I haven't been told what I can't do lately
Work on my second Lost mix has continued throughout my absence from blogging, including a few times when I've gotten sick of listening to so much Lost music, run out of ideas for how to piece things together and decided to shelve things for a little while. After taking off December and most of January, I came back to the project a lot fresher and finished the master for the first disc in the middle of February. After another month, I came back again and wound up finishing the second disc almost two weeks ago. All that remains now is designing some jewel case insert that can handle the rather excessive number of tracks (40 on disc one, 25 on disc two), creating the actual discs and, hopefully, getting a few copies to ears other than mine.
Having people who aren't me listen to it will, I think, assuage some trepidation I have about some of the edits. There are a few I've never gotten quite right over the years, but mainly the problem is that I'm still really close to the process--I know exactly where each edit is and what I wanted each one to sound like because I just created them recently. Time and the experience of discussing these things with others doesn't make me forget all that, but it gives me some distance. I feel much differently listening to all of my old mixes now than I did just after finishing them. (I'd get Scott to listen to it, but this music is really not his bag. His big thing is Mo Sassy Mo Brassy action music, not violins, percussion, a harp and a trombone; he's happier with his copy of Giacchino's Star Trek. Maybe I'll just run the actiony bits by him.)
There have been some annoyances in this process that I don't think I could really have avoided. The mastering for the original Varèse discs came with some volume issues (I wound up pulling back some of the louder sections and amping up most of the quieter sections, though I had to try to avoid some hissing and incidental orchestra noise--people adjusting their chairs, turning pages, breathing) as well as a few skips/pops that are on my original CDs and were also, I believe, in copies I downloaded. Also, since this is television music, there are many short tracks and many uninteresting stingers, most of which I was able to edit out. I do think Giacchino's action music got a little more interesting as the series went on, or at least there were more themes to interact with the action rhythms, though I've tried not to make the compilation too reliant on action material. In fact, there are a couple pieces I originally wanted to include before I decided I'd simply put in enough action music. Even so, this is a bit of a heavy listen; I think the two discs are more rewarding when listened to separately rather than in one long block.
Speaking of the ever-growing library of themes (and I do mean ever--there were two new motifs introduced in the finale ferchrissakes), I've been walking a bit of a tightrope in deciding which themes to introduce where, how much emphasis to place on them, which themes don't even make sense to include, etc. In the final season some of the characters got new main themes, many of which are quite beautiful and all, but due to the turns of the storyline only one of them was ever developed significantly; I made that theme the backbone of disc one, dropping in variations throughout and placing its culmination (from the penultimate episode) at the end. I deliberately chose not to include Jack's theme in Volume I because I never really liked it...but it grew on me in the later seasons and now appears in Volume II several times. It feels a little funny excusing something due to time restrictions in a compilation that runs two hours and 38 minutes, but I realized after finalizing the second disc And Seeing That It Was Good that two out of the three tracks making up the action climax use themes that aren't anywhere else on the compilation (one of them appeared in Volume I, at least).
I don't want to make the notes too spoilery (I'd prefer to keep it to the "you hear this theme interacting with this other theme, so you know they're related somehow" variety, like in the notes for Volume I), but at the same time there's a lot to digest without context. I mean, I've gotten fairly good at taking in libraries of themes for SF/F franchises and I've been absorbing Lost specifically for years, and I still had a thing or two to learn once I started digging through the Lostpedia pages on each cue. These are pretty good reasons for me to not have started the notes yet; I'll likely need another spurt of creativity like the ones that got me out of each break with the actual editing.
The presence of cues I would've wanted to include and didn't, and particularly those in the first three seasons that never stood out to me until long after I'd finished Volume I, almost make me want to go ahead and make a "Best of the Rest" disc covering the whole series. This after taking more than five months to produce Volume II. My friends, I am not a sane person.
Having people who aren't me listen to it will, I think, assuage some trepidation I have about some of the edits. There are a few I've never gotten quite right over the years, but mainly the problem is that I'm still really close to the process--I know exactly where each edit is and what I wanted each one to sound like because I just created them recently. Time and the experience of discussing these things with others doesn't make me forget all that, but it gives me some distance. I feel much differently listening to all of my old mixes now than I did just after finishing them. (I'd get Scott to listen to it, but this music is really not his bag. His big thing is Mo Sassy Mo Brassy action music, not violins, percussion, a harp and a trombone; he's happier with his copy of Giacchino's Star Trek. Maybe I'll just run the actiony bits by him.)
There have been some annoyances in this process that I don't think I could really have avoided. The mastering for the original Varèse discs came with some volume issues (I wound up pulling back some of the louder sections and amping up most of the quieter sections, though I had to try to avoid some hissing and incidental orchestra noise--people adjusting their chairs, turning pages, breathing) as well as a few skips/pops that are on my original CDs and were also, I believe, in copies I downloaded. Also, since this is television music, there are many short tracks and many uninteresting stingers, most of which I was able to edit out. I do think Giacchino's action music got a little more interesting as the series went on, or at least there were more themes to interact with the action rhythms, though I've tried not to make the compilation too reliant on action material. In fact, there are a couple pieces I originally wanted to include before I decided I'd simply put in enough action music. Even so, this is a bit of a heavy listen; I think the two discs are more rewarding when listened to separately rather than in one long block.
Speaking of the ever-growing library of themes (and I do mean ever--there were two new motifs introduced in the finale ferchrissakes), I've been walking a bit of a tightrope in deciding which themes to introduce where, how much emphasis to place on them, which themes don't even make sense to include, etc. In the final season some of the characters got new main themes, many of which are quite beautiful and all, but due to the turns of the storyline only one of them was ever developed significantly; I made that theme the backbone of disc one, dropping in variations throughout and placing its culmination (from the penultimate episode) at the end. I deliberately chose not to include Jack's theme in Volume I because I never really liked it...but it grew on me in the later seasons and now appears in Volume II several times. It feels a little funny excusing something due to time restrictions in a compilation that runs two hours and 38 minutes, but I realized after finalizing the second disc And Seeing That It Was Good that two out of the three tracks making up the action climax use themes that aren't anywhere else on the compilation (one of them appeared in Volume I, at least).
I don't want to make the notes too spoilery (I'd prefer to keep it to the "you hear this theme interacting with this other theme, so you know they're related somehow" variety, like in the notes for Volume I), but at the same time there's a lot to digest without context. I mean, I've gotten fairly good at taking in libraries of themes for SF/F franchises and I've been absorbing Lost specifically for years, and I still had a thing or two to learn once I started digging through the Lostpedia pages on each cue. These are pretty good reasons for me to not have started the notes yet; I'll likely need another spurt of creativity like the ones that got me out of each break with the actual editing.
The presence of cues I would've wanted to include and didn't, and particularly those in the first three seasons that never stood out to me until long after I'd finished Volume I, almost make me want to go ahead and make a "Best of the Rest" disc covering the whole series. This after taking more than five months to produce Volume II. My friends, I am not a sane person.