We went to see Star Trek last week (twice). I was impressed and completely enjoyed it (hence the second viewing) and expect lots of other folks did too – it’s grossed almost $200M in only 8 days – but I’ll save a real review for another time.
Although I’m not awestruck by Giacchino’s new Star Trek theme – maybe it’ll grow on me – I was fascinated to hear how he worked Alexander Courage’s original into his new one for the end credits.
Here’s Courage discussing the concept, composition and production of the original T.V. theme, with a little surprise near the end.
The underlying “train” feel, with an overlaid, lyrical melody that Courage describes here is exactly the sort of thing I was shooting for in the little T.V. theme I did with SONAR and the JV-1080 years ago.
Assignments from the last two weeks of SONAR class have yielded positives, I think.
Last week we began to lay out the tracks for our final project, just to get a feel for some of the MIDI elements. I tend to start things at the beginning and work through sequentially, so I put together a very rough pass at the Intro section for Volo Flamenco. This snippet adds just the bare beginnings of percussion and strings – all synthesized via plug-ins, specifically, the TTS-1 and Session Drummer synths that comes with SONAR 8.
This week was an overview of sound synthesis, which technically isn’t a huge part of the SONAR course (synthesizers are a course of study in their own right). The idea was simply to understand the various types – additive, subtractive, modeling, sampling, etc. The task I chose here was to manipulate a few existing sounds’ elements – attack, decay, release, modulation (vibrato) – to create new ones. This short bit has tweaked piano, bass and percussion, tied together with a melancholy little melody inspired by the piano tone.
