…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).