
Survivor: How We Made Eye of the Tiger - tintinnabula
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/27/how-we-made-eye-of-the-tiger-rocky-iii-survivor-sylvester-stallone
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cyberferret
This is one of those classic songs that sounds easy, but is really hard to
pull off effectively. I clearly remember learning it in one of the bands I
played with decades ago. Getting that right 'swing' feel in the opening
quarter notes is hard, and the guitar chord riff (that were originally timed
with the punches in the trailer) have an incredibly difficult syncopated
timing to them. Get it wrong, and the song falls flat. Get it right, and the
audience goes OFF!

~~~
i_am_nomad
I’ve heard very, very few worthy covers of it. The most recent is by Vomitron.

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dhosek
Jim Peterik is arguably the most famous graduate of my high school. The year
this song came out, it we did the marching band arrangement of it at every
football halftime show. I still have the tuba part permanently engraved in my
brain.

~~~
milesward
All hail the Sousaphones

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charliemil4
"The Grammy is still sitting on my recording console. The money doesn’t suck,
but the best royalty is that I’ll be in the supermarket and meet random people
who tell me the song has affected their lives in a positive way. It’s helped
people through cancer or a heart attack. I know people that have been on the
operating table and asked to have Eye of the Tiger playing. That’s the real
shit."

This is what everything's about. If everyone wrote software, designed boards,
worked like this...

~~~
bonniemuffin
No joke, this song has had a huge positive impact on my life. When I was
learning to walk again after a broken ankle, I would put on Eye of the Tiger
when I thought I couldn't go any farther, and it would help me walk just a
little bit more. When I was having my baby and the pushing phase of labor got
really intense and I started freaking out, we put on Eye of the Tiger and it
helped me keep going and avoid an emergency c-section.

I wish I knew how to contact them and thank them for writing it!

~~~
jimhefferon
Try the "Contact" link on www.survivorband.com :-)

~~~
bonniemuffin
Thanks, I sent them a note and got a reply from a human saying she'll pass it
on to them. :)

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ilamont
_All I did was push the faders up a single decibel and, boom, you could feel
the difference. It was kicking and he loved it. He said: “Print it!” I told
him: “But that’s the demo!” Sly said: “I don’t give a fuck what it is.” That’s
his attitude._

There's a really good documentary on Netflix about Clive Davis, the Arista
Records founder who has probably discovered and mentored more stars and hit
records than anyone on the planet. There's a segment about the Whitney Houston
soundtrack for "The Bodyguard" and "I will always love you." The recording
almost didn't get made at all (the movie studio was reluctant to have Houston
do it for some strange reason), but when the demo came out it was so good that
they just went with it, and didn't want to risk messing it up with additional
production work.

Davis, incidentally, was a corporate lawyer in his mid 30s with no musical
background when he got started in the music business in the late 60s. He
realized there was a major shift in pop music, and further had a "magic ear"
for hits (this comment was made by Bob Weir) in many pop genres. In the
documentary Barry Manilow basically says his only hits he had were the ones
that Davis pushed him to record (I believe from other songwriters).

This pattern of Davis and his A&R teams working on the hits was repeated with
many artists over many decades. Only a few musicians who were signed to his
labels (Patti Smith and Kanye among them) were given a longer leash and more
independence.

~~~
atombender
Another famous example is Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. He recorded the songs
on an Teac 4-track cassette machine at home as demos, took them to the studio
to record with his band, but felt that they didn't work as well as the demos,
and so the demos became the final album. (One of the songs from these
sessions, "Born in the USA", ended up getting a studio version on a later
album.)

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ggm
Tunes from before 'does this pass the AI' probably wouldn't pass the AI bland-
o-matic test in the system now.

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chooseaname
> I still have the tape of Rocky III with Another One Bites the Dust on it –
> maybe the only one. It might be worth a lot of money today. But out of
> loyalty to Sly, it stays locked in my safe.

Pretty good definition of integrity.

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ogre_codes
I will never again hear this song without thinking about _Another One Bites
the Dust_. Both songs have a kind of energy to them which seems simple but
evades so many.

~~~
abraae
On a first aid course I learned that Another one bites the dust has just the
right beat for doing CPR. Delightful irony.

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jacquesm
You can't easily hear a difference of just one decibel. 3 dB is about the
minimum that can be reliably differentiated by an average audience.

If you want to test your own hearing:

[https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_level.php?lvl=1](https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_level.php?lvl=1)

~~~
CamperBob2
Chances are good he didn't change anything at all. There are lots of knobs and
sliders on a mixing console, and most of them aren't hooked up to anything at
any given time. When the client comes to you and says something infuriating
like "Needs more balls" or "Needs more feeling" or "Needs more cowbell", you
turn one of those knobs conspicuously and do another take.

What you _don 't_ do is argue.

This trick is as old as setting your line spacing to 1.1 if your report is a
bit too short to reach the required number of pages or 0.9 if it's a bit too
long. Or including something obviously awful in a presentation you're trying
to get approved by upper management, so they can go home that night thinking
they're the real MVP for pointing it out.

~~~
ChainOfFools
ah the old battlechess duck

[It was well known that producers (a game industry position, roughly
equivalent to PMs) had to make a change to everything that was done. The
assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't
adding value.

The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this
tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for
the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the
queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations,
had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that
it never overlapped the "actual" animation.

Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the
queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were
done, he turned to the artist and said, "that looks great. Just one thing -
get rid of the duck." ]

~~~
soylentcola
I always heard it as the "hairy arms" trick at Disney:

[https://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364760847/whats-with-all-
of-t...](https://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364760847/whats-with-all-of-the-hairy-
arms-in-graphic-design)

