How I Inherited the Transformers Music Restoration Project

Zobovor

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Feb 2, 2015, 2:22:06 AM2/2/15

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So, not too long ago, I believe it was Shin Hibiki who made me aware of Jim Figurski's amazingly awesome Kickstarter project. Another fan named Grimbot had previously done a great job of piecing together music from the G1 DVD's, but that was only the first step. The recordings were pretty rough. Jim raised enough money to buy some decent sound editing software to try to clean it up and create a truly soundtrack-quality version:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1342576182/grimbots-soundtrack-restoration

So, let me say that I have always loved the music from G1. Johnny Douglas and Robert J. Walsh are my personal heroes. I hum the tunes constantly (and now, thanks to this music restoration project, I also dream about them) and I've wanted to see an official soundtrack release for years. Many, many years ago, I even tried to teach myself how to use a MIDI composition program because I was going to write MIDI versions of every theme. I am not a musician and I know nothing about such things, but such is my love for the background music in Transformers that I was prepared to trudge through it somehow. It never materialized, of course, but my love for the music remained.

I jumped into this project wholeheartedly. I offered my services and was prepared to help identify which themes appeared in which episodes. The way the soundtracks were recorded, the dialogue was on one track and the music and sound effects were often combined together on a separate track. This means the dialogue can be isolated and removed, but oftentimes the music is marred by the sounds of laser blasts or footfalls. An encyclopedic knowledge of the music really is required, since it's sometimes necessary to pluck the same music track from three or four episodes and combine pieces together to finally arrive at a copy of the music without sound effects ruining it.

I discovered very quickly that my memory is flawed. Slightly, not deeply, but even slightly is a bothersome problem. I know the G1 cartoon very well, and I can usually cite numerous episodes and scenes in which a specific piece of music is used, but I can never guarantee that it's a complete list. I keep e-mailing Jim with messages like "This music appears in 'More Than Meets the Eye' part 2 and 'Fire in the Sky' and I'm not aware of any other instances" and then two weeks later I remember it's also in "War of the Dinobots." I know Jim is working super hard and putting in some long hours towards making this restoration a success, because he doesn't want to let his Kickstarter backers down.

So what I decided to do was just dig through every single episode and document precisely which themes show up in which episodes. Then we would have a complete list to work from and I would not be relying on my unreliable memory circuits. Of course, this necessitated giving the themes names. Grimbot assigned names to all the ones he archived, but what I have discovered is that his archive was not complete. He was pretty exhaustive for the first season, but as soon as I hit the second season, I found that I was having to invent names for themes left and right because these new tunes were popping up left and right that never got archived. The "Cold Slither" instrumental theme was even missing, and that's one of my favorites!

(As an aside, I have determined that the music editors probably didn't know the themes by heart. Most likely, they picked which music track would be played during which scene based on the theme's name, or perhaps by a description of mood assigned to the theme by the composer. For instance, I think the music that plays at the very beginning of "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1 was the "Mystery" theme for the first season. The theme that plays when the Decepticon Welcoming Committee approaches Wheeljack and Bumblebee is the "Emergency" theme. When you keep these ideas in mind, it's easy to see why specific themes were chosen for specific scenes.)

I have discovered so many new things about the show in documenting the music (and I'm only about a third of the way through). I was always vaguely aware that the show eventually started to use music from G.I. Joe, but now I can tell you precisely when it happened (it began with "Changing Gears"). The sound library was pretty limited when the pilot episode was produced (there were only about 20 distinct themes used for "More Than Meets the Eye") but new music was being written for the show all the time, and by the end of the first season the sound library had ballooned to over 60 separate themes.

Something which absolutely floored me is how many themes were borrowed from other series. Yes, incidental music from G.I. Joe was borrowed for Transformers during season two. I've also long suspected that the romantic theme from "Money is Everything" was borrowed from the Jem cartoon, though I've never actually screened the entire Jem series to prove it. In the interest of making this restoration project as complete and accurate as possible, I sought out a webmaster who appeared to be an expert on the Jem cartoon and finally got confirmation of my theory. He also suggested I look into the old Spider-Man cartoons (there were two of them, one from 1967 and another from 1981) and Incredible Hulk (1982) as well as Dungeons & Dragons (1983), whose score was also composed by Johnny Douglas. I was aware of the Spider-Man connection already but I didn't know just how deep these threads ran. I was only aware of a few isolated examples (the Hulk's growls being used for Unicron in The Transformers: the Movie; the groovy disco theme from "Auto-Bop" appearing in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends).

There are 13 episodes of Hulk and 24 episodes of Amazing Friends and 27 episodes of Dungeons & Dragons and 52 episodes of the 1960's Spider-Man. That's, like, 42 hours of cartoons to sit through, but I was prepared to do it. For the good of the project. I was furiously downloading episodes and archiving them on my hard drive and researching which episodes were available on DVD. I've watched only a handful of them and I'm already finding so-called "Transformers" themes that predate their first appearance in G1 by several years. This completely blows my mind. And I'm really surprised that it's not common knowledge in the fandom. This is the year 2015 and I'm making huge discoveries about a cartoon from 30 years ago. Nobody at all knew that Transformers borrowed music from Dungeons & Dragons? Really? Is this like the animation model for Optimus Prime showing up in G.I. Joe BEFORE the first episode of Transformers aired? Again, how did nobody know about this until I just blindly stumbled into it?

So here I am, staying up late every night and typing away, taking note of the time index and the totally made-up-names for these themes, half of which I've had to invent myself. Example: In "The Core," there's a short heroic theme at time index 3:49 that we literally only hear one other time in the show (during "Surprise Party" when Ultra Magnus tells Sky Lynx to fuel up). Then at 5:07 we hear the "Battle Stations" theme (from G.I. Joe) but the ending has been artificially extended to fit the length of the scene. Then at 6:10 we hear a new theme that hasn't popped up anywhere else in the show up to this point; it's missing from Grimbot's archive, so I tentatively entitle it "Destruction" and make a note to listen for it as the show progresses. 6:45 has "On Patrol," a theme I named that we heard in "City of Steel." I'm getting to know the music so well that I can hear a single note and I know which track it's from. At this point I've screened 30 episodes and I've already identified 26 themes that Grimbot never ripped from the DVD's.

I'm already seeing mistakes that Grimbot made, and minor things that I want to fix because they bother me. Sometimes during the course of the show, one theme begins just as another is ending, but he's got them both archived as one track with a single name. At first, I was using names like "Stop the Decepticons I" and "Stop the Decepticons II" to differentiate them but after a while I started assigning names that I liked better. Some of Grimbot's names were very scene-specific (he named one of them "Factories Are Busy," from the narration at the beginning of "Divide and Conquer," but that theme showed up several times before and after this episode so it's not a factory theme specifically). Jim gave me free reign to assign new names to the themes, because unless we can get some kind of confirmation from Johnny Douglas what they're actually called (and don't think I haven't written to him and asked), made-up names are all we've got.

So, it's at this point that Jim e-mails me and tells me the scope of the project has gotten far too large. He was anticipating being done in two or three months, and he's got Kickstarter backers he wants to keep happy. I was the one who told him that all the music that Grimbot archived in a folder called "G.I. Joe" was actually Transformers music too (he was unaware of this), and I was the one who told him that there are many more themes that Grimbot never accounted for (we were both unaware of this). I've tried to do as much legwork for him as possible in identifying themes and making it easy for him to find them, but he's at a point where he just wants to remaster what he's already got on his plate, call the restoration project over, and move on with his life. I can't say I blame him.

He did mention that it would not be extraordinarily difficult for me to pick up the reins. He said he's prepared to send me all his sound files (he's ripped the soundtracks from all the Rhino DVD's I lent him and separated them into six channels) and all I would have to do is edit the music together the same way Grimbot did. A piece from this episode, another chunk from that episode, and the ending from yet another episode. I actually feel fairly confident that I could do this. I have the sound editing experience (in addition to doing voices, I also mixed all the sound effects and music for Radio Free Cybertron's much-maligned parody of The Transformers: the Movie) and I have the encyclopedic knowledge of the music that would be required (I campaigned repeatedly to get Jim to fix the erroneous edit that Rhino made to the music they used in their animation restoration extra on the bonus disc of season one, because they slipped in ONE EXTRA NOTE and it BOTHERED ME SO MUCH). What he said he was willing to do was continue to remaster the music in his spare time as I was able to piece together complete recordings.

This is not a project I was expecting to do. I was very comfortable operating in the capacity of a helpful assistant, but for me to take over is somewhat daunting. However, I've already made the work very easy for myself in documenting precisely where every piece of music can be found on the show. If he sends me music channels free of dialogue, piecing them together in sequence should be a snap. (Of course, a most complete list would also include G.I. Joe. I do have the episodes on DVD but I don't know if I'm prepared to screen the entire show. It's only my insane love for Transformers that's enabling me to slog through all of G1. It's one thing when I'm watching the show for fun, or even when I'm taking screen captures. In dissecting the show so methodically, I don't think I'll ever be able to look at it the same way again. It's no longer a cartoon show, but a concurrent string of many twenty- or thirty-second music clips set to animation.)

At some point I may ask for help. It is my very strong suspicion that episodes of Dungeons & Dragons and Spider-Man and such will have more complete themes than the short snippets we sometimes hear in Transformers. The very short "Teen Dance" theme from "Megatron's Master Plan" part 2 ("Laserbeak wanna cracker?") can in fact be heard in its entirety in the very first episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends episode "Triumph of the Green Goblin," for example. If anybody has the series on DVD, I would need to borrow it and probably send it to Jim so he can extract the music channel from it. It's possible I might have to do this for The Incredible Hulk and Dungeons & Dragons, too, but I'm not even at a point where I know for sure.

I almost want to ask people to help me watch some of these other shows. I've never sat through the entire Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, but I liked it as a kid and I bought a DVD with nine episodes on it a while ago. I would probably benefit from having seen it. On the other hand, I have absolutely no desire to watch a Spider-Man cartoon from 1967.

I thought about just washing my hands of this whole business and going, "Well, if you're out, then I'm out, too." Really, though, this is something I've wanted to see done FOREVER. It used to be that the closest we'd ever get to a soundtrack was Rik Bakke's site where he had little ten- or twelve-second snippets of music without any dialogue. That was great, and I loved it, but it wasn't a soundtrack. The technology finally exists where we can do it, and do it not just half-assed or reasonably well, but extraordinarily well. Being a part of this is really exciting, but it's also exhausting. I've put every other project on hold (generic character profiles, writing e-books, painting toys) so I can devote all my energies to this. I haven't been this jazzed about a project in a long time. I feel like it's worth it in the long run, but I just hope there are enough fans out there who feel the same way. I already have all the music permanently burned into my brain, so I don't think I'd put forth all this effort if it was just for me. It's just such a mind-boggling amount of work. I could probably have screened two more G1 episodes just in the time it took to write this post. That's all I think about now.

I'm worried about hitting burn-out and struggling to get through to the end. I can usually tell that a toy will take four or five days to paint, or that an e-book will take six months to write, but I have no idea how long I'm going to be immersed in this project. I may be looking at a year's worth of labor or more; I have no idea. It's so weird that this is what my life has become suddenly.

Right about now I wish I'd heard about this project back in September, and maybe I could have just pledged my five or ten dollars and felt like I was doing my part. Of course, I probably would have gotten involved anyway, and I'd likely be in exactly the same boat.

Give me some feedback about this so I know I'm not completely alone in the Universe!

Zob

Travoltron

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Feb 3, 2015, 10:38:05 AM2/3/15

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I'd love to see this project completed.
Be aware there are two versions of the DVDs of Dungeons and Dragons; one
has had its music messed with.

"In Region 1, BCI Eclipse (under license from Disney) released Dungeons
& Dragons - The Complete Animated Series on DVD for the very first time
on December 5, 2006. The 5-disc set, however, is also notable for having
had some music alterations for copyright reasons; parts of the original
scores for the last nine episodes have been replaced with various
instrumental tracks from other episodes of the series plus a few from
other sources."

"In June 2009, Mill Creek Entertainment acquired the rights to the
series and subsequently re-released the complete series on August 25,
2009, in a 3-disc set without any special features but with almost all
the original music restored"

Shin Hibiki

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Feb 4, 2015, 2:32:47 AM2/4/15

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Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:

>So, not too long ago, I believe it was Shin Hibiki who made me aware of Jim Figurski's amazingly awesome Kickstarter project. Another fan named Grimbot had previously done a great job of piecing together music from the G1 DVD's, but that was only the first step. The recordings were pretty rough. Jim raised enough money to buy some decent sound editing software to try to clean it up and create a truly soundtrack-quality version:
>
> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1342576182/grimbots-soundtrack-restoration

<SNIPSNIPSNIP>

First, thanks for the rundown--your project descriptions never
disappoint!
Second, it is indeed me who is to blame for sending you down
into the pit where you currently find yourself. :) Not my intention,
to be sure. I have also long had a desire to see this music released
in a useful format, and the speed with which the project was funded
suggests that I am not the only one. (I can't prove it, but I suspect
that Tony Bacala bankrolled a significant portion of it--it would be
an invaluable library for his remixes.) If only the composer could
have released it himself as he long ago planned to do! In any case, I
couldn't think of a better resource than you, but having not been
involved with any of the editing myself, I didn't know how deep it was
going to get!
I would like to see the project continue, but never to the
point where you get burned out on it. I believe that this is
potentially one of the most significant gains that the fandom could
ever experience, but if it causes you to hate TFs or something, the
resulting loss to the fandom would be equally great. That's about as
succinctly as I can state it. If you think there's something I can do
to help, I'll try.

- Shin Hibiki

----
The race ain't over yet, baby
It's only just begun
They thought they had it won, baby
But soon we'll have 'em on the run

Zobovor

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Feb 7, 2015, 4:05:39 PM2/7/15

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On Tuesday, February 3, 2015 at 8:38:05 AM UTC-7, Travoltron wrote:

> Be aware there are two versions of the DVDs of Dungeons and Dragons; one
> has had its music messed with.

If I were to find, say, the episodes on YouTube, is there any way to tell which versions of the episodes I'm looking at? Or do I basically need to track down the DVD's myself?

Zob

Zobovor

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Feb 7, 2015, 4:12:50 PM2/7/15

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On Wednesday, February 4, 2015 at 12:32:47 AM UTC-7, Shin Hibiki wrote:

> I would like to see the project continue, but never to the
> point where you get burned out on it. I believe that this is
> potentially one of the most significant gains that the fandom could
> ever experience

And that's the main reason I'm willing to devote so much energy towards making it happen. If I were on the other side of things as an observer, I would be so amazingly excited about this prospect. Now that I'm actively involved, I feel like a lot of people would benefit from this. It's like the "Till All Are One" BotCon CD, with the incidental score from The Transformers: the Movie, only times a hundred. (Well, times 98, I guess.)

Zob (because there are 98 episodes, y'see)

Travoltron

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Feb 8, 2015, 3:20:03 PM2/8/15

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On 2/7/2015 1:05 PM, Zobovor wrote:
> is there any way to tell which versions of the episodes I'm looking at?

I'm afraid I don't know.

Shin Hibiki

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Feb 16, 2015, 1:29:35 AM2/16/15

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Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:

>It's like the "Till All Are One" BotCon CD, with the incidental score from The Transformers: the Movie, only times a hundred. (Well, times 98, I guess.)

That's the thing that comes to mind for me as well. I was at
BC'97 when that came out (so long ago already...!) and I distinctly
remember the way it felt when I walked into the dealer room and they
were piping it through the speakers. Rapture.

Zobovor

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Mar 2, 2015, 12:00:00 AM3/2/15

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On Monday, February 2, 2015 at 12:22:06 AM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:

> I have discovered so many new things about the show in documenting the music

>(and I'm only about a third of the way through). The sound library was pretty

> limited when the pilot episode was produced (there were only about 20
> distinct themes used for "More Than Meets the Eye") but new music was being
> written for the show all the time, and by the end of the first season the
> sound library had ballooned to over 60 separate themes.

Well, it's about a month down the road and I've finished screening all 98 episodes. When all is said and done, there are about 188 individual tracks! I had no idea there were that many separate music tracks used on the show! That number is probably a little inflated because it includes things you don't really think of as background music, like the three different theme songs and the commercial bumper themes, and also because I may have inadvertently given the same music track two different names. We're talking about probably around three hours' worth of music and it's difficult to keep it all straight in my head sometimes.

What this means is that now we have a working list of every single instance of every single music track used in G1. Now we can look at a track like, say, "Unity" (the music from "The Killing Jar" that plays when the Autobots and Decepticons and Quintessons all cooperate to get through the white hole) and I can see that it appears throughout the show a total of seven times in six different episodes, and we know exactly what source material we have to work from. The way the G1 cartoon was recorded was that the sound effects and music were on the same channel, so even removing the dialogue sometimes results in laser blasts and footfalls and transforming sounds that can't be extracted. The only option is to look for the same music, used again somewhere else, that doesn't have sound effects in the same spot.

At some point in the future I may be digging through the Rhino version of G.I. Joe on DVD to see if there's anything worth extracting from it. I know they didn't release the full series, but the Shout Factory was released only on 2.0 audio so the music can't be extracted from that version. I won't be extracting anything from Dungeons & Dragons because it's also a 2.0 release which makes it worthless for our purposes. I will probably still screen the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon to identify the first use of so-called Transformers music, because I would like to be able to state definitively, for example, that the track we're calling "Decepticon Activity Spotted" was originally heard in Dungeons & Dragon episode 16, "The City at the Edge of Midnight."

The current plan is to release virtual albums, season by season, so Jim is working on restoring all the first-season music first. The second season library is much larger, and I will have to personally piece together a lot of finished tracks from the raw episodes in order to release a complete season two album. (I imagine we can fold seasons three and four together since "The Rebirth" only introduced one or two new tracks.)

I've been eating, sleeping, and breathing Transformers music for the last three months and it's consumed my life. It's gotten to the point where my kids (seven and two-and-a-half) are humming along to the music when they hear it because they've been exposed to it so much. ("Not that that's a bad thing," says the Sweep from "Webworld.") I'm at a point now where I think I know this music better than anyone except maybe the guys who actually wrote it!

Zob

Shin Hibiki

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Mar 2, 2015, 12:39:16 AM3/2/15

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Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:

>Well, it's about a month down the road and I've finished screening all 98 episodes. When all is said and done, there are about 188 individual tracks!

<snipsnipsnip>

Bravo, sir. I bow to your superior... well, everything.

Zobovor

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Apr 24, 2015, 9:11:54 PM4/24/15

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On Monday, February 2, 2015 at 12:22:06 AM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:

> The technology finally exists where we can do it, and do it not just half-
> assed or reasonably well, but extraordinarily well.

Until very recently I had no idea just how much work was involved.

I really had thought it was just a matter of finding the beginning of a background music track in some random episode, taking a chunk of the middle out of another episode, and finding the complete ending in another episode and then piecing them all together. If there are annoying sound effects, just find an episode that isn't playing sound effects at that moment.

The problem with a show like Transformers is that there's almost always some kind of ambient noise. Teletraan I softly humming. Autobots revving their engines. Mechanical footfalls. Laser blasts. Pulleys squeaking and servos whirring. It's like the sound editors were bound and determined to fill every single quiet moment with some kind of Foley sounds. I never thought I would grow to actively hate sound effects as much as I do now.

So, sometimes there is literally no clean recording of a given musical fragment in the entire show. I have completed screening G.I. Joe, so I can tell you for sure which musical themes were and were not shared with Transformers (there are 64 themes total that you can hear on both shows). Even using the G.I. Joe sound library, there are themes that we only hear once, or sometimes twice, in the entirety of both shows. If you get an unwanted sound effect, there are literally no other sources to draw from.

Jim actually does a lot more work when it comes to restoration than I was aware of. Sometimes he can replace a ruined note by extracting another note from elsewhere in the track and pitching it up or down to the correct key. Sometimes he can isolate a fragment of a note and artificially lengthen it, replacing the piece with an unwanted sound effect. This sounds disingenuous on the surface, but he does such an exceptional job that I had no idea he was even doing this until he told me. (If he was altering or editing the music so that it no longer sounded like it should, I would notice immediately.) He has literally spent eight or nine hours working on a four-second snippet of music. He does with his sound editing program what I do in Photoshop when I touch up blemishes and correct coloring errors in screen shots of the G1 cartoon.

He's begun to send me the sound files he extracted from the DVD's, so I'm able to start building music tracks. It's an exciting process, especially since I've never heard some of this music isolated from the dialogue before. One fringe benefit to gaining access to these files is that I also get a dialogue track with no sound effects and almost no music. I would love to build a voice actor tribute site with isolated dialogue clips. Or, perhaps more practically, I would love to see somebody ELSE build a voice actor tribute site and I could build and provide the clips. (Of course, I do have a growing collection of screen captures, too. Hmm...)

I expect all this music editing will keep me very busy. Of course, I have to wait until the kids are asleep before I can put my headphones on and dig into the music files, so I'll still be posting reviews and stuff in the meantime. (I haven't been buying toys much lately because I am broke. Clunker needed new brakes and some body work. We met a guy in the Del Taco parking lot who undid some of Clunker's dents with a crowbar. We paid him to do this because we didn't have the money to meet the insurance deductible to get it fixed professionally. That's how broke we are.)

Zob

Zobovor

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May 28, 2015, 12:02:36 AM5/28/15

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On Friday, April 24, 2015 at 7:11:54 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

> Until very recently I had no idea just how much work was involved.

Did I really write that a month ago? Wow.

So, here's an update! I've spent the last month building 11 new themes that have (to my knowledge) never been archived before anywhere. I would name them off, but they're names I assigned to the music myself, so nobody would know what the hell they mean. Well, I guess I'll do it anyway:

"Ghosts"
(played in "City of Steel" when Hound is tracking Optimus Prime's signal;
used much more frequently in G.I. Joe)
"Trudging Through the Swamps"
(heard during "City of Steel" when the Autobots are fighting the
alligaticon)
"Militarized Zone"
(played in "City of Steel" when the Autobots are patrolling Megatron's
city of New Cybertron)
"Aerial Battle"
(plays in "Dinobot Island" part 1 when the pterodactyl attacks Powerglide
and Bumblebee)
"Report"
(heard in "Traitor" when Cliffjumper reports on Mirage's activities)
"Parade"
(used for the Decepticon Day celebration in "Megatron's Master Plan" part
2)
"Up, Up, and Away"
(when Megatron tests the transfixatron on Starscream)
"Heading for Trouble"
(heard in "Atlantis, Arise!" when the Autobots are submerging and are on
their way to Subatlantica)
"Rally the Troops"
(heard in "The Autobot Run" when Spike and Chip are convincing the
Autobots to participate in the race)
"Cold Slither"

I've just been going chronologically, because otherwise the temptation would be to do my favorite themes first... and then get stuck with all the ones I've been avoiding. Working on "Going to War" tonight, but it's far from complete. It's heard in "Blaster Blues" when the scientists are testing the voltronic galaxer, and in "Dark Awakening" when Prime is flying the flagship into the Quintesson trap.

A lot of the titles I came up with were working names that I just never bothered to replace. Some of them really do fit the themes and some of them are just placeholders ("Aerial Battle" is not always used for aerial battles and "Trudging Through the Swamps" only got its name because I remembered it from the beginning of G.I. Joe: the Movie).

There are many more to do. It really is a time-consuming process, though. First I have to dig through my sound archives (the entirety of Transformers and Sunbow-produced G.I. Joe episodes) and build a library of a specific theme. The sound program I used to rip the DVD's allowed me to rip the sound into six channels, so I am able to work with just tracks that include music and sound effects, without dialogue. If there is an ambient sound present through the entire piece of music (Autobot engines revving or an evil invention humming) then I'll usually reject it as worthless, but if there are only sporadic sound effects I'll typically add it to the pile. Some musical themes only show up in the show a handful of times; others are warhorses that were trotted out dozens of times. The ones used more frequently give me more material to work with, but it also takes a long longer to make copies of them all. I have learned that if I do not do a thorough job, then inevitably I require more material to work with and I have to dig into the episodes again.

If I'm very lucky, the piece of music I'm working with has been used at the beginning of an episode at some point, or perhaps following a commercial break. That usually gives me a clean intro that isn't ruined by a crossfade from the music in an earlier scene. I also look for instances where the music was used at the end of an episode, or right before a commercial break. Those are most often the cleanest endings. Finding a clean intro or a clean ending is like striking gold. It's such a delight when it happens.

G.I. Joe is generally a more talky show than Transformers, and there are lots of scenes with characters just standing there having a conversation. These scenes are valuable for me because there are usually very few sound effects. Transformers, on the whole, seems to suffer from a lower-fidelity sound quality. I really do think that G.I. Joe was considered the higher-priority show for Sunbow... they got better animation studios in 1986, and I wouldn't be surprised if they got better sound equipment for their studio, either. Seriously, when it comes to certain tracks, it sounds like the Transformers sound editor left the tapes in his car one afternoon in the hot sun. So much of the music is all muffled and warbly.

So what do I do when I find an annoying sound effect? I look for the same music that's been used in a different episode, and usually I can a clean example of the same notes. I'm being very careful when splicing them in. I go out of my way to make sure it's a seamless edit, because I am a very anal-retentive audiophile and nothing annoys me more than a bad sound edit. After I'm done putting together a file, I'll even put it to bed for a few days and then bring it up again, listening to it to see if I can detect my own edits. If I can't remember where the edits are, and don't hear them in the final cut, then I've done a good job.

(I think that eventually somebody is going to ask me to do this for the G.I. Joe music, too, and I just don't have the love and passion for the series that I do for Transformers. I did build a version of "Cold Slither" with lyrics, but that's about as far as I'm willing to go. I would probably do this for the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, which also had some amazing music, but all the DVD releases were on two-channel audio instead of six--the dialogue and music cannot be separated--so that precludes the possibility altogether.)

Besides listening to this music just for fun, it also has potentially has some practical applications. I could see people doing parody versions of G1 episodes, doing their own voices and then splicing in the music tracks for that extra added air of authenticity. I basically never get credited for the contributions I've made to the fandom but I do hope that I get acknowledged in some capacity. Maybe I'm just a raging egotist, but I don't think it's a lot to ask for it to be referred to as "the TF music built by Zobovor" instead of "the TF music from TFCog.com" (which is, I believe, going to be the final destination for the archive, though I may request to retain a copy on my web site as well).

Still, I'm piecing together these music tracks because they need to exist in this world, not because I want credit for doing it.

Meanwhile, Jim is nearing completion on restoring and remastering the first-season music, which will be released as a virtual "album" soon. Most of the work I'm doing is for season two, which will be released later.

Zob (with my luck, Robert J. Walsh will probably announce the release of an official soundtrack any day now)

Zobovor

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May 30, 2015, 12:04:52 AM5/30/15

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On Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 10:02:36 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

<snip>

By the way, Jim has posted a video documenting the restoration he did on a theme called "No One Gets Out Alive" which is used only once in the entire Sunbow catalog of cartoons. We hear it in "Transport to Oblivion" when Megatron traps the Autobots in the cave:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1342576182/grimbots-soundtrack-restoration/posts/1241014

I find it fascinating. This is kind of similar to the work I've been doing in building new themes, but he's a sound engineer by trade so he does a lot of technical stuff that's a bit beyond me. What I do is more like piecing together a puzzle... and using a jigsaw to cut new pieces.

Zob (does not own a jigsaw, unless you count the Tonka GoBot)

Shin Hibiki

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May 30, 2015, 12:14:05 AM5/30/15

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Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:

>I go out of my way to make sure it's a seamless edit, because I am a very anal-retentive audiophile and nothing annoys me more than a bad sound edit.

But that's why we love you.

>I would probably do this for the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, which also had some amazing music, but all the DVD releases were on two-channel audio instead of six--the dialogue and music cannot be separated--so that precludes the possibility altogether.)

Plus, twice as many episodes! O_O

>I basically never get credited for the contributions I've made to the fandom but I do hope that I get acknowledged in some capacity.

You darn well better. I don't think Jim will leave you
hanging, though. (It's probably because you don't hang around on the
usual websites--not that I blame you--so you're sort of invisible to
most people.)

>(with my luck, Robert J. Walsh will probably announce the release of an official soundtrack any day now)

He said that was gonna happen a decade ago, but nary a peep
since then. Even if he did, there's no freaking way it could be as
comprehensive as what you are doing. What did you say, 188 tracks?
No way that's happening.

Zobovor

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May 30, 2015, 9:53:16 PM5/30/15

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On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 10:14:05 PM UTC-6, Shin Hibiki wrote:

> Plus, twice as many episodes! O_O

Well, yes. There are about 80 episodes of G.I. Joe that I've been working with, too, so I'm really juggling about 178 episodes' worth of music as it stands...

> (It's probably because you don't hang around on the usual websites--not that
> I blame you--so you're sort of invisible to most people.)

I recognize that and accept that. It's nice to be operating under the radar sometimes, though. No flame wars!

> He said that was gonna happen a decade ago, but nary a peep
> since then. Even if he did, there's no freaking way it could be as
> comprehensive as what you are doing. What did you say, 188 tracks?
> No way that's happening.

Especially since he would probably only have the rights to the themes he personally wrote himself, not the ones written for the show by Johnny Douglas. (My understanding is that Walsh wrote most of the "generic" shared themes while Douglas wrote a lot of the themes that incorporated motifs from the series theme songs into the mix, but I don't know how accurate that is.)

Zob (cartoon background melodies now serves as the theme music for my dreams... EVERY NIGHT)

Zobovor

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Apr 8, 2016, 10:26:11 PM4/8/16

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On Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 10:02:36 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

> Zob (with my luck, Robert J. Walsh will probably announce the release of an
> official soundtrack any day now)

Had to open my big mouth!

Zob (sigh)

banzait...@gmail.com

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Apr 11, 2016, 7:01:20 PM4/11/16

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Too funny, but not really. Look, just because nobody uses the telegraph anymore to communicate doesn't mean that it didn't play an important role in human history. IF that thing materializes, which is a big if, your contribution will still be valued.

-Banzaitron

Rodimus_2316

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Apr 11, 2016, 7:05:11 PM4/11/16

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I second that.

- Rodimus_2316

brianj...@gmail.com

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Apr 11, 2016, 9:39:43 PM4/11/16

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Thirded.

Rodimus_2316

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Apr 12, 2016, 4:49:31 PM4/12/16

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http://www.allspark.com/2016/04/robert-j-walsh-and-sony-records-to-release-original-transformers-g1-musical-scores/

Zobovor

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Apr 12, 2016, 6:18:21 PM4/12/16

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On Monday, April 11, 2016 at 5:01:20 PM UTC-6, banzait...@gmail.com wrote:

> IF that thing materializes, which is a big if, your contribution will still
> be valued.

Thanks!

We've decided to continue going forward with the project as planned, until it becomes clear that either a) Rob Walsh is duplicating everything we're trying to do, or b) Sony hits us with a cease-and-desist letter.

Zob (when in doubt, wait it out)

thethir...@gmail.com

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Sep 22, 2016, 9:25:53 AM9/22/16

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Hello,
It just so happens I've been thinking about the G1 music, too. I need to read what you've been writing- I've skimmed it- but have downloaded your complete Season 1, which I believe was just completed a few days ago (right?) and will be checking it out.

One thing you said right off the bat, and my reason for writing now, is your mention of creating MIDI files. I'm not making any promises, because it's ridiculously premature, but given that there has been recent interest due to a novel and interesting fan recreation of Season 5 which I believe was only shown in some Asian country like Korea, but this fan version also intersperses short bits and pieces from earlier scenes, well, I've remembered the G1 Music, something I grew up with and loved as well. Last summer 2015, I used a freeware program called MuseScore to make a full show of a reunion for a music ensemble I was in. Perhaps I could share that work with you somehow. There was no sheet music, so I had to listen and recreate the music best I could (while also arranging it into a medley.) Anyway, I start poking around with G1 just a bit, and (like I said, no promises) but let's see if I can't make not just MIDI files but ideally computer recreations which would sound something like the original. Now, unless I learn a helluva lot about synth sounds, it will never sound like the original- and actually a lot of the excitement in both the music and sound effects in G1 comes from those amazing 80's synthesizers and effects- much of which could be recreated, though probably not by me. (I wonder if a ring modulation was frequently employed, but this is a vague guess.) By the way you probably know about it, but one discovery the other day for me was the clean version of the commercial theme- this was VERY EXCITING as I've always preferred that version to even the G1 intro, though it was hard to hear with the announcer talking over it about the toys. (Look for Transformers G1 Clean Commercial Music on YouTube if you've not heard this, I assume you have.) Just the arrangement, the sound of it, it's real hard to describe whats going on with the synths... but it's certainly my favorite, so a real treat to hear it. And the middle bit, with (music talk here) that sus4 to the major (resolution) and down to the minor 3rd- it's just very well done. Uh, what was my point, though? Mostly that I've still got MuseScore, and started poking around just a bit with a theme called (on YouTube) Noble Autobots. The woodwind ensemble at the beginning may consist of flutes, clarinets, oboes (and bassoons?) which the program has, but I'll have to see. The string ensemble seemed pretty straightforward though I've never arranged for it before- violin, viola, cello, bass- I tried the progression, not perfect but close. And when the brass comes in with the theme, it's obviously trumpet and trombone (with tympani counterpoint) but maybe french horn and tuba in there. I probably shouldn't even be writing this until it's actually tried. Point being, I may be trying to do this, if only to get these themes out of my head. And if I do, you'll be the first person I send them to.

thethir...@gmail.com

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Sep 22, 2016, 11:59:14 PM9/22/16

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In case anyone thinks I'm all talk, no shock, I did an arrangement of "They'll Be Back" tonight and rendered it in both WAV and MIDI. Not sure quite what's going on with the muted trumpets and xylophone so that parts probably wrong but otherwise, sounds OK. Is there a way to upload here, or how?

thethir...@gmail.com

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Sep 23, 2016, 12:06:33 AM9/23/16

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These are the ones I'd start with.

04 Teletraan I (1:25)
07 Attack! (1:36)
08 Plan (1:38)
10 Blasting Off (1:52)
11 Battle (1:45)
14 Industrial Theme (1:42)
21 Ruins (0:27)
24 Problem (1:42)
28 Autobot Fanfare I (0:26)
29 Autobot Fanfare II (0:25)
30 Autobot Fanfare III (0:14)
34 They'll Be Back I (0:39)
38 They'll Be Back II (0:38)
47 Noble Autobots (1:16)
49 Survival (1:44)
50 Schemes (1:51)
51 Working (0:42)
57 Preparing for Battle (1:50)
68 Chaos (1:34)

Zobovor

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Sep 23, 2016, 12:40:01 PM9/23/16

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There's no way to host it here, unfortunately. There are dozens of places to upload files, and many of them are free:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_hosting_services

MediaFire is a good one.

Zob (can't wait to see what you've come up with!)

thethir...@gmail.com

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Sep 23, 2016, 10:02:12 PM9/23/16

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Tried YouTube but it would not accept any of the file formats despite trying a number of the ones suggested, using a file converter. I may investigate Dropbox or Google Drive, but mostly right now I'm just working on them. I should probably talk to Jim directly.

Got "Ruins" done since it was so similar to "They'll Be Back" and now am on to "Industrial Theme."

Zobovor

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Sep 24, 2016, 12:46:57 AM9/24/16

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On Friday, September 23, 2016 at 8:02:12 PM UTC-6, thethir...@gmail.com wrote:

> Tried YouTube but it would not accept any of the file formats despite trying a
> number of the ones suggested, using a file converter. I may investigate Dropbox
> or Google Drive, but mostly right now I'm just working on them.

I would be more than happy to host them on my personal web site as well.

Zob (excited)

thethir...@gmail.com

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Sep 24, 2016, 2:01:20 AM9/24/16

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That's fine with me- just tried to respond privately, let me know if you got the message.

Zobovor

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Oct 17, 2016, 1:50:21 AM10/17/16

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On Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 10:02:36 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

> Most of the work I'm doing is for season two, which will be released later.

So, at this point I've managed to build roughly 40 musical themes from the second season. This is a somewhat contentious number, of course, because there are things like the one episode that used G.I. Joe commercial bumper music, which technically counts as a unique theme.

I know that Jim is working on finishing the first batch of themes archived by Grimbot before he works on mine, because he has an obligation to his Kickstarter contributors to give them what he'd promised them. (He didn't know there were dozens of themes that had not been pieced together at all until I started e-mailing him.) After he gets the first batch done, though, he will start digging through the ones I've built and add them to the virtual album.

Here are some interesting pieces of trivia about the second season:

The Decepticons are operating in an abandoned ghost town in "The Autobot Run," and when we first see them in this episode, a few notes of a bluegrass-style fiddle theme is heard. It turns out that this is only the beginning of an entire bluegrass theme, as heard in another Sunbow series called Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines.

There is a theme used in Transformers in episodes like "Child's Play" (when the bouncy ball falls on Starscream) or "Surprise Party" (when Cyclonus sets the asteroid for a collision course), but we never heard the whole theme in the show. The beginning of the theme can only be heard in G.I. Joe, where it was used in roughly a dozen episodes. Fans who are familiar only with the music from Transformers, but not G.I. Joe, are in for a treat. There are a couple of other themes that are like this as well. It's similar to having a favorite movie, only to buy the soundtrack and find out that entire chunks of music were written but never made it into the finished film.

Many themes written for the shared Transformers/G.I. Joe library have a short ending and a long ending. I'm guessing they were written this way to better allow the music to fit the length of the animated scenes. (At least one scene, the attack on Omega Supreme from "The Golden Lagoon," just uses one ending right after the other!) Some of the alternate endings appear only in G.I. Joe, but I'm compiling them all anyway for the sake of completion. Even if you think you know the music from Transformers pretty well, these variant endings will surprise you!

Zob (might actually go back to painting toys some day)

Shin Hibiki

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Oct 22, 2016, 12:46:23 AM10/22/16

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Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:

>The Decepticons are operating in an abandoned ghost town in "The Autobot Run," and when we first see them in this episode, a few notes of a bluegrass-style fiddle theme is heard. It turns out that this is only the beginning of an entire bluegrass theme, as heard in another Sunbow series called Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines.

Seriously--how do you uncover something like that?!

>It's similar to having a favorite movie, only to buy the soundtrack and find out that entire chunks of music were written but never made it into the finished film.

That actually happens a lot. Fortunately, musical scores get
a lot more respect than they did in years past, so you actually have
the chance to hear stuff like that.

Zobovor

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Oct 22, 2016, 12:42:44 PM10/22/16

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On Friday, October 21, 2016 at 10:46:23 PM UTC-6, Shin Hibiki wrote:

> Seriously--how do you uncover something like that?!

A brute force approach, honestly. I've been screening pretty much everything in the Sunbow library, or at least the shows where Robert J. Walsh and Johnny Douglas contributed music. Some it was enjoyable to watch (it's the first time I've seen Robotix in its entirety) and some of it is maybe a little less than fun for me (My Little Pony).

Zob (you're not dreaming; it's a Moondreamer!)

Zobovor

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Feb 19, 2017, 1:21:16 AM2/19/17

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I wanted to let everyone know that Jim is shooting for a release of the season two music by the end of this February. He's currently making one last sweep through the completed second season music and will send it along to me for a final review before it gets posted online.

Season three/four shouldn't take as long as season two did, since there's a lot less new material to work with.

Zob (never had to scrape candle wax off a cat's tail until tonight)

Travoltron

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Feb 21, 2017, 7:04:04 PM2/21/17

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On 2/18/2017 10:21 PM, Zobovor wrote:
> I wanted to let everyone know that Jim is shooting for a release of the season two music by the end of this February.

Awesome, awesome news!

Pablo Wilson

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Feb 19, 2024, 10:31:29 AMFeb 19

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