Fly On The Wall Film Of A Large Orchestral Session At Air Studios (London)

I just spent my afternoon completely fascinated by this.



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Just my thoughts :
This once again re-enforces to me my belief why one just cant create that moment in your own room or even come close. Put a bit of your money into buying/upgrade for dynamics, timbre and tone and the rest for listening to live music.
Baaki ka sab “intangibles”rehne do 😇.
 
I've been following the trend towards Immersive Audio closely. There seems to be a case for some of the new developments in Atmos etc that would greatly help in recreating a convincing sound stage for complex orchestral music like this. The new mixes that are being released these days are starting to get really good at presenting the music in a more convincing manner.

Modern music that is performed in the studio for movies is a completely different animal. I was watching this video just fascinated with how they work through the entire thing one piece at at a time. The sound engineers then patch the whole thing together to create a massive piece of work that is just mind boggling in complexity. Reproducing this kind of music is no small task.

I need to speak to some of the guys in the movie industry to get some info on this.


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I just spent my afternoon completely fascinated by this.



.
Fascinating video (just saw an initial part before writing this) but raises a pertinent question- what is the conductor doing waving his arms if the musicians are seeing the music for the first time as claimed…isn’t he superfluous? No prep, no interpretative contribution (I mean it is brand new music)…the music is a little (film like) so not something particularly difficult or distinctive which reinforces the question of what is the conductor doing? I mean if there was a speak directly to the orchestra from the control room would there have been a difference?
 
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Fascinating video (just saw an initial part before writing this) but raises a pertinent question- what is the conductor doing waving his arms if the musicians are seeing the music for the first time as claimed…isn’t he superfluous? No prep, no interpretative contribution (I mean it is brand new music)…the music is a little (film like) so not something particularly difficult or distinctive which reinforces the question of what is the conductor doing? I mean if there was a speak directly to the orchestra from the control room would there have been a difference?

Sir, you make a very valid point ! It propably is film music, it says Tutenkhamun in the first frame itself.
My take is this piece was not seen by the musicians for the first time. There has to be a rehearsal possibly somewhere outside. The music scores of new pieces are usually distributed in advance and practiced whether symphonic or movie scores.

For e.g The part where the guy in the booth felt a couple of bars were very “ominous”and told the conductor to tone it down which means the musicians would have played it once or twice there under the conductors directions before it was passed. What we are seeing are video cuts and I am sure there is footage there that we haven't seen.

If one has to believe that playing music one hasn’t seen or heard before bar by bar goes straight onto the disk then besides mediocre music quality there is a whole lotta manipulation that the sound engineers have to do just connect two bars of music which means you are no longer hearing the composer and his musical flow but you are hearing the sound engineer(🙈) and just very harsh cuts of music.
 
what is the conductor doing waving his arms if the musicians are seeing the music for the first time as claimed…isn’t he superfluous?

I just had a quick talk with my son who plays in orchestra and he explained that this guy waving hands (the conductor) ensures that everybody reads(and plays) the music at same speed.
 
In fact, sometimes I read about the instruments used in the recording and mastering studios, and that too reveals how complex and complicated this whole process is.
 
I just had a quick talk with my son who plays in orchestra and he explained that this guy waving hands (the conductor) ensures that everybody reads(and plays) the music at same speed.
Yes I know the role of the conductor…but it is not just keeping it together…but adding his concept of the music. The role of conductor as marker of time was the original concept back in the days of Jean Baptiste Lully, the court composer and master of music in the court of the Sun King Louis XIV. He in fact died after a wound with his conducting stick! Anyway any school orchestra would need a time beater certainly not professional musicians…they are much better off with a composer and sound engineer guiding the concertmaster / first violin (especially in string heavy music)…the only other reason being in providing entry cues for particular instruments like timpani or woodwinds or brass over an obbligato string texture (standard layer in film music). In fact great conductors like Karajan conducted eyes closed with no baton and hand movements moving in tandem with the tempo of the music but not at a bar or phrase level that Would necessitate musicians looking at him. In fact, Barenboim in a concert at the Salzburg music festival (Mahler 9th -approximately 75 to 85 minutes in length) was one full best BEHIND the orchestra…I saw it with my own eyes and when I turned to members of the group I had travelled with, they said it was a bad habit Barenboim had picked up and was mostly for show. I was flabbergasted…but as these fellow travellers were a mix of European and American musicologists I guess this was usual. Often modern conductors do this for show…Simon Rattle one of the much lauded conductors is terrible in standard Romantic repertoire (the origin of film music)…impressive to watch but with such tame climaxes…an Interesting topic though…
 
Sir, you make a very valid point ! It propably is film music, it says Tutenkhamun in the first frame itself.
My take is this piece was not seen by the musicians for the first time. There has to be a rehearsal possibly somewhere outside. The music scores of new pieces are usually distributed in advance and practiced whether symphonic or movie scores.

For e.g The part where the guy in the booth felt a couple of bars were very “ominous”and told the conductor to tone it down which means the musicians would have played it once or twice there under the conductors directions before it was passed. What we are seeing are video cuts and I am sure there is footage there that we haven't seen.

If one has to believe that playing music one hasn’t seen or heard before bar by bar goes straight onto the disk then besides mediocre music quality there is a whole lotta manipulation that the sound engineers have to do just connect two bars of music which means you are no longer hearing the composer and his musical flow but you are hearing the sound engineer(🙈) and just very harsh cuts of music.
Yes sir…the moral of this Story is the sound engineer is King…😀
 
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