Terminator Timings

Brad Fiedel's Terminator soundtrack is one on my favorite pieces of music so I decided to try and emulate using my two synths. I set the Moog to 'Bad Atmosphere' then slowed it down to a crawl to get an good approximation of that background buzzing in the Terminator's main theme. The next step was to create the simple but distinctive bass drumming on the Korg which was easy enough - or so I thought. I was happy with the beat but when I went and listened to the original song I was surprised how different my beat was.

What I had tapped out on bass sounded like Terminator to me but I when I tried to figure out the difference I quickly found that Fiedel's bass beat was strangely complex. I kept trying different rhythms but I could not figure out exactly what I was hearing. I'd listened to that song dozens of times and now I couldn't even figure the most basic part of it.

Well here is the answer

slate wrote:Fiedel was at heart an improviser. To create the Terminator theme, he first set up a rhythm loop on one of the primitive, early-’80s devices he was using. (In those days, Fiedel was firing up a Prophet-10 and an Oberheim.) He recorded samples of himself whacking a frying pan (!) to create the clanking sounds. Then he played melodic riffs on a synthesizer over the looped beat. Amid the throes of creation, what he hadn’t quite noticed—or hadn’t bothered to notice—was that his finger had been a split-second off when it pressed the button to establish that rhythm loop. Being an old machine, there was no autocorrection. Which meant the loop was in a profoundly herky-jerky time signature. Fiedel just went with it. The beat seemed to be falling forward, and he liked its propulsiveness.

Fiedel enlisted a friend named George Kahn, a jazz musician who had a music degree and more formal training, to help set the score to paper. “He called me up and said, ‘Brad, what time signature is this in?’ I said, ‘I dunno, 6/8?’ He said, ‘No, it’s quirkier than that.’ ”

And the verdict? “It’s in 13/16. Three plus three plus three plus two plus two.” DAH-two-three-DOONK-two-three-CLANK-two-three-GONK-two-GONK-two.

I feel a little better knowing this. And it is a nice illustration of how technological limitations can sometimes help a song. Without whacking frying pans and off-kilter drum loops we wouldn't have one of the greatest soundtracks of the 1980s.

Here is a video of Brad Fiedel where he plays some Terminator music with the Japanese interviewer at the end.