Tribute to JG

[Alan T]

I have been studying the unique musical legacy of Jerry Goldsmith, IMHO one of the greatest composers of the 20th Century who just happened to work in film.
For educational purposes I have produced, from a private transcription, this Concert Arrangement of his heroic theme for the film: Star-Trek – First Contact.
The mock-up was hand-crafted, one orchestral section at a time, using GPO4 and Cakewalk Sonar.
I hope you enjoy the music … http://www.box.net/shared/dbh4xdxhk3

[Larry G. Alexander]

My word! That's remarkable work! This is an excellent rendering. One of the best I have ever heard. Your timpani work is extremely realistic.

Tell us about your computer setup, please.

Thank you for posting. I look forward to hearing more of your fine work.

Regards,

[Hippie]

This is excellent Alan, every part of this piece is perfect. The mix and mix down/rendering is outstanding.

[Rhap2]

Hi Alan:

I'll second Larry's impression that your work is "remarkable" and
"excellently" rendered. You certainly know how to mix the different
parts of the orchestra and tame a library into producing an awesome
result.

BRAVO, Alan

Jack

[Jonte]

Yes, I'm really impressed!


/Jonte

[FLWrd]

Very impressive. Listening to it as performance music, conjures the image of a sail ship. Pretty good transcription skills!

[qccowboy]

Wow!
Stunning.

This has always been one of my favourite of Jerry "God"smith's works.

When that theme plays at the end of the film, tears ALWAYS well up for me.

The complete sense of awe and grandeur and "momentous occasion" is so perfectly rendered.

Personally, while I love the sound you got from GPO (it's absolutely amazing) I found your tempo slightly slow. But that's a minor quibble.

I'm still awe-struck by the sound you got out of GPO. My eyes are full of tears.

[Alan T]

Thank you all for your kind words, I’m still blushing!

To answer Larry’s question, there’s nothing special about my workstation, it’s an old home grown 3GHz Pentium 4 based machine with 1GB of memory in which I have fitted two Yamaha DS2416 mixer cards.

The superb transcription by my collaborator ‘Z’ was exported from Finale into Sonar as raw MIDI files. Rendering was done using the GPO4 Aria multi VST plugin in Sonar 6 Pro. Each section of the orchestra was rendered and mixed separately. That’s how I think an orchestra balances itself, and I’ve found that using the same principle the rendering is more realistic.

You asked specifically about the timpani Larry: The rolls were created by playing them in on a velocity sensitive MIDI keyboard. Since the Aria player lets you use different keys on the keyboard for left and right mallets you can literally play them in to get a human feel. The harp gliss were created similarly by using harp packets and running a finger up the MIDI keyboard. Sonar’s Punch In-Out was used to add them into the final mix. Hope that answers your questions.

Alan T.

[DPDAN]

nice work Alan

There sure are a lot of unisons in that piece.
Dan

[Alan T]

Very impressive. Listening to it as performance music, conjures the image of a sail ship. Pretty good transcription skills!

Here’s an interesting anecdote … when Jerry Goldsmith was writing the underscore for the first Star Trek film - Star Trek The Motion Picture - his first work was rejected by Director Robert Wise because ‘he got visions of sailing ships‘; thank heaven it was, else we would never have got his Star Trek and Enterprise themes. I hope to collaborate with ‘Z‘ on both these themes soon.