Hi Everyone
I just found this video of Bill Baley arranging the Dr Who theme in the style of Belgian Jazz. I found this quite interesting and inspiriational and hope that you may also do so (or at least find it entertaining).
The first step in Bill’s approach to creating the arangement is to find the chord progression in the music for which Scaler is a good tool. He then creates the arrangment ariound the chord progression.
Hilarious thanks for sharing. Wish I had his talent! The story of Delia Derbyshire cutting each note on seperate bits of tapes is remarkable. It could never be recreated regardless of technological advances. Some things are sacred!:
Each individual note was then trimmed to length by cutting the tape, and stuck together in the right order. This was done for each “line” in the music – the main plucked bass, the bass slides (an organ-like tone emphasising the grace notes), the hisses, the swoops, the melody, a second melody line (a high organ-like tone used for emphasis), and the bubbles and clouds. Most of these individual bits of tape making up lines of music, complete with edits every inch, still survive.
This done, the music had to be “mixed”. There were no multitrack tape machines, so rudimentary multitrack techniques were invented: each length of tape was placed on a separate tape machine and all the machines were started simultaneously and the outputs mixed together. If the machines fell out of sync, they started again, maybe cutting tapes slightly here and there to help. In fact, a number of “submixes” were made to ease the process – a combined bass track, combined melody track, bubble track, and hisses.
Grainer was amazed at the resulting piece of music and when he heard it, famously asked, “Did I write that?” Derbyshire modestly replied, “Most of it.” However the BBC, who wanted to keep members of the Workshop anonymous, prevented Grainer from getting Derbyshire a co-composer credit and a share of the royalties.
