So I was watching another video review of Halo Reach today (this one on ign.com) and decided that, as alluded to in my last post, I should reserve judgment a little bit on the soundtrack. While one of the tracks in the background sounded like pretty standard fare for O'Donnell and Salvatori - and in fact sounded remarkably like a jazzed up version of the empire theme from Final Fantasy VI - some of the rest of it gave me some pause. Not a huge steaming plate of pause mind you, but not a small room temperature bowl of pause either. Maybe like a miso soup appetizer pause. So while I scoff at the reviewers assessment that these guys turn out some of the most compelling soundtracks in videogames (Have you never listened to Symphony of the Night? Gears of War? And I sort of hate to say this since I think John Williams while he's done some mindblowing work is extremely overrated, but any of the fifty million Star Wars games? I mean damn, I wouldn't go so far as to call the two Modern Warfare soundtracks mind-blowing, and I definitely don't count MW2 among Hans Zimmer's most impressive efforts, but they are excellent in their own right and certainly beat the stuffing out of Halo), I'm anxious to hear the soundtrack now (and let's face it, play the game.) I'm going in expecting to be underwhelmed, so we'll see (I went into Avatar having read enough criticism that my expectations were very low, and it blew my mind).
Okay, briefly. Inception. The dungchen. I did it first (and to be clear, Philip Glass did it before me in the awesome soundtrack to Kundun and Tibetan Buddhists did it at least a millenium before that.) The dungchen is that massive trumpet used overwhelmingly (as in primarily, not way-too-much) in Tibetan Buddhist religious ceremonies that possesses that deep and booming (and badass) voice. Now apparently (not sure, one guy says it and I haven't researched the claim) Zimmer, unlike Glass, slowed down a recording of actual trumpets to produce the sound rather than using an actual dungchen for the Inception soundtrack. The result sounds really good and fits the mood of the movie very well. While I'm infinitely less skilled and experienced as a composer, I simply want to indicate that I finished Cloudbreaker, the final boss theme to Give me Your Lunch Money which also makes use of a doctored sample to replicate a Dungchen, back in I believe April, when the..well balls. Apparently a preview aired on the superbowl in February. Anyway, I just want to make clear that I wasn't aping Zimmer (though I probably will soon, Sherlock Holmes' soundtrack was sweeeeet!) in that particular aesthetic choice. Far from it, at the time I made it, I felt quite clever and innovative (and LUCKY, I'm not good at doctoring samples and it's not something I do often) for hitting on a combination of distortion and dynamic variance on a guitar string patch in Reason that made for a convincing dungchen, which is exactly what I was going for. Anyway!
I will confess that one of the reasons I don't go crazy over the Halo soundtracks is simply a matter of aesthetics. It's like when Yasunori Mitsuda went crazy after doing the Chrono Trigger soundtrack and decided to go all Celtic with everything from there on out (But Yasunori, we don't LIKE Celtic! Too damn bad!!!) Okay, that's not really fair. It's always fun to listen to people you admire and strive to emulate to one degree or another evolve as composers, but sometimes they evolve in the wrong directions. Of course it's a natural process for them, but you don't like it, so it must be wrong, yeah? Yeah exactly. Anyway, I'm pretty lukewarm about what they tend to go for in their tracks stylistically which in and of itself is difficult to fault them for. Also, they used the exact some soundtrack from Halo to Halo 3. That is one of my biggest complaints. If there were any new tracks at all (which OK, come on, I know there were) they were thoroughly underwhelming. This wasn't thematic renovation, it was downright self-plagiarism and quite frankly it's insulting to the audience.
-R
No comments:
Post a Comment