Star Trek

FallOnYourSword’s Back To The Ship remixes the audio and video of classic Star Trek episodes to create a NSFW and often hilarious music video about Kirk taking too much LSD and trying to get a circumcision.

Motion Pictures Editorss Guild has published an interesting interview with sound designer Ben Burtt, a four-time oscar winner for sound effects.

Burtt reveals some of the stories behind the sound design for J.J. Abram’s Star Trek movie:

EGM: We’ve talked about the library of sounds you created for J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek. Can you talk about how you re-created some of the iconic effects for the movie? Let’s start with the hand phaser.

BB: In the original series, the steady blast of the phaser was derived from the hovering sound of the Martian war machines made for the 1953 version of Paramount’s War of the Worlds. The original was made with tape feedback of an electric guitar and a harp. You can achieve a very similar sound on a Moog synthesizer by modulating a steady sine wave with pink noise. The phasers in the new movie are more like the blasters in Star Wars in the sense that they are flying bolts or tracer bullets, rather than a steady beam. The steady sound just wasn’t the right way to go because the visuals are so different, so I made something that recalls it, but features a Doppler effect and is shorter and sharper. My sounds were added to those that had already been supplied by Mark P. Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin.

EGM: And the Photon Torpedoes?

BB: That sound can be traced back to the Paramount Pictures library; it even turns up in some 1940s Bob Hope comedies, so no one can say for sure how it was created. My ears tell me that it was an impact on a spring, maybe picked up with a contact mic. I reproduced mine using a very long spring, capping it and putting a contact mic on it, and combining that with a cannon blast. I also created a derivative of that for the phasers. It recalled the style and feeling of the original, while translating well in to the very different visuals of the movie.

EGM: What about the Enterprise Warp Drive?

BB: The original warp drive sound was a very musical tone that ramped up and down in pitch, with all kinds of hum and distortion, and it was undoubtedly produced with a test oscillator going through a plate reverb chamber. I wanted to go back to that musical idea, and get something with an emotional feel to it, so I reproduced that sound in exactly the same way in analogue fashion, using a 1960s-era test oscillator that was once in the physics department at my old school, Allegheny College. I went back there and actually found that oscillator in a basement, and brought it back with me to use on the movie.

EGM: What about the transporter?

BB: There are several different elements to it in the original version, including, once again, a rising oscillator tone as well as a “singing” ethereal tone. The transporter in the movie looks and functions a little bit differently than the one in the series, but I wanted to recreate the feeling of the original’s shimmering, ringing tone. So I came up with something that was reasonably close, using bar chimes and a lot of reverb.

See the full interview at Editorsguild.com.

This may be the most awesome video of the day – a “Trekkie nerd” beams in to play the Star Trek theme on Theremin.

DJ Spock is in the house.

I know – this is pretty insanely stupid.

But you know what? It made me blow coffee out of my nose just the same.

Enjoy.

Here’s another source, if the YouTube embed doesn’t work for you:

via Mookie

OT: Alexander “Sandy” Courage, who composed the theme for Star Trek in the 1960s, has died. He was 88.

Courage, who had been in declining health since 2005, died May 15 at an assisted-living facility in Pacific Palisades, said his step-daughter, Renata Pompelli.

After launching his 54-yearcareer as a composer for CBS Radio in 1946, Courage became an orchestrator and arranger at MGM in 1948.

Over the next dozen years, he worked on a string of classic musicals, including “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Show Boat,” “The Band Wagon,” “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “Gigi.” He later was an orchestrator for musicals including “My Fair Lady,” “Hello, Dolly!,” “Doctor Dolittle” and “Fiddler on the Roof” — as well as for films including “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Jurassic Park,” “Basic Instinct,” “Hook” and “The Mummy.”

“He made a very big contribution to the musical life of Hollywood from the end of the second World War to recent years,” Oscar-winning composer John Williams told The Times on Thursday.

“He was known to most musicians in the community as having been one of the architects of what we used to refer to as the MGM sound, which meant that most of the musical films from MGM had a particular style of orchestration, which was an extension and development of what was done in the theater in the 1920s,” Williams said. “They actually took that to a very high art form, particularly in the musicals produced by Arthur Freed.

He began composing for television in 1959 and wrote music for more than 350 episodes of series that included “The Untouchables,” “Laramie,” “Daniel Boone,” “Judd for the Defense,” “Lost in Space,” “Land of the Giants,” “The Waltons,” “Eight Is Enough,” “Falcon Crest,” “Flamingo Road” and many others.

On Star Trek

Courage was no science-fiction fan when Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry asked him to score the pilot episode in 1965.

“I never have been” a sci-fi fan, Courage later told film music historian Jon Burlingame. But I thought, ‘Well, what the heck. It’s another show.’ ”

Roddenberry, Courage recalled, said he didn’t want the show’s score to sound like “space music,” nothing “far out.”

“He wanted something that had some . . . drive to it,” Courage recalled. “In fact, he told me to always write that way through the show, all of it.”