Datameister

My reading as well.

You can watch whatever you please. Some evenings I want to just shut my brain off. Sometimes I want to be challenged, or scared, or educated. Sometimes I just want the comfort of watching something I've seen a thousand times. Sometimes I crave something emphatically new. Sometimes I want to laugh. Sometimes I want a show that just oozes "premium quality." Sometimes I'm just interested enough in a junky show to stick around for the ride. Anyone who judges someone else for what they want to watch has too much time on their hands. Probably enough time to watch another show I still haven't seen.

All good insight, @karelm. Thank you. One recording that hints at this not being exclusive to the Sony Pictures Scoring Stage (as I've sometimes mused) is "The Adventures of Han." I'd either forgotten or not known that the suite was recorded at Fox, not Sony like the other disappointing recordings. But it does have the same sort of sound, pointing toward performance, miking, and/or mixing as causes.

Oh, there's so much stuff I haven't watched. I do watch a variety of new and old shows, but there's only so much time in the week. The only one that I definitely will watch but haven't touched yet is Andor.

Belated thanks for posting this. It's a really interesting question. On the one hand, I think the library is very well-programmed, so there's a certain "it sounds so real!" excitement in listening. But yes, I do hear some of the same tendencies in the trumpets, and they still crop up a lot more with polyphonic than monophonic passages. @karelm my questions are … what specific mixing choices contribute to this sound, and what specifically is (subjectively) wrong with the resulting audio signal?

There's a very slow electronic arrangement that plays in the land's entry tunnels. Orchestral arrangements are heard during takeoff in both rides (plus the landing for Falcon), as well as in the lightsaber-building experience. Those are the only uses I know of.

Now THAT is something that sounds like it shouldn't be there. (Because it shouldn't.)

It is weird, and I like it. My assumption has always been that they wanted the musical phrase to last neatly for the whole shot of the band. If they'd cut the film the exact same way but not edited the music, it would have been a little awkward in the cut to Han.

Ah, I getcha. That's probably a big part of it. Part of me still expects Cantina Band #2 to have that conspicuous edit in its main melody.

Definitely disagree. The film version is fine, but I prefer it without the edit. I wouldn't even call it an extension of the theme; that's just how the family theme always goes. I'm curious if you have the same issue with other statements of the theme?

Interesting, I've never taken issue with the snares in KOTCS. Anything in particular you can put your finger on?

You certainly do get a wide range of sounds with The Raiders March, don't you? I don't know that I'd agree about placing Wallin's TLC mix over Murphy's KOTCS...but that's because of my distaste for Wallin's sound, not because of any fondness for the KOTCS recording. (As you said, I don't mean to be unkind; Wallin sure seems to be something of a legend in the scoring world, but his recordings are definitely not to my taste.)

Booooo. Thanks!

Unrelated, but can anyone confirm—the liner notes for this set don't list the musicians, right? I won't have access to my set for a bit.

I'm late to the Setting the Trap/Training Montage debate, but it is interesting to compare them. Setting the Trap is by far my favorite of the two. It's still primarily an orchestral piece; it's just got the dated drum machine on top of it. I love the contrapuntal stuff, the usual JW harmonic interestingness, and the overall arc of the thing. Training Montage is all electronic, much simpler, and a lot more … static. I still enjoy it—dated isn't a problem—but there's a lot less to love, IMO. It feels more like the sort of electronic instrumental quasi-song cue you might find in any number of 80s movies, whereas Setting the Trap is still distinctly Williams.