How the Terminator 2 music was made

do you like music like this [Music] and this and this affirmative you do this is why a mission priority is to watch the T to score under the skin now listen to me very carefully I'm going to hand you over to Alex to talk about the music because he has detailed files I'll be back thanks to 800 one of my all-time favorite scores and films is Terminator 2 Judgment Day I thought it would be interesting to get right under the skin of the score as its creation is very specific and we can actually play with the identical sound sources Bradford L use back in 1991 sounds like these [Music] I'll get into exactly what those are in a minute but before we get on to Terminator 2 I want to roll back the clock to 1984 The Terminator to fill in the back story Brad Fidel score both of these original films and there's a distinct evolution from the first to the second the first film was scored using a sequential circuits profit 10 an emu emulator the Oberheim system and Ross Levinson on electric violin although MIDI had been introduced the previous year and there was now a universal standard between manufacturers Brad Fidel's equipment predated this so he didn't have the cross connectivity to synchronize the profit 10 with the Oh behind system but she describes in this interview excerpt I had all these individual keyboards and they had to be played individually it was all live every note is live performed with the exception of this I had an overtime situation where I could put a little drum machine and a little dough those things were chained together but it was their technology it didn't interface with anything else so if my profit 10 was going buh-buh-buh-buh-buh boom boom boom and the other thing was going I had to literally sit there live and change the tempo and try to get them to match part of the nature of the score is me trying to get control of the machines while the machines are trying to get control the people in the movie I'm sitting here desperately trying to get control of these machines now I don't have a profit tenon over home system or an original EMU emulator but I do have equipment from the same manufacturers and from the same era a sequential circuit Pro 1 I know behind DX samples from the emulator series that I can trigger from coincidentally my EMU controller and I'll pick up a violin to take the role of Ross Levinson here's a quick remake of a very short excerpt of the terminator score as a reference [Music] six years later when Terminator 2 was starting production Brad Fidel's equipment had moved on in the same way that the film production itself had moved on it was scored almost entirely on two Fairlight CMI threes one for the percussive sounds and one for the sustains and melodies and again Ross Levinson on violin so whilst the sampling site had been hugely expanded upon the analog synthesizers from the original film were no longer present now I don't own a Fairlight CMI 3 as you could imagine but Mike over at 100 things I do does Mike over to you so let's actually take a look at the fair light so the fair lights made up of multiple different components we've got the alphanumeric keyboard the music keyboard display and a computer mouse so at the heart of the CMI is the main prime now the mainframe deals with all the computational power of the fellow without the mainframe nothing actually works or makes any sound so in this system here it's divided into three major parts we've got the computer and the i/o all here we've got the voice cards running all 16 voices with the red LEDs on them there and right at the end we've got an upgrade to this fair light which is 32 Meg's of full memory on a single card so one of the things that really makes the fair light sound the way it is are the voice cards now these are digital analog hybrid cards and have quite a lot of analog filtering onboard so with the series 3 kind of massive learning curve to actually be able to use the sampler as you can see from the amount of books you would have to read to actually be able to create music on it so let's load up one of the Terminator 2 sounds on the Fairlight so first of all you go to the directory mode by escape f15 this will read the contents the disk and very similar to Windows Explorer or finder on a Mac it'll display absolutely everything that's in this folder so the one we're looking for is brass ball so we move across to it here and we press the f5 key to load it into memory once it's loaded into memory you can play it on the keyboard of course [Music] [Applause] [Music] huge thanks to Mike for showing us a real fair light and for giving us a little preview of some sounds I'll go into in more detail later if you want more history on the Fairlight CMI series and the Fairlight founders Peter Vogel and Kim Rory then there's further links in the description anything examples but physical conduct and here is Peter Vogel and Kim Rory with the Fairlight series one a few years later they'd released the series three which was the cornerstone of the t2 score and this is miles Dyson in a few months he creates a revolutionary type of microprocessor and this is James Dyson in a few months who creates a revolutionary type of vacuum cleaner so that's the machine but let's get right under the skin of how Bradford l employed it in the tea to score the fair lights were loaded with the series three factory banks and also some of the earliest orchestral sample libraries ever made commercially available the Presonus series is the manipulation layering and supplementation of these sounds within the Fairlight machines that gave the terminator to score its distinct sound the Fairlight you could load in or record a sample at a given pitch and stretch and squash it in either directions so that it replayed at different pitches is a violin sustain sample from the pro sonís library played at normal speed and pitch and now the same sample played over three octaves lower which means it has to be played back at a fraction of the speed [Music] this kind of unnatural Reap itching of samples is absolutely key to the t2 score something that was only possible because of the technology of the time in Brad's own words I was really able to develop the full library at that point of sounds like the sounds of the t1000 and all these different elements a particular kind of orchestral string sound that wasn't a real sound you know the way the Fairlight employed variable sample rates to change the pitch of a sample in the digital domain meant that it imparted something called imaging frequencies now I'm ill qualified to explain the science behind that but essentially this meant that there is a buzzing harmonic sound present when the Fairlight replayed a sample you can hear it all over the t2 recordings and it's an integral part of the sound i've crudely recreated it with some plugins in my door but you'd have to program the music on a real Fairlight CMI to get the identical effect over the top of our stretch violin note I'm going to take this violin Marketo sample and replay some simple dyads two octaves down after that I'll add in some stretch in a reverse cymbal and Gong samples all from the Fairlight or Presonus libraries using the same technique and let's see what happens [Music] and that's essentially the opening cue of the film now you see as we look at the actual notes played that the harmony isn't anything to write home about it's pretty standard chords and writing but that's not the point the key factor is how those chords are turned into audio it's all about the quality or tomber of the sound interestingly in this interview Bradford L mentions that they considered re-recording the score with the real Orchestra but decided against it and the score would probably be reasonably generic if it was performed by traditional instruments out of interest here's that opening cue played using modern orchestral samples without any the stretching or artifacts at the fair light imparted [Music] it works but it doesn't have the same character at all some more perspective on this from the man himself most of the sounds in Terminator 2 actually originated organically they were organic acoustic sounds that I compiled - the technology that had become available so I was cutting edge with the music technology the same way Jim was with the CGI technology it seemed to blend well at some point we realized that I was about to do the music for the most expensive film ever made at that moment in my garage basically so we made that decision and I think it served the film well it's a bigger richer sound mostly because of the technology Terminator 1 was mostly all oscillators and synthesizers just coming out of the wall socket you know a lot of the sounds in t2 were generated by real things real air moving in a room of something being played but then twisted you keeping up with this my CPU is a neural net processor a learning computer a PC not a Mac back to the score and after the opening monologue and credits the t800 arrival is marked by an F - 7 chord played on French horn samples from the Fairlight Factory Bank if you want to track the samples down this is their precise name it's during this opening cue that we get partially introduced to one of the sonic devices that they use throughout the film have a quick listen [Music] the sound in question originates from a fair like factory bank sample titled anvil 11 here it is in its original form layered with some other fare like percussion and again played unnaturally low it sounds like this before we later hear it in its full form that's two of the same samples at different pitches and out of sync with each other one pan left and one pan right now at this point I absolutely have to stop and give credit to Python blue who's the guy who reverse engineered this sample and made this patch and in fact the majority of the information I'm presenting this film is built upon his experimentation and discovery so credit where credit is due check out his tee to score recreations of unreleased cues they're as close as you'll ever get to the original recordings links in the description this anvil 11 sample is a prime example of a recurring technique throughout the score the same sample pan left and right pitch differently and staggered so that they're slightly out of sync this is all over the t2 score if you listen to the left and right channel separately you'll hear it and if you look at the waveforms you'll even see it like these examples there is in fact a very specific reason for this Bradford L explains there was a technical reason for that the original mix of the film at that point was on Dolby stereo Dolby stereo was actually a synthesis of stereo that lived on a two-track optical track when you hit the Dolby box if you have shared material in your left and right track it sucks it into the middle track because the middle track doesn't really exist what we discovered is you couldn't have exact shared material in the left and right in some cases when I wanted stereo strengths I would literally laid two different tracks that was slightly out sync 12 milliseconds or something so that the samples weren't phasing and we could keep it wide so that explains the kind of flam stereo sound that's part of the character of the t2 score if humble 11 is the mnemonic for the t800 then brass fall 12 is the mnemonic for the t1000 here's the original sample at normal pitch and speed and now replayed several octaves down in layers [Music] Bradford L describes this warped and distinctive sound and then I took it down into a speed and pitch that was not recognizable when I played it to Jim or trying to describe it it sounds like a weird machine room somewhere but with monks like artificial intelligent monks chanting in a weird Chapel or something and that's to me the essence of what's so brilliant about this score a manipulated anvil sample a manipulated brass sample and we have two very unique ear worms that identify the mechanical protagonists to the audience it's like a more modern evolution of the idea of light motifs now that I helped a field I'd plug in I can finally change the speed in pitch if my voice now that I have to failed I'd plug in I can finally change the speed in pitch if my voice now this loads more examples of specific Fairlight samples across the score here's some excerpts from the steel mill battle and t1000 death scene [Music] and now some samples labeled brass ensemble effects from the Presonus libraries and it's clear Fidel was using these exact sounds is another rolling trumpet effect heard as the t1000 churns in the molten lava before finally dying [Music] and here's the brass ensemble effects sample it comes from amazingly the very last sample in this collection is a long swell of a tonal noise but they decided not to edit the audio file down and left the tape rolling if you crank the volume up at the end of the sample well have a listen anyway I'll whisk through a couple of others here's a soundbite from the cue our gang goes to Cyberdyne and here's a colino cello effect sample from the pro sonís library played a tone down from this original pitch and finally a snippet from Cameron's Inferno from the score [Music] and some pro sonís bowed cymbals and prepared piano samples with the same technique of panning left and right and pitching differently and you get the idea Brad Fidel's sums up nicely with this quote one director I'd work with in the past came out of the Hollywood premiere screening of Terminator 2 saying this is definitely starting a new era of he was referring to the kind of seamless relationship between music and sound effects because he couldn't tell the difference between what I had done and what they the sound designers had done and in some cases there were things that I did that were very much sound effects in a sense though I didn't intend them to be there's just one last element I want to mention and that's the fair like choir samples using the score here's Brad Fidel's explanation I felt that the fate of all humanity demanded that kind of sound as she liked the rather primitive choir samples that were available back then for their infinite quality not too specific I altered them further to accentuate that element to blend with the rest of the score and create the feel you mentioned looking back I think part of what unified the score and added to his impact was that by necessity it was designed to make the most of the limits of the musical technology of the time the samples in question are called choir oh three and from the Fairlight factory banks in the main theme you hear it and here's the sound of the isolated samples so now you know what you'd need to recreate this sound I need your clothes your boots and if you have an extra prophet tense synthesizer or take it of course there's dozens and dozens of Fairlight sounds lurking all over the t2 score but covering them all would be a very very long video so if you're into that I've put links in the description of where you can get these libraries nowadays without owning a fair light and you can do your own detective work or if you want to pick up your own Fairlight CMI they cost about what I don't know where you'll cry now before the video was terminated you have to press the like button do it now goodbye [Music] yeah good morning how are you I don't know why you cry it's because you want a jack to live at the end of Titanic it's because you were born into a family and your father was already dead in your mother's a psycho and you only have a robot father figure friend me I need you opposed your flutes and your old vinyl know that I have to fear night plug-in I can finally change the speed and pitch of my voice sanity

Channel: Alex Ball

Views: 378,333

Rating: 4.9499331 out of 5

Keywords: Terminator 2, The Terminator, Arnie, Fairlight, Fairlight CMI III, Prosonus, Sequential Circuits, Oberheim, Synthesizer, Sampling, T-800, T-1000

Id: nnpYowxlwsU

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/nofate2029work]

Great find! It's awesome to see the history of the T2 soundtrack and how it came to be. It was would be a dream come true to see Brad Fiedel come back to score Jim Cameron's new Terminator movie but I doubt that will happen.

If y'all haven't seen it, a dude recreated The Terminator theme, it's well done imo.

[u/CELTICPRED]

T2 is one of my favorite films of all time, and the score is a huge part of that. It's just so unique and distinct, so easy to place each section of the score in memory as the film plays through my head. I was shocked when I read through soundtrackdotnet's reviews for the score, rating it very poorly, for not being "melodic" enough, citing "John and Dyson" into the vault as one of the few tracks with any melody.

I understand that's it's not an easy album to throw on and just listen through with some headphones, but I feel it perfectly accompanies everything on the screen. Something pretty similar recently happened with Henry Jackman's Winter Soldier score.

There are some re-creations out there, but I'd love to hear a properly isolated section of the score with the canal/dirtbike/tow truck. I was hoping we'd see more of these with the 4k release of T2 recently, but I don't think it has an isolated score option in the features. edit: after posting this, didn't realize they had re-released The Terminator's full score in 2016, it was previously only available as the definite edition and was pretty hard to get a hold of.

[u/cookeharry]

Brad Fiedel better be back for Dark Fate.

[u/Pansonic_]

Thanks for the link! As a super fan of Termintor 2, I should have searched for this long ago!

Edit: I see the video is practically brand new. Nice find!

[u/ReflexEight]

Thanks! Just watched the movie again earlier today and love the soundtrack

[u/[deleted]]

Thank you for this

[u/ArrrGaming]

Thanks so much! This is absolutely brilliant.

[u/CollumMcJingleballs]

I enjoy T2's score, but enjoyed how Marco Beltrami took the base snare of the Brad Fiedel Terminator theme and managed to create a whole new tragic theme around it in T3

[u/prodical]

Fascinating watch! Also this guys Arnie impression is excellent.