

By the way, no one has yet explained what 'supervision' means. Did he just give a 'go' once the album was ready? How creatively involved was he, really?

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Williams has more money than he knows what to do with. Re-releasing albums is not on his mind. He's past all of them. That doesn't indicate that they shouldn't exist, just because they are no longer on his mind. Baseball players don't concern themselves with what goes onto the baseball cards each year. It's just that the sense of entitlement in the film score community seems to have transcended common sense.

Very few re-(re-re-...)releases in recent years seems to be the definitive release that pleases everyone, but many come close.

Does Hook? Have we all spent our $30 on the best Hook presentation that money could have bought in a perfect world if Hook had been as well preserved as, say, Gremlins or 1941? No. Probably a generous cross between the original album and an isolated film score a la UE extracted from the film stems. It's still probably a better investment than sticking with the boots or paying top dollar for a high-end footwarmer.

If the original Epic album was so great, please, anyone here is welcome to it. Just stop pissing in LLR's cornflakes.

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If the original Epic album was so great, please, anyone here is welcome to it. Just stop pissing in LLR's cornflakes.

There has been some 'pissing in LLR's cornflakes' in this thread, as you put it, but not from those who are content with the Epic release, but rather from those that think even this new release is not enough!

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Ya know, I've been thinking... it seems the more the music's allowed to breathe in the film, the less severe Williams' album edits are (that's why the Prequel scores have a fuckton of editing - there's a lot of flitting about and droning (especially in the later two), with very little room for extended treatments of music). For Hook, he made very few in the way of microedits and segues, and the ones he did make are pretty smart (Forgotten How To Fly going into Granny Wendy, You Are The Pan into The Face of Pan, Remembering Childhood, etc.). So it must say a lot about how highly he holds this music that he allowed this new set to contain the vast majority of what he wrote.

Just a thought.

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He microedited out the beginning of "I Don't Believe In Fairies" to make a segue for the OST that doesn't exist in the film (in the film there's a space between the end of The Arrival Of Tink and the start of I Don't Believe In Fairies)

But yea, other than that, there were no in-cue edits, pretty impressive for a Williams OST.

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But yea, other than that, there were no in-cue edits, pretty impressive for a Williams OST.

Jason, could you give an example.. or examples of in cue edits from his other albums? I don't think i've ever noticed differences between the scores in films.. unless its some thing lucas messed with in the editing room ( ex. being Duel of the fates )

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He microedited out the beginning of "I Don't Believe In Fairies" to make a segue for the OST that doesn't exist in the film (in the film there's a space between the end of The Arrival Of Tink and the start of I Don't Believe In Fairies)

But yea, other than that, there were no in-cue edits, pretty impressive for a Williams OST.

I said very few, I didn't say none.

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Jason, could you give an example.. or examples of in cue edits from his other albums? I don't think i've ever noticed differences between the scores in films.. unless its some thing lucas messed with in the editing room ( ex. being Duel of the fates )

Star Wars has some moments snipped out of "Imperial Attack", "The Land Of The Sand People", "Inner City", etc. TESB has microedits in "The Heroics of Luke and Han", "City In The Clouds", etc. Raiders has edits in "The Desert Chase", "The Well of Souls", "The Basket Game", etc. Temple Of Doom had the best part of the End Credits edited out.

I could go on...

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Yes, Harry Potter 1 and War Horse are the only two others that quickly that come to mind that are mostly chronological

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Please people tell me why is it so important the album is in chronological order.

I mean I'm definitely happy with my TPM UE, more music, good sound, i just try to forget that lousy film.

And CE3K, CE, I have heard some complaints. It's still the best album I own.

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The composer writes the music knowing the themes will develop in a certain order when used in the film.

Most fans therefore enjoy listening to the music outside of the film in the same order

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Chronoligical order can make musical sense at times. But that's not a give. I for one I'm happy the edits on Hook Napped and You are the Pan were retained. It just sounds more sensible to my ears, has a larger musical continuity

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The composer writes the music knowing the themes will develop in a certain order when used in the film.

Most fans therefore enjoy listening to the music outside of the film in the same order

Crazy people. ;)

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The composer writes the music knowing the themes will develop in a certain order when used in the film.

Most fans therefore enjoy listening to the music outside of the film in the same order

Yeah. After watching it too often.

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Crazy?

Would you listen to The Who's "Tommy" on shuffle? All the time? And enjoy it?

Genesis' "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" makes barely any sense at all unless you study the lyrics and understand the unspoken narration the "libretto" puts between songs. Can you imagine how much more confusing it would be if someone decided to sequence it based on their favorite songs, or brought a song from side two over to side one on a whim?

Jaws 25th did that by placing The Shark Cage Fugue as the third or fourth track, instead of waiting until the Orca was long at sea.

Amazingly, those of us with any technical savvy know how to sequence the tracks onto our iPod or CD-player's playlist when we want to listen to it the way we want to. After all, when I place an album onto my iPod, I'm not listening to the CD as John Williams provided. I'm listening to my selected arrangement of the music on the CD as John Williams provided.

One makes me happy. The other gives me hives on my ear drums. I don't listen to music that gives me hives on my ear drums.

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I'm done here.

Good riddens, you don't have what it takes.

I DON'T NEED YOU, I DONT NEED ANYBODY!!!

Oh, of course! IT'S ALL ABOUT YOU, ISN'T IT?
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