3. Batman

Batman:

This is a reconstruction of the sequence and edits of the original soundtrack album using a different source for the master.  For various reasons, I don’t know exactly why, I never thought the original soundtrack album sounded very good from a sonic perspective. There are a number of possible reasons for this. In the first place, getting a good recording proved to be difficult due to the extreme pressure of the schedule and my own inexperience in how a large score should sound. (this was my first time with a big orchestra.) It was technically difficult as well as we found ourselves in a studio that neither myself, Steve Bartek , nor the engineer were very familiar with and there were equipment problems. I was simply focused on getting the notes recorded before the clock ran out for each session, nothing more. Just to get the damn thing on tape!

It is also possible that the source of the masters when the original album was released in 1989 was itself flawed, or possibly a second-generation copy. The possibilities are endless. With our new masters, we tried our best to match the original album, with the exception of “Attack Of The Batwing,” where we added some previously cut music, thus restoring it to its full-score length.

And in addition to that, we included seven previously unreleased tracks from the score. 

Here again, with much arm-twisting from my agent Richard Kraft, I agreed to include one of my original synth-demo worktapes. This is a hodgepodge of stuff, some of which ended up in the film and some that ended up not surviving.

As is the case with my demo in Beetlejuice, this is a very primitive, crappy-sounding synth demo. And it was my first time doing action music. I always began with piano as I worked out ideas, and you’ll hear that the piano really drives the bigger stuff. This was to get the idea of the thrust and energy of the music, and not intended to actually be in the final music.  When it was time to finish the score, the piano would become much more supportive or disappear completely. But listening to these now, I find it amusing how the piano is just merrily banging away with the orchestra sounds—kind of “helping”—as opposed to the other way around. Also included, and kind of fun to hear, is some of the crazy stuff that didn’t survive the first go-around.  I was experimenting a lot, as I do now, which means that a lot of ideas went bye-bye…thankfully…but it may be interesting, I suppose, to hear now. So the best way I can describe it is this. Those days most composers just played their musical ideas for the director on a piano, plain and simple. I wanted to elaborate on that but there was almost no technology for me to work with so these are more of less old fashioned piano banging-PLUS. Meaning just one step beyond straight up “Here’s the tune boss”.

—D.E.