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Petition to have trailer soundtracks on the album of the score


Iris

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Hi, I love music scores, I’ve even composed a couple so the connection with them is very strong. Latley I’ve been watching trailers and I was just recently watching the Star Wars episode 9 teaser trailer and the soundtrack behind it is absolutely amazing and looking back at other score albums they don’t seem to include the trailer music which to me is short selling it’s spectacular first impressions. So if John William started putting his trailer soundtrack on the albums maybe others would follow, because personally it’s the first impression music and it usually is amazing.

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I think these would be really neat tracks to have.

 

In fact, the earliest versions of this website, back in 1999 or 2000, included downloadable edits of Star Wars trailer music - the Episode I trailer music, if I recall correctly - along with edits of the tracked music in the ANH special edition.

 

The trouble oftentimes would be in the little details.  With the exception of the first TFA trailer, all of the sequel trailers have been music written by other composers, adapting Williams' themes.  Williams may not want that tagged to his album, or there may be contractual reasons not to include it.

 

I'd buy them as digital downloads in a heartbeat though - they're usually a lot of fun, built to be punchy and drive excitement and emotion in a 60-120 second piece.  A different way of listening to Williams' themes.

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The tracks have their moments, but as already has been said, they’re not written by JW so there’s no way they’d end up on a soundtrack album. It would be sweet if they were compiled on some kind of separate album, but I think it would get headache-inducing pretty quickly.

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Usually, yes, they're quite formulaic. Although I can understand the appeal or 'rush' of a short piece that follows these parameters -- whether it's by someone like Thomas Bergersen/Two Steps from Hell, E.S. Posthumus, Immediate Music or others. Or oldtimers like John Beal (although I've shunned his music after I was alerted to his political leanings).

 

Other, originally composed trailer pieces have more value, like Goldsmith's JUDGE DREDD trailer. That would actually have been pretty neat on the JUDGE DREDD soundtrack way back when, but there would be probably be all kinds of legal issues involved.

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Indeed a compilation album would be perfect for this stuff.

Adding it to the OST probably means sacrificing something else, but allowing it to stand on its own would compromise nothing.

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A petition?  The execs know that if it were profitable to do so, then they would be doing it.  In the case of Williams, I don't want non-Williams droning as part of the OST--in the end, the OST is for the actual movie and written by a given artist, while the trailer is a commercial produced by different artists, different aims and certainly different "talents."  

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In the case of something like the first three Harry Potter movies, where the trailer music was also written by Williams, I would agree with that being a nice inclusion into the soundtrack album. However, in the case with something like the new Star Wars trailers, I personally wouldn’t want that being included. It’s just trailer music, produced by someone else, which happened to use Star Wars themes. 

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32 minutes ago, hornist said:

Most of them sound horrible. Without sound effects and the imagery. Generic synth drums in every bar🤮🤮🤮

Yes, I think that's part of my fascination with trailer music: it sounds great in a theatre with surround-sound with the visuals, but removed from that context it's not as self-sustaining as the film score proper. You notice how cheap it sounds (which is ironic considering the price of software and hardware involved in producing it.

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On 9/24/2019 at 8:46 PM, Iris said:

Welp who ever does should get some recognition 

It's a business that does it, so there's usually a group of people that do the trailer music, not a singular composer.

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Even the trailer music to the recent star wars movies have been pretty low quality. Just "epic" renditions of williams' themes but with lots of percussion and cheap sounding rising sweep effects. People seem to like them so whatever, but it isnt professional to put a cheap demo track in the same album as a multi-million dollar music production

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12 minutes ago, cordax said:

Just "epic" renditions of williams' themes but with lots of percussion and cheap sounding rising sweep effects.

Don't forget the emotional piano tinkle!

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