LOTR Box Set

[Jay 37,374]

I agree with Incanus. Until you know how much you like the scores, the Complete Recordings can be overwhelming. But once you fall in love with the scores, however, they are pretty wonderful (minus a few questionable decisions they made)

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

What questionable descisions (apart from the end credits)?

[Mr. Breathmask 555]

Pushing the choir waaaay back in some of the FotR tracks, I guess.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

I'm gotten acustomed to that a long while ago.

[Jay 37,374]

Why would anyone have any problems with the end credits? Its exactly what Shore wrote and is the same way in the films

My problems are:

-The cast performances that overlap Shore's underscore. It's fine to include them if they can be edited out like aragorn's song in the swamp or the hobbit's singing in the green dragon, but it sucks that i can't hear the music at the beginning with frodo or the music as bilbo leaves hobbiton without ian mckellen and ian holm singing over them

-the trimmed bars and shortened pauses. Why?

-yea, I suppose the low choir too, I hadn't though of that. Luckily thats easy enough to edit back in with the OSTS

These are again of course very minors things in an otherwise very excellent series of box sets!

[Jim Ware 526]

Why would anyone have any problems with the end credits? Its exactly what Shore wrote and is the same way in the films

I have no problems with TTT and ROTK, but FOTR includes music tracked from The Great Eye at the end, rather than the fanfare that was actually recorded for the end credits. Thankfully the original recording is on the OST.

[Charlie Brigden 7]

Why would anyone have any problems with the end credits? Its exactly what Shore wrote and is the same way in the films

But a lot of it is tracked, and it seems to have been put together with little forethought. I much prefer the versions on the OSTs.

[Jay 37,374]

Why would anyone have any problems with the end credits? Its exactly what Shore wrote and is the same way in the films

I have no problems with TTT and ROTK, but FOTR includes music tracked from The Great Eye at the end, rather than the fanfare that was actually recorded for the end credits. Thankfully the original recording is on the OST.

You know, I've always noticed it was VERY similar to the end of The Great Eye, but never investigated close enough to see if it was the exact same recording. Interesting.

Had Doug said what happened there? Or why it wasn't reverted for the CR?

There's so much good information between Doug's site and the old moviemusic.com threads, but it's so hard to search for it.... then again, I suppose between Doug's book and the upcoming dvds we'll have all the information we'll ever need...

[Marian Schedenig 8,211]

-The cast performances that overlap Shore's underscore. It's fine to include them if they can be edited out like aragorn's song in the swamp or the hobbit's singing in the green dragon, but it sucks that i can't hear the music at the beginning with frodo or the music as bilbo leaves hobbiton without ian mckellen and ian holm singing over them

The simple chord over The Road Goes Ever On clearly make no sense without the singing. Some other cast performance choices might be more questionable though.

[Incanus 5,716]

Why would anyone have any problems with the end credits? Its exactly what Shore wrote and is the same way in the films

My problems are:

-The cast performances that overlap Shore's underscore. It's fine to include them if they can be edited out like aragorn's song in the swamp or the hobbit's singing in the green dragon, but it sucks that i can't hear the music at the beginning with frodo or the music as bilbo leaves hobbiton without ian mckellen and ian holm singing over them

-the trimmed bars and shortened pauses. Why?

-yea, I suppose the low choir too, I hadn't though of that. Luckily thats easy enough to edit back in with the OSTS

These are again of course very minors things in an otherwise very excellent series of box sets!

Personally I find that only Ian Holm's performance overlaps the underscore annoyingly and even then it is not a huge discomfort. Shore just followed the logic of providing all the music from the films with the cast performances. In my opinion e.g. McKellen's performance is so integrated to the underscore in the beginning of the EE that it would have been odd to hear the specifically written accompaniment for his voice and not hear him singing. In TTT and RotK there are no problems with cast perfomances which are very well integrated to the underscore.

Trimmed bars of music which are mainly repetition of a phrase or held chords and shortened pauses were trimmed for musical experience. It was Shore's decision for listenability of his work. Again I find this perfectly acceptable and have not lamented about this after Mr. Adams told us about it back before FotR CR was released. I have not found that my enjoyment of the music has lessened even if I have heard the repetition of the Isengard percussion rhythm on one track mere 6 times instead of 9.

The low choir has to do with the balancing act between the choir and the orchestra which was again Shore's decision when the new mix was decided for the CRs which does not exactly work every time. Especially the more subtle choral sections in FotR suffer from this and sound distant. One example is the Seduction of the Ring theme heard on track The Pass of Caradhras which is barely audible.

But all in all those are such minor complaints in truly brilliant complete score releases.

[Pieter Boelen 740]

Did anyone do some improving on the CR's?

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

I added the beginning of The Prophecy to Prologue / One Ring To Rule Them All. At some point i'll fiddle around with the End Credits for sure.

[Luke Skywalker 1,796]

i dont mind the vocal solos, aragorn's in ROTK ending is great. but the songs in the taverns and feast along with laughing people are annoying, more so since they are not isolated tracks but the previous ones segue into them, and they are not even shore's compositions.

The end credits on the OSTs are the correct ones, right?

Would it suffe to change theCR fro the OST or the mixing is so different that it is better to trim down the CR version?

[Richard Penna 3,695]

The only dialogue insertion that slightly annoys me is Gandalf's little ditty in The Shire because it does interfere a bit with the melody. Although the final part of that is heard cleanly on the FotR: EE DVD on one of the title sequence card things, which I used in my earlier expanded edit.

Never paid much attention to the end credits myself, so if there's anything to bother me about them, I have yet to notice it.

Oddly I don't mind the film mixes (i.e. low choir) being used in many cues because they represent what was heard in the film, and for example in Weathertop, the low choir gives the really cool strings more prominence and somehow a different sort of pure peril that Frodo is in.

Plus, I often complain when alternate mixes are used on a score album, like when a solo instrument is dropped and the character of the cue changes because the melody or general atmosphere is relying on another part of the orchestra. And we all know how attached us music fans can get to a particular mix or presentation

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

-the trimmed bars and shortened pauses. Why?

I never noticed any of them, so I don't mind.

[Richard Penna 3,695]

Just a creative decision Shore and Doug made apparently. There was even a brief discussion here shortly before the box came out about whether people were going to edit certain tracks to include the extra bars, but I believe the general consensus was that if no one noticed that a few 'beats' had been edited out of a piece, why bother.

I haven't seen the first film for a long time, but even so, the only things I've ever noticed are maybe a few prolonged notes/transitions here and there sounding a little shorter than they might be in the film. Not the sort of thing I care about, and the care they took with these sets meant that I trusted them not to take such creative decisions during important moments.

[Marian Schedenig 8,211]

i dont mind the vocal solos, aragorn's in ROTK ending is great

Or would be, if Mortensen were able to sing.

The only dialogue insertion that slightly annoys me is Gandalf's little ditty in The Shire because it does interfere a bit with the melody.

It doesn't interfere, it is the melody. Shore just added a few orchestra chords to it. Holm singing the same song later on does interfere, because it's not related to the score in any way.

[John Crichton 4]

i dont mind the vocal solos, aragorn's in ROTK ending is great

Or would be, if Mortensen were able to sing.

Indeed. I always stop the first disc of FotR as soon as his warbling starts.

[Marian Schedenig 8,211]

I don't mind his bit on FOTR actually, it's just a "character piece" so to speak and he's just singing/humming for himself, it sounds fine for that. I appreciate his singing in ROTK as far as the movie goes (it was a brilliant decision to include it), and it's fine to have a king who isn't a good singer, but it's still a shame they couldn't somehow create an "alternate" with a better singer for the CD release.

[Naïve Old Fart 9,554]

Thanks very much, guys, for this thread. I've taken my first step into a larger world!

[Wojo 2,453]

I'm really glad I bought each CR box less than a month after its release. I didn't dream they'd become hard to find, but I knew they wouldn't get any cheaper for a while.

[Richard Penna 3,695]

Yeah, I was lucky to get Rotk when I did. I had an order with Amazon.co.uk, but then I got word that Axelmusic were shipping, a couple of days before release, so I contacted them to confirm and switched my order.

And that's when Amazon decided they didn't have any... lucky escape.

[MissPadmé 17]

Why would anyone have any problems with the end credits? Its exactly what Shore wrote and is the same way in the films

My problems are:

-The cast performances that overlap Shore's underscore. It's fine to include them if they can be edited out like aragorn's song in the swamp or the hobbit's singing in the green dragon, but it sucks that i can't hear the music at the beginning with frodo or the music as bilbo leaves hobbiton without ian mckellen and ian holm singing over them

yeah, especially the green dragon with all the audience noise distracts very much. I fell in love with Gandalfs performance from the first minute
I mean it is like the Overlay that should have been there in "The Nightclub Brawl" .
But I did a version without Gandalf and Ian Holm, which is very easy to filter out.

[Jay 37,374]

Esther, I would LOVE to hear those!!!

[fommes 153]

I love the choir mix on the CRs, I like the fact that they're equal to other instruments, and especially in combination with the strings it sounds really great. The music as a whole is more engaging in this way.