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Kevin Kiner & co's AHSOKA (2023)


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On 16/09/2023 at 12:51 PM, Knight of Ren said:

BTW, if you do those suites please share them here, as I usually love listening to those kind of fan-made compilations!

I shall! Almost done organizing the themes. Just gotta download the audios and edit them together.

Also may update them when Vol 2 comes out. Lol

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On 16/09/2023 at 12:51 PM, Knight of Ren said:

BTW, if you do those suites please share them here, as I usually love listening to those kind of fan-made compilations!

 

I'm gonna have to make second videos when Vol 2 comes out, but these were so much fun to make!

Still gotta keep an ear open for other themes. 

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On 02/09/2023 at 10:23 PM, Manakin Skywalker said:

 

Yeah, I saw a bunch of people crediting Kiner for that music the this past week. But the second I heard those cues in the episode I was like "I'm willing to bet this was DGR..."

 

 

"The Whale Pod" track?

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Not a fan of these new stormtrooper designs and the CGI they used for them. Looks like an edge lord made them or something. I’m also not a fan of the music introducing Thrawn, I feel like tracking old music (or just re-recording it) would’ve worked better than the BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Okay negativity done, Ezra stuff was cool 👍

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It baffled me what they chose to do for Thrawn's introduction... Only using his theme once? Though those synths represent the Empire in Bad Batch, I think at least the organ could have accompanied it, having Thrawn revealed being scored by "synth boings" was really weird.

 

Ezra's theme in a full orchestra was awesome to hear, and everything else was great, the voices for the witches, the warm in Sabine's journey and that one use of Thrawn's theme, all great.

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1 hour ago, JNHFan2000 said:

Another John Williams quote in episode 7!!

 

And it's a beauty!

 

I also really loved the action cues this episode. This really is the best music Kiner & Co. have written in a very long time

I liked the music for

Spoiler

Shin and Baylan, then the Raiders showing up, felt somewhat LOTRish

 

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8 hours ago, JNHFan2000 said:

Another John Williams quote in episode 7!!

 

And it's a beauty!

 

I also really loved the action cues this episode. This really is the best music Kiner & Co. have written in a very long time

What are the chances this cue makes it to the album? 😂

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To me the best music in the finale were the following sequences:

 

- The chase to the fortress (great martial undertones)

- The trooper fight (loved the choral bits and the violin blasts when they ressurected)

- The Morgan vs. Ahsoka battle (lot's of great drums and eastern flavors)

- The Force statement was fantastic!

- The final few minutes of the episode were beautifully scored. I loved the piano and the sweeping strings and brass were gorgeous.

- The new first part of the end credits was really well done. It changed now that Ahsoka has changed. She has found peace in a way and I thought the new arrangement of her theme reflected that.

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The last episode had some nice music, and it's been really great to hear all the themes from Rebels get the love they deserve, as well as Ahsoka's themes. They even used a couple of times one of her secondary ideas during this episode:

 

And the new themes are also quite great, even if perhaps not as instantly memorable as some other ideas. Baylan's theme, as played above, works really great in his scenes, and I like the use of the piano. And I also realized that Shin has a theme that has been appearing in some of her scenes at least in the last couple of episodes. I noticed because during the final montage, when we see the whereabouts of each character, we get each theme for each of the characters, and we hear her theme in full Shin on piano I think.

 

Cannot wait to listen to the second volume of the soundtrack!

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1 hour ago, LB Makes Stuff said:

Just asking out of curiosity, album releases next Friday?

 

 

I hope it releases soon! And while they are at it we never got a Rebels season 3 or 4! What's up with that?

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But what's not on there is 3-CPO's entrance.

 

The Senate hearing cue is on there. But I have not found the Williams quote. It's odd, because the other Williams quotes are all on there?

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19 minutes ago, JNHFan2000 said:

But what's not on there is 3-CPO's entrance.

 

The Senate hearing cue is on there. But I have not found the Williams quote. It's odd, because the other Williams quotes are all on there?

I really hope there's not actually any cues missing, with the missing cue from Volume 1 being included surely everything from eps 5-8 should also be there! (Especially with how comprehensive the release clearly is and as there isn't going to be another volume where any potentially missing cues could be included)

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Listened to basically the whole album, it’s a really solid effort by everyone involved. Sucks the 3PO cue didn’t make it, but I’m happy we at least got both Force variations included. And I never went through the finale’s credits, so it surprised me when Epilogue Part 2 kept going the way it did.

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1 hour ago, CGCJ said:

Just finished going through the volume 2 soundtrack! Here's my spreadsheet.

 

Interstingly Thrawn's Arrival is seemingly an alternate for his arrival in episode 6! (It matches the scenes very well) Explains it being at the end of the tracks for that episode. (00:00-03:40 of Grand Admiral Thrawn is the used cue)

 

As JNHFan2000 pointed out it is missing 1 cue from episode 7:
03:56-06:08 C-3PO senate scene (02:12).

 

I'm gald that David Glen Russell's missing cue from episode 2 was included but with another cue being missing, this time without another soundtrack release for it to be included, is disppointing... We can only hope the composer releases it themselves otherwise this will just remain incomplete.

 

So there's literally only one cue in the entire season that's missing? :o

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I have a few thoughts I would like to share:

 

I have enormous respect for Kiner's compositions. They are often highly detailed, complex pieces of music, and you can tell that he puts a lot of thought and effort into his writing, especially his application of themes. BUT his music is consistently rendered poorly.

 

Firstly, I don't understand why he and his team continue to use god-awful, outdated samples to mock-up their music at a time in history when there are so many great/better sounding sample packs available. If it was an issue that only affected smaller projects, I would have no problem, but they've been scoring immensely popular Star Wars shows for a while now, and the orchestral samples they use in their final versions of cues sound several steps below what I would consider an acceptable industry standard. I understand that for Ahsoka they were afforded the opportunity to record a live studio orchestra, but other popular shows like Bad Batch and Clone Wars S7 often relied on samples for the most part except for their finales, and they simply don't sound good at all. Yes, orchestral music is never going to sound as good in mock-up form compared to simpler, electronic music, and the time pressure for writing TV scores is well beyond that of writing for films; plus, they might not have as big a team as top tier film composers do to tidy up all the automation and other stuff in their project files. But even composer demos from the 2010s (see Powell's How to Train Your Dragon demos, Mancina's Moana demos, etc.) and even Zimmer's early samples from the 90s sound better to me than Kiner's final versions of cues which actually get used in the show. Full credit, I believe they have begun to use slightly better-sounding samples in some more recent projects, but there are still holdovers (especially the percussion) which continue to distract.

 

Additionally (and perhaps even more frustrating to me personally), his final mixes are absolutely atrocious, with overbearing compression and limiting which kills the listening experience and puts me off wanting to listen to the music at all, which is the biggest shame, as it is usually really good (as mentioned above). I can forgive the less-than-stellar mixes from the early Clone Wars and Rebels days, as perhaps they didn't even have access to a professional/A-level mixing engineer at the time, but the fact that overall their mixes continue to be so badly done, even with solid orchestral performances like at the end of Bad Batch S2 and Tales of the Jedi, irritates and confuses me to no end. I will say that Kiner and team have improved a little when you compare the mixes of Clone War S7 to Ahsoka, but there is still lots more to fix. Surely Disney can afford to hire a proper audio engineer at this point to make sure these guys' music is recorded and mixed to the highest standards. Maybe then they would even be in the running for higher profile films and TV productions! They certainly have the ability to write effectively for larger projects, but I feel like their mixes may hold them back.

 

For example: Even thought there's nothing egregious in the clip @CGCJ posted with the alternate version of Thrawn's Arrival, the light percussion has a bizarre reverb tail on it and the bigger drums feel cheap, hollow and un-impactful. Even the strings and brass, which I assume are live recordings, are made to feel synthetic as they have been compressed/limited to heck and left with a low dynamic range (loud when they play softly and peaking when they play loudly). The synths sound okay (similar to Clone Wars S7, Bad Batch, and Tales of the Jedi) but don't have a lot of depth to their sound compared to the synth work I have heard from other composers doing TV stuff. 

 

Just my own thoughts. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than me can address anything I've said which is inaccurate. I wish nothing but the best for Kiner and hope he keeps getting more work (while also addressing these issues which I feel negatively affect his music).

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