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    • CommentAuthorAnthony
    • CommentTimeJul 3rd 2013
    Now this I like!
    •  
      CommentAuthorlp
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2013
    Anthony wrote
    Now this I like!


    The persistent drum loop got annoying quick.
    •  
      CommentAuthorErik Woods
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2013
    yeah
    host and executive producer of THE CINEMATIC SOUND RADIO PODCAST | www.cinematicsound.net | www.facebook.com/cinematicsound | I HAVE TINNITUS!
    • CommentAuthorTimmer
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2013
    lp wrote
    Anthony wrote
    Now this I like!


    The persistent drum loop got annoying quick.


    It does but it's only slightly more annoying than Zimmer's incessant ruddy drumming in his Man of Steel score. Aside from that I liked it.
    On Friday I ate a lot of dust and appeared orange near the end of the day ~ Bregt
    •  
      CommentAuthorThor
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2013 edited
    Just got back from THE LONE RANGER. What a crazy film, especially the last act! Very "Verbinski".

    I LOVED Zimmer's score in this one -- a cross between SHERLOCK HOLMES, Ennio Morricone, power anthems, classic western music and his contemporary action music. And the way he plays with and interweaves his own material into the "Wilhem Tell Overture" in that last act is simply stupendous.
    I am extremely serious.
    • CommentAuthorTimmer
    • CommentTimeJul 5th 2013 edited
    Quartet Records is proud to present its two new releases: three scores on two different CDs.




    MONA LISA
    Music Composed and Conducted by Michael Kamen

    CASTAWAY
    Original Music Composed by Stanley Myers & Hans Zimmer
    Produced by Hans Zimmer

    Limited Edition of 1000 units





    Two-on-one CD premiere of two soundtrack albums previously issued on LP by EMI.

    Michael Kamen's Mona Lisa (1986) was written for Neil Jordan's stylish crime story about a high-class prostitute and her reluctant driver who descend into the London underworld while forming an unlikely alliance in the process. Kamen's score is infused with two Nat King Cole standards (the eponymous "Mona Lisa" and "When I Fall in Love"), but he also provides excellent suspense cues for scenes of deceit and murder. The soundtrack also contains two vintage Nat King Cole recording, two contemporary pop songs and an excerpt from Puccini's Madame Butterfly.

    Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer’s Castaway (1987) underscores Nicholas Roeg's erotic tale based on a true story concerning a woman who volunteers to be the wife-for-hire to an eccentric writer, seeking refugee on a deserted island for a year. Myers and Zimmer music (although the LP released at his date said only "Original Music by Stanley Myers" and Hans Zimmer was credited in the section of “aditional music”, actually all the tracks were composed by both composers, and produced entirely by Hans Zimmer) offers a psychedelic pop exotica experiment shaped by the sound of the sea, the wind and the forest. The soundtrack program also includes the theme song by Kate Bush and one additonal track by Brian Eno.

    This release contains both soundtrack programs as they originally appeared on LP, and has been mastered from first generation master tapes vaulted at Abbey Road Studios in London. The package is rounded out with richly illustrated booklet with liner notes by Gergely Hubai, who discusses both films and scores in detail.


    Both releases are available now on pre-order. The CDs will ship next Friday 12th.
    For more info and listen audio samples, please visit www.quartetrecords.com
    On Friday I ate a lot of dust and appeared orange near the end of the day ~ Bregt
    • CommentAuthorTimmer
    • CommentTimeJul 5th 2013 edited
    A nice duo, I like both of these by Zimmer/Myers/Kamen
    On Friday I ate a lot of dust and appeared orange near the end of the day ~ Bregt
    •  
      CommentAuthorThor
    • CommentTimeJul 5th 2013 edited
    Yes, CASTAWAY is pretty nice. I have a boot of it somewhere. Can't remember much of MONA LISA, but I've seen the film ages ago.
    I am extremely serious.
    • CommentAuthorBasilB
    • CommentTimeJul 7th 2013
    I really like Zimmers Lone Ranger!

    "Silver" and "Home" are beautiful pieces and the "Final" track is just a blast!

    Great and very welcome after the MoS snooze fest...
  1. My review of THE LONE RANGER, for anyone who is interested:

    http://moviemusicuk.us/2013/07/09/the-l … ns-zimmer/

    Jon
    •  
      CommentAuthorBregje
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2013
    I'm listening to some of The Lone Ranger now and I like it very much!
    Besides some of the above mentioned sounds and styles, I can hear some Trevor Jones-like arrangements in there somewhere.
    smile

    I haven't heard Rango.

    Crap, this is good! I wish we still had B-sides, so that all the people who bought the popular Man of Steel would also get The Lone Ranger on the B-side and discover the much better stuff that way.
    wink
    •  
      CommentAuthorBregje
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2013
    Jon Broxton wrote
    My review of THE LONE RANGER, for anyone who is interested:

    http://moviemusicuk.us/2013/07/09/the-l … ns-zimmer/

    Jon

    Excellent!
    •  
      CommentAuthorBobdH
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2013 edited
    Bregje wrote
    I haven't heard Rango.


    Rango doesn't really have a good presentation on album, but the nearly 6 minute suite contains all the themes you'll need. My advise is, get that one on iTunes for just € 1,29. If you like the quirky western fun side of The Lone Ranger, you'll love that suite as well. I find it quite addictive, especially in summer time smile
    •  
      CommentAuthorBregje
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2013
    Thanks!
    •  
      CommentAuthorBregt
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2013
    I see that this new thread keeps up the p(e)ace.
    Kazoo
    • CommentAuthorTimmer
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2013
    Posted by David Coscina at FSM, I thought some here may find it interesting....


    [startquote]Copied from VI Control Forum. Thought it might serve as a dose of reality here.


    Why HZ got the Job, and you didn't
    Posted: Today at 12:35 am
    I saw this on a fellow composers face book and googled it and found it on hz's webbie. I don't know if its original to there, and forgive me if this is not new, but I think to offers lots of insights for film composers.

    Here's a LENGTHY messaged posted by composer/musician Michael A. Levine, who worked at RCP :

    "Why Hans Zimmer Got The Job You Wanted (And You Didn't)

    I worked for Hans Zimmer for about 8 years, 5 of which were in a studio at Remote Control, his facility in Santa Monica. Since leaving Remote, many people have said to me, usually in a conspiratorial tone of voice, things like this: Hans doesn't really write his own music. The studios only give him work because he's famous. He's not a real musician. He just gets his clients drunk and all the work is done by guys in the back room. And so forth.

    The underlying implication is that this underhanded semi-musician has Hollywood in his thrall due to Svengali like powers and maybe, someday, they'll wake up and hire a "real" composer - like whoever is whispering to me.

    No other composer seems to stir up this kind of ire - I never hear people say, "Yeah, that John Williams only writes 12-line sketches and it's up to his orchestrators to make it into real music!"

    Well, I hate to break it to you, but Hans gets what he gets because…he deserves it.

    Here is why:

    1) HANS IS A VISIONARY. In films there is a process called "spotting" in which the composer and director decide what kind of music is needed where. Hans is the best spotter I've ever observed. He has an extraordinary sense of what will work. But long before spotting, he will spend weeks writing a musical suite which is the source of the musical themes of the film. Oddly, this isn't really about music - it's about the essence of what the story and the characters are. Film composer great Elmer Bernstein (Magnificent Seven, To Kill A Mockingbird) once said to me, "The dirty little secret is that we're not musicians - we're dramatists." Hans is an outstanding dramatist.

    But he also fearlessly pushes himself, challenging the limits of what is acceptable in our medium. In Batman: Dark Knight, long before we had footage of the film, Hans asked Heitor Pereira (guitar), Martin Tillman (cello), and me (violin and tenor violin) to separately record some variations on a set of instructions involving 2 notes, C and D. This involved a fair amount of interpretation! For those who are familiar with classical music, it was John Cage meets Phil Glass. We each spent a week making hundreds of snippets. Then we had to listen to each other's work and re-interpret that. The end result was a toolbox of sounds that provided Hans with the attitude of his score.

    Later, he asked me to double every ostinato (repeating phrase) pattern the violins and violas played. There were a LOT. And a great studio orchestra had already played them all! I spent a week on what I considered an eccentric fool's errand, providing score mixer, Alan Meyerson, with single, double, and triple pass versions of huge swaths of the score. Months later, I joked with him about how "useful" my efforts had been. Alan told me that, actually, they had turned out to be a crucial element of the score, that he often pulled out the orchestra and went to my performances when something needed to be edgy or raw.

    The attached video shows something from Man of Steel. Hans assembled a room full of great trap drummers to play the same groove at the same time, each with tiny variations. Is it a stunt? Maybe. But does it deliver a sound you've never quite heard before? Definitely.

    2) HANS WORKS VERY, VERY HARD. When working on a project - which is most of the time - Hans usually arrives at the studio at 11 am and then works until 3 or 4 in the morning. 7 days a week. For months. As the deadline approaches, everything else fades away. Harry Gregson-Williams once told me you could tell how far into a project Hans was by the length of his beard - at some point, he stops shaving.

    His late-night hours provide welcome relief from badgering studios and the noise of running a business. They proved to be a challenge to my metabolism when I was getting up at 6 a.m. to go to yoga. Which leads me to a the title of another post, "Never Keep Different Hours Than Your Boss." But I digress.

    Hans is not as fast as his one-time assistant, Harry, or his current go-to arranger, Loren Balfe, both of whom work at superhuman speed. Hans once suggested that I worked too fast. I was puzzled at the time, but what I think he was really saying was that I needed to pay better attention to the little details that, cumulatively, make all the difference.

    3) HANS IS THE BEST FILM MUSIC PRODUCER IN THE BUSINESS. We're not talking about technical music skills. Hans is a so-so pianist and guitarist and his knowledge of academic theory is, by intention, limited. (I was once chastised while working on The Simpsons Movie for saying "lydian flat 7" instead of "the cartoon scale.") He doesn't read standard notation very well, either. But no one reads piano roll better than he does. [The piano roll is a page of a music computer program that displays the notes graphically.] Which gets to the heart of the matter: Hans knows what he needs to know to make it sound great.

    Sometimes, that is the right musicians. Sometimes it is the right sample library. Sometimes it is the right room, or engineer, or recording technique, or mixing technique. All that counts is the end result. And it always sounds spectacular.

    4) HANS WORKS WITH GREAT PEOPLE. Take a look at the composers who have worked for Hans: John Powell, Harry Gregson-Williams, Heitor Pereira, Henry Jackman, Steve Jablonsky, Lorne Balfe, Trevor Morris, Ramin Djawadi, Jeff Rona, Mark Mancina, Atli Orvarsson, Geoff Zanelli, Blake Neeley, Stephen Hilton, Tom "Junkie XL" Holkenborg and on and on. And Alan Meyerson, his mixer. And Bob Badami, Ken Karman, his music editors. (Bob's credits alone dwarf about everybody in the business). His great percussionists, Satnam Ramgotra and Ryeland Allison. Sound designers, Howard Scarr and Mel Wesson. Not to mention Steve Kofsky, his business partner. And all the tech whizzes he's had over the years: Mark Wherry, Sam Estes, Pete Snell, Tom Broderick. Even his personal assistants - Andrew Zack, then Czar Russell - are remarkable.

    Of course, the really amazing talents are the ones he works for: Chris Nolan, Gore Verbinski, Jim Brooks, Ron Howard, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Jerry Bruckheimer. But he would never get the chance to work for them if he didn't hold up his end of the bargain.

    5) HANS IS A CHARMER. The first time Jeffrey Katzenberg heard Hans' love theme for Megamind he said, "It sounds like 1968 on the French Riviera." It was not a compliment. And it wasn't wrong. Actually, what Hans realized - and Jeffrey hadn't - was that the heart of the love story in the movie was right out of A Man and A Woman and La Nouvelle Vague. Rather than point this out, Hans said, "Let me work on it some more." Over the next two weeks he played revision after revision for Jeffrey, each time making small changes to the arrangement or structure, but keeping the same basic tune. A couple of weeks later, after Jeffrey tore apart the music for a different scene that we'd worked pretty hard on, he said, "Well, at least we have a great love theme!" The rest of us looked at each other. When did that happen!

    Hans is acutely aware of the presentational aspect of our business. His capacious control room, rather than being the strictly functional wood and bland fabric of a typical studio, is a lurid red velvet - a 19th century Turkish bordello as Hans describes it. With a wall of rare analog modular synthesizers in the back. At dinner, he serves his guests fine wine, and gives others cleverly appropriate (more so than lavish) gifts. As one of his clients said to me, "Hans makes you feel like a great chef is inviting you into his kitchen."

    Not all of us can afford HZ level dog and pony shows. But most of us can use what we do have better.

    6) HANS DELIVERS. Hans often gets hired for massive projects. The reason he uses an army of people is that he needs them to keep up with the demands of the directors and the studios. Halfway through Rango, Gore Verbinski suddenly changed direction, threw almost everything out, and we started over. Without a team to carry out the new directions, we'd have been dead.

    Look at what happened to Howard Shore on King Kong, Marc Shaiman on Team America, Maurice Jarre on River Wild, Gabriel Yared on Troy, or the great Bernard Herrmann on Torn Curtain? In each case they were fired because the studio or director lost faith that they could shift direction quickly enough once their original approach was rejected. In 150+ films this has never happened to Hans.

    BTW, he is also very aware of what the power structure is - who really makes decisions. I was fired - or more accurately not hired after a trial period - from a film because I jumped through hoops for the director who had hired me while not spending enough time figuring out what the producer - the actual power - wanted. Rather than being sympathetic, Hans told me I had failed in a fundamental task: determining who was my boss. He was right, and I haven't made that mistake again.

    So, is Hans my favorite film composer? No. He's not even Hans' favorite film composer! (I'm guessing that would be Nina Rota or Ennio Morricone, but you'd have to ask him.) And he can be dismissive, condescending, arrogant, exploitative, and just plain mean. Like me. And, I suspect, you.

    But he is exceptionally smart, gifted, accomplished, and hard-working. And here is the hard truth: outside of a few rare exceptions, the people who are successful in the film business are successful because they deserve to be. They have earned it. Yes, they have been lucky. But everybody gets lucky eventually. The question is what do you do when good fortune arrives. If you want to be as successful as the people you admire, you need to be as smart, resourceful, and determined as they are. As Hans is."

    _________________
    Stuart Kollmorgen
    Composer/Creative Director Big Yellow Duck
    BigYellowDuck.com[/endquote]
    On Friday I ate a lot of dust and appeared orange near the end of the day ~ Bregt
  2. Wow, now that's something ... something I have to contemplate a bit longer.

    Volker
    Bach's music is vibrant and inspired.
    •  
      CommentAuthorThor
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2013
    Awesome post. It reflects many of my own thoughts on the man and his music -- only as an outsider, not an insider like Stuart.
    I am extremely serious.
    •  
      CommentAuthorSouthall
    • CommentTimeJul 19th 2013
    In the unlikely event anyone is interested, here's my review of The Lone Ranger:

    http://www.movie-wave.net/?p=3787
    •  
      CommentAuthorScribe
    • CommentTimeJul 19th 2013 edited
    Wow the first two paragraphs are brilliant biggrin My favorite line is the one about the unsettling week...
    I love you all. Never change. Well, unless you want to!
    •  
      CommentAuthorErik Woods
    • CommentTimeJul 19th 2013
    Looks like Zimmer is scoring SPIDER-MAN 2.
    https://twitter.com/aimeecastle/status/ … 1564037120

    suicide

    -Erik-
    host and executive producer of THE CINEMATIC SOUND RADIO PODCAST | www.cinematicsound.net | www.facebook.com/cinematicsound | I HAVE TINNITUS!
    • CommentAuthorAnthony
    • CommentTimeJul 19th 2013
    For fucks sake.
    •  
      CommentAuthorAtham
    • CommentTimeJul 19th 2013
    Please wake me up. I think I'm having a BAD dream!!! slant
  3. This onslaught of Zimmer scores is getting ridiculous.
    Bach's music is vibrant and inspired.
  4. The main reason I object to this is the same reason I object to J.J. Abrams getting to direct both Star Trek and Star Wars...not because I think it'll be bad but because I don't think that either man (Abrams/Zimmer) deserves to get that many bites at the apple. I was already doubtful about Zimmer getting Man of Steel so soon after the Nolan/Batman trilogy but now this? The man will have written scores for the three biggest and most famous superheroes in existence within the course of a few years. It's not even that I don't think Zimmer has it in him to write a good score - he obviously does - but give someone else a chance for chrissake.

    And when the fuck did everyone in Hollywood collectively stop giving two shits about musical continuity in franchises?? Seems the only way we get that these days is by sheer coincidence when the new director also happens to be a collaborator with the old composer (Beltrami on Die Hard 4&5 and JNH on Hunger Games). It's really frustrating. crazy
    •  
      CommentAuthorMartijn
    • CommentTimeJul 19th 2013
    I'm more concerned about a rather uniform industry getting an even less diversified look and feel.
    Of course with Hollywood blockbusters a certain degree of bland recognisability is only to be expected (after all, they ALL need to cater to the exact same demographic in the safest and most commercially vianle kind of way).

    On the other hand I can't help but consider Hollywood in the thirties and forties where it was the same handful of people making each and every single aspect of each and every single motion picture work.

    I don't particularly like the direction Zimmer is taking for super heroes, so that's why the fact that he now pretty much hogs the genre annoys me.
    But again: if I should have disliked Alfred Newman in the thirties I would have pretty much had the same issue. smile
    'no passion nor excitement here, despite all the notes and musicians' ~ Falkirkbairn
    • CommentAuthorTimmer
    • CommentTimeJul 19th 2013
    Yes but Alfred Newman could actually write real music.
    On Friday I ate a lot of dust and appeared orange near the end of the day ~ Bregt
    • CommentAuthorTimmer
    • CommentTimeJul 19th 2013
    Erik Woods wrote
    Looks like Zimmer is scoring SPIDER-MAN 2.
    https://twitter.com/aimeecastle/status/ … 1564037120

    suicide

    -Erik-


    Oh dear.
    On Friday I ate a lot of dust and appeared orange near the end of the day ~ Bregt
    • CommentAuthorTimmer
    • CommentTimeJul 19th 2013
    Anthony wrote
    For fucks sake.


    word.
    On Friday I ate a lot of dust and appeared orange near the end of the day ~ Bregt
  5. Erik Woods wrote
    Looks like Zimmer is scoring SPIDER-MAN 2.
    https://twitter.com/aimeecastle/status/ … 1564037120

    suicide

    -Erik-

    What a fucking joke. This is really not Horner's year, is it? sad sad