Nick Parker
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Posts posted by Nick Parker
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2 minutes ago, bruce marshall said:
And you want MORE of this ....dreck?!
Who are you talking to?
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2 minutes ago, Not Mr. Big said:
BFG has colorful orchestrations and some very nice dramatic moments but overall, the "narrative" of the score is a bit underwhelming to the more tight and purposeful TFA.
And TFA has more bangers
Your point about the narrative elements throughout the score is valid, but I like the standalone quality a lot of BFG's tracks have, almost like a "normal" album.
As for bangers?
https://open.spotify.com/track/3DaR5SUVfmN9lLUl00Y16B?si=qrk1biWkRhq-fr78B0wajw
And this?
https://open.spotify.com/track/3kgBlHlZ3469aCYhSfc3QQ?si=fWGnc-yUTjGaevHRj0_5Tg
Holy @#$%.
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5 minutes ago, Not Mr. Big said:
Agreed except for the part about The Force Awakens, which rules
I like Force Awakens, but compared to BFG it's so flat and monochrome. I'm shocked by how I slept on this one for four years.
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1 hour ago, Not Mr. Big said:
Hard to do when every beat in the story is a comedic beat.
There's no excuse for moments like this!
(not mentioning the mickey mouse moment like 15 seconds before this)
Get the hell outta here, John!
I've come to terms, after years of fighting it, that The Last Jedi is one of my least favorite John Williams scores, ever. All the Escapes and Canto Bights just can't redeem it in the end. The Post roasts this score alive like a porg......And after listening to BFG for the first time these past few days, it kicks Force Awakens' ass, too. What happened on these first two sequel scores?
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1 hour ago, Gruesome Son of a Bitch said:
It's why he'd never be in the JWFan movie aside from maybe a special features deleted scene in-joke where an annoying fly buzzing around a character's ear is swatted out of existence. Spoilers: the fly is Bruce.
Paging Mr. Marshall! Mr. Marshall, you have a telephone call at the front desk.
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To answer the thread title, all the Mickey Mousing and cutesiness in The Last Jedi.
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What's the latest Williams score you've listened to, Mattris?
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Yeahhhh it's best to stay away from those. Even Cubase, robust as its score editor is, is clunky as all get out.
Best to get used to piano roll notation, then convert it to a MIDI file or something to import into a real notation program.
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4 minutes ago, Drew said:
No, I will looks at it again. It looks so easy in Logic but the Cakewalk UI is confusing at times.
That I can agree with. It's a very good and powerful DAW--and the fact that it's now free is absolutely nuts. But there are decisions they made that can be nonplussing. ( I hate how you have to create MIDI events for example. In a lot of other DAWs all you have to do is take a pencil and draw any number of bars that you want to fill in. Boom, that's it.)
Unfortunately, since the company that now owns it basically brought it back from the dead, they seem content to keep it basically in cryogenic status...I'm not sure how much they intend to update it as Sonar did before they collapsed.
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27 minutes ago, Drew said:
there a way to use this tool on Cakewalk? I think it's dynamics.
I tried to make my post last night as succint and thorough as possible, addressing this at depth. Was there anything in it that confused you?
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2 hours ago, Loert said:
I've always wondered how much this applies to somebody like John Williams, who obviously has a lot of experience hearing his music played by orchestra. Does he know exactly how his music will sound in the recording hall, or does he still get "surprised"? I realise that if he were to borrow something virtually verbatim from one of his previous scores, then he will know what it sounds like already...but I wonder how "surprised" he gets when he hears the orchestra play something he isn't used to writing. (An example might be the Conveyor music from Star Wars II, which is relatively novel for Williams).
I mean people like him get the rare luxury of having an orchestra play his material almost instantaneously. Maybe this isn't exactly what you mean, but we've seen numerous recording session footage where Williams--and others such as Goldsmith--make changes on the podium.
3 hours ago, Drew said:This has me sold on wanting BBC Symphony Orchestra Professional. I'm a huge believer that the mix makes the quality go up or down. Spitfire does have steep prices but hopefully there's a good Black Friday deal.
Did you have a chance to try out that stuff I mentioned last time?
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1 hour ago, Gruesome Son of a Bitch said:
I found another Nick. A better Nick.
I thought you wanted to talk to me!
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16 minutes ago, Gruesome Son of a Bitch said:
She's easily the worst of the major Captains of the series. She stranded her crew in the Delta Quadrant, mostly made enemies there and constantly betrayed the ethics of Starfleet.
Speaking of the not worst captains:
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26 minutes ago, Drew said:
I can write MIDI notes but I don't think Cakewalk lets me change the velocity in the middle of a note. Just 1 velocity per note.
I think what you're referring to is more of a MIDI thing than a Cakewalk thing, if I'm understanding you. MIDI Velocity only refers to the velocity of the note when it's first played--it's just how the MIDI language was set up in the 80's. I haven't used East West, but any relatively modern, decent orchestral library should have the ability to change dynamics, well, dynamically by use of a MIDI Control Change (CC), most commonly CC1: Modulation. Most MIDI keyboards have a modulation wheel, almost always to the left of the keybed itself, that allows you to control this in real-time, while performing the notes themselves with the other hand.
In most DAWs, you should have the ability to pull up a "lane" (as Cubase calls it) with the CC parameters you wish to manipulate; again, CC1 (modulation) in this case probably. From there, you should be able to use the DAW tools, usually a pencil, to draw an "envelope"--different levels of the parameter from 0-127, per MIDI standards, depending on however you want to affect the sound.
So for example, say you have a trumpet note held for a 4/4 bar that you want soft for 3 beats, then make a loud and dramatic crescendo on the final beat. In the CC1 lane, you might want it from beats 1-3 to start at a lower number, like 50, depending on how your particular virtual instrument corresponds with the CC information. Then, on the fourth beat, you use your DAW's drawing tool and draw a ramp from that first number to a much higher one--if you want to go all the way, draw that ramp all the way up there to 127!
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1 minute ago, Drew said:
Windows. I use Cakewalk and tried Reaper.
Awww, shame, I know it's been around forever and was the standard for MIDI back in the day. The different pencil tools et cetera don't do it for you? Functionally speaking you won't find tools in other DAWs to be much different.
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20 minutes ago, Drew said:
I have EastWest Composer Cloud right now. It has so many patches for everything and I'm at a loss about how to use it. On top of that, I don't have a professional DAW with practical velocity and volume tools...
What DAW do you use? And what OS are you on?
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Thanks for the retrospective!
1 hour ago, karelm said:5. It's very important to understand the words of John Adams who said in his blog "Do not be surprised if at the first rehearsal of your music you don't recognize the work as being your own piece". Very, very true. A composer needs to have an out of body experience for the first few rehearsals because it sounds nothing like what you spent the past year writing! Eventually it will surprise you and coalesce. With a great orchestra, it will surprise you! You'll hear things you never imagined!
I wish someone had told me this when I started. It's harder to think of a case where you're so riddled with self-doubt and insecurity than when a group plays something you wrote for the first time--or several--and you can't even tell what the music is.
I learnt several things during that process: one, sometimes the best players in the world can't make something you wrote work the way you think if you didn't write it that way. For example, wanting a piece to sound soft and light at a section when you crammed the music into so many different instruments in mid-low registers.
Two, learning to stop being so overwhelmed by the disappointment of that first time, accept it, and objectively analyzing what it is in front of you and work from there to bridge the gap between your mind's ear and where the musicians are at.
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3 hours ago, Falstaft said:Good grief, is this discussion still happening?
Williams did not know what the plan was, who Rey's parents were, what the Emperor's role was. None of it. Gosh, I have a recording of him saying at a Boston Pops concert following TFA that he had no clue whatsoever who Rey's parents were. And he even reieterated as much again, that he was surprised at the film's reveals, at a smaller-scale Q&A event at Tanglewood just last year, after the majority of TROS scoring had happened.
If there were some deep, pre-planned connection intended between Rey, Kylo, and the Emperor's theme, don't you think Williams would have musically developed any of them in such a way to suggest those latent relationships, particularly in TROS? Instead, they're left mostly to their own devices. Heck, Williams even seems to supress the similarities when the moment would be obvious or opportune. Note, for example, the way the tail end of the Emperor's theme simply dissolves at 4:07 of Track 1 "Fanfare and Prologue" when that would have been the perfect place to tie his and Kylo Ren's motifs together.
The motivic similarities are happy coincidences -- not exactly trivial from a music structural or stylistic standpoint, but definitively, demonstrably not evidence of any sort of long-range plan.
Would you just shut up, you fucking weirdo whose academic work on the music of Star Wars was chosen by renowned and legendary journalist Alex Ross to share and discuss with John Williams himself!? Jesus talk about grasping for straws.
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1 hour ago, Holko said:
Yes, welcome to the thread.
Hang on, since he changed his tune, shouldn't it now be called Star Wars Reenchantment?
I've become disenchanted! The name stays!
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53 minutes ago, Nick1066 said:
I don't know, but I'm sure Janeway's to blame.
And here I thought you were the one stranded in the Delta Quadrant! I was just getting used to my role as the Undisputed Nick!
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29 minutes ago, Arpy said:
Rey's Theme has similarities that we can't say for certain that they share a connection with The Emperor's Theme, or the Force or Yoda's Theme, but because Williams is writing for a litany of characters belonging to the same world, it's more likely than not that they're going to be cut fro the same cloth.
In an interview around the time of TFA, with our boy Tim Greiving, Williams mentioned that it was of prime importance of him to keep the score "Star Warsian", and specifically elaborated to mean things such as harmonies and intervals.
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43 minutes ago, Thor said:
It's a general thing with Williams. He often opens his albums with concert pieces or themes. I like variations of this too. In JURASSIC PARK, for example, he starts with those mysterioso choral and percussive elements, before launching into the 'overture' that is the main theme(s). Mostly, however, it's about the ebb and flow he creates within the album programme itself - placing 'setpiece' tracks carefully and evenly throughout, so that the experience doesn't get bogged down in big 'chunks' of similarity due to the film's whims.
12 minutes ago, Thor said:No, I sampled the whole of that A.I. release, but I had to skip ahead on some of the tracks.
As someone who thinks AI is one of the best extended pieces of music ever written, I've had to do the same, and your first post I quoted is one of the reasons I love the OST. Mecha World is such a hell of an album opener, it was an absolutely genius move on Williams' part. Combine that with the second punch of Abandoned in the Woods, and you're immediately and deeply sucked into this dark, fantastical world that Williams has constructed.
4 minutes ago, Holko said:Sure, when it's dialed down, unused, cut up tracked somewhere else, mixed under foley and dialogue so you can't hear any details or intricacies...
Film music should be seen, not heard!
Any music by JW you wish he had done differently?
in JOHN WILLIAMS
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Don't deny us our Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker alternate scores!