Pirates Of The Caribbean Sound Download
Sonjia Smith
I get to spend my days worrying about this issue, working for the film composer Hans Zimmer. Just recently, while working on Pirates Of The Carribean III: At World's End, Hans decided he wanted to push our use of technology further than normal. This resulted in arguably the most technically accomplished, realistic-sounding orchestral mock-ups ever created, and I think some of the best music written for the Pirates series so far. It also led to Hans' day-to-day technical coordinator referring to the film as 'Samples of the Caribbean'...
One of the reasons we were creating so much data is that instead of recording a single surround mix of the samples, we recorded each sample using 16 separate mics, each on its own channel, just as it might be heard in an actual film score recording. In recent years there have been commercial libraries that allow you to balance, say, close, room and stage mixes; but our goal was to build a system that would allow us to mix from all 16 microphone channels in real time, even when the composer was playing back the samples. While this might sound a little crazy (and that's partly because it is crazy), the result would enable us to work with the mix of a piece of music containing samples in exactly the same way we would work with a piece of music recorded by a real orchestra. Perhaps our secret weapon in the whole recording process was AIR's chief engineer, Geoff Foster, and we relied completely on his experience for the choice of microphones and positioning.
Even though we had developed the host in-house, though, it wasn't possible to make it a true 64-bit application, because one feature of 64-bit applications is that they can only load plug-ins compiled for 64-bit systems. Similarly, 32-bit applications can only use plug-ins compiled for 32-bit systems. So if you're running 64-bit Windows and you want to use a 32-bit plug-in, you have to run it within a 32-bit application. (Cakewalk actually have a feature in Sonar called Bit Bridge that allows those running the 64-bit version of Sonar to use 32-bit plug-ins, but that wasn't an option for us, and a full explanation is a little beyond the scope of even this article!) So even though we could have used a 64-bit application like Sonar to access a large amount of memory in a music context, there still weren't any 64-bit sampler plug-ins that we could run within Sonar to play back our orchestral sounds.
The short strings sounded great, and with six or seven velocity layers and up to six round-robin variations on each note (incorporating up and down bows), produced surprisingly realistic performances. Unfortunately, though, Hans absolutely hated the long strings! On the day he heard them, we ended up sitting in the studio until six in the morning, and he was pretty depressed about the whole thing. Part of the problem was that they weren't very playable, and the fact that they weren't very playable made it difficult to judge their quality when compared to the old library.
The new attacks solved the problem of playability and still gave the option of having the natural attacks, but it was an interesting lesson. One of the things we really tried to achieve with the samples was to create the most natural, realistic sound possible, and the idea of manipulating the recordings too much as they became sampled instruments was initially quite abhorrent. However, the experience of the long notes served as a reminder of the paradox of recreating acoustic instruments electronically: sometimes you have to do quite unnatural things to recreate something natural. Playing in a legato style is quite natural for a real violinist, but quite unnatural for a sampler.
Even though these test instruments were still far from the ultimate potential of the new library, they were pretty good and sounded, as you would have hoped, significantly better than the old library. So Hans decided he really wanted to use them on Pirates 3: if he was going to have to do another sequel, went the reasoning, we might as well try to make the music sound as different as possible and really push the boundaries. At the time, I had no idea how far that idea would take us.
In addition to memory, another problem we encountered was that playing back one of our instruments required hundreds of voices, using about half the processing resources of one fairly beefy computer running Gigastudio. On a modern system, you might get between 600 and 800 voices when running Gigastudio 3. This may sound like a large number, but it's the voice count for mono voices. For our quad samples, each note required a minimum of four voices, so that's only 150 to 200 notes all of a sudden, which easily get used up when you consider that all the samples have four seconds of natural ambience after them. Play a trill, and with the amount of overlapping notes you've just lost a quarter of your polyphony!
This 14-computer configuration was OK for Hans alone, but an added complication with the project was that it wasn't just Hans who needed access to these new sounds. On a big movie like Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End, it's very hard (if not impossible) for one composer to handle the workload. In addition to writing the themes and defining the orchestration, there are the individual cues that need to be written for the movie. And on top of that, it's very rare that the picture stays the same, so as the picture gets edited the composer has to conform his cues to the latest cut of the picture.
Yet another complication was that Hans was going to work at Disney studios in Burbank (just down the road from his facility in Santa Monica), so a duplicate mobile version of his studio was going to be created for him to work with at Disney. In addition, a second support composer would work with him at Disney and require an identical rig. And on top of this, we had four groups of people who would also need access to the new sounds. With the four-core systems required to play back the new samples costing around $7000 each, there was just no way to supply eight or nine of these systems to each studio that needed them. We needed to find another way, and quickly, since Hans was already working away on the big themes for the film, including one for the main antagonist, Beckett, which had quite a nice bit of counterpoint that became a real showpiece for the new short strings.
The following list shows the music tracks that were featured in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (The Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man's Chest, At World's End, On Stranger Tides, Dead Men Tell No Tales) and other media created by the same team. The music was composed by George Bruns (attraction soundtrack), Klaus Badelt (film 1), Hans Zimmer (films 2-4) and Geoff Zanelli (5).
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl soundtrack, score, recording sessions, remixes are official release soundtrack albums from the film with the same title. The album was released in 2003, by Walt Disney Records and contains selections of music from the movie's score and some albums even never featured music. The music of the film and this album are both credited to composer Klaus Badelt and producer Hans Zimmer.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest soundtrack, score, recording sessions, remixes are official release soundtrack albums from the film with the same title. The album was released in 2006, by Walt Disney Records and contains selections of music from the movie's score and some albums even never featured music. The music of the film and this album are both credited to composer and producer Hans Zimmer.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End soundtrack, score, recording sessions, remixes are official release soundtrack albums from the film with the same title. The album was released in 2007, by Walt Disney Records and contains selections of music from the movie's score and some albums even never featured music. The music of the film and this album are both credited to composer and producer Hans Zimmer.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides soundtrack, score, recording sessions, remixes are official release soundtrack albums from the film with the same title. The album was released in 2011, by Walt Disney Records and contains selections of music from the movie's score and some albums even never featured music. The music of the film and this album are both credited to composer Hans Zimmer and Rodrigo y Gabriela and producer Hans Zimmer.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is the official soundtrack album from the film of the same name. The album was released on July 22, 2003, by Walt Disney Records, and contains selections of music from the film score. The music of the film and this album are credited to composer Klaus Badelt and producer Hans Zimmer.[2]
The soundtrack album, consisting of 43 minutes of the film's score, was released with Klaus Badelt credited as the composer. The cues were edited for length, and minor changes to the mix were also made. For unknown reasons, the mixing of several cues are executed with gain levels so high that it causes distortion. This is noticeable particularly during the action cues and the reprise of the love theme in track 14, "One Last Shot". It is also noted that besides the first cue, the tracks' generic names were unrelated to their contents. According to the official website of composer Geoff Zanelli, this was because the production "schedule was so short that [they] had to decide on the track names for the album packaging before the score was even written!"[6]
For the most part, The Curse of the Black Pearl features simple orchestration. Counterpoint is rare; most of the louder music consists of melody, simple harmony, and rhythmic figures in the low brass and low strings. Sampled drum beats including tom-toms and various cymbals are used ubiquitously in such sections. A very low, rumbling bass line was also introduced into the mix to reinforce the cello and double basses. Quieter sections tend to rely either on the string section or on sound effects. Pan flute, possibly synthesized or sampled, and claves can be heard repeatedly in the eerier cues.
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