Survivor: How We Made Eye of the Tiger | Hacker News Reader

Survivor: How We Made Eye of the Tiger

theguardian.com

87 pointstintinnabula26 comments

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

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.

All hail the Sousaphones

"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...

it's hard to have your software heard at the supermarket though, unless you design point of sale

Once wrote some firmware for a barcode scanner. Didn’t think of it as a musical instrument. This morning Twitter showed me otherwise: https://twitter.com/crab_feet/status/1222165813135720448

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!

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

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

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.

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.)

Re: that quote from the article — my guess is that they were recording on analog gear. It was early 80s, so hard to say for sure. But, with analog equipment you can “bleed” into the red and get a certain kind of warmth that you just don’t get with a digital recording.

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

> 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.

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.

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

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

I suspect hyperbole, just meant "a small adjustment"

That's the point of the story - Stallone didn't realise it had been turned up, but something felt a little punchier to him (sorry). It's a well-known effect.

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.

On that latter, I've always referred to it as "bait". When you are dealing with someone who can't help but put their fingers in regardless of need, you give them something to do.

Works with everyone from copy editors to CEOs.

So you’re saying you turn it up to eleven?

Edit: I’ve heard the one conspicuous mistake referred to as a “duck”, after the possible-apocryphal story about the queen in Battle Chess.

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." ]

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

https://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364760847/whats-with-all-of-t...

The decibels aren't the topic being discussed. It's balls, and you can't quantify balls past a pair. It was the attitude of standing firm and not actually changing anything that gave it balls.

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