Jerry Goldsmith: Live On Scoring Stage The River Wild Part 1 

Jerry Goldsmith AND John Williams - IMHO both are the best. A pinnacle of film music writing. Both were friends, both came from similar backgrounds, professional multi-level classical training, same teachers (both attended classes with Mario Castlenuevo-Tedesco, along with Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle...), both had hands-on training “on the job”, first with radio and TV live shows, than motion picture. Both had similar influences - Stravinsky, Bartok, Krenek, Rozsa, North, Herrmann etc. That era of super-musicians is gone, probably forever...

Yea he does it really easily.

The industry is absolute garbage today. In the past, you had hardcore musicians who could actually do the stuff because they grew up living and breathing music and had formal music educations. Now the digital audio workstations that everyone uses give people the impression that they are composers simply because they can program a few notes in and then experiment with layering. This normally leads to very generic sounding scores without any real emotional content, except for whatever emotional changes are correlated with the harmonic changes. 98% of these people wouldn't have been in the business years ago because they wouldn't have been able to handle doing things "manually" (the ability to hear instruments in detail IN various combinations in their head without any reference pitch, the ability to write multi-line sketches on staff paper, conduct, etc.). In many cases, people like me who are classically trained are simply shut out because the industry is simply inundated with wannabees.

@@yishihara55527 Absolutely agree with you, Bro ! Me too - I have similar point of view, as a professional musician/composer. Part of the problem is in lower standards, cut budgets to almost nothing for music, illusion of “fullness” by layering endless patches into DAWs, augmenting them with percussion loops (Stylus RMX, Damage etc.). The result is similar sounding productions, “generic” as you pointed out [can’t agree more] coming from various project home studios, where “monster brass” lines are stack against strings and synth patches resulting in 396-piece orchestra with multiple divisi, having nothing to do with an art of actual Orchestration. Things like that... You know what I am referring to. And than everyone is happy with the result because music sounds “convincing” to an untrained novice film director... studio is happy, because they saved $$$$ on music budget, Goodbye experimentation “on the spot” with live musicians present In the studio, attention to detail etc. articulations and emotions coming out of live musicians...

@@KrystofDreamJourney It's all a big scam that mainly benefits the manufacturers. Directors and producers who don't know much about music will have some emotional reaction and say "You're hired!" in the same way that many musicians/composer purchase gear at a music store after pressing the Demo Button. All of this hardware/software junk is being marketed to people who are NOT musicians/composers but think they can trick everyone by simply modeling themselves after a huge composer, usually Zimmer (bad choice). People think that the modern approach to scoring is a cool style that has developed with strings playing rhythmic passages while the over-the-top warrior viking brass and drums shake the theater. I don't think it's a legit style at all. I think what happened is that back in the day when the big directors started handing Zimmer a whole bunch of movies based on his success with Rainman, he was asked to do orchestral scores but was clueless because he's not a classical musician. So what would someone that has a pop background do in that situation? Turn the fucking orchestra into a big giant rhythm machine. So it's not a style. It's a fucking MISTAKE! And I don't care how many Zimmer clones out there protest. When I speak these truths, it hits a nerve and some industry people in Hollywood will actually reply to my comments trying to say that I don't have the right to say anything simply because I'm not working in the industry. Well they can all go fuck themselves because I was at Juilliard for six years and lived in LA where I played as a session musician and also did a well-known film scoring program there. So many of these fuckers are simply using family money to muscle their way in and block truly talented people from doing anything...this goes on in the scoring world as well as the classical music performance world, which has basically killed the industry.

@@yishihara55527 Amen. Exactly.

David Shire? Awesome! He had great ideas

@@KrystofDreamJourney For better and worse in my experience, a DAW can't replace talent that's for sure.

@@iceomistar4302 Completely agree. Talent is one thing - one needs to have an environment to polish it, to let it mature. But because of dramatic budget cuts more and more young composers are forced to rely on DAW sample libraries editing, with perhaps a handful of musicians sweetening certain tracks, recording solos etc. - all of that can be done in small project studios. No need to maintain a large scoring stage, even for striping... It’s a sad situation, with no end in sight. For a large orchestra most recording sessions already switched to “budget cities” in Eastern Europe (Prague, Sofia, Budapest etc.). It’s wonderful however to see Jerry Goldsmith making the score fitting the film “on-the-go” in a studio with a full orchestra present. Something that is impossible by today’s budget standards- for example switching woodwinds articulations from staccato to legato in the studio during live recording session. Today you’d do everything in a DAW - use legato flute patch instead of staccato to hear the final effect against the picture ! Constant experimentation in the studio was the way of the “old good school”. That’s how Masters like J.G. or J.W. could polish their craft over the course of several decades, narrow down to certain possibilities etc. Another thing : editing music during live recording, changing meters from 4/4 to 7/8 to meet the new hit points (after additional footage editing). Today music for such a movie like The River Wild would never go to a full recording stage. Shareholders and studio execs would never have approved these large music budgets

@@KrystofDreamJourney I agree, I think Live Musicians are worth it and always will be, I'm no composer or musician just a fan of film music and I think no matter how good samples get, they can't replicate the feel of real musicians, even Hans Zimmer agrees, Sample Libraries are ridgid and recorded only one way, but if you hire musicians even if you record the same piece depending on the location you record it, the engineer you work with, the musicians themselves the result will be slightly different each time and that kind of gives the music a voice and a sense of it having been given life by real people.

@@KrystofDreamJourney Somehow, the term 'Great' and 'Modern Composers' don't go together. Hans Zimmer wannabees have flooded this industry with their "great" DAW based compositions which consist of one finger stabbers. A few know what they do, and these composers are flattened by directors who have no idea what good music really is. In any case, any composers who work on proper budget films are still using live orchestras, any projects worth their weight will use an orchestra, end of. DAW music is for kids and certainly the music coming out of DAWs in connection to the illiteracy by directors has decimated film scoring and has reduced composers to have musically atrophied. A real disgrace.

@@KrystofDreamJourney Thank you for agreeing with me, however, my post was not directed at you as I had no idea you are a composer. So if you are suffering from the idiocy of the modern movie industry, you are on the same page as to my point of view. Keep pushing for a live orchestra, if you can, but it's not impossible, all the best to you too.

Well, what a dumb comment. Elmer did not compose the music for this film, but Jerry did after his score replaced Maurice Jarre's rejected score.

Like that matters when the current composers don't have even one-tenth of the talent and skill someone like Jerry had.