I don't mean to sound unkind, but you seem to be the only one bothered by the use of these supposed presets...
I'm not the only one who has stated so over the years.
The music on Star Trek Discovery
- Thread starter Scotty
- Start date
I'm not the only one who has stated so over the years.
I must agree though, in my ten years on this board I've never come across that particular complain about the music on TNG. Sure, there are those who simply dislike the use of electronic sounds in the score altogether, but that's the first time I see someone complaining about the use of synthesizer presets.
Welp, I'm reading rec.arts.startrek right now and the usual complaints about the bland music are still there. Remember, these were complaints from when the series was new. People didn't like the music then.
As for people complaining here:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/why-did-the-music-change-so-much.151239/
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/which-background-music-synthesiser-or-full-orchestra.35021/
"I've personally always hated the incidental music from the first couple of seasons."
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/datalore-music.109410/
"I hate the 'sonic wallpaper' sound. It's so damn boring, especially in VOY when they used it over the actors talking. It's very cheesy."
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/berman-really-had-a-stupid-idea-on-music.63835/
I'll just leave that there.
^ Not sure where anyone was talking about synthesizer presets in those complaints, which is what this was about. As I said, people complaining about the music of early TNG is nothing new to me. But people being bothered by presets from a particular synthesizer being used? Never heard it until today.
No, it was about the poor use of synths, I just mentioned presets because it made the synths sound terrible. I own a D-50 and I've made it sound 100x better than the garbage you've heard on screen. That's the point - not the USE of synths, the POOR USE of synths.
And yes, people here complained about them too.
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/synthesizers.96266/
"Synthesizers dated the show horribly."
And yes, people here complained about them too.
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/synthesizers.96266/
"Synthesizers dated the show horribly."
That doesn't make sense, certainly not as a criticism of Ron Jones's work. TNG's music didn't become bland "wallpaper" until 3-4 seasons in. The first couple of seasons' scores were often quite rich and melodic. Indeed, the whole reason Jones was fired midway through season 4 is because he refused to follow Rick Berman's orders to write wallpaper music and continued to write strongly melodic, leitmotif-driven scores. So it's a contradiction in terms to conflate criticism of Jones's electronic scoring with criticism of the later "wallpaper" sound.
And it's monumentally ridiculous to cite a few complaints from the Internet as proof that the music was widely disliked. Of course there are always going to be some online complainers about anything, no matter how well-loved. And the fact that Ron Jones is the first and only Berman-era Trek composer to have gotten a CD box set releasing every single one of his TNG scores should be enough to disprove the notion that his music was widely unpopular.
Well, I don't have all night to read through thousands of posts from 30 years ago. But I was on rec.arts.startrek several times a day and yeah, the music was definitely a sore spot for fans. Think about it - 20 years of gorgeous music from Kaplan, Courage, Steiner, Fried, and then this synth stuff which was *already* being made fun of by the time 1987 rolled around.
Some of the synths Jones used didn't hold up then and certainly don't now, but others did and worked well at the time, such as the synths in "Booby Trap":
Again: There will always be some complaints about anything, especially online. Posts on the Internet are never a statistically representative sample of public opinion. For one thing, only a relatively small number of fans will frequent any given site, and only a small number of those will post rather than lurk. So they're far too small a sample to be statistically representative. Also, the people who post are a self-selected sample who will be more opinionated and outspoken than most, again making them non-representative. Plus, back during TNG's run, the sample of online commenters would've been biased in favor of those well-off enough to own computers and tech-savvy enough to use them, further factors skewing the sample away from a statistically useful selection of the whole.
For another thing, such self-selected samples of opinion such as letters to the show in the old days or comments online today are always disproportionately slanted in favor of negative opinions, since people who are unhappy with the state of affairs are more motivated to speak up than people who are happy with it. So the ratio of negative opinions to positive ones is always going to be significantly higher among those who choose to comment on it than among the overall audience. This is why pollsters and statisticians seek people out at random rather than waiting for respondents to come to them -- because self-selected samples are always going to be biased in all sorts of ways.
Besides, it doesn't matter how other people felt about it. If you personally don't like it, that's all you need to say. You're not going to convince anyone here that Ron Jones's TNG music was universally disliked. Again, the very existence of The Ron Jones Project CD set proves what an absurd notion that is. But you don't need to prove your opinion is shared by the majority in order to own it as your opinion. There's no shame in holding a minority view. De gustibus non est disputandem and all that.
tharpdevenport: Ooh, that "Booby Trap" cue is another favorite.
Ooh, yeah, about that....they weren't 'self-selected'. I just searched "TNG music". Nothing positive came up. So, yeah. I didn't search selectively for "TNG music sucks" or "TNG music bad", just "TNG music".
Unfortunately, I couldn't go past 1990. There were some juicy discussions in the earlier years, but Google doesn't go back further for some reason. They used to.
That's not what the term means. A self-selected sample, in statistics/polling terminology, is one in which the people who express opinions do so spontaneously of their own volition rather than being sought out by a poll taker or interviewer. For instance, people who choose to write fan letters to a TV show or letters to the editor of a newspaper, or people who choose to join online discussion boards or create their own blogs. In a case like that, the selection of opinions you hear will not be statistically representative of the entire population, because it's biased toward those who are more motivated to express themselves or have more opportunity to do so.
So it doesn't matter how objective your own search terms of that sample are -- the sample you're working from was already intrinsically biased to start with. And not large enough to be statistically useful, because in a small sample, any random variation can be large enough to swamp any meaningful data. (Or, as Keith R.A. DeCandido is fond of saying, "Don't mistake a few fans bitching on the Internet for any sort of trend.")
And, again, who cares? If you don't like the music, you don't like it. You don't have to "prove" your case to the rest of us, and you don't have to hide behind the pretense that your personal opinion is majority rule. Just own it as your individual opinion. It's not a competition.
Wow, you really aren't paying attention, are you? We've been over this already. The "sonic wallpaper" complaints refer to the later style of TNG music, the kind that Ron Jones was fired for refusing to do. Complaints about "wallpaper" are not complaints about Ron Jones. They're mutually exclusive categories. Heck, part of the reason Jones's music is so popular, part of the reason he was the only modern Trek composer to get his own dedicated box set, is because he was the only modern Trek TV composer whose work was consistently rich and melodic.
And gee, the posts I quoted were from....*gasp*....later seasons. I just said that i couldn't find anything before 1990. You're not going to convince me that the music was good. IMO the music was the worst aspect of the show. Well, maybe there was too much talking, but that's a different thread.
It comes back to this time and time again, you're obviously a soooo much better synth guy than Jones was....... I find it a little hard to believe though that Jones was this nitwit who didn't know what he was doing, so don't mind me not taking your word on this.....
The D-50 came out in 1987. I really don't know WHAT Jones knows or doesn't know, but I don't know if he had the time to really look at it, or did someone say "quick, use the D-50....it'll be cool!...we only have two weeks!". I *DO* know that Jarre built and entire album around the D-50 (Revolutions) and it sounds 1000x better than what came out in TNG. Reason is that Jarre took the time to program the thing and not use a lot of presets.
Also, I've had 30 years with the D-50. Jones did not.