JANUARY 2010
THE STORY AND SONG FROM THE HAUNTED MANSION

This new attraction CD is for the 40th anniversary (of the Haunted Mansion).

I’ve built a whole new ride-thru of the Haunted Mansion as it appears today. Also including some things that I learned since I did the Disneyland box set and adding more audio stuff. The bride is there and everything’s all nice and clean.

Also, with the 30th anniversary CD that was done by Red Dot Net on Disneyland Forever, they had a ride-thru there and they had auditions and behind the scenes kind of stuff and a lot of alternate takes and Tokyo Disneyland’s thing and Phantom Manor and all that kind of stuff, so with that already done, I didn’t want to duplicate things so I decided, as I usually do, to focus on the music aspect.

I wanted to include the “music box” that was originally done for Phantom Manor that’s now played at the park (Disneyland). It’s played off of an authentic Porter Baroque music box. I just got the loop from Imagineering, so there’s no beginning or ending. On an album I like to have a beginning and an ending. So to make a long story short, we ended up re-recording it all over again and hearing it crank up and being turned off and it just sounds gorgeous.

There’s also a collection of Gaylord Carter’s organ sessions and the music bed from the Graveyard and the phantom band from the Graveyard, and all the ghosts from the Graveyard singing their song separately, all linked together as one big thing and a big surprise finale that I’ll just say is a surprise, people will be very pleased.

SW: Can you elaborate on what it takes to take attraction audio and make it into a CD?

RT: Some people think that you just take the audio and put it there. Well, there’s different uses. It’s structured differently for the attraction and you have to build things out and pace them. We think of the Haunted Mansion as a linear experience because we get in the Doom Buggy and we go through it, but that’s not the way the audio is… everything’s happening and simultaneously. When you’re on the attraction, the sounds and the music and dialogue are only part of the experience. You’re actual being there physically in the attraction, how it sounds, where things are played off of each other, things that are actually happening on the attraction are all part of it, but for the CD, the only thing you’ve got is the audio. You don’t have that sense of place.

When I did Pirates (of the Caribbean) for the Disneyland box set, from the bayou all the way through the caves, there’s music going on, but once you get into the bombardment scene and in through the town, there’s no music. When you’re on the attraction you see that you’re supposed to be outside and there’s water and splashes and things going on. When you’re just listening to the audio, it sounds like a bunch of people in a recording studio. You lose that sense of place. So what we decided to do was add a little bit of water lapping and a little bit of light wind just to give it some place, so there’s some things that we did in the Haunted Mansion to do the same thing.

SW: And there’s newly redone music?

RT: Yes. It’s all focusing on the music and Buddy (Baker) and X (Atencio)’s theme and its interpretations and stuff.