veggiemusician

To start you off... Whats the differance between a soprano singer and a paranna fish? Lipstick!

Oi you talking to a pro oboist here hehe - Oboe makes the most beautiful sound ever... you been listening to too many school kids playing oboe. If an oboe sounds like a duck then a Violin sounds like a dying cat... but we all know how wonderfull a violin sounds in hands of master!

Cor Anglais is what we call it outside of USA Its a lovely instrument... a lot easier to play than oboe (still hard tho). Uses the same fingerings and a biger reed then oboe - most oboists double on Cor Anglais. One of my old Oboe teachers Michael Winfield once showed me the reed he played on the Staw Wars soundtrack - the big cor anglais solo in Jawa track. This is amazing as reed dont last very long... days to weeks! Talking about Across the Stars - I played on the very oboe used on that track (solo at begining) - its a TW Howarth XL made in London... I nearly bought the instrument before Roy Carter bought it... Found a better instrument

I dont think he will stop composing - just major projects!

I think John Williams has writen to date 98 scores - do you recken he will retire at 100? I know its a bit of a troll post but he will want to get to 100!

Well a film is 2 hours long - how much would a 7 min piece cost us?

If someone was to commision a work from him - how much? Haha maybe everyone at JWFAN forums should get together and commision something from John Williams - all put in £20 hehe - thats better than a couple of new CDs!

http://www.earphonesolutions.com/beeaforip.html Ive got a pair of Westone UM2's and they are superb! You may want to intime get rid of your ipod intime too- as headphone amp in them are weak and prone to bad bass distortion even on expensive earphones. Get yourself an iAudio X5 or Samsung J70!

Thats prob because the audio stage is better on new card. You can buy a £300 CD player that uses the same cd transport and DAC as a £1300 CD player - but the final audio analog stage is much better. This one reason ipods sound so bad using headphone out - the headphone amp is not very good - if you go to a forum like www.headfi.org you will find people bypassing the the headphone amp and using a portable amp and line out with their ipods.

Melange: thats what made mozart great - he was in a musical straitjacket but managed to do what no others could do - there are certain rules in "clasical" period music you cant brake - eg like concective 5ths etc - Mozart kept them all yet being the most "musical and emotional" composer that ever lived.

Mark: 24bit is just the DAC used not the bit rate as 24bps would sound truely terrible lol - there are many types of DAC's such as 1bit, 18bit and 24bit. In the end its all numbers a good DAC is a good DAC. its like a digi camera - u can get el cheepo 7million pixel camara, but a more expensive 2 million pixel cam will always look much much better.

Yes,but within that framework he still had plenty more scope for musical creativity than he would have had if he were composing for a movie which has scenes of an already existing duration, and dialogue already in place. With Opera, he had the basic layout of the plot and build upon that with his musical vision, doing things his own particular way. In other words, he was director,screenplay writer, and composer.With film, I believe he would have felt quite stifled and frustrated. Mozart loved putting much of "himself" into his music of later years. His late Piano Concertos are more about him, than the concerto. Within the framework he does extraordinary things. He's composing for himself, within the frame of a concerto or symphony or a mass. No doubt, Mozart would have dazzled us with his technical knowledge in the arena of film music. But i feel he would have found less scope for personal expression, and got bored. I would prob agree with you if the composer lived in the 19th cent. But any composer before lets say Beethoven very much composed within a framework... even mozart! Upto 19th cent composers where mostly owned by the church or royal court. The 19th cent "romantic" composers had a lot more freedom than the "classica" and "baroque" composers who has basicly none! Mozart never wrote the screenplay of his opera's - nore did he venture out of the framework that governed music - he kept to the letter the standard rules such as sonata form etc. In many performances the governing bodys could remove random pages of his music and he could do nothing about it We had George Lucas's in Mozarts time lol

Well I dissagree You just got to remember all the CD is, is memory - doesnt mater if its a Harddisk, flash memory etc. The DAC does the hard job! The average CD is 650mb in size. So you have 650mb of data for music - could be 2 gig drive or 256mb flash Depending on the bit rate used in the compression determines how much memory you will use. For a 75min album 256bps 44khz the file size will be about 100mb - but if set to 1200bps the file size is about 650mb - 1200bps 44khz is not the highest ratio - DAT players use 48khz - so any CD made from a DAT tape has to be down sampled to fit on a CD. In a recording studio its common for one track of a song to be many Gigabytes in size! So in the end CDs are no different from MP3s - just not compressed so much. Ive seen CDs with 160 mins of music on it that play on normal CD players!

Mozart composed to comission, he was a bit recklass with money so would have deffo gone for the highest paid music (film) - He loved the high life (holywood) and he was one of the most polific composers to ever live! John Williams 4 scores a year? Bah mozart could write a 3 hour opera in 21 days (tito) - think what he be like with film scores.

Well I only got a 1gig mp3 player - and use Westone UM2 IEMs - which possible are the best in-ear headphones you can get. I listen between 192-320 LAME - if I encode on other mp3 encoders or WMA I can hear more degradion. As I say CD undergoes compression like mp3s - anyone at recording studios will tell you. I made a CD recently and it was released on both vinal and CD - the recording company had to do some remixing of CD version because of the compression. For me the biggie when it comes to portable players is hardware... iPods sound poor full stop. iRivers sound a lot better but its a soft sound - deffo feels compressed and shut in. My iPaq pocket PC sounds fantastic - accually sounds better than my Marantz KI sig hifi - if that possible hehe - Sometimes its not about detail you hear but the full sound - is it enjoyable to listen? do you forget that you are listing to a hifi? A lot of audiophile systems have got it wrong in my opinion - they try to screeze every ounce of detail out of the music - so much so its becomes painful to listen too. I just want to enjoy the music I listen to - and yes I put on bass boost! Because I enjoy sound more

I think if Mozart was living today - he be composing for film!

Have you used LAME encoded mp3's? I think you would have to have amazing ears to notice too much diffance with your PC speakers and headphones, unless you got good hifi set up you cant hear too much diffance between mp3 and CD at that bit rate! Can you tell me what MP3 players you have used?

When he's conducting his noise, er, I mean concertos. It was Anthony Gilbert, but now its Adam Gorb who I must say is just as clueless - even tho he writes in a more film like style. Both are typical music snobs. http://www.rncm.ac.uk/Place%20to%20Study/A.../SCCM/staff.asp

You can play FLAC on some mp3 players now - anyway mp3 at 320kbs is fine - I dont have any probs listening to mp3's. One must rememeber CDs are compressed too! So if you want true sound you must go vinal.

John Williams music to play in woodwind parts are actually really hard!!!

I forgot to add He failed this composition of mine - so I went to principle and it was then passed - the Prinicpal is Edward Gregson who's done film music including stuff on Superman 3!

Being a classical musician, I’ve found so much snobbism concerning film music among academic music lecturers at Music College! To give an example, I submitted a composition to the head of composition at the Royal Northern College of Music – and he completely dismissed it saying it sounded like film music of the type John Williams writes (actually I was kinda happy when he said that lol). He went on to say John Williams’s music and other film music was not intellectual and didn’t challenge the emotions like modern music does. “When one watches a John Williams concert you think oh that was very nice – then go on with your day and its forgotten, However with modern music it really gets you thinking and stays with you for some time after concert has finished, because it has so much more intellectual material”. The modern music he meant was the squeaky squawky type that also includes people sawing their instruments in half for the sake of art/music. No wonder classical music is going down, when you get snobs running music! I wonder when John Williams conducted to an empty hall…. Music is to be enjoyed – and to enjoy something is to play on the emotions. Veggie who thinks there are too many dumb musicians around that need a life

I got given some Rega R3's for doing a recording for Rega - and the guy there said dont bother thing any cable over £5p/m - the cables used in high end speakers are no better than that and to use cables costing £50-200 a meter is insane. BTW my hifi I hardly ever listen to JW on is Technics High end CD player, Marantz KI sig amp and Rega R3 floorstanders

Empire Strikes Back Star Wars Revenge of the Sith Attack of the Clones Return of the Jedi Phantom Menarse

Just wondering what do you use - Hifi - ipod - mini disk etc Post your fave music player to play your John Williams! I always listen to JW on my iPaq pocket PC with Westone UM2 in ear headphones - JW has to be listened everywhere