1/19/2024 0 Comments Original doctor who![]() From then on, composers like Murray Gold and Segun Akinola have also tried their hand at reworking Grainer and Derbyshire’s original composition. Though some changes were made over the course of the series to match the new title sequences, it wasn’t until 1980 that the intro theme received whole new arrangements by Peter Howell, who used analog synthesizers to give the theme a new feel. The final result of this excruciating work went on to become the theme of Doctor Who for the next seventeen years. It might sound simple enough, but only in theory: can you even begin to imagine how in sync they had to be for it all to work out in the end? Besides, this early form of multitracking was pretty much unheard of at the time in which Derbyshire and her team employed it for the first time. In case you’re a music buff and want to go into the specifics of how it all works, there’s a whole website devoted to breaking down the tune. In order to put these sounds together, the crew had to press play on the three devices at the same time. Thus, Derbyshire’s team recorded their sound into three separate tapes that were then loaded into three different machines. Mills goes on to explain, in an interview with the BBC, that most tunes are divided into three parts: the rhythm, the melody, and the “twiddly bits on top”. The notes were then cut out and merged together manually, as there was no digital editing software available at the time. An entire orchestra was built up from individual notes, as explained by Dick Mills, one of the sound engineers involved in the project. In the absence of synthesizers and stereo equipment, Derbyshire and her team recorded the sounds in mono, putting them to tape “inch by inch by inch”, in her own words. Add to that a whole in-house debate about whom the actual composers of the theme are, and you have yourself a story that deserves to be told. The result was a distinctive tune that basically introduced the world to a lot of the sounds that we have come to associate with electronic music. In an era in which now run-of-the-mill synthesizers were still far from becoming a thing, the song was put together through the use of hands-on techniques that go from recording jugs of water being poured to simply pressing play on multiple tapes at the same time in order to turn them into a cohesive piece. ![]() One of the first electronic television themes ever created, the Doctor Who intro - originally titled simply “Dr. Originally composed by Australian musician Ron Grainer (and Delia Derbyshire, but we’ll get to that), the theme remains pretty much the same since the classic BBC sci-fi series aired its first episode, in 1963, though some alterations have been made by later composers working on the show. Some would even say it is one of the most unique in the history of music, period. An outlandish beat, a disquieting whistle, the sound of the TARDIS popping in and out of existence lingering in the back… The Doctor Whotheme is by far one of the most unique tunes in the history of television.
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