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NEW! Exclusive Mike Matessino interview - E.T., Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Stanley & Iris, and more!


Jay

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Terrific interview, as always. Good and direct questions with elaborated answers.

 

Very sad to hear about the album's digital elements been consumed by fire, and irked that a grammy winner album only existed on pressed CDs made some 30 years ago, until the brits came to aid. WTF, Universal??? But it also clarified to me that only the album sessions, includind "Stay with Me", were recorded digitally, as I thought everything was recorded both digital and analog, as Botnick usually did. Or we may've had a situation à la Intrada's Poltergeist 2 (which I wouldn't mind at all).

 

I also hope to have some great Williams releases in 2018 to justify another year's end great interview, unless MM has enough stories for CE3K alone. :)

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I think the main score sessions were recorded to analog and digital simultaneously, but when they came back for the 5 album tracks and Stay With Me, they recorded digital only.  I wonder why?  I should've asked Mike if he knew why. Maybe he asked Bruce about that in their talk in Burbank on Sunday?

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Maybe the budget and/or time didn't allow for this dual analog/digital recording, I don't know. But I'd certainly like to see how a full digital recording of E.T. would sound like against the already perfect conditions analog elements present in this release.

 

Also, reading this interview made me very optimistic about a future MM & Botnick expanded ToD release, as it was recorded in the same studio, with the same crew and apparently same techniques. If E.T., under those same conditions, sounds this good, I can only imagine...

 

Well, once again, terrific interview, Jay. ;)

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2 hours ago, Jay said:

So should I ask them for a job? ;)

 

2 hours ago, BloodBoal said:

No. You should start your own magazine.

 

2 hours ago, Disco Stu said:

JWFan Quarterly

 

 

YES on all these accounts :P

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4 hours ago, Brian99_1 said:

Wow finally got a chance to read the whole thing. Excellent work Jay!

 

like others have mentioned it really shines a light on the work people like MM do for these releases and makes us fans all the more appreciative. 

 

On on another note i don’t want to seem mean spirited here but I wish more interviews / articles on FSM took this approach. I’d still be a subscriber then.

There's nothing to feel mean spirited about with that comment. Interviews are important if you find the subjects meaningful. Since you're unlikely to ever get to interview the person yourself, you depend on the interviewer to try to glean details that you'd never otherwise get a chance to learn about. My wife and I were at Comic-Con this past July and watched a replay of some of the Saturday Hall H panels. Chris Hardwick was interviewing the Justice League cast and it was atrocious. You learned NOTHING from it that would have merited a 20-hour wait in line. "How was it to work with this group?" "Oh, it was amazing." Yeesh. Maybe that's why any lingering interest I had in JL evaporated on the spot that day. (For the record, Ray Miller was probably the only one who bothered not to phone it in and gave answers that were not completely asinine or empty.)

 

I may not have heard of the term "mechanical rate" before reading the MM interview, but it took me only 15 seconds on Google to learn what it means, and now I have some trivia about how a tiny part of the music industry works. That's rewarding to me. That's what a good interview should allow for. Again, thank you, Jay. Maybe you could one day interview Shawn Murphy or Conrad Pope -- I for one would love to learn a bit about the intricacies of sound engineering or orchestration!! Or any of the folks at JoAnn Kane. Or...

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Great interview @Jay!

 

I was surprised to learn that 1996 and 2002 E.T. releases featured a lot (if not for the most part) of alt takes!

 

That's a so big problem in the industry today. Labels give the job to consultants, who restore the old tapes and they don't even know what they do, they don't even know the artist, the content... they just listen that quickly, pick the takes they think are the best ones, without even bothering to compare them with the old records or original release.

 

That's a shame! 

 

Being a Charles Aznavour fan, like all people know now (I hope), it's a big problem... and Universal (and particularly since the multi-tracks stereo tapes have been newly transfered in HD) still continue to release alt tracks by error. In the case of Aznavour, we can talk of almost 50 years of alt tracks released by error... It was such a mess, that I've decided to make a catalog. ;)

 

Anyway...

 

Happy to learn that at least 2 other expansions are coming... surely next year!

 

 

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It would be fun to document exactly which take is on which album.

 

Do you have access to this information? I mean with the exact recording date, with the exact take number (ex. take 2, take 6)?

 

A catalog of all the released alt takes will be necessary one day!

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I have plans to do a series of articles like this one for Empire of the Sun that reveal the take information for all the JW scores that MM has tackled.  If there's enough interest, it should happen!

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5 minutes ago, Jay said:

I have plans to do a series of articles like this one for Empire of the Sun that reveal the take information for all the JW scores that MM has tackled.  If there's enough interest, it should happen!

 

Well, E.T., Empire of the Sun, Star Wars... what else... it begins to make a lot of alt tracks released on records... enough to document them I think.

 

I'll be interrested to see that happening!

 

 

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@Jay

 

Do you know how MM compares all those versions and alt tracks?

 

Does he use some tools/program to help him, or does he do it "the old way", by synchronizing two WAV in a WAV player and play them togheter to point out the differences?

 

And how does he tune-up the WAVs to the "right" speed? At hearing, using a keyboard? Or using a program?

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12 minutes ago, Jay said:

ProTools

 

I dunno

 

Yes I imagine, something like that, I guess we have to isolate one particular and sustained note from a WAV and Pro Tools can tell if it's right tuned or not.

 

Anyway, for my LP restorations I do them by hear using a keyboard, I don't have Pro Tools or anything like that. This is very long!

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Even with the wrong takes of the previous releases, E.T. music is still powerful on all releases. That's the magic of a well written and well performed score.

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Oh sure, no one said the wrongs takes were performed badly, they're simply not the ones JW intended for anyone to hear.

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Yes, I understand. But in the case of E.T. it didn't ruin the experience at all. I can't quite say the same thing about other scores with wrong takes...

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The explanation of how the "mechanical rate" affected the presentation of the finale cues on E.T. makes me wonder if "The Appearance Of The Visitors" will be separated from "The Visitors" on the upcoming Close Encounters release, a là the old LP.

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Yeah those comments about Close Encounters were... illuminating!

 

What do people think MM is getting at there? It sounds like Williams might have been a little more involved crafting a 'listening experience' order of tracks, but Matessino compromised by ensuring everything has clean openings/endings so we can re-arrange tracks ourselves if desired.

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Mike M went into more detail about the mechanic rate stuff on FSM:
 

Quote

When you create a track of audio for release you are "publishing" it. It's called a "mechanical" because you are putting it onto a "mechanism" (an outdated term as it was meant to imply making a tape, record, disc, etc.) So the entity controlling the publishing must be paid. The rate is generally fixed, so in the past there was nothing to stop a label from releasing two 30-minute suites and paying two mechanical royalties to the publisher and saving some serious money. Now it's tiered so that the rate is higher if a track is over 10 minutes. So that same hour of music will now be 6 or 7 tracks minimum and the publisher makes some money.

Conversely it means that it's possible to do 30 and 40 second tracks if it makes sense to do so, because the publishers, via the owner of the recordings, can grant the label a "mechanical cap," which means that a label pays for a maximum of "x" number of tracks even if their release exceeds that number.

So let's say to properly present a score we need 30 tracks, with some of them being very short... there might be a mechanical cap of 20 so that the label doesn't have to go broke on it, but those 30 tracks will then all be kept under 10 minutes so that the rate stays the same for all of them.

Aren't you glad you asked?

Mike M.

 

 

http://filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=123727&forumID=1&archive=0

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CDDA has a feature of "indices", were each track can have a number of additional entry points, beside the start. I've only seen a handful of CDs that make use of this, and I don't think many players ever actively supported it. I wonder how that would affect the fees - especially before the 10 minute cap; you could just make one big track with 30 small sub tracks.

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On classical music CDs, often there's no gap between movements (the music flows without silence), but they appears as separate tracks on the CD. I hate that, because when I rip the music into WAV, I have to extract the whole musical piece in one file, it's because my mp3 player can't play gapless files (we hear a "cut" between the mp3s)... I become CRAZY when I hear that. Same thing for my Pink Floyd albums, they all appears as one big track on my mp3 player!

 

Some tracks of the HOOK LLL CD was like that I think. Fortunately, it's a "trick" that soundtrack labels don't seems to use anymore, at least, with John Williams recent releases.

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48 minutes ago, Bespin said:

On classical music CDs, often there's no gap between movements (the music flows without silence), but they appears as separate tracks on the CD. I hate that, because when I rip the music into WAV, I have to extract the whole musical piece in one file, it's because my mp3 player can't play gapless files (we hear a "cut" between the mp3s)... I become CRAZY when I hear that. Same thing for my Pink Floyd albums, they all appears as one big track on my mp3 player!

 

 

That's because MP3 is a lousy format that doesn't support gap less playback. Some players fake it, but you're better off with Ogg/Vorbis or one of the free lossless formats.

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11 hours ago, Bespin said:

On classical music CDs, often there's no gap between movements (the music flows without silence), but they appears as separate tracks on the CD. I hate that, because when I rip the music into WAV, I have to extract the whole musical piece in one file, it's because my mp3 player can't play gapless files (we hear a "cut" between the mp3s)... I become CRAZY when I hear that. Same thing for my Pink Floyd albums, they all appears as one big track on my mp3 player!

 

Some tracks of the HOOK LLL CD was like that I think. Fortunately, it's a "trick" that soundtrack labels don't seems to use anymore, at least, with John Williams recent releases.

Seconded.

It's especially annoying if, like me, you often listen to individual tracks, sometimes in random order.

I really prefer tracks having a proper beginning, middle and end for that.

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Agreed. Very often, I’ll rip the CD in wav and then do my own “fade in” or “fade out” so that I’m able to listen to tracks in whatever order I want.

 

For a lot of tracks though, this is easier said than done.

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I understand that if MM works on the Star Wars scores in the next years, he will not do like the Special Editions and comes out with big joined tracks of 10:02, 10:40, 10:57, 11:50 and 14:48 minutes!

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2 hours ago, Brundlefly said:

But the definitive Hook should have The Ultimate War as one track of over 17 minutes.

 

It's annoying, but it's not a problem, as it can be extracted on a single WAV without any cuts. It's vey easy to do with a software like EAC.

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I don't really have much of a problem with really long action tracks, if the music goes well together.

The Battle of Hoth, The Ultimate War and the entire extensive The Battle from John Debney's Cutthroat Island are all perfectly fine.

The Battle of Endor, however, is not because the music keeps switching around.

 

In fact, sometimes I really like listening specifically to such long tracks.

Adds to their amazing epicness! :D

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