“Adventures In Sound!” – Ben tracks his own journey to find the digital devices that best re-create or at least evoke the classic theater pipe organ experience under modern screening conditions.
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Topics
Ben discusses the “temporary” theme for the podcast, “Those Keystone Comedy Cops”
Ben’s instrumental evolution
- Learning to play the organ
- Lee Erwin, theater organist, as a mentor
- Difference in technique between piano and organ
- Expanding colors and instrumentation
- Developing the Synth-Org (Sample sounds included)
- Synth(esized) sounds vs. Digital samples
- Limited availability of real theater organs
- Deploying the Kurzweil PC-2 system with a MIDI pedal unit
- Examples from two scores for Edison: Invention of the Movies
Underwriting announcement: The Alice Howell Collection on DVD from Undercrank Productions
Ben’s musical journey continued
- Jim Henry introduces Ben to the Miditzer
- An excerpt from a Miditzer score Ben created for The Penalty
- The difficulty of recording and reproducing a real theater organ for home video
- Introducing the sound of the theater organ to the modern audience, the authentic sound of silent film
- Orchestration is fun in theory, but…
- Graduating to Hauptwerk, courtesy Paramount Organ Works, and adapting it to a single 88-note keyboard
- Please rename the system! And suggest how to talk about silent film without using the word “silent”!
- Scoring for home video as contrasted with a live appearance
- The piano is more suitable for the intimacy of The Silent Comedy Watch Party
Recommendations:
- The Eye Film Museum
- The National Film Preservation Board
Links from the episode:
- The Silent Comedy Watch Party, Sundays on YouTube
- “Those Keystone Comedy Cops” by Charles McCarron. Download a copy, learn the words, sing it with your friends
- Appreciation: Silent Cinema Organist Lee Erwin – A four-minute radio story about Lee Erwin featuring some of his music.
- Watch Man Without A World directed by Eleanor Antrim at Vimeo
- Edison: The Invention of the Movies distributed by Kino Lorber – With scores by Ben and many others
- Learn about Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the music system and many other things
- The Alice Howell Collection from Undercrank Productions, 12 rare silent comedies with a female star who foreshadows Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and the great women physical comedians.
- A review of the Alice Howell Collection which highlights the major contribution Ben’s scores make to the set.
- What is a “sound font”?
- The legendary Hauptwerk Digital Virtual Theater Pipe Organ
Recommendations:
- The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam. Explore the online offerings here.
- The National Film Preservation Foundation. More free fun here.
- Sign up for Ben’s e-mails here.
Thanks so much for finally getting this podcast out there! I look forward to listening, hopefully they will be more frequent, I really enjoy them. I’m one of those dinosaurs that still download and listen on my mp3 player. Also, I can’t say it enough, thank you Ben for all you and Steve have done with the Watch Parties. It has been so nice to have something to look forward to each week when pretty much all activities have been shut down during this pandemic. Hopefully not too far in the distant future, my wife and I will be hopping… Read more »