Re: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror - Exterior BGM Playlist
I was at The Park yesterday (nothing worse that being in a meeting at Disneyland stuck in a conference room with the Sounds of Disneyland reminding you that your close, but no cigar). Anyway, while heading out, I remembered the discussion on the effect used for the Tower of Terror queue. I had noticed it many times before, but it had been a while so I popped into the park to refresh my memory. Please excuse me for actually not going to WDI and asking directly, but so many of the "illusions" of the park have been revealed to me (and I know as part of my job, they will continue to be), that I have a practice of NOT finding out how things work until I have to. I appreciate the genius on how things were accomplished, but a little magic is taken away once you know exactly how it all works.
Here's my theory:
I believe that they used only the "echo return" for this effect. When you want to add reverb to something, you have several ways to apply it to the recording — you can assign it to the entire mixer track, the object itself within the Digital Workstation, or you can send the audio out of the board and through an outboard reverb and have the outboard reverb come back into the board via the AUX Sends and Returns. What that means is on channels 1 & 2 you have the source audio and on channels 3 & 4 you have the return from the reverb (just the reverb itself). With this technique, you can actually control the reverb throughout the piece. A use of this would be to pull down the reverb in a classical piece when its a small section of the orchestra (so they don't sound like they're in a men's washroom) and to push in more reverb when the full orchestra is in play. Now when you just listen to the reverb return, it sounds distant and a bit eerie as there is no "dry" source and all you're hearing is the reverb — a completely different sound then drenching the source with verb. I first had to deal with this in "The Enchanted Tiki Room" track for the Disneyland set. The music bed had the echo return of the vocals mixed in to the music bed. The actual vocals weren't there, but the echo return was (this also explains why some felt there was too much verb on the track. But I had no choice as it was printed within the music. The best I could do was diminish the effect as much as possible).
In short, I surmise that WDI used a "Room" filter on the reverb (a Room sound has a shorter decay and less of a stereotypical reverb sound) and only used the returns to achieve this very effective, well effect.
Well, that's my theory anyway.
I know I promised you all Episode III of The Why Series, and I haven't forgotten. I've just been too busy to sit down and write the thing. I really do hope to get to it sooner rather than later.
Have a great 4th!
Randy Thornton