interview with David Wise

I came across it since Google News gives me a "Super Nintendo Entertainment System" category, heheh.
https://medium.com/cuepoint/enter-the-jungle-donkey-kong-country-vs-hip-hop-7b2b5abc8271

This is a particularly amazing interview about one of my all time favourite composers.

I especially love the part where he goes to the zoo.

Recording animals at the zoo without recording other noises is difficult. A parabolic mic isn't very sensitive below 1 kHz, which is fine for handhelds* but not for consoles connected to the living room TV. Did they have shotgun mics back in the early 1990s?

But what impressed me was how completely not "mine, mine, mine" his reaction to the sampling was. Does the DKC soundtrack (apart from scenes featuring Cranky Kong, which are derived from the DK soundtrack) belong to Nintendo or to Micraresoft? And what's with the similarity between the Rare/Nintendo plate and the WGBH Boston plate?


* I measured the frequency response of my GBA's internal speaker, and I approximate it as a third-order Butterworth high-pass with corner frequency 800 Hz.

I really want to know if Tepples has attempted recording animals at the zoo. I have this image of someone yelling at him: "dammit Tepples, my Ampex reels demand more giraffe bleats!"

And why would it be like that ? Usually it's more companies or owners who reacts like that, not the artists themselves.

Or they could be like :

Yeah, he doesn't actually own the samples anyway. Game music is almost always work for hire.

I always knew Donkey Kong had his roots in da hood.