Original photo credit: NASA, ESA and STScI – https://esahubble.org/images/heic2105a/
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The Enterprise (from Star Trek: The Motion Picture
by Jerry Goldsmith
The first in my digital orchestration series.
Throughout my career, I’ve used cover recordings as a tool to learn new technology, analyze the work of other artists, and learn new musical styles. This started back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In the last year, I decided to finally start learning the newer East West Sounds orchestral library, the Hollywood Orchestra Opus Edition. I’ve used their older Symphonic Orchestra library for many years on a lot of different projects, but I hadn’t made the switch despite having a subscription to it for several years. When I do these, I try to pick a piece I want to study in more detail, and one that I know is well orchestrated so that any issues are clearly the MIDI programming or the Virtual Instrument.
I started a few different projects with it, and this is the first one that I decided to release. I choose this piece because it is one of my favorite cues from my absolute favorite Jerry Goldsmith score. I programed this version of it directly from the Omni Music Publishing score I bought a few years ago.
For the orchestra, I exclusively used the Hollywood Orchestra. In addition, I also used the Arturia version of the _CS80 V, _Wurli for the electric piano, _B3 V for the organ. Finally, I used Bowls from Sonokinetic to stand in for the rub rod called for in the score. They are all placed in the same space with East West’s Spaces II.
My goal wasn’t to make a sound-alike. The East West strings are a bigger ensemble than was used on the original score. While I do have an impulse response from the Newman Scoring Stage at 20th Century Fox (used for the original scoring sessions), it is just a single response rather than the position-specific impulses that I have for other spaces. It is also from after the renovation in the 1990s, so I suspect it doesn’t match the original. Rather than try to do a sound-alike, I tried to create a very musically faithful performance of the piece with the larger ensemble in a larger hall.