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The Amazing Race => The Amazing Race Discussion => Topic started by: georgiapeach on September 19, 2014, 10:25:32 PM
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So excited to bring you AMAZING news Straight from Lee!!!!
For the first time ever, Lee will be doing a weekly Podcast all about that week's music! He will also drop by here to answer any questions you all might have!!
This is one I've wanted to do for a loooong time, and now we're finally doing
it—! Beginning a week from Monday (that's September 29), I'll be podcasting
about each previous Friday night's episode of The Amazing
Race.
I'll be talking about the music from the episode, and how it came into being:
ethnic instrumentation and style, production technique, work flow… I'm aiming
this at anyone and everyone who's interested in music—either ethnic music, or
film/TV music, or both.
I can't wait to unleash this thing. It's going to be so much fun. Between now
and then, though, there's a lot of work to be done to get it
ready!
http://www.sandersmusic.net/ (http://www.sandersmusic.net/)
And while you are at Lee's , check out all the great projects you may not have known Lee has done! http://www.sandersmusic.net/projects-gallery/ (http://www.sandersmusic.net/projects-gallery/)
Congratulations Lee!! This will be so fascinating to hear! :hearts:
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I am so happy to be sharing with you Lee Sanders' first WEEKLY video discussion of what went into the TAR 25 Episode 1's MUSIC!! It is a great treat to get to hear how Lee composes his music. TAR would NOT be the same without his creativity, his music binds the show together!!
Lee will be stopping in tomorrow to answer any questions you may have, so please ask away!!
https://www.youtube.com/v/rf3XUNnQZsQ
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I'll be dropping in all day long to answer questions—thanks, everyone, for your support of the show! This cycle is going to be so much fun. Can't wait for you all to see it.
Also, yes, I did just get my wisdom teeth removed. I'm hoping my face will be a little less, um, swollen in future podcasts. But maybe I should just lay off the carbs. :groan:
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I am SO happy that you will come take our questions. When I started watching TAR I began noticing the music for the ending credits and I loved it! How do you decide what to feature in your music for each show?
Welcome to RFF! (And UGH on the extractions! Feel better.) :_
:bigwelcome
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And I'm interested in the technical bits. What equipment do you use? And how much freedom do you have when you create the music?
Are you at all involved in the small musical motifs some teams sometimes get_
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I am SO happy that you will come take our questions. When I started watching TAR I began noticing the music for the ending credits and I loved it! How do you decide what to feature in your music for each show?
Welcome to RFF! (And UGH on the extractions! Feel better.) :_
:bigwelcome
Don't know if I quoted that correctly, but the question is how I decide what to feature in the music for each show. The answer is that I generally don't—decisions over what music goes against picture in reality TV shows start with the picture editors, then are signed off on by producers and network as the cut of the episode goes 'up the food chain.'
In the case of Race, we do quite a bit of custom scoring per episode, so obviously that music is intended to go with certain scenes… but even then, if a producer feels the intended cue isn't working for whatever reason, a replacement will be selected from the 13 years of Race music that are already on the editors' hard drives.
If there's time (rarely!) I'll get notes and a request for revisions, but things are usually moving so fast that there's just not enough time to do that. Part of the thrill of scoring the show is that there's no time to "miss a pitch"—I generally have one shot to get the music right for a given scene.
Hope that answers the question. If you were just asking about the end credits, specifically, then I think the show producers and editors sort of powwow at the end and decide what the most iconic moment from the episode was, and sometimes they put that music in under the end credits (other times they default to the end credits cue they've been using for a while now).
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Hi, Lee
Its cool there was a bit of steel band in the music this leg (I used to play the instrument back in high school, so instantly recognized it!). My question is do you travel to these locales visited on the race to scout the musical culture present?
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And I'm interested in the technical bits. What equipment do you use? And how much freedom do you have when you create the music?
Are you at all involved in the small musical motifs some teams sometimes get_
Quoting seemed to work, so I'll just answer this one!
(If the first couple of paragraphs below are all opaque geek-speak, please feel free to skip a bit…!).
I use Digital Performer as my sequencing software (i.e., the "writing canvas" onto which I program all the musical instructions for a given piece of music). For sample playback I use Vienna Ensemble Pro to coordinate multiple Macs, which run Kontakt, Omnisphere, and various PLAY-based libraries. Mixing is generally done "in the box" with a few pieces of outboard gear that I like, as they're needed. And if I need to create scores and parts (rare, but it happens) I'll use a separate music notation app called Finale.
As for team themes, yes! I'll sometimes be asked to write something specific to a particular team. The Cowboys are probably the most obvious example of this. The first "Cowboy Theme" was used so often that, when Jet and Cord came back each successive time for All-Stars, I created two more Cowboy Themes. The three, taken together, make a nice little Western Suite, actually.
The show is mature enough now that producers and editors sort of know what they're going to need, and we've devised a kind of language to talk about the cues I'm going to create. Beyond that, though, I'm free to write whatever occurs to me… and, in fact, I'm almost always encouraged to go as big and as wild as I want! That's one of the great fun things about The Amazing Race—painting with the sort of epic-scale brush the show so often requires is something not every composer has a chance to do.
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Hi, Lee
Its cool there was a bit of steel band in the music this leg (I used to play the instrument back in high school, so instantly recognized it!). My question is do you travel to these locales visited on the race to scout the musical culture present?
I wish they'd just pack me in with the luggage! I travel a lot, and I'm always taking notes about what I hear wherever I am in the world… but I don't specifically scout out the countries on the show. If it's a place I haven't been (and many, many of them are) I will do all kinds of research.
Whether it's searching around online… or via musician friends who specialize in the style of a culture/region… or even things like taking a meeting with an embassy staffer to talk it over… there are a bunch of things I do to try to start from a place of knowing everything I can.
Having said that, I should add that, when it's time to write, I end up having to distill it down considerably! Telling the story in the most compelling way possible means that, a lot of the time, some really cool elements of a culture's music just don't convey the emotion we need.
So it's a constant balance of the three elements that make up the show: 1) travelogue, 2) action/adventure story and 3) character/relationship drama. Not necessarily in that order. Music has to be serving one or more of those at all times, and that means that often I'll need to step away from the ethnically-accurate palette and into something a little more orchestral and/or traditional. Finding the balance is always a challenge, not just for me, but for the picture editors, who place a lot of the music into the show.
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Start to finish, how much time are you given to do one leg usually?
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I typically have 5-6 days to do the custom music for a particular episode, although it's rarely so regular as that sounds. Different cuts of episodes—and different scenes within different episodes!—often get ready at different times. So I work my way in a very roughly chronological fashion through a cycle.
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Gosh, that seems so fast! Do you have an all time favorite leg, or one you are particularly proud of?
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I've been waiting for years for someone to ask me that! In Cycle 3, Episode 8, teams are in Zürich, where they have to run around town to find a bunch of numbers, then assemble those numbers to arrive at the combination to a safe (inside which lies their next clue). A big, active sequence that took up an entire act of the show (nine minutes or so).
For whatever reason, I got a very last-minute call to score the whole thing, completely 'to picture,' overnight. I worked around the clock, turned it in the next day, then slept for a long, long time. Maybe I should resurrect the music file and post it somewhere… I remember the mix wasn't exactly perfect, but it was exciting, edge-of-your-seat stuff to get it all finished in time.
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Oh DO post it!! We'd love to hear it.
Thank you so much for sharing today!! We love hearing the inside stories. :funny:
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I used that sequence in a speech I gave once! So, so brilliant.
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I finally got time to view the podcast and found it fascinating. I would love to hear even more which thoughts and even individual elements which went into the different pieces.
And I couldn't resist chuckling when we talked about the roadblock music being written in 11/8. I recently played Serenade by Derek Bourgeois which starts in 11/8 and after changing around a bit eventually settles in 13/8. And rumour has it he wrote this music for his own wedding. It is not easy to march stately to this piece of music.
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Lee, a question about the opening theme!
It seems to me that the arrangement currently being used is the original or something darn close to it as opposed to the arrangement introduced with TAR 13, and kept until the recent change. What's the story on that? (And for the record, I greatly preferred the original to the one used beginning with TAR 13 until recently.)
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PODCAST 2 IS UP!! With a contest for you serious music lovers.
In this second episode of the podcast, teams travel to England—where a series of grueling tasks awaits (as usual!).
Lee talks about re-using cues from previous shows, as well as deconstructing iconic English melodies to create a tension cue for the episode. Can you decode the musical 'quotations'?
https://www.youtube.com/v/xTADsl1TP_4
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I've been waiting for years for someone to ask me that! In Cycle 3, Episode 8, teams are in Zürich, where they have to run around town to find a bunch of numbers, then assemble those numbers to arrive at the combination to a safe (inside which lies their next clue). A big, active sequence that took up an entire act of the show (nine minutes or so).
I just saw that episode! What a coincidence and also the subsequent leg when JVJ and Jon and Al were racing to avoid last place. Really good and appropriate music!!!
I have a question for you though (a rather selfish one) :funny: ... have you worked on any music for the asian leg(s) [not saying which just in case it is a spoiler] visited this season and if not, will you be deconstructing some local music to create possible appropriate music for different various scenarios?
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It seems to me that the arrangement currently being used is the original or something darn close to it as opposed to the arrangement introduced with TAR 13, and kept until the recent change. What's the story on that? (And for the record, I greatly preferred the original to the one used beginning with TAR 13 until recently.)
It's a good question. John Keane composed the Main Title theme and several of the episodes on the first cycle before moving on to score CSI; I do know that he was specifically asked to do the new arrangement for Cycle 13. I'm guessing the new version is yet another update (that incorporates some of the elements from the older version), but I'm not sure.
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have you worked on any music for the asian leg(s) [not saying which just in case it is a spoiler] visited this season and if not, will you be deconstructing some local music to create possible appropriate music for different various scenarios?
This is a big question, and a great one. Let me answer that this way: Researching musical styles is part of what we do for nearly every location. Even in the case of countries we've visited before, there are regional variations which can make huge differences. And part of my job is to be aware of that, and knowledgeable about those nuances. You mention Asian-location cues for this cycle, and I think I'm in the clear to answer that yes, I've written some of those recently. :)
But.
There are a few other factors at play. First, the style and instrumentation of the local music may not lend itself well to the emotional needs of the scene. Styles that feature smaller, more delicate instruments, for example, often have to be augmented a lot to serve tense, active events. So that's a balance that we're constantly trying to achieve.
Second (and this is something I talk about on the podcast), the show editors are placing quite a bit of the music you hear. To do that, they're drawing from cues that have already been composed. They are phenomenal at their job, and they're consistently careful about keeping the music location-appropriate, but you can imagine the challenge they're facing.
We do several things to make that job easier for them (every cue, for example, has a number of alternate mixouts, that omit certain elements… so, for example, a cue might be delivered in a FULL mix, a NO ORCHESTRA mix (i.e., drums and ethnic instruments only), a NO SITAR mix (if, say, a sitar was carrying the melody line—these types of mixouts help a cue "get out of the way" during dialog-heavy moments), etc. Sometimes a cue will have eight or nine additional mixes! Cues are also organized and databased in a proprietary way once they arrive at the show.
Last thing I'll mention here (I've written a book already—!): In some cases, it's just not possible to replicate a given style. Rare, but it's happened a couple of times over the years. Usually it's because the style is dependent on local performers, or on extremely exotic instruments. It's beyond the scope of our schedule and budget to travel to, say, a certain village in Indonesia to find this one gamelan player who uses this very specific tuning.
That's the kind of thing I would love to do, btw, but it's just not realistic under the time and budget demands of the show. So again, we strike the best balance we can.
Hope that answers the question, Jobby!
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Thanks for being here, Lee! I've got a ton of questions that will come to me as I dig up my references, but for now:
Do you try to sync up your music with the scenes (or do the editors sometimes try to fit the scenes into your music)? One of my favourite scenes set to music was in TAR 5 when Colin/Christie were racing Brandon/Nicole to the Pit Stop in Dubai from opposite sides of a Detour; the former was in a dune buggy, the latter skydiving from a plane. Each time the focus shifted from one team to the other the musical cue changed, and it went back and forth for a minute or so; it was awesome!
(Would love to see a similar race to the Pit Stop with the score switching back and forth between a major and minor key between the "heroes" and the "villains"! :D)
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Thanks for being here, Lee! I've got a ton of questions that will come to me as I dig up my references, but for now:
Do you try to sync up your music with the scenes (or do the editors sometimes try to fit the scenes into your music)? One of my favourite scenes set to music was in TAR 5 when Colin/Christie were racing Brandon/Nicole to the Pit Stop in Dubai from opposite sides of a Detour; the former was in a dune buggy, the latter skydiving from a plane. Each time the focus shifted from one team to the other the musical cue changed, and it went back and forth for a minute or so; it was awesome!
(Would love to see a similar race to the Pit Stop with the score switching back and forth between a major and minor key between the "heroes" and the "villains"! :D)
So the short answer is: a bit of both. Some editors prefer to have the music written as early as possible, then use the rhythm as a guide to cutting the scene. Others like to get the edit fairly tight, then have my custom score arrive considerably later in the process to drop in. There are advantages and disadvantages to both ways of doing it.
If I'm working with a cut that's nearly locked (i.e., they're not going to tweak it much further), I'll definitely score "to picture," observing and reacting to events on-screen. If it's just a first assembly or a "string-out," where the footage isn't tightened up at all, I'll write something that includes many musical "hits" for the editors to use later, as they figure out the pacing and the dramatic beats of the scene.
Bottom line: either way, I have to write it a little loose, because I'm almost never working with a completely locked picture. Exceptions would be for the beginning of the first episode in a cycle, and for the finish line… those are much more frequently scored to locked or near-locked picture.
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Hi Lee,
I wanted to ask about the music you used for the second leg of all stars (2014). What was the music played during the run to the pitstop. The intense music i mean. Thank you
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Wow amazing reply Lee! Thank you and I learnt so much more about the behind the scenes production of TAR.
Ok here's one last one (cause I'm greeeeeeeedy)
Any new TAR theme song soon? I loved the change during Season 14 and was hoping we'll hear another mixed up version of the theme song soon for future seasons!
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AND... one personal question cause I'm really interested to know... Do you have a favourite team or what sort of teams do you normally root for! :funny:
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Hi Lee,
I wanted to ask about the music you used for the second leg of all stars (2014). What was the music played during the run to the pitstop. The intense music i mean. Thank you
Just looked back at this. If I'm looking at the right spot (Brenchel et al. running through the park to the mat), the cue must be something one of the other composers has contributed over the years—it's not one of mine. I like it, though. :)
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Wow amazing reply Lee! Thank you and I learnt so much more about the behind the scenes production of TAR.
Ok here's one last one (cause I'm greeeeeeeedy)
Any new TAR theme song soon? I loved the change during Season 14 and was hoping we'll hear another mixed up version of the theme song soon for future seasons!
I don't know on that one, Jobby—It's John Keane's main title theme, and I'm out of the loop on when they ask him to update it.
As for favorite teams? I try not to pick and choose, because I might later need to play a victorious emotion for a team I'm not crazy about, for example. It's tough to be impartial, though, isn't it?
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How does it work working with other composers? Do you collaborate at all, get to decide who does what, or is it just do your own assigned part?
And when you finally get to watch the completed show....does the music go to the background a little or is that all you can "see" on first viewing?? ??? #soNOTaMusician
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Lee, just another question.. Was the "Survivor-style" music by Brenchel on last season Leg 3 done by you as well? :funny:
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How does it work working with other composers? Do you collaborate at all, get to decide who does what, or is it just do your own assigned part?
And when you finally get to watch the completed show....does the music go to the background a little or is that all you can "see" on first viewing?? ??? #soNOTaMusician
There is no collaboration between composers on the show. We're competitors for air time, in a sense.
Over the years the show has had many producers come and go, and several of those people have brought in their favorite composers to add to the show's catalog of music cues. My philosophy about all of this is that editors should be able choose the cue(s) they think work best with the scene, and sound best as music… regardless of who wrote it. Meritocracy—may the best cue win.
All of the above, of course, applies only to scenes for which custom music isn't being written… custom music is assigned to one composer only. In other words, there's never a situation where composers are scoring the same scene, working to picture, and people at the production choose which one they like best.
Hope that makes sense. And certainly I'm locked in on the music when I watch. Just like on any show. It's tough for me to get carried away by TV, film, etc. I am a victim of over-analyzing the music! "Oh, that transition was really good." "Ouch! That mix totally steps on the dialog!" "I wonder how they made that sound." "Hm. I really like how they made that character seem untrustworthy with that last little dissonant chord before commercial."
These are the things you'll hear me muttering in the living room. :)
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Lee, just another question.. Was the "Survivor-style" music by Brenchel on last season Leg 3 done by you as well? :funny:
Not sure exactly where in the episode you mean, Jobby… I wrote a lot of that stuff, though. If you have a specific moment in mind I may be able to say for sure.
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Lee, just another question.. Was the "Survivor-style" music by Brenchel on last season Leg 3 done by you as well? :funny:
Not sure exactly where in the episode you mean, Jobby… I wrote a lot of that stuff, though. If you have a specific moment in mind I may be able to say for sure.
I think he means in TAR24 Leg 3 when Brendon & Rachel are completing the blowpipe Detour. There was a great montage and great music!
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These are the things you'll hear me muttering in the living room. :)
:funny: I think I might be glad I don't watch with you, LOL!!! I can appreciate that attention to detail though!
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Hi Lee!
I think someone asked previously about character themes. I just wanted to know aside from the Cowboys, which teams have had a cue specifically written for them? It's kinda hard to figure it out since I noticed even the Cowboys theme gets reused in different scenes.
Thanks!
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Any new TAR theme song soon? I loved the change during Season 14 and was hoping we'll hear another mixed up version of the theme song soon for future seasons!
I don't know on that one—I'm not in on their discussions with John Keane. I do know they like to refresh it every so often.
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…aside from the Cowboys, which teams have had a cue specifically written for them? It's kinda hard to figure it out since I noticed even the Cowboys theme gets reused in different scenes.
A number of teams have had their own cue written, for a number of reasons. It's sort of a gray area: Some of the music I've written specifically for teams has been to 'set the scene' for their background, rather than to depict their personalities or to 'brand' them. Mark and Bopper's first intro is an example of that—the music isn't to give them a Mark and Bopper Theme; it's to dramatize the circumstances as they talk about where they're from, and about their reasons for running the Race.
I'm afraid I'd forget someone, so I won't try to reconstruct a list… but there have been a bunch. And obviously the Globetrotters came with their own theme music. :)
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I think he means in TAR24 Leg 3 when Brendon & Rachel are completing the blowpipe Detour. There was a great montage and great music!
That was a cue I wrote specifically for the scene, called, surprisingly, "Blowgun." And yeah, there's a little clarinet motive in there that's intended to be my homage to the Indy-fleeing-blowgun-darts scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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Episode 3 of the music podcast is up now! http://t.co/axucqTJUi9
Next week's will be longer, I promise… I'm a teensy bit under the weather. I mean, it's LA, the weather is warm and sunny, but… never mind. Check it out. :groan:
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https://www.youtube.com/v/6aj25U78FIY
I loved the music, (even without bagpipes!!) and think the "grandness" and "epic" feeling came across well. Interesting! I never thought about us not actually knowing anything about Viking music.
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The screen capture for Episode 3 looks like I ate something unpleasant. Why, YouTube, must you torment me like this?
Seriously, though, the Viking-music thing was a revelation to me, too, when I began researching it a few months ago. I figured there would be a crazy amount of information out there, artifacts all over the place, references in historical records… not so much.
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Lee has run into a "RoadBlock" this week but will be back with more on Monday!
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…aaaaand I'm back. Here's the new podcast. Check out the discussion of themes, in particular—I'm planning to talk about several other themes in episodes to come, but this one (the Adventure Theme) is the biggest and most frequently recurring (with the exception of the "Previously On…" music, which is different because it's almost always the same exact piece of music).
You'll see what I'm talking about by watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwYm-Ulwo90
Hope you enjoy it!
LHS
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Wait till you see how we have seen this theme before!! Such a blast from the past!
https://www.youtube.com/v/jwYm-Ulwo90
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Lee, I've been drafting a really, really long reply about the "Adventure" theme, but you beat me to it in your podcast!
It's definitely my favourite musical element in the show, because of how it's adapted to different cultures while still remaining coherent and recognisable, like the early Survivor themes! I caught it in the introduction to Shetland two weeks back, and I've been paying attention to it since it was used in the finale of TAR 1 with Rob/Brennan running to the finish line before seguing into Now We Are Free... Missed its use in Sant'Agata though.
And you came up with a second Hawaiian Adventure for TAR 3 - I remember a ukelele steel guitar (?) playing the theme over Flo complaining about being hungry!
Separate question: I remember you saying all the music on TAR is original (except Now We Are Free?), but how often does the music you produce get adapted for use in other shows? I distinctly remember an African tune (women vocals going ay-ay-ay...) being used "wrongly" in some Pacific location on Survivor!
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…Missed its use in Sant'Agata though.
The first statement of that theme, in the "Previously On…" segment on show 107, was written on my first 'official' day as a Race composer (!). So it's pretty much as old as my Race music gets. Kids who are the same age as that theme are now beginning to dream of getting their driver's licenses. Oboy. :)
And you came up with a second Hawaiian Adventure for TAR 3 - I remember a ukelele steel guitar (?) playing the theme over Flo complaining about being hungry!
That's right—there were quite a few Hawaiian cues for those episodes. And there are a bunch more cues that use the Adventure Theme (prepping through that podcast, I skimmed my Race scores, and grabbed 30 cues "off the top of my head" that used the theme in some way).
Separate question: I remember you saying all the music on TAR is original (except Now We Are Free?), but how often does the music you produce get adapted for use in other shows? I distinctly remember an African tune (women vocals going ay-ay-ay...) being used "wrongly" in some Pacific location on Survivor!
That's a great question, and if the answer is what I think it is, it's actually kinda interesting but a little "inside baseball." If you want to know how the sausage is made, read on.
No, seriously. This might spoil it a little too much. Don't read any further if you want to retain some of the mystery. If I were a magician, this would be me explaining the tricks.
OK. You asked for it.
The African women's chorus snippet is almost certainly not a cue at all!
It's a sampled loop, available royalty-free for usage by anyone who purchases the sample library of which it's a part (there are lots of these sample libraries out there). It's infeasible for me, or David Vanacore, or anyone else writing music for reality shows, to record these choirs in situ, of course, and recording local vocalists is sub-optimal, as well (LA session vocalists are amazing, but you lose authenticity).
So the trade-off is to use those voices, accepting the compositional limitations that come with them (and the fact that someone else might use them on another show, as is the case here—!), and taking those negatives along with the positives of legit regional style (the sample library was recorded in Africa, in this case) and affordability.
For me, the trick with that is to use the sampled loops as a seasoning, rather than the main ingredient. Here's one more example: the horn that opens the Survivor Main Title is also a sample! I own it, too—it's from an older library (of course) called Heart of Africa, and had been around for a little while even when Survivor premiered.
So nothing is prohibiting me from using that sound in some piece of music… nothing, of course, except that it's so indelibly linked to Survivor that I'd be run out of town. So if I were to use it, I'd have to bury it sonically into a thick palette of other stuff, rather than solo it (as it's heard in that Main Title).
Oh, OK. One more, since I can't resist this subject: The opening credit sequence of Lost features a sound called "Armenian Sun" (from the Omnisphere software synth) incredibly prominently. As in, it's nearly the entire main title.
None of this is a criticism, by the way! Those main titles are incredibly effective, and sometimes you find the perfect thing "right out of the box," so to speak.
Hope that answers the question, Neobie! I'm dropping by here as often as I can, so keep 'em coming. This is fun (as long as I don't spill the beans too much, and a Music Enforcer shows up at my door with brass knuckles to punish me for breaking the Code of Silence).
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I remember hearing someone confirm Survivor's "tribal chanting" is actually a chorus of elderly Ukrainian women about a year or so ago, so there's a long way to go before the Music Enforcers kick down your door.
I've been rewatching a bunch of the old seasons recently for something else I'm working on, and now that you've mentioned it I keep hearing that theme everywhere. My personal favourite variation is this panpipey one that randomly plays in Seattle for a few seconds right when Flo's doing her "you're supposed to say I haven't been a massive pain in the ass this entire trip" rant. So unexpected and haunting, and then it segues right into the "Flo is the Winner!" piece of music (still, after all these years, my favourite piece of music the show has ever used). Amazing.
Here's a question: When you riff on an established piece of music (such as Turning Japanese for the rollercoaster Road Block in TAR9, for example), is it hard to compose the music so it's easy to tell what the reference is without actually using the piece of music itself?
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When you riff on an established piece of music (such as Turning Japanese for the rollercoaster Road Block in TAR9, for example), is it hard to compose the music so it's easy to tell what the reference is without actually using the piece of music itself?
"Soundalikes" can be extremely tough. All you can do is fail to the least extent possible ("succeeding" would mean you've opened yourself to a lawsuit—i.e., you've come too close). If I'm working with filmmakers who want a certain piece of music, I encourage them to license it rather than asking me for a soundalike. Because nine times out of ten what makes it cool/funny/dramatically effective is that it's that piece of music. That's the punchline, so to speak, and anything else is inferior by definition. It's an external limitation on the success of the final product. It's nearly always done to save money, and that's just not how anyone would prefer to work.
In the case of Race it's different, because we're generally adapting long-standing themes to be played in the style of, say, Hawaii Five-O. That makes it a little more of a knowing wink. The theme is ours, but the palette, style, tempo, orchestration, etc. all refer back to something else. The homage deepens the connection of the existing theme, and the resulting cue is stronger, funnier, and/or more emotionally effective as a result.
BTW, I'm still working on this week's podcast. Haven't forgotten. Hoping to post today (Thursday, Nov. 6).
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Love these themes!!
Episode 5!!
https://www.youtube.com/v/-1wFmx4kkfo
Published on Nov 6, 2014 In this episode, Lee talks more about music for Morocco, and about the various mixouts he delivers for every piece of music on the show. Two more long-running themes for the show are also featured in detail—one of which is named completely WRONG.
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I. absolutely. love the mystery theme!! :hrt:
Brings back so MUCH memories. Thank you Lee!
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Hi Mr. Sanders
with all respect, i really miss the music that you've played before season 18. i thought that the current music lacks suspense and thrilling factor. sometimes it was a little bit too playful for me. ( e.g. the music played upon the teams' arrival in Singapore.) i want to re-live my TAR experience when i was younger. i really hope that you don't consider this as rudeness, instead my enthusiasm and eagerness to give constructive feedbacks for the betterment of the show.
ps: TAR 25 has been really amazing :D