Six Things About Six Soundtrack Albums

 Quick post here with behind-the-scenes trivia about some recent album releases.

Jurassic Park III

I edited this album for Mike Matessino and La-La Land Records. We had 5.0 mixes of every recorded take. This was recorded in the era where digital editing had hit an all new-level of precision. Performances could now be perfect with the ability to edit multiple takes seamlessly together. Here is an example.

I don't remember what cue this is, but this represents three different takes in five seconds. I'm able to do this by precisely lining up the recorded takes to either the film or original album which are used as reference.

The Godfather Part II

So I've established that I match performance takes to the film as reference. But what if the cue in question is for a deleted scene? That happened on "The Godfather Part II." On that score we only had the selected takes and in many cases they were able to do it in one take but for cue 19m2B, the second half of "Remember Vito Andolini (Film Version)" on disc 1, we had two takes and the scene was cut from the film. Which take should I use? Luckily, I remembered this deleted scene was on the television broadcast. I asked co-producer Dan Goldwasser for the scene which he had extracted to his computer. Sure enough, they intercut the two takes together and I duplicated that for the album.

Spider-Man 2

This was a challenging project because so much of the music was changed in the final film, with different composers coming in and even cues from the first film being repurposed for this film. We had stereo mixes of all of the final intended cues, but in some instances, once again, the takes we had didn't always match what was in the film. My theory is what existed was the entire score cut together, possibly to assemble the original album. That makes sense, right? Anyway, I was able get the missing takes and reassemble performances to match what was selected for the film. The ones I remember spending the most time on were "Spidus Interruptus" and "Armageddon." One of the Christopher Young "Demonstration" cues was also an edit of two takes.

Heavy Metal

If you like the original score album for this, thank Jeff Bond for its inclusion on this release. In 2008, Film Score Monthly issued the full Elmer Bernstein score on CD for the first time using the composers tapes which contained the film mixes. For our release, we stuck with the same transfers of these tapes. Jeff Bond, who wrote the notes, said it sounded good, but he preferred the mixes on the original album. So I reached out to Warner Music Group and sure enough, they had the original stereo 1/4" album master, already transferred in high-res 192 kHz/24-bit. The transfer ran a little fast but I was able to correct all of that and now Jeff Bond is happy. Looking at it now, I love this cover, too.

The Man With The Golden Gun

Surprisingly, there isn't much to say about this score. It's well known that it was completed in a hurry and there weren't many variations. It was a surprise though to learn "In Search Of Scaramanga's Island" was a different take in the film than on the album. The film uses take eight while the album uses take four. So if you're wondering why disc 1, track 22 says "Film Version" now you know.

Licence To Kill

One of my favorite things to do is rebuilding original soundtrack albums with our new transfers and mixes. In some cases, like "The Godfather" and "Moonraker," there is a major sound quality upgrade. In the case of "Licence To Kill," the original CD already had good sound but for some reason it was the editing that could be improved. The album track "Licence Revoked" had a cut in it that always stood out to me but in analyzing all of the score cues on the original album I found edit points that weren't the most refined throughout. That's all been addressed on the new CD.