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Hi everyone. I have been keeping this journal here on DisneyChris.com since 2013, so that anyone interesting in tracking my audio editing and web design adventures will have an easy means to do so. In 2017 I began doing these updates in video format on my YouTube channel "DisneyChrisDotCom" and Brian Crawford has been providing show notes for these videos. On this blog and in these videos, I discuss all the changes and additions I am making to the website, including an insider's look into all that goes into my audio editing work. I will provide insight on the process of editing my audio tracks, the reasoning behind my artistic choices and the work involved in creating this audio for your listening pleasure. I may also share with you some personal anecdotes along the way. In general, this is to be a "sort-of" look inside my thoughts and the inner workings of how DisneyChris.com is being developed over time. I am also interested in your thoughts and opinions. You are welcome to respond to my blog by contacting me via email at DCLyndon@gmail.com. I will respond to any of your emailed questions or comments either within the blog or in a private email response. Just let me know if you choose to be anonymous. You can scroll to the bottom of this page to go back in time to read up on what you may have missed in the past, or you can just start with today's blog post and read or watch the videos from here forward. The choice is yours. Enjoy! • To view posts for 2019-20 CLICK HERE • To view posts for 2017-18 CLICK HERE • To view 2015-16 CLICK HERE • To view 2014 CLICK HERE • To view 2013 CLICK HERE
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September 17, 2016 Hello everyone, now that summer is almost officially over, it is high time for an update on DisneyChris.com and more specifically the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour. For the past month I have exclusively been focused on my Adventureland chapter. Here is a link to that page so you can follow along: http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/130-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-5.html 1 - Walt Disney Takes You to Adventureland - This is the Adventureland introduction from the 1956 album "Walt Disney Takes you to Disneyland" - originally I had this lead into the song Serengeti Serenade, but I have opted to separate the song as its own track 2 - Serengeti Serenade - This is a mix of three versions of this song, two from the 1967 animated feature "The Jungle Book" and another version originally from the 1964 New York World's Fair. 3 - Adventureland Theme - This is a song from a mid 1950's children's album produced by Little Golden Records. 4 - Disneyland is Your Land - Adventureland - This is an excerpt from a 1980 live stage show called "Disneyland is Your Land" 6 - Adventureland Gateway - This is my re-edited and cleaned up version of the original loop that played as you entered Adventureland's gate, prior to the Tiki Room being added. 7 - Plaza Pavilion - Hawaiian Bandstand - This is music from a vintage album performed by a group called the Kahauanu Trio who also performed live in Disneyland in its early days. So this is authentic music you would have heard performed at the Plaza Pavilion before that complex later became the Tiki Room and Tahitian Terrace. 8 - Enchanted Tiki Garden - Moonlight Time in Old Hawaii - This is music from the complete 1960 album Moonlight Time in Old Hawaii - arranged by legendary Disney composer George Bruns. 14 - Tiki Room Show Announcement and Introduction - This is an updated version of a track that has long existed on the Magical Audio Tour. I have improved the sound quality, and my good friend Dawn Short stepped in to provide the vocal performance of the Tiki Room hostess. 16 - Enchanted Tiki Room Demo Recording - This is a early version of the Tiki Room prior to the Sherman Brothers adding the famous theme song. It is interesting to note the similarities and the changes that were made for the final version. I did a major clean up on this audio and it came out very nice. 17 - United Airlines - Tiki Room Preshow - Before Dole took over as the Tiki Room sponsor in the early 70's, United Airlines had that honor. This track contains some earlier audio from the Enchanted Tiki Garden preshow, that was meant to promote the airline. 18-22 - Enchanted Tiki Room Instrumental Soundtrack - These 5 tracks make up the complete original soundtrack to the Enchanted Tiki Room, but without the vocals and sound effects. It is great to be able to hear these instrumentals by themselves, and I did some major clean up on these tracks. They all sound great. 23 - Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing - The Mellomen - A really fun version of this song from the Tiki Room, performed by the famous Mellomen that I just had to include. Pure Disney. 24 - Tiki Room Ragtime Medley - Chris Calabrese - Music from the 1998 album "Ragtime in the Magic Kingdom" 25 - In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Room - Cover Versions - This track contains several versions of the Enchanted Tiki Room theme song. A lot of fun. 26 - Dole Pineapple - Enchanted Tiki Juice Bar - This is the music used to underscore the newly updated Dole Pineapple film shown in the Tiki Room preshow area. 30 - Tahitian Terrace - The Legend of the Island Jewel - The only authentic audio you will hear for this track is the dialogue between Mickey, Minnie. Roger Rabbit and Goofy. The rest of the show was all live actors and live music. But my great pal Scott Leonard (aka RocketRods) created a fantastic mix by adding appropriate music to match all the vocal introductions. I then added a few changes of my own. This came out fantastic. 31 - Aladdin’s Oasis - Area Background Music - This is the complete current area loop played at the Oasis. It takes several popular songs and plays them in a mid-eastern style. A lot of fun. 32 - Aladdin’s Oasis Dinner Show - This is a fantastic, rare piece of audio. It is the authentic soundtrack to the short lived dinner show that played at the Oasis in the mid 90's - Thanks to my pal Scott Wolf at www.MouseClubhouse.com for sharing this gem with DisneyChris.com - I did some major clean up on this and it sounds fantastic. 33 - Aladdin and Jasmine Storytale Adventures - This track uses all the prerecorded music and sound cues from this live show. You will notice there is no dialogue, and that is because the dialogue was all performed live and never recorded. 34 - Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Stone Tiger - Another track put together by my good friend Scott Leonard. I did a little more clean up on this and removed some background hiss. He used all pre-existing music to match the music that was used for the live show. 35 - Adventureland Bazaar - Area Background Music - This is all middle-eastern Arabian knights type music. I originally was using a piece of music from Disneyland Paris to represent this venue, The track was originally 5 minutes long. The new and improved version runs 45 minutes. 41 - Jungle Cruise 1955 Ticket Announcement - This is a recorded announcement played in the park in the early days to entice guests to buy a ticket to ride the Jungle River Cruise. I have done some major clean up on this and added jungle sound effects. Sounds just great. 43 - Jungle Cruise Area Background Music - This comes from an album it is believed was used for the Jungle Cruise's earlier background music before it became a loop of 1930's and 1940's Big Band songs. Originally the music was authentic African folk songs. The name of the album is "Drums of Passion." 44 - Tropical Imports - Shortwave Radio - This is the complete shortwave reenacted broadcast heard on the second floor of the Jungle Cruise queue. I have decided to have this short loop play in it's entirety without any jungle sound effects. I also did some major clean up on this, as there was a constant humming noise that was very distracting. I took this out and it now sounds just fantastic. 45 - Trinidad and Tobago Showboat Orchestra - This is authentic music performed by this group, who performed live at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World. 50 - A Trip Through Adventureland - This is audio from the 1956 episode of the Disneyland TV series where Walt Disney shows the behind the scenes making of the Jungle Cruise and then the audience is taken on a tour of the actual attraction. I did a lot of audio clean up on this one as well. 51 - The Adventurous Jungle Cruise - Audio from the 1968 album "The Enchanted Tiki Room." On the album's flip side was a tour of the Jungle Cruise with voice over legend Thurl Ravenscroft and your guide. 66-69 - The Disneyland Hotel - Adventureland - These tracks are each also located on my Disneyland Hotel page as well, but for convenience I have decided to also add them to my Adventureland page. It includes the music heard in the Adventureland Tower, Trader Sam's Enchanted Tiki Bar and the Tangaroa Terrace restaurant. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So as you can see, I have been extremely busy adding new content to the site, but that is not all I have been doing to keep busy since my last update. I have also been releasing my weekly podcast called Jiminy Crickets!http://jcricketspodcast.blogspot.com/- Todd Horan, William Dodson and I have been having a blast doing this show. If you have not checked it out yet please do. We have great chemistry and the show is high quality. I do all the editing myself. We talk about all sorts of things, from Disney theme parks to movies and music, you name it. Anything in the wonderful world of Disney is covered. And all October long we will have five weeks of special Halloween themed shows. A new show is released every Monday. I am also co-host of a new internet radio show called Magical Day Radio. My co-host Dawn Short and I interview a new guest in the Disney community every other week. We also have some AMAZING Disney legends lined up as future guests, so don't miss it. The prerecorded show broadcasts live every other Wednesday at 5pm Pacific Time and 8pm Eastern, and if you miss the live broadcast you can find it posted on Youtube the following Sunday where you will also find an archive of all our past shows. The live show can be found here -http://dreagusprod.tumblr.com/and the Youtube channel is here - https://www.youtube.com/user/MsShortyTV I have also recently become a contributing writer for the Disney Avenue blog. I will be writing one article every month about a classic Disneyland Record album. I have already been featured this month and you will find my article here - http://www.disneyavenue.com/2016/09/meet-me-down-on-main-street-1957.html Also - Remember to check out my website every day for the rest of this month, as it is "Supercalifragilistic September," and the Disney Song of the Day, each day, is a classic Sherman Brother's tune. Then starting October 1st, and all through the month of October, the song of the day will feature a new Halloween themed song each day. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, I would like to remind you all that I am now on Patreon. If you would like to become a supporter, and help me out with my web fees and the cost of adding new content to the site, it would be very appreciated. To those who have already sponsored me, big shout outs to you all, and a million thanks. For those unaware, I am disabled person and live on a fixed income, so it is quite difficult for me to afford the costs associated with the upkeep of my site and all the projects I do. I do it because I am passionate about it and it is a labor of love. So if you enjoy the audio on my site and my podcasts, please consider showing your appreciation. Here is a link to my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/DisneyChris - And if you prefer to make a one time donation, you can do so on Paypal. You can link to my PalPal account by going to this page and clicking on the icon marked "Paypal" - http://disneychris.com/donate.html So that is all the news to report on for now. Hope everyone is enjoying some nice early fall weather. I will be back in October for another update. See you then, and stay tuned for more.
August 14, 2016 Well it's been a month since my last update, so it is definitely time to fill you all in on all the changes I have been making to DisneyChris.com and more specifically the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour. Things have gotten a little busier for me lately because I have taken on the role of co-host of yet another podcast. Now I am involved in a total of three podcasts shows, two of which are released weekly and I am the person in charge of editing the audio. This takes up a lot of time, so for now, I have had a little bit less time to devote to my site, but this has not stopped me from getting as much done as I possibly can, since doing work for my site is my main passion out of all the projects i do. My new show is called Magical Day Radio and I co-host the show with a very nice lady named Dawn Short. Her original co-host had to drop out sort of unexpectedly and I was recruited to fill his shoes. This show is different from my regular "Jiminy Crickets" podcast in that it is mostly an interview show, where we invite guests from within the Disney community. This show is actually not a traditional podcast in that it is broadcast on internet radio, and reaches a very wide audience of 30,000 plus listeners every week. We are also working on getting some terrestrial radio stations to pick up our show. We have some amazing A-List guests lined up in the weeks ahead, some of them authentic Disney Legends. The show is broadcast every Wednesday at 5pm pacific and 8pm eastern and can be found on the following site:http://dreagusprod.tumblr.com/- We also have live chat during the show! So be sure and join us. If you can't make the show, we post the past week's episodes on Youtube, on the following channel:https://www.youtube.com/user/MsShortyTV ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Now on to the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour! I am nearly finished with my entire "Disneyland Showtime" chapter now. See my last blog post for more details on what work I had previously done on this chapter. Since my last report, I have completed all but three tracks from this page. The three tracks I still need to do are currently already on the page, as they are not all new additions, but they are all "re-do's" I plan to improve. These are: Track 26 Show Biz Is Everything else on this page is completed. Here is a rundown of the changes made to this page since my last blog, in numerical order: To follow along, here is the link to the Disneyland Showtime chapter:http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/143-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-12.html 17 - Mickey Mouse Club Circus - Area Background Music - This music comes from a Jack Wagner reel to reel tape made in the 1970's - as I am unable to determine the exact original use for this audio, so I have placed it alongside my Mickey Mouse Club Circus era music of the 1950's until further info on this audio becomes available. I have extensively cleaned up this audio and it sounds fantastic! 20 - Show Me America - Old Broadway Medley - I had another "placeholder" track that had been posted on my site for quite some time, meant to represent this 1970's live show. Since that time I have come across an actual program for the show which lists the authentic songs that were used. Before it was all a guess. Now that I know the names of the actual songs used, It became necessary to redo this track to be more accurate. No known authentic audio of this show is known to exist, so I had to pick some songs that sounded about right for the time and had a Broadway-like live show feel. So again, this is another "placeholder" but more authentic to what you would have heard at the actual show. I chose three George M Cohen songs as representative music. Incidentally, Cohen was born less than 5 miles from where I currently live, here in Providence, RI. There is a statue of him erected nearby. 23 - Mouseketeer Days - Mickey Mouse Club Reunion Show - This is a redo of an existing track. I did not have the full TV show before, but thanks to my friend Todd Horan I now have the complete 1980 TV special, so I was able to add more music to this mix and improve the sound quality. I have used the 1980 25th Anniversary TV special to represent the equivalent live show that was presented on the Tomorrowland stage in Disneyland. 28 - Festival Japan - I combined a mix of songs from Epcot Center's Japan Pavilion and other songs with the right feel, including Japan's National Anthem, to reenact the feel of this festival in Disneyland. 29 - Festival Mexico - Again, I combined a mix of songs from Epcot Center's Mexico Pavilion and other songs with the right feel, including Mexico's National Anthem, to reenact the feel of this festival in Disneyland. 35 - Circus Band - I found an album of circus music that has a distinctively live band sound to it, and felt it was a perfect way to represent the live circus bands that played in Disneyland during the Circus Fantasy event. 36 - Plaza Gardens Stage - Clown Alley - I found an old video of this show on Youtube and noticed the orchestration of one of the numbers to be very similar to a CD I have of a group called "The Make Believe Brass" - As it turns out, three songs used in this show were on that same CD, so I made a nice little medley to represent this short lived Plaza Gardens show. 38 - Circus Fantasy Show - Vidiopolis Stage - Using a vintage video posted on Youtube, I reenacted this show using the pop studio recorded versions of the songs that made up this show's live score. 42 - Pigmania - Billy Hill and the Hillbillies - Thanks to my friend Scott Leonard for compiling this playlist. Although not the authentic show, it is the authentic group who performed for this show, and it does have the exact right feel. Incidentally, this was the debut of the group Billy Hill and the Hillbillies in Disneyland. 47 - Danny and the Dappers - The original audio I used for this track had really bad sound as it was taken from a clip of an old TV special. Even though it was the authentic group performing, I decided it would be better to find an alternate, and fortunately I did find a perfect match for the original song in this track plus several great additional songs. You would not know this was not authentic audio unless I told you. Sounds perfect. 48 - Rainbow Diner - Big Daddy - This is not the authentic show that was presented in Disneyland, but it is the authentic group. One of the songs in my mix "I Write the Songs" was actually used in the live Disneyland show, while the rest are just a collection of songs by the same group with the right feel. 51 - Chubby Checker - World Record Twist-Off - This is two songs by Chubby Checker representing this live event in Disneyland. The versions of the songs I used are later studio recordings, not the original 1960's versions, so they do sound a little more modern and updated, keeping with the feel of this event that was staged in the late 80's. 55 - Dick Tracy’s Diamond Double-Cross - My original version of this show was very much abridged. Now I have included the full uncut show, and also vastly improved the audio quality. 58 - Disney Afternoon Avenue - Area Background Music - I have extended this mix using all songs from the 1992 Disney Afternoon CD. 72 - Snow White, An Enchanting Musical - Again, my original version of this show was abridged. Now I have included the full uncut show, and also vastly improved the audio quality. 73 - Original Princess Fantasy Faire - Area Background Music - This music is taken from two CD's including authentic Renaissance era music. My original mix was very much abridged only containing about 14 minutes of songs. This new version is the complete uncut mix, running over 45 minutes. 77 - Mickey and the Magical Map - Background Music - Diligent Anaheim locals recorded this music live at the Fantasyland Theatre, and using song identification software, discovered that this preshow music is actually preexisting production music. 78 - Mickey and the Magical Map - Having been sent this highly coveted audio by an online pal, it gave me the reason to work on, and complete, my entire "Disneyland Showtime" chapter. While the track is not perfect, as it is taken from a rehearsal track with several distortions purposely added in on top of the audio to prevent bootlegging, I did my diligent best to remove these distortions as best as I could. These distortions are hardly noticeable now, and the track is a delight to listen to. So glad to be able to scratch this one off my "Wish List" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So between recording and editing podcasts, I have also managed to get started on a whole new project for the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour, and that is the long anticipated redo of my Adventureland chapter. I have so far only added in all the new pictures and slots for the "Coming Soon" tracks. I still need to write all the new liner notes. So you will notice that the paragraphs next to the pictures make no sense. These are just place holders. I am going to be rewriting everything over the course of the next few days. It is still a work in progress. So don't be too confused, but for now you can at least check out all the new pictures and tracks I plan to be adding to the chapter: http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/130-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-5.html I also need to work on my "Song of the Day" for September. I plan to bring back my very popular "Sherman September" which I started last year. So I need to pick out all the songs and artwork for the month. I always do this a month in advance, and not day by day. It is just easier to have it all the music and artwork ready to go and planned out ahead. So as you can see, I am very, very busy and juggling many projects all at once. So if you notice a slight slow down in the new audio being added to the site, this is the reason why. Never fear though, new audio will be coming very, very soon, I promise. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now a few reminders - My t-shirts are still available you can link to the webpage where orders can be placed by visiting my home page:http://disneychris.com/- All proceeds from the sales of these shirts will help support my site. Be sure to check the shirts out. I did the artwork myself, bassd on a 1950's title card from the "Walt Disney Presents" TV series. They are really cool looking, and very colorful. Feedback from those who have received their shirts so far has been very positive. Make sure you place your order ASAP. Also - Please consider making a one time contribution to my PayPal donation page, or better yet, become a Patreon sponsor. I am a disabled person, on a fixed income, and running my site and adding new content takes a huge chunk out of my monthly budget. In order to keep my site alive, I depend on help from the Disney fan community. You can link to both my Patreon account and PayPal donation page from this page on my site:http://disneychris.com/donate.html Your help is so very much appreciated, even if all you can afford is a few dollars, that is still a lot of help to me, really. So that is all I have to report on for now. Thanks to everyone for all the kind messages and shows of support. Hope your summer is going wonderfully, and talk to you soon.
July 15, 2016 Happy Summer everyone. Hope everyone had a relaxing and safe 4th of July. I stayed busy through the holiday weekend adding more content to my website. And it is now time to plunge into the pool and bring you up to date with all the new additions. Upon the conclusion of two major projects, Chapter 25 (Magical Milestones) and Chapter 19 (The Disneyland Hotel) - I was sort of at a loss for what project to tackle next, but then a friend of mine sent me some amazing audio that has been on my wish list for quite some time, and I decided to work on the full chapter where that new audio is going to reside. So I have now been working exclusively on Chapter 14 since my last update. This is a chapter called "Disneyland Showtime" and it is devoted to all the live shows and special events that have taken place inside Disneyland over the years. Here is a direct link to that chapter so you can follow along as I describe the new tracks I have added: http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/143-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-12.html First thing I did was take a couple of days to redesign the page to make space for all the new additions I planned to make to that chapter - AKA "Coming Soon" slots. So I had to gather all my pictures together, and write all new liner notes for over two dozen new tracks I have been waiting to add to the site. Luckily I already had all the pictures selected and edited in advance, but the writing of the liner notes did take me a few days to accomplish. I am always daunted my the task of writing these liner notes, but once I sit down and do it, it always seems to come to me quite easy. I have a lot of Disneyland info stashed inside my brain I guess, so it all pretty much comes right from memory and there is very little looking up dates and research needed. Then I began to add several new tracks to the site and my goal was to reach the 1200 mark before doing any revisions of existing tracks. I just was so close to that milestone number that I wanted to hit it before moving on to any work that would not increase my track number total. So I accomplished that a few weeks ago and now I am at 1217 as of today! So here is what I added so far, not in chronological order, but in numerical order while looking at the page from top to bottom... REDO 1 - The Disneyland Entertainment Experience - Jack Wagner - This track has long existed on my site, but I completely redid it from scratch and made a huge improvement in the audio quality while adding a couple minutes in length. This is a track recorded in 1981 where Wagner describes all the many live entertainment offerings in the park at that time. NEW 2 - Disneyland's Best in Live Entertainment - This is an all musical track which I created using several different live performances of the park's regular performing groups, like the Dapper Dan's and the Disneyland Band to name a few. It is sort of a companion track to the previous Jack Wagner track, playing the type of music he mentions. but in a more extended format. NEW TRACKS 3-14 - The Disney Characters - These 12 tracks contain audio from vintage training materials originally meant to teach Cast Members how to perform, and the special requirements involved in being a Disney Character. These were difficult to edit because the sound quality was poor, but I was able to clean these up very nicely and they sound crisp and clean now. These are a fascinating behind the scenes look at what it takes to be a character. Don't miss these! Thanks to my pal Joshua Smith for providing the source materials. NEW 15 - The Golden Horseshoe Revue - This is from the 1957 Golden Horseshoe album found on other chapters of my site as well, but I really felt it belonged on this chapter too, as it was Disneyland's very first live show. So I decided to include it here as well. NEW 19 - Kids of the Kingdom - Tomorrowland Stage - This track is highlights from the 1968 Kids of the Kingdom vinyl album, cleaned up to perfection thanks to a friend of mine who did an amazing digital transfer. I also include a special announcement at the beginning of the track. REDO - 21 - Lady America/Center City USA - Musical Highlights - This was two existing tracks that I decided to combine into one track. No major changes other than that have been made. REDO 22 - It's Showtime - The New Mickey Mouse Club - This was an existing track which I expanded from 4 minutes to over 15 minutes long. It is audio from the New Mickey Mouse Club album released in 1977 and I took several songs to create a sort of reenactment of what a live show in Disneyland would have been like. Again this is from a great digital transfer done by a pal of mine and the sound quality is pristine. NEW 27 - Kids of the Kingdom World Friendship Medley - This rare track is also featured on my Disneyland Hotel chapter. I decided it also belongs on this page as well. I used to have a strict rule about not posting tracks more than once on the site, but I have loosened the reins on that a bit, since certain tracks really do fit into more than one catagory, and with over 1200 tracks now, the chances of stumbling over too many duplicates is quite minuscule. NEW 30 - Plaza Gardens Stage - Fantasy Follies - This is another import from another chapter. This can also be found on my Central Plaza page, but it really does belong on this chapter as well. You may notice some missing singing in this track. That is because it was meant to be performed live with only the instrumentals and the voices of the Disney characters being prerecorded. So all the live vocals are missing. However I tried to edit this in such a way that it is less noticeable, at least during dialogue only portions. There are a few other tracks like this also found on this chapter. NEW 34 - Circus Fantasy Commercial - Vintage 1986 TV Ad - with nice cleaned up audio NEW 37 - Circus Fantasy Parade - Import from my "I Love a Parade" chapter. NEW 39 - State Fair - TV Commercial - Vintage 1987 TV Ad - with nice cleaned up audio NEW 40 - Disneyland Railroad - State Fair Express - Import from my Town Square chapter. NEW 41 - Come to the Fair Parade - Import from my "I Love a Parade" chapter. NEW 44 - Blast to the Past Parade - This too is an import form my "I Love a Parade" chapter, but I improved the audio slightly and added in the TV Land segment, which is a separated track over on the Parade page. So here it is the full parade, uninterrupted. NEW 45 - Blast to the Past Parade - Encore Season - Import from my "I Love a Parade" chapter. NEW 49 - Submarine Voyage - Blast to the Past Sea Cruise - This track is very fun. I discovered a while back this video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFlsFacmTEQ - And I decided to take each song used in this overlay version of the ride and create a medley playing the full uncut versions of each song. It is a great collection of oldies. NEW 50 - Papa Doo Run Run - Beach Party - This is authentic music recorded by Papa Doo Run Run on various CD's they have released. It captures the spirit perfectly of the live "Beach Party" event they took part in during Disneyland's Blast to the Past. REDO 52 - One Man's Dream - I originally only had the main theme song from this show, I now have added the full 28 minutes uncut show, and yes, it is the English version, not from Tokyo. A rare gem. NEW 53 - Dick Tracy's G-Men Quintet - I did some major hunting to find music that would work to represent this group. It is hard to find a Sax group, without any other instruments, playing music from the 40's - Not a lot of it is out there, but thanks to help from my pal Scott Leonard I was able to assemble a pretty good mix of tracks with the right feel. REDO 54 - Dick Tracy's Diamond Double-Cross - Background Music - This track has been expanded with extra songs and fun preshow announcements. NEW 56 - Disney Afternoon Live! - TV Commercial - Vintage 1991 TV Ad - with nice cleaned up audio NEW 57 - Disney Afternoon Cavalcade - Import from my "I Love a Parade" chapter. REDO 62 - Plane Crazy - This is now the complete Plane Crazy Videopolis show from the 1991 Disney Afternoon Avenue promotion. Before now I just had the song "Friends for Life" from the Disney Afternoon CD, but now this is the audio from the actual stage show, and it is the uncut full show with great audio quality. This again is missing the live vocals so it only includes the prerecorded audio and some of the singing and dialogue is missing, however, it works just fine since the vast majority of the show was prerecorded, and there was only a minimal amount of live performances done for this particular show. NEW 63 - Beauty and the Beast Live - TV Commercial - Vintage 1992 TV Ad - with nice cleaned up audio NEW 65 - Hamm's All-Doll Review - This was from a live show performed in front of the recently closed Mission to Mars building in Tomorrowland as part of a promotion for the original Toy Story release in 1995. It is a cute show with characters from the film and cute songs. REDO 67 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Festival of Fools - This was an existing track and I made a huge improvement in the audio quality. NEW 68 - Animazement - Area Background Music - Thanks to my pal Scott Leonard again, we were able to replicate the preshow music used during the Animazement stage show bassd on a live recording made back in 1998. All the music came from soundtrack albums that were from films being highlighted in the live show. So it was easy to find this music and match it up to the live recording. NEW 70 - Club Buzz - Calling All Space Scouts - This was a live show at Tomorrowland Terrace. There was one live performer in this show and the rest of the soundtrack was prerecorded, so again some of the dialogue and singing seems to be missing, but it is still fun audio and worth including in the collection. NEW 71 - Mickey's Detective School - This was the most challenging track I had to work with as far as missing live singing and dialogue. I did my best to make sense of it with the missing portions and it came out pretty good. The issue is that this show was not so much a musical as it was a straight play with just a few songs, so it was very heavy on dialogue. But I am satisfied with the outcome for the most part. NEW 76 - Long Lost Friends - The music you heard as characters emerged from backstage was taken from a show at Tokyo Disneyland, so it was easy to use this piece of music since it was recorded in English. I plan to continue working on this chapter until it is completed. I have 24 tracks left to work on. If you want to keep track of my progress, here is my "To-Do" list which includes all the work I have left to do on this page... 1 – The Disney Characters – Mickey Mouse fix wavy audio I am about half way done with the chapter, and would like to get it finished by mid August if possible. Also - Please consider making a one time contribution to my PayPal donation page, or better yet, become a Patreon sponsor. I am a disabled person, on a fixed income, and running my site and adding new content takes a huge chunk out of my monthly budget. In order to keep my site alive, I depend on help from the Disney fan community. You can link to both my Patreon account and PayPal donation page from this page on my site: http://disneychris.com/donate.html Your help is so appreciated, even if all you can afford is a few dollars that is still a lot of help to me, really. Well that is all to report on for now. As you can see I have been extremely busy, and there is a lot of work still left to do. So stay tuned...
June 21, 2016 Happy Summer everyone! I have done a lot of work on the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour so it is yet again time for another update. I have completed fully updating two chapters since my last blog post, The Disneyland Hotel, and Magical Milestones. Lets first take a Monorail over to the Hotel so I can share the changes I have made - BEEEEP BEEEEEP http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/131-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-17.html 3 - Disneyland Hotel Tram - This track used to be combined with the Monorail as a single track, I have split the two up into separate tracks and expanded the narration of both. 4 - Disneyland Alweg Monorail to the Disneyland Hotel - This is the separated version of the Monorail as mentioned above. This is the same version found on the "Welcome to Disneyland" chapter - I used to have a self imposed policy of not posting the same track on more than one page of the site, but since then I have loosened the rules and in some cases, if something fits the theme of more than one chapter, I will post it more than once. 5 - Music to Ride Monorails By - Another import from the "Welcome to Disneyland" chapter. I felt this track belonged on the Disneyland Hotel page as well, since the Monorail is such a key component of the classic era of the Disneyland Hotel. 6 - Embassy Ballroom - Bernie Bernard & His Orchestra - This is an album recorded live at the Disneyland Hotel in the early 1960's - I do have it posted on my "Disneyland Records" page, but felt it needed to be on my Disneyland Hotel page as well. 17 - Dancing Waters - 1989 - I removed the 1980 version of Dancing Waters from the site for a few reasons: A) I did not have all the music for this version B) It is basically just a rehashing of the "Disneyland is Your Land" show which is already posted elsewhere on the site in multiple places C) I found a better version of Dancing Waters on Youtube, from 1989, and was able to make a much better track bassd on the 1989 version. Here is a link to the video I used to replicate my track from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S7Snuxgqdo - Although the video was recorded in 1991, I did a little research and discovered in a news article that this version of the show premiered originally in 1989. I was able to very closely mock the video because I had almost every piece of music at my disposal. It is a near exact duplicate and sounds great. 18 - Fantasy Waters - 1992 - Another version of the Water Show, this premiered in 1992 as far as I can deduct. I had this version on the site previous to now, but was missing some of the music, I have added in the missing portions and now it is the complete show. 19 - Fantasy Waters Alternate Show - 1996 - Had some issues dating this version of Fantasy Waters, but from what I can deduct it premiered in 1996 - It was short lived and the 1992 version was brought back after this version had it's limited run. This recording is taken directly from the original source. It is the authentic audio from the show. I did make a few adjustments to improve some of the transitions that I felt were originally edited poorly, so my version is an improvement on the original. 32 - Princess Bedtime Stories - This rare audio is from the closed circuit hotel channel. Fortunately my pal Scott Leonard (aka RocketRods) grabbed this audio before it was retired and it is something you will not find anywhere else. I did some major clean up on this one too. It was a lot of work. After completing the Disneyland Hotel chapter, I decided to get my Magical Milestones chapter completed, and just a few days ago I finished fully updating that page: http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/179-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-22.html 14 - Fantasy in the Sky 25th Night - Anniversary Event - Thanks to my pal Jim Moore, who sent me the complete audio to this fireworks show, I was able to replace some of the sections that did not have the correct music. So this 2.0 version is much more authentic to the actual show. Big improvement! 40-44 Disneyland 40th Anniversary - I added 5 new tracks representing Disneyland's 40th anniversary, including press releases , TV ads, and a 1995 Rose Parade segment. Also I used music from the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular from Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World to represent the "Indiana Jones Over Disneyland" track. 45-46 This section is two shows from Disneyland's 45th Anniversary - The Parade of Stars has a special 45th Anniversary introduction which is different from the version of this parade I have posted on the "Disneyland on Parade" chapter. 47-57 This section represents Disneyland's 50th anniversary. It includes press releases, live events, the parade and fireworks shows. 58 - Mickey Mouse's Birthday Cavalcade - A collection of songs used in various cavalcades to represent Mickey's Birthday observances. 59 - It's a Small World 50th Anniversary - Audio taken from the live ABC broadcast on It's a Small World's 2014 50th Anniversary celebration. 60-66 - A block of audio representing Disneyland's 60th Anniversary - One key song is missing from this collection... "A Kiss Goodnight" - I could not find any usable audio of this piece. I am hoping that in the future it will surface and I will be able to add it in. ------------------------------ A few reminders - My t-shirts are still available - you can find them at https://disneychrisdotcom.ecwid.com/ and all proceeds from the sales of these shirts will help support DisneyChris.com - Be sure to check them out. I did the artwork myself. It is bassd on a 1950's title card from the "Walt Disney Presents" TV series. They are really cool, and very colorful. Feedback from those who have received their shirts so far has been very positive. Also - Please consider making a one time contribution to my PayPal donation page, or better yet, become a Patreon sponsor. I am a disabled person, on a fixed income, and running my site and adding new content takes a huge chunk out of my monthly budget. In order to keep my site alive, I depend on help from the Disney fan community. You can link to both my Patreon account and PayPal from this page on my site: http://disneychris.com/donate.html Your help is so appreciated. Well that is all to report on for now. I am still deciding what chapter to work on next, but I still have hundreds of new tracks to add, so stay tuned.
June 1, 2016 Can you believe a whole month has gone by since my last blog post? Well the good news is I have made tons of new additions and have nearly completed two more chapters. So sit back and get ready to be updated... Before I get started on the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour, I have some other things to mention first. Most notably is that my new T-Shirts are now available to purchase! They are very reasonably priced, have a great retro Disneyland design that I illustrated myself bassd on a vintage TV logo from the 1950's, and all proceeds from the shirts will go to help support the costs of running DisneyChris.com. So don't delay and get your shirts ASAP, they are available for a limited time only. All sizes can be ordered, from SM to 3X, and there are also woman's V-Neck and children's sizes. To order your shirt go to https://disneychrisdotcom.ecwid.com/ I also want to mention that episode 8 of the MouseMusic Podcast has just been released. https://sideshowsoundtheatre.com/2016/05/24/mouse-music-8-the-jungle-book/ This is a good one. We talk all about the 1967 version of the Jungle Book and The Jungle Cruise. Also, don't forget to check out my weekly show, Jiminy Crickets! http://jcricketspodcast.blogspot.com/ We will be releasing our 25th episode this Monday! It is hard to believe we have already reached this milestone number. Now onto the real order of business. To follow along with my updates, you will want to go to Chapter 23 of the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour, which is called "Disneyland in TV Land... And Now Your Host, Walt Disney" All the audio comes from various Disney TV episodes and specials released during Walt Disney's lifetime. Since my last update, I have completed all but 1 track on this page. so this entire chapter is nearly completed. http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/136-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-20.html 14 - A Disneyland Progress Report - This was an existing track on the site that was an abridged version. I have now included the full audio from the entire TV segment. 15 - The Pre-Opening Report from Disneyland - This again was an existing track. I have replaced it with a much better version with much improved audio quality. 16-23 Dateline Disneyland - July 17, 1955 - I have cleaned up the audio on every single track from the Dateline Disneyland TV special. With my noise reduction software I was able to make some improvements. 25 - Mickey Mouse Club March - I made some minor editing corrections and improved the cymbal sound at the end of the song. 27 - Mickey Mouse Club Newsreels: Dateline Disneyland - I added an additional Newsreel segment to this mix, so now there are three segments instead of two. I also improved the audio quality of the original two segments. 30 - Jimmie Dodd - Disneyland TV Commercial - This is a brand new addition to the chapter. It is a great vintage TV commercial with Jimmie Dodd, leader of the Mouseketeers. 32 - Building a Jungle - Brand new addition with audio from a 1956 episode of the Disneyland TV series. 33 - Adventureland's Jungle River Ride - From the same episode as track 32, this has replaced an existing track I called "Adventureland Suite," where I edited out all the narrative and had music only. I have now decided to include all the narrative. 35 - Disneyland The Park & Pecos Bill - This again was an existing track. I have replaced it with a much better version with much improved audio quality. 37 - An Adventure in the Magic Kingdom - Originally this was only a four minute track - I have now included the audio of the entire TV episode in full, so it now runs 45 minutes. 40-46 Kodak Presents - Disneyland '59 - I have added several new tracks from this TV special and improved most of the existing tracks - Some of the audio comes from a theatrical short called "Gala Day at Disneyland" which showcased the same event, and not the actual live TV special, because the audio quality and narrative was better in the the theatrical version. 48 - Disneyland '61 - Introduction - This track has been extended to include most of the opening segment of this TV episode. Prior to now it was a very short track with just the name of the episode being announced. 50 - Disneyland '61 - This was originally an abridged version. I have now extended the track to the full length of the TV segment. 57 - Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color - Main Title - I have improved the audio quality and added an extra fun introduction to this track. 58 - Disneyland Theme Music - All new track - This includes several instrumental themes often used on the Disney TV series when showcasing the park. I hope to add more music to this track over time if more of this type of music gets released. 72 - Pecos Bill - I have improved the ending of this song. I was dissatisfied with the way I originally edited it, and have fixed the issue. 73-78 Holiday Time at Disneyland - I decided to include the audio from this entire TV episode. Prior to now I only had one track "Every Day's a Holiday." I have now added 5 new additions. The only segment I left out was the Monorail/Matterhorn/Submarine dedications because it would just be redundant of the tracks presented in the Disneyland '59 section. 82 - World's Fair Attraction Preview - All new track. This covers most of Walt Disney's narrative throughout the "Disneyland Goes to the World's Fair" TV episode. 83 - It's a Small World - A Guided Tour with Walt Disney - I have added a new introduction and ending to this existing track. 84-86 Disneyland 10th Anniversary - Two brand new tracks covering the narrative of this entire episode. And a new and extended version of the Disneyland Anniversary Song. 87 - The Jack Benny Hour: Walt Disney - I have improved an editing glitch on this track as well as replaced the introductory theme music with much better audio. 89-92 - Disneyland on the Big Screen - These four tracks are the complete audio from four theatrically released productions filmed at Disneyland. All four are brand new to the site. ------------------------------------------------ Meanwhile I shifted gears and did some work on my Disneyland Hotel Chapter, which you can link to here --- http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/131-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-17.html 1 - Disneyland Hotel Song - I have cleaned up the audio on this existing track 4 - The Monorail Room - Cocktail Lounge - Added a brief new sound effect intro to this existing track 8 - Seaports of the Pacific - Area Background Music - Brand new track comprised of easy listing style production music of the mid 70's 13 - The Neon Cactus - Country Western Bar - Brand new track comprised of Country style production music. Special thanks to my pal Jim Moore for contributing this music and the music for track 8. 14 - Dancing Waters - 1980 - This is bassd on a recording posted on this site... http://mountainearsorg.ipage.com/wm2/index.php/just-for-fun/item/269-1980-dancing-waters-show-disneyland-hotel - My pal Scott Leonard helped me ID some of these tracks and I was able to replicate a good 80% of this vintage piece. 22 - Fairytale Wedding Pavilion - Bridal March - I separated the Bridal March music from the area music from track 21. 30 - Duffy the Bear Bedtime Story - This is audio from the Disneyland Hotel in room TV channel. 32 - Disneyland Resort Vacation Planning DVD - This is the complete audio from the 2014 planning DVD. I do have the 2015 version in my possession, but opted to use the 2014 version instead, because it made for a better audio only experience than the newer version did. ----------------------------- Well that is all for now, but I am busy working on many new additions to the site. I plan to have the Disneyland Hotel and "Your Host Walt Disney" chapters completed withing the next few days. Then I may move onto an entirely new, and untouched chapter, perhaps Adventureland??? Again, if you would like to help support my site, you can purchase a T Shirt, but you can also become a Patreon subscriber, or make a one time donation to my PayPal account. To do any of these three of these things, you can visit this page on my site, http://disneychris.com/donate.html - You will find links to everything there. Remember, I only ask for help because I am a disabled person and live on a fixed income, therefore I really do need the support to help pay for the costs of running my site. I would not ask for help if that were not the case. I do it because I enjoy doing it. It is a labor of love for me. So Hope everyone has a wonderful summer, and I will be updating you all again very soon, so stay tuned...
May 1, 2016 Has it been a month since my last blog already? Indeed it has, so it is way past time to update you all on the goings on at DisneyChris.com. But before I get into the meat of the matter, "The Disneyland Magical Audio Tour," I'll go though a few other things that have been happening with the site and with my other Disney ventures. First of all, my podcast, Jiminy Crickets! is still going strong. I will be releasing my 20th episode tomorrow. How time does fly. I also have a new co-host and he is a welcome addition to the program. Todd Horan is his name, and I am sure you will all get to appreciate his vast knowledge of Disney and likable personality in the weeks, months and hopefully years ahead. If you have not checked out the show yet, please do. You can find us on Itunes under the name Jiminy Crickets!, or you can find all our past shows posted on our blog site which is: http://jcricketspodcast.blogspot.com/ - So be sure to "Catch the Cricket!" every Monday. Next bit of business is to mention that I am going to be offering DisneyChris.com T Shirts very soon. They will be available in all sizes from infant to XXX and in men's and woman's styles and colors. I designed the graphics for the shirts myself bassd on a vintage Disneyland TV show logo. It is very retro and very fitting with the look of my website. So if you appreciate the visuals on my site, you will love this t-shirt. They should be available in a few weeks, so please keep checking the home page of DisneyChris.com. or my Facebook and Tweeter feeds for further details. I also recently spent a few days preparing the "Song of the Day" selections for both May and June, so all is set up in advance for the next two months. I like to have the songs planned out ahead so I can concentrate on other projects. I will have the usual salute to Mother's Day and Salute to Father's Day this year, as well as a tribute to Donald Duck's Birthday in early June. So be sure to check out the Song of the Day each and every day. Last thing I want to mention, before getting into the "Disneyland Magical Audio Tour" is my membership on Patreon. Those who have already subscribed are most appreciated. However, I really need more financial support from the Disney community. Even if all you can pledge is $1.00 a month, everything is helpful and so very much appreciated. I am on a fixed income, and as a disabled person it takes a huge percentage of my limited resources to run and maintain the site. Not to mention the hours and hours of blood sweat and tears I poor into the site. I do not have any sort of advertising and it is 100% non-profit. So I am really depending on the support of my fellow Disney fans, who appreciate what I do, to keep my site up and running for the years to come. My Patreon page can be found here - https://www.patreon.com/DisneyChris - and thank you all in advance to anyone who donates as a show of support for my love and passion of Disney and my need to keep sharing that passion with others. If you prefer to make a one time donation instead, you can do so on my PayPal page. One time donations are fantastic too! The really help me out a lot. To do this, you can just click the following link: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=v7jzbqrmhP9uWK2UvwRLs5UV5Zq2Z1KZox28UbwXp2dgavgj2awbR1JQk08&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f8e263663d3faee8d6625bf1e8bd269586d425cc639e26c6a I do plan to offer rewards in the future to those who contribute to either PayPal or Patreon, if and when I have enough support to justify spending some of the acquired funds on those rewards. For example, I would offer complimentary t shirts if I had enough financial backing. In the mean time I will be offering some special exclusive audio content to supporters. Fweww, now that all that business is out of the way, let's get onto what you really came for, an update on the Magical Audio Tour!!! Two days ago I completed yet another entire chapter. "I Love a Parade - Disneyland on Parade" - Here is a link to the page so you can follow along with the updated tracks I am about to describe... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/129-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-4.html Track 3 - The Firehouse 5 Plus 2 - Main Street Parade - This track consists of three classic Dixieland recordings by the Firehouse Five, typical of the type of music they would have performed in parades. Each of these tracks had a piano solo which I removed from the music because parades typically don't have pianos in them. See if you can tell where I made these cuts. I bet you can't. I worked really hard to make the cuts undetectable. Track 5 - Automobile Club Parade - This is a vintage sounding version of the song "In My Merry Oldsmobile" with the sounds of many vintage auto horns mixed in for fun. Not authentic audio to the parade, but a good way to represent it. Track 7 - Zorro Days Parade - This includes a version of the song "Zorro" performed by the actor who played Sargent Garcia in the Zorro series, Henry Calvin, followed by some music I found while hunting the web that has the perfect Disney/Spanish feel for this parade. Not authentic music, but it does set the mood of the parade perfectly. Track 8 - Disneyland '59 - Gala Day at Disneyland - This is audio taken directly from a 1960 documentary called "A Gala Day at Disneyland." The audio was previously on my site, but it was abridged. I have now included the uncut version. Track 9 - Mickey at the Movies Parade - Disneyland Parade Anthem - The music I used to represent this parade comes from three sources, and each is an example of the type of music Disney used in the early 60's to represent parades when being showcased on TV. It's a sort of marching type music with a very Disney sound to it. The three sources I used are the animated short "Goliath II" a portion of the music from the Disneyland 10th Anniversary TV special, and lastly, the title music from the film "Son of Flubber." All this music represents this era in Disneyland quite well, even if it is not entirely authentic to the actual parade. Track 10 - Parade of the Toys - This audio comes from a 1962 Disney TV episode called "Holiday Time in Disneyland," and was already posted on my site before now, but I have improved the sound quality quite a bit for this new version. Track 11 - Anaheim High School Marching Band - This is not authentic music, but is typical to the type of music that would have been performed by marching bands visiting Disneyland. Track 12 - Fantasy on Parade - Introduction - This is three radio spots narrated by Dean Jones, Peter Ustinov, and Susanne Pleshette. They were on my site before now but they were cut off at the beginning and end in my original recordings. I now have the full uncut versions. Also, I opted to not underscore the narrative with music this time, unlike I had before. Track 13 - Fantasy on Parade - This audio comes from a 1966 TV episode called "Disneyland Around the Seasons" - It was on my site prior to now but it was a very much abridged version. I have now posted an almost full and uncut version (I did make some minor cuts just to improve the flow of the track, but it is 95% intact) Track 14 - It's a Small World Opening Day Parade - I do not have any authentic audio for this well documented parade, but because of its historical significance, I felt it needed to be represented. The music I used is the Disneyland Band's 1968 album recording of It's a Small World, followed by two instrumental versions of "It's a Small World" from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Track 16 - The Kids of the Kingdom - I Love a Parade - This track was originally combined with two other songs, but I separated them and added those other songs at a later point in the chapter. (see track 21 below) The reason I did this is because the time period of this song was 1968, and the other two songs were from 1975, and I wanted to keep things in more of a chronological order to keep the flow of the chapter sounding more evolutionary. Track 17 - The Disneyland Band - Main Street Marching Medley - I added one additional song to the end of this track just to make it a little more of a substantial representation of the Disneyland Band. I felt the track was too short before now. Track 18 - Fantasy on Parade - Season 8 - This track is AMAZING and I am so happy to have it on the site. It is very rare and something I only recently acquired. It was shared with me by a long time Disneyland cast member, and my good friend Jim Moore, who fortunately saved a lot of audio during his tenure working in the entertainment division of Disneyland. THIS IS NOT TO BE MISSED. I worked really hard to restore this audio and it came out just wonderfully. I am so honored to have this on my site. Track 20 - Mickey's Character Parade - Existing track that I improved the audio. Track 21 - The Kids of the Kingdom - America on Parade Medley - This medley was already on the site, but as mentioned above, I divided it from track 16 because it was music used a few years later, and I wanted to keep things in more of a chronological order. Both of these songs were used for an opening pre-parade to the main America on Parade of 1975-1976 Track 25 - Festival Japan Parade - The music for this parade was likely performed all live, so there are no recordings of it. I am using some traditional Japanese music to represent the parade. Track 26 - Festival Mexico Parade - The music for this parade was also likely performed all live, so there are no recordings of it. So I am using some traditional Mariachi band music to represent the parade. Track 29 - Dumbo Circus Parade - This is the same circus music used for the Dumbo segment of the Season 8 Fantasy on Parade provided by Jim Moore. Track 31 - The All-American College Marching Band - I removed this track which had been posted on my Central Plaza page, and placed it on the parade page instead. Instead, to represent the College Band on Central Plaza, I added a brand new track. It is track number 40 "All-Star College Band - Plaza Concert" on this page http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/150-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3b.html - The new Central Plaza track is authentic audio of the band taken from a live performance in the 1990's - I cleaned it up a bit, and added some fun extras. Track 32 - It's a Small World Parade - Existing track that I improved the audio. Track 38 - Circus Fantasy - Come to the Circus Parade - The song used in this parade was actually written for a non Disney film starring Dorris Day called "Jumbo" so even though the actual authentic soundtrack to the parade is currently missing in action, I was able to use some placeholder music that is at least the proper song featured in the parade. The first part is from a circus music album I found on Itunes, and the second half is from a 1990's Disney Sing-Along video. Track 46 - Blast to the Past - The Main Street Hop - Existing track that I improved the audio. Track 47 - The Main Street Parade - This is another track provided by my great pal Jim Moore, and is a fun new addition to the site. It includes the song "Walkin' Right Down the Middle of Main Street USA." Track 55 - Hooray for Disney Stars Parade - Existing track that I improved the audio as well as made improvements the introduction and ending. Tracks 56 - 61 - Tournament of Roses Parades - This block of audio includes parade segments produced by Disney for the Rose Parades spanning from the early 90's to 2016 - Special accolades must be given to Scott Wolf, who moderates this website: www.MouseClubhouse.com Thanks to Scott for providing this very rare audio. Although his copies were from his old cassette recordings, I was able to do a great job restoring them. Track 62 - Party Gras Parade - Existing track that I improved the audio. Track 64 - Celebration USA Parade - Existing track that originally only included one segment of the parade. Now it includes four segments and also the sound quality is greatly improved. Track 65 - Disney Afternoon Cavalcade - Existing track that I improved the audio. Track 71 - Hercules Victory Parade - This was an existing track which I added in the Hades House of Horrors segment that was originally missing. Track 72 - Mulan Parade - This was an existing track with poor audio. I found a much better copy of the audio which includes additional segments from the parade and an introduction by Mushu the Dragon. Well, that covers all the additions I made to the "I Love a Parade" chapter. and the chapter is 100% updated. I have no materials left to add to this page!!! For now anyway. However, I forgot to mention another great track I added last month to my Disneyland Hotel chapter. This too was sent to me by my buddy Jim Moore. Be sure to check out the Kids of the Kingdom Hotel Convention - "World Friendship Medley," track number 11 on this page: http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/131-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-17.html So what is next for DisneyChris? - I think my next project will be to finally fully update my two TV related chapters, Chapter 23-24, "And Now Your Host Walt Disney" and "The Wonderful World of Disney." which have both been on the back burner for way to long. So much work left to do! So stay tuned my friends.
April 1, 2016 It has been over a month since my last update, so it is high time to fill you all in on what has been happening with the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour. Since my last update, I have completed all of Chapter 3, Meet Me Down on Main Street. http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/160-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3-setup.html - and the following tracks have been added or updated: Track 4 - Main Street USA Attraction Preview - Jack Wagner ***Special thanks and major shout outs to Melanie Ross, my pal from Facebook, for providing the voice of Esmeralda for track 63 - Her performance is amazing. Be sure to check it out. My next project was to complete updating my Central Plaza chapter. http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/150-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3b.html I did not quite finish the chapter yet, but I now only have a few tracks left to add. Here are the new tracks that I have added or improved: Track 11 - Gerber Baby Care Center ***Track 42 is something not to be missed. it is the complete area loop of the Fantasy Faire Village. This is from a great recording made live in the park by my good pal CThaddeus. Major shout outs to him for doing an amazing job recording this loop, and for sharing it with DisneyChris.com - Also be sure to check out track 39, Fantasy Follies. This is a rare gem, and shared with me by Scott Wolf who runs a great website: http://mouseclubhouse.com/ Next, I added a few new tracks to my "Magical Milestones" chapter, and completed the block of audio dedicated to Disneyland's 35th anniversary - http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/179-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-22.html Track 32 - Tournament of Roses - Celebrate 35 Years of Magic Following that, I decided to move on to my "Disney on Parade" chapter, and updated the entire page with all the images and liner notes for the planned additions. Be sure to check out this page for a sneak preview of what I will be working on next. http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/129-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-4.html I have added or updated several tracks to the chapter already: Track 40 - The Disneyland State Fair - Come to the Fair Parade So as you can see, I have been very, very busy adding new content to the site. Hope you will all enjoy these great new additions. I have hundreds and hundreds of audio tracks left to add, but never fear, I am in this for the long haul. Finally, I would like to remind you all that I am now on Patreon. If you would like to become a supporter, and help me out with my web fees and the cost of adding new content to the site, it would be very appreciated. To those who have already sponsored me, big shout outs to you all, and a million thanks. For those unaware, I am disabled person and on a fixed income, so it is quite difficult for me to afford the costs associated with the upkeep of my site. I do it because I am passionate about it and it is a labor of love. So if you enjoy the audio on my site, please consider showing you appreciation. Here is a link to my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/DisneyChris And if you prefer to make a one time donation, you can do so on Paypal. Here is a link to that page: So that is all for now. Be sure to keep track of my "Disney on Parade" chapter, as I add some fantastic new audio in the days and weeks ahead.
February 23, 2016 Hi all. Time for another update. I have been very busy adding to my Main Street USA chapter. A lot of new content has been added. Here is a link to the chapter so you can follow along... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/160-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3-setup.html Track 2 - Meet Me Down on Main Street - Disneyland USA: This comes from the 1956 theatrically released documentary "Disneyland USA" and is a fun little tour of Main Street with great music. Track 3 - Meet Me Down on Main Street - The Mellomen Quartet: This combines music from two vintage Disneyland records for a fun little mix. This has been on my website for several years, but I have improved the audio quality. Track 7 - The Disneyland Band - King Mickey March: Another track that has been on my site for quite some time, but I have revised it and made some fun additions. Thanks goes to my pal Joshua Smith for providing the audio for this track. Tracks 10-15 - Enchanted Windows: These tracks all represent the new display windows at the Disneyland Emporium. Another shout out goes to my pal Scott, AKA RocketRods, for providing the audio and identifying the appropriate music. Track 16 - The Storybook Store - Area Background Music: This track has been on my site for some time, but it was an abridged version. I have updated this and it is now the full uncut loop. Track 23 - Main Street Organ Grinder: This is a fun track representing a feature of very early Main Street. It is audio taken from an authentic antique street organ that I found from a Youtube video, which I then cleaned up and enhanced. Track 24 - The Keystone Cops - Main Street Saxophone Quartet: This is another long time track on DisneyChris, but I have added several additional songs to the mix. Each of these additions comes from an album sold at the Tokyo Disneyland parks, and is not available in the US, called "All That Brass." My good pal Joshua Smith also shared this audio with me. Track 26 - Main Street Cinema - Phantom of the Opera: This comes from a CD of music from the Silent Film era, and is a song called "Villain's Theme" - It is a song I am sure you will all recognize. Track 29 - Main Street Town Band: This is music performed by a different group that once did perform live in Disneyland called The Rhythm Rascals from a CD they released called "Christopher Columbus." The music is nearly an exact match to the sound of the Main Street Town Band, so I used some artistic license here. Track 41 - Upjohn Pharmacy - The Triangle of Health: This audio comes from a series of educational shorts produced by Disney in the late 1960's for the Upjohn Company. I felt it was a good way to represent the Upjohn Pharmacy, and the song is a lot of fun. Thanks to RocketRods again for giving me the idea to use this. Track 42 - Main Street Area Music - The Gaslight Orchestra: This is music from an album called "Alexander's Ragtime Band" which was recorded by the Gaslight Orchestra. Some of the songs from this album have been used in Main Street area loops in decades past, so I have included several songs from this album, some have been used in these loops, and some have not, but all fun stuff. Track 43 - Main Street Area Music - Gay Nineties Waltzes: This is a complete album also by the Gaslight Orchestra which is believed to have been used, in full, as a very early Main Street area loop. Thanks to my pal Foxxy for providing the research on this. You can find more information about this on her website called Passport to Dreams... http://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/ Track 44 - Main Street Area Music - The Jack Wagner Collection: This is an authentic and complete Main Street area loop, likely first used in 1973 and retired in the early 1990's. Special thanks to Foxxy again, for providing the research on this. I had this track on the site previous to now, but I have completely redone it because more authentic materials have now become available. Track 46 - Center Street - Disneyland Art Festival: This track includes the sounds of a caricature sketch artist from Disneyland Paris doing an in park drawing (authentic audio provided by RocketRods) and a fun little song appropriate to the era that this exhibit was in the park. It is called "The Poor People of Paris." Track 47 - Carnation Ice Cream Parlor: A fun little ad jingle from the 1950's Track 48 - Sunkist Citrus House: This track begins with audio derived from cassettes handed out to vision impaired guests to help describe the park to them. It is narrated by the voice of Disneyland, Jack Wagner. This is followed by a vintage ad jingle for Sunkist. Track 49 - Gibson Girl Ice Cream Parlor: This loop is from Disneyland Paris. It may have been planned for use in Disneyland USA as well, when they installed this ice cream parlor in the 90's following on the theme of the new ice cream shop of the same name at the Disneyland Paris park, but because of the layout of this venue in Disneyland USA it is not conducive to having it's own loop in comparison to Paris, so I used some artistic license here. Track 52 - The Silhouette Studio: This is a long time track on DisneyChris, but I added a new introduction with Walt Disney from a 1958 episode of the Disneyland TV series called "An Adventure in Art." Track 54 - Main Street Mellomen Quartet: This is also a long time track on DisneyChris, but I have improved the audio and added several additional songs. These songs all come from a Disneyland Record called "Meet Me Down on Main Street" - You can hear the full album on my Disneyland Records page: http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/134-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-21.html - tracks 19 and 20. Track 55 - Granny's Rocker: The music heard under the sound of this wooden rocking chair is a song appropriately called "Rockin' Chair" and comes from an album of songs recorded from a Nelson Wiggen Orchestrion. This exact model orchestrion existed in Disneyland, (and still does) at the same time that Granny was still in the park, so it is appropriate music to use. Track 57 - Dearie - The Main Street Pianist & The Dapper Dans: This is a long time track on DisneyChris, but I revised it with much improved audio. Track 59 - Main Street USA - Area Background Music 2012: I have had an abridged version of the current Main Street loop on my site for a few years, but I have finally gotten around to replacing it with the full and uncut loop. I did some noise reduction and clean up, and this may be the best version of this loop you will hear. Came out very nice. Track 60 - Main Street USA - Area Music Alternates 2012: Another one of my alternate mixes. This has most of the songs from the 2012 Main Street Loop, but alternate versions of these songs, with lyrics. (with he exception of a couple songs that do not have existing lyrics) These mixes are a lot of fun, so be sure to check it out. Track 66 - Kodak Photo Supply - Makin' Memories: This is the full audio from the former preshow to the EPCOT Center attraction Magic Journeys, sponsored by Kodak. It is a very appropriate representation of Kodak's long relationship with the Disney parks. I used some artistic license here, because the song is more affiliated with Epcot than with Disneyland, but it WAS used in a Disneyland "Sing Along Songs" home video from the early 90's, so it is not an complete stretch to use it. You MUST listen to this track. I did a major clean up on it and it sounds amazing. Crisp, clear and CD quality. You have not heard this song sounding so good in a long time, if ever. Track 71 - Main Street Medley - 25th Anniversary Parade: This is taken from the Main Street USA section of the 1980 Disneyland 25th Anniversary parade. Fweew! I have been busy. However, even with all those new tracks, I have managed to do a few other projects as well... My new "Continual Play" feature, as mentioned in my last blog, is now available throughout the entire Disneyland Audio Tour, on every chapter. You will find the "Continual Play" at the bottom of each page. And now you are also able to navigate forwards and backwards between songs. Someone who has been very generous with their time helped me out with this project. So a big thank you to them. This feature allows you to listen to the tracks in succession without clicking on each one. I have been told by a couple of people that it does not work on their mobile devices, however, never fear, because I do have someone working on a new ap for mobile phones, and soon the entire site will be accessible in that format. I have also been very busy with my new podcast called "Jiminy Crickets!" - Be sure to check it out. My good friend Jerry and I have been having loads of fun doing the show, and the feedback has been very positive. We have already released eleven episodes, and a new episode comes out every Monday. http://jcricketspodcast.blogspot.com/ or you can find us on Itunes. Be sure to give us a five star rating so that more people will find our show. My other podcast, MouseMusic just released our 7th episode and it is all about the Muppets! Be sure not to miss this show. So much fun. http://sideshowsoundtheatre.com/2016/02/08/mouse-music-7-the-muppets/ And last thing to mention is that I am now on Patreon. If you would like to become a subscriber, and help me out with my web fees and the cost of adding new content to the site, it would be very appreciated. To those who have already sponsored me, big shout outs to you all, and a million thanks. Here is a link to my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/DisneyChris And if you prefer to make a one time donation, you can do so on Paypal. Here is a link to that page: So as you can see, I have been very busy, but I plan to remain just as busy in the days, weeks and months ahead, so be sure to check on the site often, I am adding new content almost every day. Stay tuned for more...
January 30, 2016 I can't believe that nearly a month has passed since my last update. It has been a bit of a slow month on my end because I was so driven to add new content to my website in the late part of 2015 that I sort of had a bit of a burn out and took a little time to relax in the mid weeks of January, but things are picking up again, so I finally have some news to report on the progress of the Disneyland Audio Tour. The first thing I worked on in 2016 was the first of my five Disneyland Railroad ride-throughs, which I finally completed. You will find it on my Town Square page track number 71: http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/127-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-2.html As expected, it was a really difficult edit, and this is one of the main reasons I got burned out and took some time off once it was completed. I always knew it was going to be tough, and that is why I put it off for so long. The first version of the planned five ride-throughs is very timely though, because it is the just recently retired R.R. narrative that will more than likely change once the attraction is re-opened after it is rerouted due to the Star Wars Land expansion in Disneyland. So I am glad to have it on my site so that people can now continue to ride the train mentally as it will be out of commission for the next approximately 18 months. I still have plans to get the other four versions of the Railroad done, and sooner than later, but have decided to work on a few other projects first before digging deep into another railroad ride-through. Each version of the railroad has its own unique challenges, so it is like starting from scratch for each one I will be editing. The very thought of jumping back into that pool is not something I am looking forward to at this time. I need to be in the right mindset for such a big undertaking, so in the meantime I am doing some easier projects, but I promise to get back to railroading as soon as I am mentally ready again. What I have been working on, since I completed the first of the Railroads, is audio for the Main Street USA and Central Plaza chapters of my website. I actually made a huge discovery that made me excited to get back to work again, and snapped me out of my lazy spell. The 1992-2012 Main Street USA area background loop has always been a bit of a problem for those that collect Disneyland audio. The reason: several of the source version, studio recorded tracks had never been released. This includes the songs "Dearie," "Sidewalks of New York," from Hello Dolly "Elegance" and "Before the Parade Passes By," from Oklahoma "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" "Many a New Day" and "Kansas City," and from the Music Man "Wells Fargo Wagon" "Gary Indiana" "Lida Rose and "Iowa Stubborn" So over the years, people visiting the parks recorded these missing songs live, by placing a microphone next to a speaker. (Also known as induction recording) Obviously this meant a huge downgrade in audio quality when mixed back together as the full area loop which included the songs that were available from source materials. However, someone, (who would like to remain anonymous,) about 6 months ago sent me a Main Street loop file that I placed in a folder and never listened to, because I assumed it was just the same thing as all the other times I have received this file, a mix of the studio stuff along with the live induction in-park stuff. However, as I started to go though my files about 10 days ago, as I was thinking ahead of what I am going to be doing for my Main Street chapter, I realized that I had a rare gem in my possession. The file that had been sent to me was the full 1992 Main Street Loop, taken from source. All the songs were there, 100% studio quality! I was so excited to find this out that I immediately replaced all the audio I had been using those induction recordings for with these improved studio versions. So you will now find new versions of the following tracks on my Main Street page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/160-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3-setup.html 7 - Main Street USA - Area Background Music Also on my Central Plaza Page - Track 2 - I have posted the entire loop replacing the live recordings with the newly discovered audio... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/150-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3b.html The reason I have the complete loop on my Central Plaza page and not my Main Street Page is because I am planning to use the complete 2012-Present Main Street Loop on my Main Street page, and I wanted to break things up a bit. Also, it allows me to split up the 1992 loop into smaller sections for the Main Street chapter without having the same music play more than once on the same page. Also, I need to note that two songs are now missing from my loop because I have a copy of the Disneyland version, not the Walt Disney World version, and two songs from the WDW loop were not included in the Disneyland loop for unknown reasons. One song is "Before the Parade Passes By" and the other is "Gary Indiana" - But I feel ok about leaving these songs out, because they never actually played in Disneyland. However, for my Hello Dolly track (see number 33 above) I have included the version of "Before the Parade Passes By" that comes from the new 2012 loop. So really the only missing song is "Gary Indiana." I also redid my 1992 area music alternates track (number 17 on my Main Street Page) to exclude the songs "Before the Parade Passes By" and "Gary Indiana" and also removed the final little chunk of songs which all come from the "Old Timer's Waltz" medley. The reason I removed the "Old Timers Waltz" songs is because you can know hear that part of the track as a separated selection on my Town Square page, (track number 17.) I felt those songs had a different pacing that the rest, and work better on their own rather than being tagged on as part of the full Main Street alternate track. I also plan to do an alternates track for the 2012 loop, so "Before the Parade Passes By" will be making a return when I add that track to the site in the near future. Two more additions have also been made to my Central Plaza chapter... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/150-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3b.html I have replaced my existing track 8 - Plaza Inn Dining Room - Atmosphere Music with a new version. The old version was less than 30 minutes long and included background restaurant crowd noises. The new version does not include any added sound effects and is the full one hour loop. I also purchased several CD's to create this version of the loop. This is not taken from the sources that have previously been floating around the web. With I think only one exception, every song in this loop has been taken directly from the original CD, so the sound quality is much improved. The main reason I had those sound effects added on my old version was to hide the poor audio, but now it is not needed. I also added a new track, track 9 - Plaza Inn Quartet. This track is supposed to represent a live ensemble performing inside the Plaza Inn, So I am now using those restaurant crowd sounds here instead of for track 8. So you still have a track using the sound effects, but I feel it is much more effective here. By the way, the sounds come from the ballroom scene of the Haunted Mansion. The addition of the new track 8 and track 9 on my Central Plaza page has also allowed me to add yet another "Continual Play" track to the site. I will be adding more and more of these over time as I complete more additions. Eventually the entire Disneyland Audio Tour will be available in "Continual Play." I also added a very cute little commercial jingle called "It Can Only Happen at Disneyland" to my "Welcome to Disneyland" page, Chapter 1 track 64. Be sure to check that out too. http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html Other news to report beyond the Disneyland Audio Tour: I plan to have DisneyChris T Shirts available soon for purchase. I did the artwork myself bassd on a 1950's Disneyland TV logo and it came out great. I should have the shirts available in only a few weeks. I will post information about them on Twitter, Facebook and on the homepage of my site. I know you are all going to love these shirts. I already have a prototype and it came out beautiful. Also, I will be releasing episode 8 of my all new "Jiminy Crickets!" podcast this coming Monday. Be sure to check out my show. http://jcricketspodcast.blogspot.com/ Jerry and I are having a blast doing the show, and have some amazing episodes and special guests planned in the months ahead. Don't miss it. Hope everyone is having a happy new year so far. Don't be a stranger, and feel free to contact me anytime with questions, comments or concerns. I would love to hear from you all. Talk to you soon.
January 1, 2016 Happy New Year Everyone! Lots of exciting additions have been made to my website since my last post, so it is time, once again, to fill you all in on the details. Before I get to that though, please let me implore anyone who can afford to, to consider becoming a DisneyChris subscriber on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/DisneyChris - Or to make a one time donation to Paypal. http://disneychris.com/donate.html It is now more important than ever that I receive financial support from those who appreciate what I do for the Disney community. I have now reached 100% of my allotted 20MB bandwidth by my website host, and will now be charged an extra fee each month for every MB I am over that allotment. I am already 2MB's over, and I have hundreds of additions to make to the site, plus a new "Continual Play" feature which will double the MB's I am currently using now. So that overage is going to increase over time, and my monthly fees are going to skyrocket. Because I am disabled and on a fixed income, in order to keep adding to the site, and bring you the very best in Disney audio, I really need your financial help. I am also planning special awards and prizes for my Patreon supporters once I reach a certain level of financial support that will warrant it. I plan to provide exclusive audio content and t-shirt giveaways. I have also invested quite a bit over the past year in new audio editing software to improve the sound quality of my tracks, and have also purchased several rare and expensive vintage Disney vinyl albums which have all been posted to the site. I also had to pay a lot to have these albums professionally cleaned and converted to digital format before I was able to edit them and share them on the site. My new feature "Continual Play" is what put me over my allotted 20MB, but this is something I really wanted to add to the site for the convenience of those visiting the site while at work or while doing other things besides sitting at their computer. I have now grouped together all the tracks on each page into 3-4 hour long-playing tracks, so you can now alternately listen to everything without clicking on each individual track. This makes it much easier to enjoy the site for those doing things around the house or who listen while at work. No more clicking on each individual track. You will find these "Continual Play" tracks scattered throughout each chapter of the Disneyland Audio Tour as you scroll down the page. So far I have only added this feature to Chapters 1, 2, 22 and 25. This is because the other chapters are all going to undergo the major re-do treatment, so it is best to wait until the other chapters are updated before posting the continual play tracks, as they will be incomplete. But over time I plan to have every chapter of the site filled with "Continual Play" and now life will be easier for all you who have wanted to enjoy the site without all that annoying clicking. Before I get to the new additions let me also quickly promote my new podcast called "Jiminy Crickets!" http://jcricketspodcast.blogspot.com/ My pal Jerry Skids and I decided to create our very own family friendly Disney podcast Disney with our own spin. We have released three episodes so far. We are also on Itunes so you can check us out out there. Be sure to leave us a 5 star rating. New episodes will be released every single Monday. Now enough about all that business, lets get into the real reason you have all come here. What is going on with the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour.... The majority of additions I have made this go-round are to my Town Square chapter, so to follow along click on this link - http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/127-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-2.html Track 16 - Town Square Area Music - The Jack Wagner Collection - This is a redo of an existing track and is now the complete unabridged 1976 AM Main Street Loop. Special thanks goes to my Twitter pal Foxy, who is the writer of the blog http://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/ for the research behind this. Track 17 - Town Square Area Music - Old Timer's Waltz - I created a neat mix of alternate versions of all the songs contained in the "Old Timers Waltz," which is a medley of songs that has consistently been a part of Main Street's area music since 1971. Now you can learn the lyrics to these songs. Track 18 - The Original Disneyland Band - Town Square Concert - All the tracks from this mix are taken from the 1970's Walt Disney World Band album. But, many of these arrangements are identical to the Disneyland Band, so it is apropos to use songs from this album to represent Disneyland. This is an extended version of an existing track, with lots of extra songs and fun surprises. Track 19 - The New Disneyland Band - Town Square Performance - These songs come from an album available exclusively in Japan called "All That Brass." It is actually the Tokyo Disneyland Band, but they have the exact same musical style as the new Disneyland Band in California, so it is appropriate to use this as a representation. Thanks to my pal Joshua Smith on Facebook for sending me this music. Track 20 - Wurlitzer Music Store - This is a fun little mix I created of all the many different types of keyboard instruments that were likely heard at the Wurlitzer store on a daily basis. I have included player piano music, electric organ music, and traditional piano music. Track 21 - Disneyland Showcase - A Preview of Coming Attractions - This is a redo of an existing track. This was one of my major nemesis. The sound quality of the original version I had posted was so bad that it was almost an embarrassment. This new version while not perfect, is a major improvement over the old version and is now acceptable under my high audio quality standards. It provides a preview of several attractions that were once planned for the park but never ended up being built, including Dumbo Circus and Discovery Bay. Track 22 - The Straw Hat Strutters - This is a sound alike band I found while searching Itunes. Not the authentic group, but you may not know this unless I told you. Perfect match. Track 26 - Saxophone Quartet - Town Square Performance - Same as the above track, this is another sound alike group I found on Itunes. Track 27 - International Street - To represent this attraction that was never built, I have put together a nice mix of easy listening songs with an international flavor. All these orchestrations are very mid 20th century in sound, so very appropriate for the era in which this attraction would have premiered had it been carried out to fruition. Track 28 - Liberty Street Introduction - This introduction by Walt Disney was taken from an episode of the Disneyland TV series in which the film "Johnny Tremain" was being broadcast. Walt actually mentions Liberty Street as a planned attraction for Disneyland. I also include two songs from Johnny Tremain. Track 29 - Liberty Street - Area Background Music - To represent another attraction never built, I have taken the 1980 Walt Disney World Liberty Square area loop, and combined it with fife and drum music from the 1971 Walt Disney World Liberty Square area loop. This is definitely the style of music that would have played in this land, had it actually been realized. Track 30 - One Nation, Under God - Another attraction never realized was the precursor to the Hall of Presidents attraction at Walt Disney World. Before Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln began its development, the original concept, like the Walt Disney World version, was to include ALL the presidents. So I have taken the audio from the 1971 version of the Hall of Presidents to represent this attraction that never was, and combined it with some appropriate patriotic music. Track 34 - Walt Disney Story Preshow - Disneyland Wasn’t Built in a Day - This is an existing track which I have improved the audio. Track 35 - Walt Disney, Naturalist - Musical Highlights - Another existing track with improved audio. Track 37 - The Walt Disney Story - I have cleaned up the audio on this existing track and added additional music. Most of the audio used in this mix is authentic to the actual film, but I did use a few appropriate placeholders. Due to the very poor audio of the actual film, this is basically a musical highlights mix, but is does include the brief narrated introduction by Pete Renaday. Track 40 - Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln - Preshow - This is very much the same as the version that was previously posted on my site, but I have improved the audio and smoothed out some of the transitions between segments. Track 41 - Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln - Overture - Identical to older version with improved audio. Track 42 - Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln - Again, this is very close to the version that was previously posted on my site, but I have improved the audio and smoothed out the transitions between segments. Track 44 - Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln - Musical Score - The background music from Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln Track 47 - Journey to Gettysburg Preshow - A redo of an existing track with a MAJOR improvement in audio quality. Track 48 - Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln - Journey to Gettysburg- And yet another redo of an existing track with a MAJOR improvement in audio quality. Track 51 - The Disneyland Story - Lobby Area Music - This is the current background music used in the lobby of the Opera House. It was also once the music from the Disney Gallery Exhibit called "Enchanting the Classics" - So this is why that exhibit is excluded from my block of Disney Gallery background loops. Track 52 - The First 50 Magical Years - If You Believe in Magic - This is an improved version of an existing track, which I obtained a better audio source for. Track 53 - The First 50 Magical Years - Musical Score - This comes from a special very exclusive CD made available only to the press who covered the premiere of this attraction in 2005. It was on my wish list, and an anonymous source shared it with me, so now it is my pleasure to share it with all of you. It is a fantastic musical score. Track 54 - Disneyland, The First 50 Magical Years - I have improved the audio quality and extended this track to include the full and complete film. Tracks 55-60 - The Disney Gallery - These are the complete background loops for all the exhibits that were showcased in the Disney Gallery at Town Square before it became the Disneyana store. Two of the tracks were on the site previous to now, "All Aboard! the Trains of Disney" and "Crowning Achievements" but they have now been extended to the full, uncut versions, and the audio has been improved. Track 62 - The Carolwood Pacific Railroad - This comes from an Episode of the Disneyland TV series called "Where Do Stories Come From?" - a fantastic bit of nostalgia where Walt discusses the popularity of model railroading among his staff and the development of his own backyard train. Track 63 - The Disneyland Railroad - Introduction - This informative overview of the Disneyland Trains comes from a 1985 local TV broadcast. It provides a great introduction with many insider details about the history of the Disneyland Railroad line and its trains. Track 64 - The Disneyland Railroad - Depot Announcements - This is a redo of an existing track. I have added extra announcements and changed the format because it became repetitive of what I have now included as part of my new track 65 "The Disneyland Railroad Ticket Announcements" (mentioned in previous blog) Track 66 - Main Street Station - Nelson Wiggen Orchestrion - This is taken from a CD I came across that is authentic music from the exact same model orchestrion located in the Main Street train station. Some of the songs are also exact matches to Youtube videos people have posted of the orchestrion playing in the station, so even the songs themselves are authentic, because they generally all derive from 20 minute scrolls that contains multiple songs, so if one song matches, it is likely that the other songs are also matches. Track 78 - Town Square Evening Concert - Dee Fisher - This is from the 1957 Disneyland Record "Echoes of Disneyland" - But I have done a major overhaul on the audio. I have painstakingly removed every single click and editing glitch on this album one at a time, by hand. It was loaded with lots of issues, and it took me hours and hours of hard work to do this. It now sounds amazing without all the distracting sounds of the levers being clicked on and off whenever there is a change in key. You have not heard this album so crisp and clean before now. I also replaced the version on my "Disneyland Records" page, tracks 17-18 http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/134-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-21.html So that is all for now, but the good news is that I have finally begun work on my Disneyland Railroad ride-through tracks. I saved the hardest project for last, but after much anticipation, I am finally going to get these completed. So stay tuned for more!
December 14, 2015 Wow, has it really been an entire month since my last blog post? Well I have tons to catch you all up on. Lots of changes have happened at DisneyChris. So sit back, relax, and get get ready for a nice read... First of all, I need to mention my all new Podcast called Jiminy Crickets! http://jcricketspodcast.blogspot.com/ - My good friend Jerry Skids and I decided to create our own show and do a family friendly podcast with our own spin. Episode 1 was just released today. We are also on Itunes so you can check out out there. Be sure to leave us a 5 star rating. Second of all, I have become a member of Patreon! Now you can be come a monthly subscriber to DisneyChris and help support what I do through a small monthly donation. It cost a lot of money for a guy like me on a fixed income to keep my website going. I have recently purchased new audio hardware, and have spent thousands of dollars of my own money on software to edit my audio, in order to make the vintage sound crisp and new. I also am constantly purchasing new music, vintage albums, and not to mention the monthly fees I pay to my web host. Also, I only have about 12% of my bandwidth remaining before they start charging me even more for going over my allotted 20 GB's and I still have hundreds, if not over a thousands, more audio tracks to share. So please consider being a subscriber guys. Nothing in life is free. Once I have enough subscribers to justify it, I plan to have a monthly drawing, and give away special T-shirts and other great exclusive prizes, PLUS I will start to release some exclusive audio content for subscribers only. Now enough about business, lets discuss why you have all come here. What is going on with the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour.... I have been very busy working on chapter 2 of the collection. This is my Town Square focused chapter, and it includes everything in the circle surrounding the square, from the Opera House to the Wurlitzer Music Store, to the Emporium, and the Disneyland Railroad. I am not only adding several new audio selections to this chapter, but I have also been extending and improving most of the existing tracks. I will describe for you all the new tracks that have been added so far. If you want to follow along, you will find them all on the following page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/127-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-2.html 1 - Walt Disney Welcomes You to Town Square USA - This is taken from the classic 1956 album "Walt Takes you to Disneyland" - but I have used some trickery to move around the wording and make Walt's Main Street introduction into a Town Square introduction instead. Pretty sneaky eh? 2 - Town Square Morning Announcements - This is a track I have had on my site for years, but I updated it with more appropriate music. The new song comes from the 1976 Disneyland loop. Originally I was using the song Fortuosity from the 1992 Main Street Loop, but the new music has much more of an early morning vibe to it. I also did some more trickery by removing some sound effects heard at the beginning of the track, so now all you hear is the narration and the music, nice and clear. 3 - Town Square Vehicles - This track is a "You Are There" audio experience. The sounds you hear as you first enter the park. Plus a Jack Wagner description of each Main Street Vehicle with a corresponding sound effects for each said vehicle. It is a short track but with amazing sound and it is lots of fun. 4 - The Trolley Song - Two versions of this song, one from the Disneyland 25th Anniversary Parade and the other from the 1968 Disneyland Band album. I have combined the two into one song, and it is hard to tell they were not originally all one in the same track. This was a lot more difficult to do than it sounds. I had to speed up the parade portion and do some tricks to get the sound quality to match between the two. Came out very nice though. 5 - Guided Tour Garden - Another long time track I have now redone to make some improvements. Same music, but I added two additional spots of narration during two song transition points in the medley. I also removed the ambient Main Street sounds at the start of the track because that is now heard under my Main Street Vehicles track instead. And I made the bird sounds a little louder to emphasize that this is supposed to be a garden, off the path from the main throngs of guests. Track 6 has no changes. 7 - Disneyland City Hall - Phone Greetings - Mickey, Minnie and Goofy recordings you can hear at City Hall if you are celebrating a special event. I added phone ringing and dial tone noises, etc etc. 8 - Disneyland Firehouse - Regina Music Box - This one is amazing! - before now I was using a placeholder, but now I have audio from 12 of the actual authentic music box discs that are in Walt's Real Apartment. These recordings were all done live, so I worked really hard to do a lot of clean up on these, and it came out fantastic. 9 - Disneyland Firehouse - Edison Gramophone - Another track that has been on the page for some time, but I added a second song, and also did some major clean up to try and remove some of the really bad distortion on these very vintage recordings. This one was really though to do. Lots of work. But although the recordings are by no means perfect now, nor would I want them to be because I want them to sound like old Victrola albums, the removal of much of the high frequency distortion makes these much more enjoyable to listen to now. Less sounding like scratches on a chalkboard than they were before. 10 - Disneyland Fire Dept. - Horse-Drawn Chemical Wagon - I used some of my creativity to mix some sound effects together to come up with this one. I think it sounds pretty authentic. 11 - The Hook n' Ladder Band - This is not the authentic Disneyland group heard in the park. However, I found a Swedish group that were so inspired by the original Firehouse Five Plus Two Dixieland group of the 1950's-1970's that they have emulated their style. So this is the perfect placeholder for the Hook N Ladder Band. I sped up the tempo a bit on their recordings because they had a tendency to play a tad bit slower than the real Firehouse Five did, but it came out nice when I did that. 12 - The Dapper Dans - Town Square Performance - All the songs from this mix are taken from the authentic Dapper Dan album "Shave and A Haircut" - I tried to mix it in such a way to sound like a typical set they would perform in front of the firehouse. I also added the pitch pipe at the start of the mix, just for a little fun. 13 - Town Square Lockers and Lost & Found - I used the same announcement from track number two, "Morning Announcements," but moved things around a bit in order to just describe the lockers. (Seems like I enjoy making people say things they did not actually say) - I also used the player piano version of the song Flitterin' from "Summer Magic" as the music to represent this venue, because that song is about moving to a new home, and the lockers were in fact sponsored by a moving company. (There is method to my madness) I end the track with the sound of a locker opening and closing. 14 - Main Street Emporium - Area Background Music - My original track for this ran all of 16 minutes. The new version I just posted yesterday now runs a full hour and 8 minutes. It is now the full loop. There is some controversy about this loop. Many believe it may not be used in Disneyland, and is only heard at Disneyland in Paris. But there are many that swear they hear this loop at Disneyland, only it is almost inaudible because of how loud it gets inside the Emporium. I will go with the second school of thought, because it is such a great collection of music, and I want to include it. 15 - Town Square Popcorn Wagon - This is the exact same track you will find on my Central Plaza chapter, but I decided to include it in Town Square too, for obvious reasons. --- For the rest I am going to describe, I will be skipping over any track numbers I have not yet edited and posted to the site yet --- 22 - Maxwell House Coffee House - Fun mid century advertisement jingle. Perfect feel for Disneyland. 23 - Town Square Café - My friend Dawn Short from Facebook recorded the part of the waitress at the start of the track. I take a song from the 1976 Main Street Loop and underscore it with coffee house ambient sounds and Main Street vehicle noises. At the end of the track it is me you hear saying "Check Please!" This track came out so cute. 24 - The Mad Hatter - The sound effect you hear in this track is 100% authentic. It is the actual machine that was once used to do the hat embroidery. I have underscored the sound effect appropriately with the Unbirthday Song. 30 - Babes in Toyland - Movie Set Exhibit - I used music from the Mickey's Christmas Chalet shop loop which was taken from the original Babes in Toyland soundtrack, with a fun little intro I made using Mother Goose and some wedding bell chimes. 31 - Mickey Mouse Club Headquarters - Consists of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, and introductory song to the Mouseketeers, the Mousekartoon theme, and the soundtrack to two classic Disney shorts - "Orphan's Benefit" and "The Band Concert" followed up by the Mickey Mouse Club Alma Mater. I find this one very enjoyable. 32 - The Walt Disney Story - Introduction - I was able to do some editing trickery to get Jack Wagner to say "Town Square" instead of "Main Street" when introducing this attraction. and added new music. Originally I had music from Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln underscoring this intro, but now I have music from the actual "Walt Disney Story" film instead. I was having an issue finding the right music to end this track with. I ended up using the end title music to the 1972 live-action Disney film "Napolian and Samantha" and surprisingly it sounds perfect together. 33 - Walt Disney Story - Disneyland Wasn't Built in a Day - No major changes made. I just improved the audio quality of this one. Less echoed. 38 - Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln - Introduction - Walt Disney's introduction to Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln as seen on the Wonderful World of Color TV episode called "Disneyland Goes to the World's Fair" - I removed some distracting ambient sounds and added new music at the end. I should mention that ambient sounds are accepted more when you can see the action that causes the sound to happen. When you change something originally meant to be experienced visually and it is now an audio only experience, these sounds can just seem like errors in the recording. So it is important to try and remove them if possible. I was successful doing so. 42 - Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln - America the Beautiful - The music from the 1967 Circle Vision film that has now been incorporated into the current version of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, in a nice little 3.5 minute musical medley. 44 - The Gettysburg Address - The portion of the 1964 Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln record album that was omitted from the original show, but portions of which are now being used in the current show. I have the full version here. 45 - Fifth Freedom Mural - I used a piece of music from Walt Disney World's original Hall of Presidents soundtrack for this. It had the exact right feel to represent this mural, which focused on great 19th and 20th century American inventors and visionaries. 48 - Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln - Golden Dream - I combined the music that used to be the finale to the 1985 version of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, with the music now heard as you exit the theater and enter the lobby. Came out as a nice mix of both versions. 60 - Disneyana Gifts - Disneyana Theme Song - This is a new song recently written by Bobby Sherman, son to the late Robert Sherman. It is a great song that has the feel of the old Sherman Brothers tunes, and is a great way to represent this gift shop musically. 64 - Disneyland Railroad - Ticket Announcements - These are all the Jack Wagner Announcements from the days when it required a ticket to ride the Disneyland Railroad. It includes each station announcement, and I underscored it with a sort of Honky Tonk style version of the song "Casey Jones." 76 - Flag Retreat Ceremony - I now have two different version of the Flag Retreat posted on Disney Chris - This is because this ceremony is performed in two different ways. Sometimes it is done with live musicians, as is the case with the version I posted on my Town Square chapter, and other times it is performed without any musicians, but with pre-recorded music. I have posted the pre-recorded music version on my Disneyland After Dark Chapter, and you will find it at the top of this page if you want to compare the two... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/138-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-18.html ------------------------------------ Fwew - I added a lot didn't I? But there is much more to come. Don't forget to also check out my daily "Disney Song of the Day" because from now until January each song is themed to Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, I will likely not blog again until AFTER the holiday, so I wish you all a happy and safe holiday, and may all your Christmas wishes come true. Peace to all.
November 15, 2015 It is definitely time to update you all on the progress of the Disneyland Audio Tour. I have made a record number of new additions in the past two weeks since my last blog post, so there is much to discuss. Before I get into that, let me mention my current side projects I just started working on today. This is more like a little housekeeping than anything else, but worth mentioning to you all so you know what is going on for the next few days, and why things may suddenly seem so quiet on adding new audio to the site. Song of the Day has crept up on me yet again. Last time I set it up three months in advance, but December 1st is the end of my three month reserve, so I must get December ready now. As you may know this is a big month for Song of the Day, because it is my annual Countdown to Christmas. I also like to decorate my site with a lot of colorful Christmas clip art. I have already set up a new December home page which is good to go, and all I have to do is switch it over at midnight on 12/01. So that is at least one project checked off. Next I have to pick out all the songs for December and the corresponding images for each day. This year I was smart, and I have been collecting Christmas themed images for the past 12 months, so there should be no searching for images required. I should have all the pictures I need. My only issue is how I am going to make this year's countdown unique. There are only so many Disney songs themed to Christmas. I need to figure out a way to make this year's countdown special, and not just a rehash of the past three years. I am going to try and find alternate versions of songs if I can, but I will still bring back many of the favorites. Once December is done, I plan to get January and February done in advance as well. I have a big project lingering and I don't want to be distracted by having to set up Song of the Day over and over. Better to get it done now, so I can fully concentrate on my next project. January will be a random month of songs, but February will be the return of "Love Month" - a month of Disney love songs in honor of Valentine's Day. Next housekeeping project is to set up the Disneyland Hotel chapter with several new additions I am planning to make to that chapter. So expect to see several new "Coming Soon" slots posted on that page in the next few days. I do have to do some hunting down for some images I need, and may need to edit these images, so this could be a 2 day project. So after all that is completed, I will begin my complete re-do of Chapter 2, AKA Town Square. This will begin in about 4-5 days from now. As I get my plan in order, I will be making a "To-Do" list and will share the list both on Twitter and Facebook in my "Disney Music Fans" group. This list will let you see all I am planning to do to this chapter, and will allow you to keep you updated on my progress as I check things off the list. The "To-Do" list also keeps me motivated, because as I cross things off the lists, it actually gives me a feeling of final accomplishment. Now with that out of the way, let me discuss what I have been doing for the past two weeks. As mentioned in my last blog, I made a list of tracks to edit that are from all the many 1980's era Disneyland anniversary celebrations. And the good news is, I completed the entire list! This effects both my TV Land page as well as my Magical Milestone page. So first, let me talk about TV Land... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/156-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-22b.html Kraft Salutes Disneyland's 25th Anniversary - Track 42 - Once Upon a Time in Anaheim - I have added the narrated TV special introduction to the beginning of this track, which announces all the guest stars appearing on the program, before fading into the song. This is basically exactly how it was done on the TV show. All other versions of this song posted throughout my site do not have this TV introduction, so now this version is unique to all others. Track 45 - When You Wish Upon a Star Medley - Micheal Jackson - I did a major clean up on this track. It was already on the site, but the new version has much better audio. Track 46 - Walt Disney Musical Montage - This was a challenge to edit, because of all the background ambient in-park noise heard throughout. It was obviously recorded on location in the park, and not in a sound proof studio. I managed to maintain a nice balance of keeping the atmospheric qualities of the in-park sounds while also removing excess distortion and smoothing out the fades from one edit cut to the next. I feel it came out quite well and is a big improvement from the original 1980's edit job. Track 47 - The 'F' Ticket - Disney Dream Montage - Again, this was already on the site, but thanks to my new noise reduction tools, I was able to do a much improved and slightly extended version of this song, no longer needing to be concerned about the many quiet moments in the track. All background hiss is virtually vanished. Track 48 - Once Upon a Time in Anaheim - Finale - This was a challenge to edit because of a lot of wind and background noise that was not consistent throughout, so in order to mask this, I added in birds chirping, and it did a perfect job of covering up all the issues. I also did some cut and paste to move things around a bit differently than presented on the original show, in order to have a better and more dramatic ending to the track. Disneyland's 30th Anniversary Celebration Track 53 - I was so excited to get "I'm So Excited" because this segment has been cut out from every version of this special I have ever been able to find. I am so happy to be able to include it. It is really bizarre but a lot of fun. Track 54 - Thank You Mickey - This is the opening number of the show and consists of scenes from the 30th Anniversary Parade and cutaways to all the guest stars on the show who sing a verse of a celebratory song in a nice little medley. Some of the singers chose songs that did not quite fit the same rhythm structure of the rest of the piece, so I cut out a few segments in order to keep the flow of the music consistent. Track 55 - Zip a Dee Doo Dah - This is another song that was already on the site, but now I have much better audio, AND, I was able to add an extra New Orleans Square segment that was not included before. Track 56 - Alabama Jubilee - I included this live performance of Roy Clark because I could not find this song in a studio recorded, non-live version. (This will be explained below in track 58) I really like this live version anyway, so it turned out to be a happy accident. Track 57 - Marie Osmond - I'm Walkin' Right Down the Middle - This is pretty much exactly what was on the site before, only with a major improvement in the audio. Track 58 - 30th Anniversary - Guest Star Performances - I gathered together all the original studio recorded versions of the songs that were performed live in the TV special, and made a fun medley of songs. Surprisingly, they are all pretty much the same sounding versions as the ones from the TV show, just with much better studio quality source sound. It is a fun medley for those who love their mid 80's nostalgia. Track 59 - For Thirty Years We've Been Coming Together - This is a song mentioned in my last blog post. I decided to also include the song on my TV Land page. It is identical to the version already mentioned and posted on my Magical Milestones page. Also, I did another version of this song, cutting out references to "30 years" and posted this over on Chapter One - I call it "Who Comes to Disneyland?" and it is track 25 on this page... http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html (As I told you, no page is ever "completed") Track 60 - Marie Osmond & David Hasselhoff - Castle Ballet - New to the site. A nice little duet. Track 61 - Julie Andrews - Walt Disney Tribute Medley - Also new, Love hearing Miss Andrews singing Disney classics. Came out just lovely. Track 62 - Peter Allen - Is There a Band Big Enough? - This again is the same track that was already on the site, but the sound quality is much better now. And a few others added to this page... Track 65 Golden Anniversary of Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs - Fun little medley of songs by Dick Van Dyke as performed in a 1987 TV special. Although the show has little to do with Disneyland, this production number was filmed in the park, so I felt it was appropriate to include it as part of the Disneyland collection. Track 66 - Mickey's 60th Birthday - It's Magic - Another 1980's TV special that had little to do with Disneyland, but this one musical routine was filmed in the park, so decided to include it. Had to do some tricky editing to get a good sounding ending to the song, because the song does not really come to a defined ending in the TV show. It is just interrupted by dialogue, but I came up with a good ending using some magic of my own, and it sounds great. I also made some slight tweaks to two older tracks on this page: Track 25 - John Davidson - Flattery/Top of the World - I made a correction to improve one little spot in the song that had a bad off key sounding warble. I improved it and it sounds much better. Track 32 - I Believe in the Unbelievable - I added some bass to this track. It seemed to be missing some lower range resonance. That is all for chapter 24 the rest of the new additions are on the following page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/179-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-22.html Track 14 - Fantasy in the Sky 25th Night - Anniversary Event - This was likely the most difficult track to edit on my recent list. Floating about the internet for a few years was a very bad audio copy of this presentation. So bad, there was no way I could have justified using it on my site, and it was totally beyond repair. Then I acquired a much better copy, and was thrilled. However, it was still not perfect, but much more usable. So what I did was extract Jack Wagner's narration, and overlay it on top of the source versions of the songs that were originally used to make this mix. I was able to find source copies for almost everything used in this presentation, with two exceptions... the Matterhorn music, and the medley of "Celebrate/Here's to the Future" But i came up with two very good placeholders for these. Some of the audio on the new mix I acquired was also good enough to be used in combination with the studio recorded audio. So in doing a little cut and paste, and mix and match, I came up with a wonderful sounding version of what I once thought was a hopeless cause. It took me hours of work to get all the sound to match just right, but I am very proud of how it turned out. I also took some liberties by extending some of the original musical edits from the 1980 presentation, to make the songs a bit longer and less choppy in its transitions from one song to the next. So now it is a more flowing and enjoyable experience than the original show. Don't miss this one. Tracks 15-18 - All songs devoted to Donald Duck's 50th Birthday. Lots of fun stuff here. Disneyland's 30th Anniversary - 1985 Track 19 - Disneyland's 30th Anniversary - TV Commercials - two vintage ads promoting the anniversary events. Track 20 - Disneyland's 30th Anniversary - GM Showcase - a short but fun little narrative taken from the Disneyland Monorail spiel. I added perfect 80's background music. Track 21 - The Gift-Giver Extraordinaire - This is virtually the same track as found on Chapter One as mentioned in my last blog post, however, I added a new introduction unique to the 30th Anniversary. Track 23 - Is There a Band Big Enough? - This is identical to the track mentioned above for chapter 24 Track 24 - 30th Anniversary Rededication Ceremony - The version of Happy Birthday heard here is the authentic audio from the 30th Anniversary rededication birthday party from July 17, 1985. I followed this up by a cover version of the Beatles "Today is Your Birthday" Track 26 - 30th Anniversary Family Cavalcade - This is the full and complete audio from this event. All of which has been posted on my site in various places before, but never together all in one place. Also the audio is great thanks to my new noise reduction software. Track 27 - Skyfest Balloon Festival - A collection of flight themed songs, both Disney and non Disney, representing this event. This is not authentic audio, but is meant to give the impression of what this event was like. And a few more additions to this chapter... Track 28 - Snow White Golden Anniversary Celebration - I took audio from the Snow White Parade, TV special and live stage show and made a nice little medley to represent all the anniversary events of 1987. Track 30 - Mickey's 60th Birthday Bash - The was already on the site, but I improved the audio and sounds fantastic! Track 31 - Mickey's 60th Birthday Parade - This track was posted on my parade chapter prior to now, but I now added it to the Magical Milestone chapter. This is a new version, with much improved audio. Also note that any parade tracks added to Chapter 25 were also replaced on my Chapter 5 "Disney on Parade" page. Some are identical versions and some are slightly varied, so you may want to check out all the items marked "NEW" on my parade page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/129-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-4.html Fweew! Well that is all that happened in the past two weeks. An amazing number of new tracks have been added. I have finally surpassed the 1000 audio track milestone, and as of writing this blog the Disneyland Magical Audio Tour has a grand total of 1014 tracks! By the way, be sure to check out my Song of the Day postings all this week, as it is a week long birthday tribute to Mickey Mouse. That will be followed by all Thanksgiving themed songs until the end of November, and then, Countdown to Christmas! Speaking for Thanksgiving, may you all have a wonderful and memorable holiday! I am thankful for so much, and all of you that follow me and appreciate what I do is definitely at the top of that list! Talk to you all soon.
November 1, 2015 Well I achieved my goal, and completed editing all of Chapter 1 before the end of the month. I posted the final track yesterday evening. I'm so glad to put that chapter behind me and move onto a new project. I love the way the chapter turned out, and feel it is a complete and perfect representation of the history, the themes and all the emotions associated with the entrance to Disneyland. I would say the chapter is "Done" but those who have been following me for a while know, I never say a chapter is done, just "Fully Updated" because new audio will often come along and the chapter will be added to in the future. But to date, everything I have in my possession that represents this chapter has been posted. A good example of my reasoning for the "Fully Updated" designation is my Rivers of America chapter. At one point I gave that chapter the full treatment, much like I just gave to Chapter One, and had it fully updated, but over a year has passed since then, and I now have more to add to that chapter, and will be including more tracks in the future. Although some chapters have a lot of spaces that say "Coming Soon" and others do not have any, this is not a prediction of what is to come. EVERY chapter will be getting the same RE-DO full treatment that I gave to Chapter One. I just decided to do some preset work for a few chapters I will be attacking sooner than the others, in order to have them ready to work on. So you will notice Chapters 2-4 and Chapters 22-25 have A LOT of "Coming Soon" slots in place and that is because these are my priority chapters to get done first, before moving onto the middle chapters 5-21. The two exceptions to this are Chapter 9 "Rivers of America" and Chapter 19 "Disneyland Hotel" - Because I have once already given those 2 chapters the full treatment, and even though I do have more to add to both, these will not undergo as intense of a Re-Do as the others. So if you are keeping score: Chapter 1 - Fully Updated My next mini project, as sort of a break for myself, is to concentrate on all of the 1980's Anniversary celebrations. This will effect chapters 25 and 24. After I complete this side project, I will go back to Chapter 2, and give it the full treatment, including the Railroad tracks everyone has been patiently anticipating. Here is a "To Do" List I just made for my 1980's Anniversaries side project... Chapter 25 Chapter 24 - TV Land Part 2 - 30th Anniversary Special - Mickey's 60th Birthday Special I know the list seems long, but the reason I consider this a break is because with one or two exceptions, these are all easy to edit, and with one or two exceptions they are all short tracks less than 10 minutes long. Also there are no area music loops involved in this go-round. So I should be able to fly through these tracks and then get started on Chapter 2 very soon. I am also at 983 tracks as of this moment, so I am exciting to get to track number 1000. The easy editing of the above list will allow that to happen faster. Now, about the new audio I added since my last blog post. You will find all the new tracks (with one exception) on this page... http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html Track 7 - The Disneyland Story - I did some minor tweaking to this track, I improved some of the transitions, and the ending fades out a bit slower. I also tried to make the sound quality of the dialogue more consistent. Tracks 39-42 Kodak Home Movies - I have completed the remaining audio form the vintage Super 8 films. There are now 7 different versions you can check out. These are a lot of fun, with fun music. Track 43 - Disney University - Cast Member Orientation - I have gone into detail as to what this track consists of in previous blog posts, so I will not be redundant here. This was the final track I completed and was just posted yesterday. It was extremely challenging to edit. Lots of clean up was evolved, and lots of cutting and moving things around to remove references to Walt Disney World while keeping the information intelligible. Overall this was a major project representing hours of hard work. I saved the hardest for last, but it came out very good. Please check this one out. Track 47 - The Gift Giver Extraordinaire - This track includes an introduction by Jack Wagner and then the entire 1983 era Fantasyland King Aurthur Carousel Band Organ Loop, with special 5 o'clock whistle sound effects between each musical segment to represent the steam whistle sounds made when grand prizes were awarded. After viewing several amateur videos of the Gift Giver posted on Youtube, it became apparent that it actually did use the same loop as the carousel. Track 49 - Storage Lockers - Area Background Music - This loop is a bit of artistic license and foggy memory on my behalf. Every version of the recorded narrative/locker instructions used at this location that I have ever come across is underscore by a piece of music from an album called Disney Strings Fantasy, which was released in Japan in the mid 1980's. The song used was "Heigh Ho" which comes from volume 2 of this series. There were two volumes produced. So I decided to create a loop using volume 1 and volume 2 of this collection of instrumentals in its entirety. If I recall correctly, back in the 80's and 90's there was in fact faint music heard inside the main gate lockers that was unique to that facility, and it may not have only been the song Heigh Ho on a repeating loop. As I remember, and I could be wrong, there was a whole collection of songs heard inside the locker building. So with that in mind, I decided to include both albums. Besides that, the music is fantastic, so why not use it? The final new addition I made since my last blog post can be found on this page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/179-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-22.html Track 21 - For 30 Years We've Been Coming Together - This song is from the 1985 Disneyland 30th Anniversary TV special. A Facebook friend sent me his recorded copy of the full, uncut TV special, with very good sound quality compared to other versions I have come across. This is also why I decided to do all the 1980's Anniversary stuff now, before I start chapter 2, because I am excited to have finally obtained a good copy of this TV special, and I am excited to edit it. A couple other things to mention before I close out today's blog. I have been getting the hang of Facebook, and after trying out a "Page," I decided it was a better idea to start a group. Groups allow a lot more interaction with others than do pages. I still have my page active, but I have not been focusing on it anymore. Now my Facebook time is spend interacting within my group. If anyone would like to become a member of my group, it is called "Disney Music Fans" and we are now 1800 plus members strong! We have a lot of fun talking about Disney music in the parks and movies, sharing pictures, and posting Youtube clips of Disney songs. Please stop by and join our fun group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/DisneyMusicFans/ I am also in talks with a great friend of mine about doing a weekly podcast. So in addition to MouseMusic, which is a monthly show, I may be hosting a new weekly show about all things Disney. We will likely start recording in a couple weeks. So look out for that. In anticipation of this new podcast, I purchased a top grade microphone, So the sound quality will be premium. Before now i was using a camera mic, and the sound was not up to quality standards. My other friend already has very good mic, so we will sound great! Another recent purchase I made was a program I mentioned in a previous blog that reduces harsh "S" sounds or sibilance from recordings. This sure came in handy when doing my vintage film strip recordings for chapter 1. So as you can tell, I have been making some investments out of my own pocket to improve my podcasts and website. So now is a good time to once again remind you that I do take PayPal donations. As I am disabled and on a fixed income, it would be most appreciated if anyone could help out. Any amount you are able to spare is more than appreciated. I am also going to start selling t-shirts that I designed in the very near future, of which all the profits will also go towards my website and podcast projects. Here is a link to my PayPal page --- http://disneychris.com/donate.html Hope everyone had a happy and safe Halloween. Can't believe Christmas is so close now. Where did this year go? Well, talk to you all soon, and stay tuned for more...
October 20, 2015 Time for another update. Some great things have been added to the site in the past 20 days, and I would love to share. So you can follow along, all of the additions to the site I will discuss in today's blog post are located on this page... http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html As I mentioned in my last update, I was on the fence about waiting until a future date or now tackling the 8 tracks located on Chapter 1 that involve audio taken from vintage home movie projector films, often to referred to as "Super 8" Well I made up my mind and decided to go ahead and get them done now. So far I have posted 3 versions. These are tracks 36-38. Each of these films were called "A Day at Disneyland" and could be purchased at the park as a take home memento of your visit, if you happened to own a movie projector at home. Back then, many people did, because this was before the advent of the VCR. These films were first available in the 50's and could be purchased throughout the 60's, but it was not until 1974 that they included sound, so this is why I have started at that year. Every 1-2 years a new version would be produced to reflect changes made to the park, and each version had unique audio, although some are similar. I have two more of these Day at Disneyland films left to edit, as well as one called An Evening at Disneyland from 1977, and a sort of background/brief history of Disneyland called "Disneyland From Dream to Reality." I actually ended up purchasing some new editing software that is specifically used for an issue in vintage recordings called "sibilance." This is when the 'S' sounds are too strong resulting in distortion. One of the films left to edit has some significant sibilance issues and I needed to come up with a solution. I think I am going to be able to repair the issue, but I have to play around with the new software and learn how to use it. It is a brand new toy for me. Surprisingly, it is the most recent of the recordings. The 1980 version of A Day at Disneyland that is the problem child. So stay tuned for updates on these Super 8 additions. The other track that also involves audio from a movie projector film, is actually my "Disney University" track, which is number 43 on the page. I have the audio from a 1970's training film used for newly hired cast members at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. This film had some serious audio issues and major damage to correct. I have finally got my first draft edit done, but it was not easy. I finally chose to mask some of the minor remaining flaws by having the clicking sound of a film projector underscoring the entire film. I have shared the audio with one person to see what their opinion of this was, and they liked the effect. As a prologue to the film, I am using audio from a segment in a documentary produced in 1985 called "In Search of Excellence" which discussed in detail the Disney University and cast member training method. It was actually filmed at Walt Disney World, but I have cleverly removed all Florida references and re-edited this to be a Disneyland segment instead. The way I edited the documentary ends with the "class" entering a movie theater to watch a training film, and that is when the 1970's filmstrip audio begins. I still have a ton of final editing to do, but the main set up is completed. I hope to have this done by the months end. Two tracks I just added in the past 48 hours are my "Alternate" version mixes of the 1992 and 2004 main gate area loops. I have taken each song from both of these loops and chosen alternate versions of the music that are usually the original soundtracks, but in the case when the original soundtrack version is already in the real loop, I have picked other fun alternate versions. Each loop runs over and hour, and they are a whole lot of fun. I have been listening to them quite a lot. They are among my personal favorites now. These can be found at track 53 and track 57. Incidentally, these two alternate mixes where a major pain to edit. There were a lot of issues I had to clean up in some of the older recordings. I used to just let these things slide, convincing myself people will understand it is older audio and not expect perfection, but now that I have the tools to improve the audio, I have been revisiting many of my old 1930's - 1960's favorites, and making them better. So these two track literally took me weeks to perfect. And finally, I would also like to invite anyone interested to join a new Facebook group I have started called "Disney Music Fans." https://www.facebook.com/groups/DisneyMusicFans/ We are nearly 1700 members strong already, and we all have a lot of fun discussing all things Disney and Music related, sharing audio clips from Youtube and archival Disney photos. Please come and join us! So that is all for now. Stay tuned for more!
October 1, 2015 Time for another update. It may seem that not much has changed over on my site, but I have added a few new tracks, and have been doing some "behind the scenes" preparations for several other tracks I am planning to add. So there is quite a bit to fill you all in on. First and foremost, I finally got around to creating a Facebook page for my website. This is the address: https://www.facebook.com/DisneyChrisWebsite - I plan to use this Facebook page as a way to better communicate directly with people who want to discuss my site and share ideas. I also have literally thousands of Disney images I want to share. In fact, I have already loaded over 5000 images to the page. I have been collecting Disney images while surfing the web for nearly a decade now, so I have a lot of gems to share. I will continue to use Twitter as well... @DisneyChris73 - So please like me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter if you have not already, and you can see all these wonderful pictures and also stay up to date with the many goings on of my website. I did not reach my goal, mentioned in my last blog post, of completing the four remaining tracks left to do on the "Welcome to Disneyland" page. This is because I had another one of my brainstorm incidents and thought up four additional tracks to add to that chapter. I often get a bolt of creativity each morning as I am getting out of bed. Some of my best ideas seem to happen to me this way. It is quite unusual. However, even though this has caused a slight delay, since my last post I have still managed to add four additions to the chapter and two of them are in fact the result of that brainstorm. Here is a link to the chapter so you can follow along... http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html The first two new additions are the full and complete, unabridged versions of both the 1992 Main Gate and 2004 Main Gate loops. Tracks 52 and 56. I spend a great deal of effort to find the best possible source recordings and did some major editing to make these loops sound crisp and clean. Likely the best version you have heard without actually being in the parks. Special thanks to my old friend RocketRods from Mousebits.com once again, for leading me in the right direction on this one. Major kudos! The two completed tracks which were new brainstorm ideas are number 7 and 35 - "The Disneyland Story" and "Parking Lot Tram Loading Zone." Both of these are pretty much the result of my lifting a self imposed restriction on duplicating anything on more than one chapter. There are just so many things that strongly belong in more than one catagory, so I am making the occasional exception to that old rule. The Tram Loading Zone has been on my Disneyland After Dark page for years now. But it really does belong on the Main Gate chapter as well, so I created a new version. This one is neat because it repeats the Jack Wagner spiel a few time over and over, just as it used to do when you were waiting for the tram at the end of the day. So it really makes you feel you are there, waiting in line, as it was back in the Disneyland of yore. "The Disneyland Story" is from the premiere October 1954 episode of the Disneyland TV series. I have had this on my Disneyland in TV Land chapter for several years as well. But again, this audio really belongs on the Welcome to Disneyland page as well, because this is really the first time Walt ever did welcome America to Disneyland, for real. So, I created a new and improved, extended version of this track. The challenge is that this archival footage has music underscore throughout, but the opening segment requires some of Walt's words to be extracted so it makes more sense as a non visual, audio only experience. Problem is, when you cut things out, it makes the musical underscore skip around. To solve this originally, I simply put new, loader music under Walt's vocals, to mask the quieter original music so you do not notice the cutting. My original attempt at this was pretty good, but you could still hear a lot of the original music in some spots, and it sounded a bit muddy here and there. So this time, I used my more advanced software to remove all the music entirely, so that when I put new music over it, it now sounds clear. This was not easy to do. I had to pretty much remove every bit of music by hand, cutting around the dialogue in the spectrogram (a visual representation of the audio) while trying not distort the natural resonance of Walt's voice. This took me days to accomplish, and it is actually only about 1 minute and 20 seconds of the 4 minute track. The rest of the track uses the original underscore. This 1 minute and 20 second segment took me about three days of very labor intensive work to perfect it. I am very happy with the final result, and hope you all will enjoy it as well. The other two new ideas that came to me that fateful brain storm morning, was to create two "Alternate Universe" versions of the 1992 and 2004 Main Gate loops. This is still a work and progress, but I am down to the final editing stage on both of these. All the initial set up is completed. This took me about 5 days of work to set up, so these and the "Disneyland Story" tracks are why I am behind now. What I mean by "Alternate Universe" is that I am placing all the same songs in the exact same order in a new mix, but using all different versions of the songs. So instead of the main gate instrumental version of Zip A Dee Doo Dah, the "Alternate Universe" version will have the original 1946 soundtrack version of Zip A Dee Doo Dah, etc etc. I already created an alternate version mix of the 1992 Main Street USA loop, and there was a lot of positive feedback on it, so I wanted to do more of these. They are a lot of fun, and I plan to do even more of them for other loops throughout the park in the future. I should have both of these Main Gate loops posted in the next few days. I have been listening to set up, non final versions of both and I am enjoying them a lot. They are really fun. I know you are all going to love these. By the way, if you have not checked out the Main Street USA alternate version mix, it is track number 11 on this page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/160-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3-setup.html So after those are done I will be working on track 48 "The Gift Giver Extraordinaire," and track 49 "Storage Lockers - Area Background Music" Then my goal as mentioned in my last blog post will have been reached. I mentioned also that I will not be editing the 8 tracks that involve audio ripped from vintage film strips until a later date. These are tracks 36-43. Now I am on the fence about this plan. After all the hard work I did with the "Disneyland Story" and the "United Airlines" tracks, these should actually be quite easy to edit in comparison. So I may just want to get the entire chapter updated now so I can entirely then focus on to something else and not have to look back. I will decide how I feel after the other four tracks are done. So stay tuned for my decision. Oh by the way, in case you didn't know, it's October again! So be sure to check out my daily Song of the Day each day this month. This is my fourth annual "Countdown to Halloween" - I can't believe it has been four years already! This year will be a lot of fun because I have "unearthed" (pun intended) several songs entirely new to the countdown. Don't miss it. Another thing I need to mention, even though I really don't like to, is that I really could use some donations. As a disabled person on a fixed income, it is sometimes hard for me to justify ithe amount of money I spend on the site, either with web service fees, or the cost of purchasing new content and software. So if anyone does have a little that they can spare, every little bit does help me a lot. I will also be doing DisneyChris.com t-shirts very soon, and hope to raise some money selling them. I have already designed them and they are going to sell very well I think. Hope all you reading this will want a t-shirt designed by me. For those who don't know, I actually have a bachelors degree in illustration, so I do know how to create a nice t-shirt. See Dad, all that money did not go to waste! To make a donation, you can go to this page... http://disneychris.com/donate.html And finally, I must thank each and every one of you who wished me a Happy Birthday last Sunday. It was overwhelming the outpouring of love I got that day, and it made me feel really special. I am a single guy with no kids and I live alone, very far from my family. It is difficult for me to get out of the house too, because of my disability, so birthdays and holidays can be a bit sad for me. But this year was very different thanks to all the on-line love I received. Thanks everyone, and right back at you.
September 16, 2015 I am going to try and do blog updates more frequently so that when I do write them, there is less to cover, and it is not as daunting a task. So here is a comparatively brief update on what has happened since last week. As promised in my previous post, I have been working on the seven remaining (non Super 8 filmstrip) tracks from chapter one. So far I have completed three... track 20 "Music to Ride Monorails By," track 22 "United Airlines In-Flight Music" and track 30 "Disneyland Main Gate - Original Area Background Music" - All found on this page: http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html So that leaves just four more... Track 45 - The Gift Giver Extraordinaire I would like to have these done by my birthday, as a little reward to myself. My birthday is on the 27th, so that is 11 days. I think it is possible. A little background info on the three tracks I just added since my last post. I have had some inquiries regarding all of these in either a forum I frequent or in my direct email. So rather than retype all my answers to the questions I was posed, I am going to paste these here, and you will get some interesting info on these three additions. 1 - "Music to Ride Monorails By" - I was asked if I could provide a track list for my recently posted "Music to Ride Monorails By" track. Here was my response... 1 - The Monorail Song - Buddy Baker This track was inspired by a collection of audio found on a Disney fan blog called DesignerLand - http://disneydesignerland.blogspot.com/ I used many of the same songs from that collection, but added in several of my own selections as well. 2 - "United Airlines In-Flight Music" - This audio was sent to me by an anonymous source, and is from an actual in-flight entertainment audio option for United Airlines passengers, from about 12 years ago. This source wanted me to explain the process I used to edit this track. Here was my answer to them... I knew you were looking forward to this one, and I only put it off as long as I did because I knew it was going to be a monster to re-edit. I mixed in the music from the actual CD to match what was on the original track. In some cases I extended the song, because I felt the way it was presented in the original version felt too truncated. I also changed the way some the songs ended, because the CD these came from had a lot of fading out and not a solid ending. Small World's ending is a good example of this. I took the ending from a different source and matched it to the other version for a more dramatic finish, rather than just a slow fade out. Also, there was a major editing error in the original version, When the narration introduced the Country Bears, you heard "Laughing Place" and when he then introduced Splash Mountain, you then heard "The Great Outdoors" when it should have been the other way around. So I had to fix this, and it was very tricky to get it to sound right, due to the underscore music the led into the songs did not want to cooperate without a lot of fudging and editing trickery, I also left out three major songs, just to keep the flow of the program better. One song is the Tough to Be A Bug "We're Pollinators" song. Due to its very short length, it just felt tacked on, and did not fit the rhythm of the rest f the musical selections. The other DCA song I left out was the Eureka California parade. This was more a personal preference. I wanted to extend some of the Disneyland songs and keep the track down to an hour, so since I really do not like this music, it was placed on the chopping block. Last song I eliminated was the Space Mountain music. Again I wanted to keep it under an hour. The last piece of narrative is the Tomorrowland lead in, other than a very short goodbye at the very tale end, so with Space Mountain, Star Tours, and Believe. There's Magic in the Stars all squeezed together, it just seemed like too many songs with no narration compared to the rest of the program. So to keep the fluidity consistent, I scratched Space Mountain. I also reprised the United Airlines Rhapsody in Blue theme at the end of the track and added airplane landing sounds. I moved the "Comeback to Disneyland Real Soon" to AFTER "Believe" when it was original placed before it. One last challenging thing was the Superstar Limo track, which is actually not referenced as being from that attraction. (Must have already closed by the time the recording was made, but they had only this one option on the CD to represent Hollywood Backlot) I spent a great deal of time redoing the fade transitions from scene to scene, because the original "Studio Produced" mix sounded way off. The transitions just did not flow right from scene to scene. Being the perfectionist that I am, I worked very very hard to get these transitions to sound more naturally flowing and on the right beat. So everything I just mentioned is what I did to preset the track. And all this was done over a month ago. Then came the final editing process a few days ago, and this was the part I was dreading. The issue was not the musical portions, but the narrative. It contained so much distortion - waving from right channel to left channel, clicks pops and other editing glitches it was "Re-donk-ulous" And I knew it was going to be a major headache to clean. And it was. For example. The narrative between Indiana Jones and Pirates is just under one minute long, but took me four hours to clean. I had to remove all the errors by hand and try to fill in the spaces with audio grabbed from other sections of the track nearby in order to cover up the extracted portions. This is a trial and error process and can sometimes be very very difficult to get just right. When there are dozens of these little glitches, it can be a nightmare if you are not the patient and dedicated type. 3 - "Disneyland Main Gate - Original Area Background Music" - I was asked to explain the time period this loop was used, and I added in a brief history of Disneyland's Main Gate background music loops in general... To answer your question about the time period. This loop was first used in 1971 and was not removed until 1992. Prior to 1971 they did not have a main entrance loop. There were only recordings from loud speakers directly at the ticket booths, but these just included narration explaining new attraction offerings, park hours and the ticketing system with very occasional underscore music, and more often no music at all. It was the official Disneyland voice over man, Jack Wagner, that pushed the whole concept of area music, and in 1971 he created this loop himself using various commercially available albums of the period. Some of the songs were not even Disney, such as some selections from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. A lot of people remember this loop fondly, because it lasted at the park for over 20 years, There have in fact only been 4 area loops used at the Disneyland main gate in its 6 decades. And one of them is almost exactly the same as the one used prior to it, with only two additional songs added in, so technically there have only been three. The second one came in 1992. That was the year when a lot of the loops for Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland and Walt Disney World that Jack Wagner had originally created in the 70's and 80s were finally retired, some after twenty years of use. The new Euro Disneyland in Paris inspired a whole new emphasis on area music, and along with its premiere came a wealth of newly recorded in-park area music, much of which quickly migrated to all the other Disney parks around the world. This too was when the Disneyland main entrance loop was changed. The 1992 loop lasted until 2001 - When DCA opened, a new loop was then needed that included songs representing BOTH adjacent parks. Many of the 1992 songs were included in the new 2001 loop, but there were also several new versions of Disneyland themed songs and also many DCA themed songs were added to the new mix. Then in 2004, they reworked this loop to include two additional songs, representing two recent additions to the parks, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and the new Bugs Land. No songs were removed, just two additional songs were added in. Since 2004, the loop has remained unchanged. On my site I do represent the 1992 and 2001/2004 Loops. However, they are currently abridged versions. It is my intention to extend both of these to be the full one hour plus loops. So look for both of those in the next few days. Still working on them. I will be including the 2004 version and not the 2001 version, since as I explained before, it is just the same, but only with two additional songs. ------------------------------- In another bit of exciting news, I have kept this on the down low for many months, but now that the documentary has aired I can spill the beans. I was approached at the start of the year by the producers of the PBS American Experience documentary on Walt Disney's life. In doing their research, they came across my website. They were interested in using two of my edited mixes for their program. I explained to them that I hold no rights to this audio, and they would have to contact Disney. I explained that Disney likely has this same audio in their vaults and they may provide it to you directly, and if not, I would need to know that they offered their ok to use my audio. So they contacted Disney and got back to me. Disney gave the producers the green light to use my audio. In return for using it I asked if I could have a credit at the end of the film, and they obliged without a beat. They asked for two specific pieces. One was my 1969 ride thru reenactment of the Mark Twain Steamboat. The other was my Monsanto House of the Future mix with period 50's music. Here is where they are located on the site: Track 8 - The Mark Twain Steamboat - 1969 Excursion - http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/139-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-8.html Track 13 - Monsanto House of the Future - http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/144-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-13.html So I knew since January about this, but told only family and very close friends, just in case they decided to not use the audio. I was not asked to make this a secret, but I chose to do so in case the deal fell through. I did not want to end up with egg on my face. So last night the documentary aired and both pieces of audio were used. Just short snippets of each, but was still amazing to be a part of a full scale production like this. If anyone missed the documentary on PBS, you can watch it in its entirely here - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/walt-disney If you are listening for my audio, you will hear it from the 3:00:50 thru the 3:02:25 mark. So that is all the news for now. Stay tuned for more new Chapter 1 audio, coming real soon.
September 7, 2015 Happy Labor Day! Time for another update. I decided not to wait so long this time to post a new blog. It makes it easier to write a blog when there is less time between the last post and therefore less changes to discuss. Nevertheless, there is still plenty to let you know about since my last update. Directly following my last blog update, I took a few days off from the "Disneyland Audio Tour" to get things ready for the months of October and November's "Disney Song of the Day." It gives me piece of mind to have the artwork and songs all set up in advance, so I can fully concentrate on the Disneyland stuff without a looming deadline to interrupt my creative process. This year, I am doing a more traditional Halloween countdown for the month of October. It is hard to believe this is my fourth annual Halloween Song of the Day Countdown. For those who may not remember, last year I focused on songs about the Disney Villains, but this year, I am doing a general Halloween theme, with only a couple of songs devoted to villains. However, the 2014 Countdown remains active so you can still go back and listen to all the villain songs anytime you like. I also have many songs all-new to the countdown this year, so lots of surprises are in store. For November I have two themed blocks planned during the course of the month. The first one is a week long tribute to Mickey's Birthday. Then I have the last 10 days of the month planned as a special Thanksgiving themed block. Again, some all new songs to the countdown will be featured in these blocks as well. Once everything was set up for "Song of the Day," I went back to my Chapter One editing for my "Disneyland Audio Tour," and completed the Superstar Limo Background Loop, found on this page, track 17 http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html The audio on this one was a major headache to clean up. The hour and five minute loop contains dozens of songs, as most of the songs are very short, many clocking in at just around one minute long. Also, each song had its own unique audio qualities to repair. So it was like editing several dozen songs all at once. Each requiring a different approach. Nothing was consistent from song to song. Some had a lot of background hiss, some had a lot of crackling, some had fade in and fade out issues, etc etc. Long story short, this one took me about 5 days of very hard work to perfect. The good news is that is came out very nice, and it sounds just lovely. Why am I including this track as part of my Welcome to Disneyland chapter when it is a Disney's California Adventure piece? Well, I wanted to use it because it does a fine job of musically setting the mood for mid 20th century Southern California freeway culture, and to me, Disneyland was as much a part of the automobile boom of this time as were drive-in theaters, motor lodges and drive-thru restaurants. Its success was so closely tied into the expansion of the Freeways during that era, that I wanted to represent that part of Disneyland history. It is the perfect music to do this, and also it was located in what was once the Disneyland parking lot. With so many connections to the "Welcome to Disneyland" theme, it was a no-brainer to include it. After I completed Superstar Limo, I took a slight detour to my new "Magical Milestones" chapter to include a new and 100% improved version of the Disneyland 30th Anniversary Parade. I was excited to share this one, so I did not want to wait until the rest of Chapter One was finished. An anonymous source sent me a version of this that had much crisper audio resonance than any version that has been floating out in internet land over the past several years. It still did still have to do some minor repairs and cleaning to do, bu the final outcome is a jewel. So wonderful to hear this audio in an unmuffled state. You will find it in two places: Ch 25 Track 24 http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/179-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-22.html Ch 5 Track 26 http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/129-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-4.html Following this side track, I returned to Chapter One. http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html I added all new and improved versions of two tracks that have been part of my site for quite some time. The first one is the "Main Gate Storage Locker Announcements" - Track 48. I was able to use the actual source music that underscores the narrative, and overlay it on top of the existing track to make the music louder. It sounds much better. The music was way too quiet before. Next change is to my Mickey and Friends track. Not sure why, but my original edit of this is one of the most often copied and reused tracks I have ever posted. I would come across it constantly on other web sites. My original was actually borrowed from Rick Conant's "50 Years of Imaginearing" collection which he released 10 years ago. I simply added the engine and horn sound effects on top of his original. I was never happy with this track for two reasons. 1 - It was not entirely my own creation asside from the sound effects, and 2 - the music used to underscore the narrative is actually from Disneyland Paris and is not authentic to the tram. However, until recently I did not have a copy of the audio without the music overlapped on it. Once I finally did come across the audio, sans musical underscore, I planned to make it my own by taking out the music. I also added a new preboarding introduction which was missing before now. Track 51. An all-new recent addition to Chapter 1 is track 18 "Disneyland-Alweg Monorail System." This is a neat piece of audio originally from the 1959 TV special "Disneyland 59" and acts as a perfect general introduction to the Monorail, which I have followed up by two other vintage Monorail related tracks just below this, tracks 19-20. Track 20 is still a work in progress but will be posted to the site very soon. Once these were done, I went back and made some minor improvements to all three of my recently added Monorail ride-thru tracks. This is numbers 19, 49 and 52. I cleaned up the horns and gliding noises a bit. I noticed some minor up and down waves in the volume when the horns overlapped the other portions of the soundtrack, so I corrected this and also removed a few other glitches here and there that I had missed before. I know, I am too much of a perfectionist. I can't help it. My final change to this chapter is track 58 - "Entering Disneyland - The Main Gate Tunnel" - This is another recent addition which I originally posted just a couple of weeks ago. After listening to it several times, I was just not happy with it. So I went back from scratch to do a 2.0 version. The newly added version is much better. I am much happier with the transitions and sound effects now. I am glad I went back to redo it. Check out the new version to see what you think. So my next order of business is to do the remaining 7 tracks on this chapter that do not involve any vintage 8mm film strip audio. I am saving those vintage audio tracks for another round of editing down the road after I get some other chapters updated first. They are going to be a major challenge to clean up, and I need to take a break from Chapter 1 for a while before I dig into the weeds with them. However, the seven that I will be redoing in this go round are... Track 20 - Music to Ride Monorails By The three followed by "New Version" in parentheses are already posted to the site, but I am redoing them. The new versions will now be the full loop. Currently they are each abridged versions. Each of the above tracks averages an hour in length, with the exception of "Music to Ride Monorails By" which is about 40 minutes long, so it will be a slow process to get them done. Will take me a week or so to get them completed. So as you can see, I have a full plate on my agenda. Be sure to check on Chapter One every day or so to see if any of these new tracks have been posted. Talk to you soon!
August 24, 2015 Hope everyone has been enjoying their summer. Sorry it has been so long since I have updated my blog. I have been really busy with the site though, and have much to share.As you may have noticed, the first four chapters and last four chapters of my Disneyland audio tour appear different than the middle 17 chapters, in that these have several tracks listed as "Coming Soon" - It is my goal to get these 8 chapters completed before moving onto the middle section of the tour. so I have set up those pages in advance to make it easier to add new audio as it is completed. This also allows you all a sneak peak into what I have planned for these 8 chapters. Keep in mind that none of these pages with "Coming Soon" tracks are cast in cement though. As I get into the weeds with each chapter, I often come up with many additional ideas and the list of "Coming Soon" tracks often changes and grows. Such has been the case with the present chapter I have been working on lately, Chapter 1 - Welcome to Disneyland. I decided to move to this chapter next and get a large portion of it done, since, after all. it is the opening page to the entire audio tour, and the most often visited page on my site. So it would be nice to have it as complete as possible so people who come to that page don't see.. "Coming Soon' posted all over the place. It may leave the wrong first impression. So I started to narrow down a definite program of tracks for the page, and it ballooned from an original plan of 45 tracks to the current 62. Presently there are 47 of these tracks available now, so that leaves a remaining 15 to edit and add to the page. However, I am also planning on redoing a few of the existing tracks. I will be redoing all three area loops so that they are the complete hour long versions. I am also redoing my Mickey and Friends Tram track, as well as the Main Gate Locker announcements which is being enhanced with improved background music. The first new addition I worked on for this chapter is something I am very proud of, and that I worked very hard on. It is a special audio mix I created using dozens upon dozens of sound bites. I call it "Welcome to Disneyland" and it is a very special new introduction not only to this chapter, but to the entire Disneyland audio collection. This one is no longer marked "New" as it has been posted for over a month, but, it if you have not heard it yet, please check it out. It took me over a week of 12 hour days to get this right. It is perhaps the most difficult editing mix I have ever attempted, and it came out very well. Do not miss it! Chapter 1 track 1. Then I made a slight change to an existing track called "Walt Disney Welcomes You to Disneyland" - track 2 --- I shortened the track and moved the ending piece of music to track 9 instead, which is called "Disneyland Theme," because it is actually an instrumental version of the same song, and works much better as an ending there. Next new additions: Track 21 "The Disneyland Heliport" a special track representing the Disneyland Heliport taken from a vintage documentary Track 16 "Where the Santa Ana Freeway Meets Harbor Blvd" a a fun track describing the Freeway journey to Disneyland circa 1955 as described by Walt Disney himself Track 5 "Where it All Began - Walt Disney" Walt Disney's famous where Disneyland started quote with appropriate carousel music underscore Track 23 "The Disneyland Hotel Tram" - narrative and sound effects representing a trip from the hotel to the main gate. Track 26 "The Disneyland Gazette" - representing Disneyland's short lived in-park newspaper publication Track 29 "Disneyland's Official Host - Mickey Mouse" - A brief intro to Mickey as official Disneyland Host with fun underscore music. Track 45 "Disneyland Newsstands" and a track to represent the main gate Disneyland Newsstands as described by Jack Wagner with clinging cash registers. Track 25 "Ticket Booth Attraction Announcements" Three vintage main gate announcements. I found the original source music for all three and was able to overlay it over the narrative for much enhanced sound quality. Following these Chapter 1 additions, I moved onto presetting up most of the remaining tracks in advance, so that all that would be required before posting them would be a final run-through check, to clean up any remaining clicks or editing glitches after the tracks had already be mixed together. I took a couple weeks to do this, so did not add any new audio for a while. then last week I finished these presets, and began to go through and do final editing. I have been adding new audio since then. Sometimes the final checking stage can take a long time, depending on how many errors need to be corrected. Here is what has been added so far... Track 3 "Disneyland Introduction Jack Wagner" - This replaced an existing track for which I used a single piece of music to underscore a land by land description of the park. In this much enhanced version the new music matches the narrative, with several great instrumental versions of Disneyland songs underscoring the tour. This one was another really challenging editing job, but came out very well. Don't miss this one! Track 7 "Project Florida Prologue - Disneyland USA" - This is taken from the first five minutes of the 1966 Project Florida film, with cleaned up audio. Track 10 "Disneyland Symphony" - This is a mix of the entire 1956 Disneyland Record "Walt takes you to Disneyland" - I removed all of Walt's introductions (don't worry they can be heard in several other places on the site) and turned this into a full instrumental symphony. also removed any sound effects and the Tomorrowland Rocket announcements. So this is a nice and different music only version of this album. Track 13 "Every Day's a Holiday in Disneyland USA" - This track has been on my TV Land page for some time. I went back and gave it a thorough clean up, and this new version is by far better in sound quality. Still can be found on my TV Land chapter as well. I also replaced that version with this new improved track. Track 15 "Vintage Disneyland Radio Ads" - This is a new version of an existing track - I added two additional ads to this mix and cleaned up the existing ads. Tracks 19, 49 and 52 - The Mark III, V, and VII Monorails (Three versions of the Monorail) I have three versions of the Monorail spanning from the 60's through today. Each includes monorail ride through sounds, and appropriate music for each time period. Track 28 "Ken-L-Land Pet Motel" - This is the official theme song for the sponsor who ran the Disneyland Kennel for decades, and dog sound effects taken from the classic 1964 Disneyland sound effects album "Thrilling Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House" Track 42 "Meet the Disneyland Cast" - This is a segment from a 1985 special parade honoring the Disneyland cast. Track 58 "Main Gate Tunnel" - After an introduction from the 1956 film documentary "Disneyland USA" - I mix together audio to represent what you would actually hear as you pass through the tunnel to enter Town Square" After I finish the rest of this chapter I plan to move back to Magical Milestones or Central Plaza, two chapters I started but got side tracked on. I may skip 8 of the planned additions for Chapter One before moving onto the others for a while, as they are going to be difficult to edit, and may need a bit of a break before diving into them. These are numbers 34 - 41. Each of these uses old 8mm filmstrips as my audio source, and as you can imagine, the sound can be difficult to get right on these, since they are ancient recordings derived a less than reliable audio source. I do plan to get these done sooner than later, but may need to move to some easier projects for a while before I do, because some of my recent additions for chapter 1 have been quite laborious. I need a break. Don't forget, Supercalifragilestic September starts in a few days. This is a month long tribute to the Sherman Brothers. All the "Song of the Day" selections for September will be classic Disney songs written by this legendary song writing duo. Then October will be a month long Halloween celebration. As always, any donations you could make to my site would be most appreciated. It costs a lot of money to maintain and add new content to DisneyChris and anything you could contribute would be most appreciated. You can make a donation by following this link...Donate to Site Enjoy the rest of your summer, and stay tuned for more great audio to come...
July 13, 2015 It has been way too long since my last blog update, so it is high time to get you all up to date on the many happenings here at DisneyChris.Com. Before I get started, let me first mention a the status of the website called Mousebits.com. I have always been a frequent visitor to that site, and was very active in the chat forums there. Because I have a website and make my email address public, I have been contacted by many members of Mousebits asking me what the status is of the website, which has been down for a few weeks now. As far as I know, the site is going to return. I spoke with one of the administrators and he told me that their server crashed. They have to rebuild the entire site, and it may be some time before it gets done, but they fully intend to bring it back. That is all the information I have so far. I will keep you all updated if I find out more.
Since my last blog post, I first began to add content to my new Magical Milestones chapter. http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/179-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-22.html - I completed the entire block of songs for Mickey's 50th Birthday, and continued on to the 25th Anniversary block. I still have two more songs to complete for that section. I am currently working on the 25th Anniversary Parade. Just yesterday someone sent me a much better audio quality version of this parade so I am really excited to post a pristine quality version for all to enjoy. The version I already have on my "I Love a Parade" chapter does not include several segments of the parade, but I now have the soundtrack in its entirety. Every segment will now be included. I should have this completed by today or tomorrow.
After I finished some work on the new "Milestone" chapter, I decided to get all of my "Song of the Day" artwork and audio tracks set up from now until the end of September, so I do not have to worry about it and can fully concentrate on adding content to the Disneyland Audio Tour. I currently have a special tribute to Disneyland's 60th Anniversary going on, and every day until the end of July the songs will be related to Disneyland. I also decorated my site with some special 60th Anniversary artwork. August will be a regular rotation of songs, but for September, I have a special month long tribute to the Sherman Brothers planned. It is going to be a lot of fun.
After completing my "Song of the Day" set up, I moved onto a major project that I wanted to have done in time for the 60th birthday of Disneyland, which is July 17th. It is a special mix I created to act as an introduction to the entire Disneyland Audio Tour, track one, chapter one. http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html - I call it "Welcome to Disneyland" - I have dozens of sound bites overlapping music to represent all the many unique narratives and sounds you hear in Disneyland. It is inspired by the Disneyland tour segment from the "Remember Dreams Come True" fireworks show, but it is my own take on it. Due to the many overlapping bits of audio, from so many different audio sources, this took me over a week to edit. It is one of the most ambitious tracks I ever attempted to mix, and I am very proud of how it turned out. Please check it out, and would love to have some feedback and what you think about it.
Following that project, I received my long awaited digitally converted copies of two of the albums on my "Disneyland Records" page. http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/134-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-21.html Tracks 59-60 "March Along with Mary Poppins" - and track 89 "Kids of the Kingdom Show album" - I edited these right away and added them to the site. I was excited to share them. I now only have one missing track from this chapter. I am waiting for my pal who does the recording for me to send me the missing file. It is "Your Trip to Disneyland on Records" - As soon as he gets this to me, I will be posting it, and will have the entire chapter 100% updated.
The Kids of the Kingdom Show album I just added to the Disneyland Records chapter involved several other tracks from other chapters that I either updated, or newly added. I revised my "Kids of the Kingdom - I Love a Parade Medley" on my "I Love a Parade" page, track 12 - http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/129-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-4.html - In addition to a much crisper version the song "The Glorious Fourth," it now includes an additional song called "Freedom" which I have confirmed was performed as a PreParade number at the start of America on Parade.
I then extended my "Bicentennial Medley" to include songs for the "Show album" on my "Holiday Time" page, track 48 - http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/137-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-19.html - And I added "Lady America" to my "Disneyland Showtime" chapter, track 5 - http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/143-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-12.html
The last "Showtime Album" addition I made is sort of up in the air right now. I posted a track called "Hotel Convention - Kids of the Kingdom" track 9 on this page - http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/131-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-17.html - I was trying to figure out exactly what the purpose of this show was, and was getting mixed information. I made a major educated guess that this was a road show used for conventions. bassd on the name in the song lyrics "Center City" which could possibly be replaced with the "city of your choice" to coincide with whatever venue the show was being staged at, and the fact that I know it was once performed at the Galleria Mall in Glendale CA. However, I have been speaking to a former cast member who worked in entertainment at the time this show was created, and he seems to think, as now do I, that this was actually not a traveling road show for conventions, so I may need to remove it from its current location and rename the track. While I do know it was performed outside the park at that particular mall, it may have been a one time only event, and not something that was a regular practice. My new thinking is that the show may have been staged concurrently with the other "Lady America" show. I know that for the 25th Anniversary in 1980, the show called "Disneyland is Your Land" was staged at the same time as another Kids of the Kingdom show called "The Best of Disney." One show played during the weekdays, and the other show on weekends. So I am now thinking it is possible that there were also two different bicentennial shows which followed this same pattern. It think that is a much more likely scenario.
So I will likely move that track to my "Disneyland Showtime" page. However, I am thinking about replacing the current "Convention" track on the Hotel page with a medley of many different Kids of the Kingdom songs from all different shows. I do know that they made frequent guest appearances at the hotel, and performed many different shows there, so would be a good way to represent that. Stay tuned for those updates.
So I hope everyone is enjoying their summer so far. If you are like me, and will be unable to attend Disneyland for the 60th Anniversary, try and do something special to honor the day, and make it special for you, so you do not feel left out. Prepare a Disneyland recipe, watch some old Disneyland clips on Youtube, and of course, listen to some Disneyland audio. Make the day special for you. Talk to you soon.
June 8, 2015 It's high time for another update. A lot of major changes have occurred to the site since my last post, so it is time to fill you all in. First of all, I decided to delay my original plan, mentioned in the end of my last blog post, of continuing on with editing the Central Plaza tracks. This is still on my to do list, but I needed to find a different project that did not involve any audio for a short time, because I was having some major repair work being done to my apartment and the noise would make it impossible to edit new tracks until the work was done. I had a slow leak coming from above the ceiling of my bathroom, and the ceiling had to be fixed after the leak was stopped. New drywall had to be put in, and the bathroom had to be painted. While they were at it, they replaced the floor tiles in my shower, because the old floor was cracked. (That was like that for several months but it finally got fixed) - So I had to move everything from the bathroom out into the main room. I live in a small studio so it caused major chaos to do so. However, they also decided to give me a brand new kitchen counter and new cupboards, because the tiles in my kitchen were messed up as well. So again, I had to move everything from the kitchen into the main room. I was buried in my own possessions for about a week. To add to the problem, all the tile cutting and the drilling of a hole in the counter top to fit the new sink had dust flying everywhere in my apartment. So once all the work was done, I had a major mess to clean. I had to move all my furniture, dust everything I own down to the smallest knick-knack, and scrub down the floors. It took me three days of hard labor just to clean up after all the repair and installation work was done. I finally finished three days ago, and my life is back to normal. So here is what I did while all this was going on. First of all, I decided to go through all the images loaded up onto my site, and reorganize everything. I deleted any duplicate images, placed everything in the proper folders, and renamed the images to make them easier to locate. This is something I have been wanting to do for a long time. Although it is a major headache, in the long run it will make my life easier. So I did complete that chore, and my site is now super streamlined when it comes to images. If anyone is browsing through my site, and notices any missing images, or pictures in the wrong places, please let me know. I may have missed one or two here and there with the many thousands of pictures I have posted. Next thing I decided to do was to set up all the visual elements for chapters 1-3, aka "Welcome to Disneyland," "Hometown USA" and "Meet Me Down on Main Street." So as I have done for Central Plaza (chapter 4) I put into place all the images and wrote the new liner notes for all the tracks I am going to be adding to those chapters in the near future. Basically that means everything but the actual audio is done for those three chapters. So you can now get a preview of all the exiting additions that are coming. Anything marked "Coming Soon" will have no audio, but everything else on those pages is already available to hear. I will explain each track in finer detail as I add the actual audio files in, so stay tuned for more information in future blog posts. Here are the links to those three chapters so you can check out the new pictures, liner notes and get a preview of the audio that will be added in the future... Welcome to Disneyland -http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html Town Square -http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/127-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-2.html Main Street -http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/160-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3-setup.html The final non audio related project I just completed yesterday is the addition of an all new chapter! Chapter 25 This is devoted to all the birthday and anniversaries that have been celebrated in Disneyland. I call it "Magical Milestones." I originally was going to include all this material as part of my "Holiday Time in Disneyland" chapter, but since then, I have acquired a lot more audio related to anniversaries, and also, with the 60th Anniversary in full gear, it's going to add even more to the list, so I now had enough material to justify a special chapter. I am not going to go into too much detail about what I am planning to add, but I have the entire page set up now, so you can go read all the liner notes and preview everything that will be added. As I add in the audio, I will explain things in more detail. You will notice that nearly everything is currently marked "Coming Soon" but there are 7 tracks on the page currently, carried over from when they were placed on my "Holiday Time" page. You may want to check out the Holiday Time page. I changed the artwork a bit in the third section, under the Halloween section, because it no longer includes birthdays. Here are the links to those chapters: Holiday Time in Disneyland (scroll down towards bottom of page to see changes)http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/137-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-19.html Magical Milestone (All New Chapter) http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/179-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-22.html So that is all I have to report on for now. I kept it brief this time, because I have not added any new audio since my last update, but as you can see, that does not mean I have not been busy. I will begin to work on audio again right away, because things are finally back to normal, and the dust has literally settled. Talk you all again soon.
May 21, 2015 Hey everyone. Time for yet another update. A lot has been added to my website lately, so again, it is time to bring you all the latest happenings. Before I get into the new additions, I want to share an email I sent to a fan of my website, because he was asking if I was planning on including a version of the Monsanto House of the Future without musical underscore. Also the other day someone asked me why one of my loops was not the full version. Since this seems to be something that needs to be addressed, so that everyone understands what my plan is for the future of the site, here is my emailed reply... I am planning on doing a new and improved version of my Monsanto track in the future. My collection has sort of taken on a change of purpose over time, and many of my older edits are from a different era in my ever evolving story. When I first started creating my Disneyland audio library, it was with the intention of creating a collection of Compact Discs, that I burned multiple copies of and shared with family and friends. This was before a lot of audio was being shared via the internet. Then when I discovered on-line media sharing, I continued with the mind set of creating everything in Compact Disc format. This meant that everything had time limits on it, since a CD is 80 minutes long. This meant that I had to shorten things and leave a lot out. This also meant that I wanted to include musical underscore for everything, because it was not a random choice of what you listen to, but a set program of tracks, meant to be listened to in a certain order, and so it was much more focused on music rather than straight sound effects or narrative. I started my website about 3 years ago. When I did so, I basically transferred all my audio library I had originally created for these CD collections onto my web site. Over time I have been changing these. I have been extending loops that I had originally abridged for time into the full versions, I have been adding multiple versions of tracks, so that there are versions with and without music. I have also acquired tons of new material to add. When my Disneyland Audio Tour first went live on my site 3 years ago, there were less than 400 tracks. Now there are 925. And I have over 500 more yet to add, and even more yet to re-edit, extend and improve. This is an ongoing project that is going to take a couple years to complete. I add an average of 1 new track a day. So with hundreds to add, it is going to take a while. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If anyone has any questions about the above email, feel free to email me anytime. Now onto the business at hand. Since my last update, I have completed all but four of the tracks for my Disneyland Records chapter. The four that are not posted yet are on hold until June, as mentioned in my last blog, because the person who does the conversion from vinyl to digital for me is out of town until then. So as soon as they have returned I will be able to complete the entire chapter. Everything else is done. Here is a link to that chapter so you can follow along as I list the new additions since my last blog post... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/134-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-21.html Tracks 57-58 Thrilling Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House - This was a major headache to edit, not just for me, but I am sure for my neighbors as well, because they must have heard screaming and crashing and banging for hours and days on end. The problem in editing this, even though it came from a digital source, is that no attempt was ever made to remaster this album. There was a unforgivable amount of background hiss, and major distortion in many sections. Another issue was the old school methods used to originally edit this album together. Because the audio sources used to create this back in 1964 were from many multiples of sources, a lot of scissor and tape editing was obviously done, and in many cases the remnant glitches are very detectable and not easy to ignore, even if you are not as picky as I am. So I went in and did a thorough cleaning and re-editing of this entire album. I removed hundreds of glitches, all the background hiss and distortion. This album took me hours and days to edit. I am very happy with the results. You will not find a cleaner crisper version of this anywhere. If you have this in your collection already, please compare it to mine. The improved quality is astounding. Tracks 90-91 - A Musical Souvenir of America on Parade - Next project was to do a cleanup on this album. Again, I did not use a vinyl source, but used the "Walt Disney World Forever" collection version as my source. The tracks from that collection, which was once sold in kiosks at the Magic Kingdom back in the late 90's, was the exact same as the album. I compared the two. They were identical. So all I did was link all the individual tracks together as one continuous track (divided as Side A and Side B) and removed several glitches and some distortion issues. Sound quality is fantastic! I also replaced the version of the America on Parade track posted on my parade chapter. It is the exact same as the one on the Disneyland Records chapter, but it is not divided into Side A and B, it is the full soundtrack without interruption. It is track number 13 on this page: http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/129-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-4.html - I also created a third version of this on my "Holiday Time in Disneyland" page. This abridged version includes just the major patriotic anthems from the parade, Yankee Doodle Dandy, You're a Grand Old Flag, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Stars and Stripes Forever and God Bless America. It is to represent the Forth of July in Disneyland. Track 57 on this page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/137-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-19.html Track 86 - America Sings Original Soundtrack - I went ahead and did a new edit of this. I edited my original version years ago, and since I have much better software now, I decided to do an improved cut. I removed background hiss and corrected many of those aforementioned scissor and tape editing glitches. It sounds better, crisper and cleaner than ever. The America Sings track on my 1970's Tomorrowland page has also been replaced by this improved version. The only difference between the two is that the one on my Tomorrowland page does not include the exit music. I have the exit music as a separated track (which I also replaced with the newly edited audio) The album version on my Disneyland Records page does include the exit music as part of the same track, since that it the way it was presented on the original album. I also added a new track to the Tomorrowland 1970's page featuring three versions of "Bill Bailey Wont You Please Come Home," all performed by Betty Taylor, star of the original Golden Horseshoe Revue. She also sang this for the America Sings soundtrack. So I included a fun track featuring three of her different versions of this song. The Tommorowland page is here... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/146-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-15.html - And the newly added tracks are 2, 5 and 7. As a side note, I did not change side B of the America Sings album, because I had already had it posted on the page before I decided to include side A, and therefore it did not require any changes. Track 80-81 - Country Bear Jamboree Original Soundtrack - As with the America Sings album, it has been years since I did my original edits from this album, so I decided to do a new and improved cut. I redid both side A and B, and they sound better than ever. I also replaced both of these on my Bear Country Chapter as well... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/140-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-9.html- tracks 4 and 10 - The Country Bear Jamboree show is the exact same track that is on my Disneyland Records page. No changes at all. The Mile Long Bar, which is side B of the album has a minor tweak to the song ordering. The version on the Disneyland Records page is the same order as it was presented on the original vinyl. The version on my Mile Long Bar page just has the last song moved up to the front of the track, so that the second to last song from the album is now the last song on the Mile Long Bar version. I did this because I wanted to end it with the dramatic "Shave and a Haircut" with two heavy beats at the end of that song for the closing of the loop. It just makes a better finish in my opinion. After I finished the above tracks I took a bit of a side trip, and added one track to my Disneyland in TV Land part one page, Zorro TV series theme song. It is track number 35 on this page:http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/136-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-20.html - As is my nature, I added some fun extras to this, so it is different than the version you would hear officially from Walt Disney Records. I added a fun intro and some extra sound effects. Fun stuff! Then I finally got back to the Central Plaza Page - here is the link to that chapter, so you can again, follow along... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/150-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3b.html Track 5 - The Dapper Dans - Plaza Performance - This is a very old and authentic recording of the original incarnation of the Dapper Dans from the early 60's I am guessing. My source for this audio is from the Big Thunder Mountain queue area. The barbershop in the old west town plays these songs as you pass by. I am not sure what the original origin of these tracks is, but I am guessing they may have been recorded specifically for the Nature's Wonderland - Rainbow Ridge town barbershop back in 1960, and were retained for use at Big Thunder when the attraction was replaced. I took out all the sound effects and dialogue have presented the audio here as just the songs. There was also a huge amount of clean up needed on this audio. The source I had was very distorted with a lot of sibilance. (aka heavy 'S' sounds) and there was a lot of background noise, volume dropping and skips. Took me a couple days to edit this. A lot of work, but it sounds great now. At some point I will be replacing my Big Thunder Town Chatter over on my Frontierland page with an extended version, and will incorporate this improved audio into the new mix, so stay tuned for that. Track 17 - Adventureland Gateway - Barker Bird - I did some fact checking and a little research on this one. It turns out there were actually two versions of the Barker Bird dialogue used in Disneyland. The original version, which is currently posted on my Adventureland Page, did not include any sponsorship references. However, the version I have now posted on my Central Plaza page is totally different, and is what replaced the original when United Airlines took over as the sponsor. This is also the same version that would eventually be used in the Florida park as well, but because United was no longer the sponsor, they simply edited out all references to them as the sponsor, but kept the rest of the spiel intact. I basically have done the same with my Central Plaza version. I took out all references to United. So, the original version can be heard here...http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/130-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-5.html - Track 4 - and the later version is on the Central Plaza page. The Central Plaza version has no music underscore, but I did add music to the Adventureland version. I also plan to do a special United Airlines version of this in the future, which WILL include references to the airline, and will also include the Enchanted Tiki Garden presow, because their was also a second version of the preshow as well, which mentioned United Airlines several times. Stay tuned for that. Track 23 - Tomorrowland Gateway Area Loop - The next Central Plaza addition is an abridged version of the current Tomorrowland loop. I wanted to have a version of this that ONLY used the actual Disney songs included in this loop. So all the other music has been removed, and this version runs about 16 minutes. I also have an abridged version of the loop on my "Present Day Tomorrowland" chapter, but I fully intend to replace that version with the full one hour loop in the near future. So you will have the choice to either listen to just the abridged Disney version on the Central Plaza page, or the full uninterrupted loop over on the Tomorrowland page. I also obtained a much improved audio quality of this loop, so you will notice a major difference in the sound of the newly posted mix. The same will be true of the full loop, once I get around to replacing the one on the Tomorrowland page, so stay tuned for that too. Track 29 - Snow White's Grotto Area Background Music - This is taken from isolated sources of the frog sounds, bird sounds and music. Because I now have all of these as separated elements, which I did not before, I was able to make a much nicer mix of this than the version I had been using on my site prior to now. For the Central Plaza version, I added the Castle Area Background Music Medley in between two playings of the wishing well segment. So you will hear "I'm Wishing," the Castle Medley and back to "I'm Wishing" again for a second round. I wanted to give this the sense of being on a continuous loop, just as it plays in the park. I did a similar treatment to my Adventureland Gateway and Frontierland Gateway (tracks 15 and 19) on this same page, so it is sort of a running theme for this chapter. I also replaced the version of the Snow White Wishing Well on my Fantasyland page. This version is just one run through of the "I'm Wishing" segment, and does not include the Castle Medley. You will find that version on this page -http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/170-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-11-a.html - track 5 Track 33 - Castle Forecourt Mary Poppins Arrival - This fun little bit of audio includes a park announcement for the arrival of Mary Poppins, incorporating the original soundtrack overture from the 1964 film as background music. As she does today, Poppins would make an appearance in front of the castle for live impromptu shows and a meet and greet opportunity. I cleaned up this old piece of audio and added extra music at the end to make it a little more substantial of a listen. The original just faded out at the end, but in my version I carried the music to the end of the piece. As a side note, the version of the music they used for this was NOT from the film, but was from the 1964 vinyl released soundtrack, which had some slight variants. Track 16 - Chinatown Tearoom Restaurant - I had not originally even considered representing this on my website, as it is from an attraction that was never actually built. However, since it is significant to the history of the park, as it included the very first audio-animatronic human ever constructed, (even predating Lincoln) I decided to represent it in some way. What I have presented here is a totally imagined mix of songs that would have been appropriate as background music for this area had it ever been built. There is nothing authentic about this in any way. No known audio exists of this as far as I know, but my track is just meant to give the impression and set the mood for what might have been. I had a lot of fun doing this one. It was a bit of a challenge, because the type of music I wanted to use is actually not that easy to find. I wanted this to be an Americanized version of China, as it was thought of in the mid 20th century. After digging through many tracks, I found a handful that fit my criteria perfectly, and really capture the exact sound I was going for. All of the songs are not from the orient, but are American popular songs about China or Asia in general. They include: Chinatown My Chinatown, Hong Kong Blues, Fan Tan Fannie (From the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song) Japanese Sandman, and March of the Siamese Children (From Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I) - I also created a very dramatic intro to this mix using a loud gong and some dramatic Chinese Imperial type music, before fading into the first song. I am also quite proud of the image I edited for this track. I took a wax figure of Confucius, and cut him out, overlaying him in front of the Nine Dragons restaurant interior at Epcot and adding in some red dragon scrolls and a hanging red lantern. Came out very cute. Again, this is not an authentic image. This track is all make believe, but still a lot of fun. Please check it out. Track 7 - Plaza Inn Area Background Music - This is the most recent track added to the site. I completed it earlier today. A few areas of interest concern this track and the two following track on the same page. This version of the loop is not what is currently used at Disneyland. This is an older version, but it just so happens to still be in use at Tokyo Disneyland in their Crystal Palace restaurant. It may have been used at Walt Disney World's Crystal Palace too, before it was replaced by the current loop. Tokyo Disneyland seems to hang onto loops a lot longer, because guests develop an even deeper nostalgia for them than people in the American parks. Loops seem to be rarely replaced there. How did I get this loop, or even know it existed? Well a long while back, in passing, I mentioned to some fellow Disney theme park music collectors in an internet forum that I distinctively remembered hearing an instrumental version of the song "Summertime" from the Gershwin operetta "Porgy and Bess" playing at the patio area of the Plaza Inn when I was a young boy. I wanted to know if anyone had any information about this. I specifically remembered one section of the song in my head, and if I heard it, I knew I would recognize it. It sort of had the sound of a full orchestra, heavy on strings, like the Hollywood Strings Orchestra may have recorded it. Well, it turns out that Disney at one point published the track names of several of the Tokyo Disneyland loops in one of its theme park CD collections. It was sort of an odd thing, because none of this music was included in the collection, only the names of the songs in these loops. One of the loops included in this publication was for the Crystal Palace, and on that list was a Porgy and Bess medley. I knew this had to be the same loop I heard in Disneyland USA back in the 80's. It was much to much of a coincidence. However, all we had to go by was the names of the songs in the loop. We had no recordings of the loop, none of the artists names, and no dates. So what I did was check Itunes to see if a Porgy and Bess medley by the Hollywood Strings existed, and it in fact did! This had to be a match. Then one by one we began to put the pieces together, finding versions of the other songs that were likely from the loop. We often found versions by artists that we knew already had a connection to the parks because we were aware of other loops that used their music. We also found versions of songs that sounded like they had to be a match, because the song in question is normally played in a very different style, but the version we came across had a very distinctive Crystal Palace/Plaza Inn sound to it, so again, it was too much of a coincidence to not be a match. Mind you, all of these selections are only educated guesses. Nothing has been confirmed. I am hopeful that someday, someone who lives in Japan, or is a frequent visitor to Tokyo Disneyland will get me a live recording of this loop, so that I can confirm what I have, and add more to it. The version of this I had on my site before now was about 32 minutes long. The updated version is 45 minutes. Since I first made this mix, more of these possible tracks have been located, so I was now able to add a few more songs. Their are still some missing, but a good 75% of the loop, as best as I know it to be, is there. Side note, I also did a major clean up and re-edit on this as well, so the sound quality is much better than the prior version was. As far as track 8-9 - Track 8 will be the current loop in full. This is the next project on the docket. My current version is only about 1/3rd of the loop, and it also includes background sound effects replicating the sound of a restaurant. I plan to remove the sound effects, and just have the music. I have also purchased a few CD's and have the original studio recordings for every song in this loop. The current version circulating out there on the web sounds like it is likely from a live induction recording. My version will be 10 times better because it is not taken from a live in park source, but all studio quality sources. Track 9 is going to be a tribute to the live quartet ensemble that used to play in the atrium of the restaurant as guests dined. I have decided to use the aforementioned restaurant sound effects for this track instead of the background loop itself. It makes more sense, since this is supposed to replicate a live concert, and it will sound very authentic this way. Interestingly, the sound effects i am using come from the Haunted Mansion ballroom scene. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fwew, well that is all the additions for now. Much more exciting things are coming though. Before I close this blog though, I want to mention a couple more things. First of all, I want to remind anyone who is interested, that donations are greatly appreciated. It takes a lot of money to add new content, and I recently purchased several new vintage vinyl albums and other new music, so it would be nice to recuperate some of that investment if possible. to link to my PayPal page and make a donation click here.... http://disneychris.com/donate.html- any amount you can give is appreciated, and every little bit helps. Last thing I want to mention concerns several inquires made to me on Twitter concerning accessibility to my site via mobile device. If anyone has any technical know how, and is interested in partnering with me to create an app for my site that can be used on smart phone devices, please contact me. Remember, this is a volunteer assignment. I am a non profit site, so if you are interested in volunteering your time let me know. I know nothing about creating an app, and would have no idea how to go about doing it. Any help is greatly appreciated. Well, sorry to be so long winded today, but hope you appreciate a thorough update. Stay tuned for more, and have a great Memorial Day Weekend!
May 3. 2015 Sorry it has been so long since my last blog update. I have been very busy with the Disneyland Audio Tour, and have added lots of great new content since my last update. I recently reached a milestone, surpassing 900 audio tracks! So it is definitely time to do a full update. Since my last post, I went through every single planned addition for my Central Plaza chapter, and have done what I call an "initial set-up" for each and every track. http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/150-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3b.html All of the titles on the page marked with a "Coming Soon" next to it have been fully set up, and are prepped for final editing. Finale editing is a very tedious and time consuming job. I go through the entire track, second by second, and listen for any and all clicks, distortions of editing flaws, and correct them manually one by one. This can take me no time at all if there are few mistakes, or can take me hours and hours if there are many. I have spent as much as 8 hours editing just one minute of audio. After I took about 2 weeks to set up all these planned tracks, then I began to go through and do the final editing. Here are the new ones I added since my last update... Track 2 - Central Plaza Area Background Music - This track is the full 1992 Main Street USA Loop. I have the songs from this loop also posted on my Main Street and Town Square chapters, but this version is the full loop without interruption, in the proper song order. I decided to place this in Central Plaza because that allows me to use the loop split up in the other chapters to represent many different things, and yet still have a place to listen to it in full if that is your preference. For my version, I took the best sources I could find and cleaned them up the very best I could. For the most part, the sources are original studio recordings, but there are a handful of songs that were recorded live in the parks because the studio versions were never made available. With these live recordings, I worked very hard to clean up the audio and enhance the sound to make it a much better version that what I had to start with. Not perfection, but a huge improvement. This may be the very best version of this loop you will presently hear. Track 3 - Central Plaza Bandstand - This audio is authentic, and is also from the exact time period when the bandstand was in the park. I took it from the 1956 album "Disneyland Band Concert" - I purchased this album on Ebay and had it digitally converted for me. Then I went through and did a heavy clean up and click removal. The sound came out very nice. This track contains about 3/5ths of the album. The full album has been posted on my Disneyland Records chapter. I will discuss that chapter in more detail further down in this blog post. Track 4 - The Keystone Cops - Plaza Performance - This track comes from the same album mentioned above. One of the songs on the album was a live performance by this group. So again, this is authentic and of the proper vintage. Track 25 - Alpine Gardens Swiss Polka Band - Again, more tracks from the Disneyland Band Concert album. The album also contained some songs by the Polka Band, and I have represented them here. Track 30 - King Triton's Garden Ariel's Grotto - This short track represents the special music that was heard when Ariel made her entrance and exit at this former meet in greet area. Because the character had no legs, the throne she sat in would rotate to the back of the structure, and she would put on coveralls and exit out the back, out of sight of guests. Thanks to Rocket Rods, who made a live recording of this music back in the 90's, I was able to replicate this exact music. ------------------------ Upon completion of my Central Plaza Area Music loop, I redid and added more music to both my Main Street and Town Square chapters... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/127-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-2.html http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/160-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3-setup.html Town Square Track 3 You will also notice that track 12 on the Main Street page, the Wonderland Music Store - Wurlitzer Player Piano, has also been redone. This is a much improved and extended version of the track, using the materials I recently edited for my Disneyland Records chapter. ------------------------ Speaking of Disneyland Records. After I finished my initial setting up of all the tracks for my Central Plaza page, and did the Central Plaza area loop, I went back to my Disneyland Records chapter and completed several of the items that were marked "Coming Soon" http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/134-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-21.html I originally went back to this chapter to do the aforementioned "Disneyland Band Concert" album, because it contained content I needed to edit for Central Plaza. Once I was in the grove (no pun intended) I decided to stick with this chapter a while. I also decided to add more content to the chapter I originally was not going to include, so I had to come up with more artwork and write new liner notes etc. 1 -Walt Disney's Little Man of Disneyland - This album was a major challenge to edit. The copy I had was quite poor, and had a very bad echo effect. After a lot of blood sweat and tears, I was able to successfully clean it up. Sounds great, and I am very happy with the results. You should hear what I had to originally work from. You would be shocked by the difference. 3 - Your Trip to Disneyland on Records - This track was posted on my site, but I have temporarily removed it and marked it "Coming Soon" - I have a better copy of the album (hopefully) and will be replacing it soon. I am waiting for my friend to transfer my copy to digital. I removed the version that was there, because it is not up to DisneyChris.com standards. Stay tuned for this one! 4-5 - Walt Disney Song Parade - The very reason for my expansion over to the Central Plaza chapter was this album, and the themed land specific songs contained therein, which I have used for the the "Gateway" tracks over in that chapter. I finally went through and did the final edit to this entire album. This one was a Doosie! It had so many things I needed to manually fix that I spend 4 full days on this one album. The hard work has paid off though. The album sounds amazing and is an amazing vintage gem. Don't miss this one. 13-14 - You Too Can Be the Life of the Party - Volume 2 - This came out great, and was a relatively easy edit. Now both volumes of this player piano series have been posted, and sides A and B of volume one, as mentioned above, are also available on my Main Street chapter, and an uninterrupted 30 minute track. 15-16 - Disneyland Band Concert - The complete album, which as mentioned above was used for several Central Plaza tracks, is available to listen to here. This one was a bit of a challenge to edit because of some distortion issues. I think these were not because of my copy of the album, but was the way the album was originally recorded and edited back in 1956. According to the liner notes on the back of the album cover, the entire program was recorded live, outdoors in the park. I imagine the distortion was due to the fact that this was a 1950's recording, not done in a studio, and there was a limit to the technology at that time. Regardless, I was able to quite successfully make huge improvements, and it came out very nice. 30-31 - A Musical Mural - America the Beautiful - This film was redone in 1967 and a new soundtrack was produced. But this is the soundtrack from the 1958 version. I am not exactly sure how the music was used in the film, and how the narrative overlapped the music. It is likely that the songs were not used in full but were abridged for the film version. Then when the album was produced, the full versions were made available. I say this because the album runs over 30 minutes, and the film was about 10 minutes shy of that length. I have personally never seen or heard the original film. Would love to someday be able to. This album was a bit of a challenge to edit because it has some major sibilance issues. Sibilance is the sound made with a harsh "S" - I was able to make a lot of improvement on this problem, but took me a look of trial and error to get it just right. Overall, the final edit of the album sounds lovely. I used the audio from this album for two new tracks located on other chapters. I posted "O Columbia the Gem of the Ocean" over in my Rivers of America chapter, track 38 --- http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/139-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-8.html Also in my 1950's Tomorrowland chapter, I extended my "America the Beautiful" track to include several of the songs from the album. I also added an amazing and rare piece of narrative audio from the 1950's that introduces the Circarama theater. You must check this one out. It is fantastic! Tracks 23-24 on this page --- http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/144-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-13.html Back to Disneyland Records --- 42 - Mr. Piano Man - He's My Ideal - I purchased the original 45 in order to get a better sounding version of side B, He's My Ideal" - The sound quality is vastly improved now. 43 - Dance Annette - Around the World - There was some major clicking issues in my original edit of this, so I went back and fixed it all. Sounds 100% better now. 52-53 It's a Small World - 18 Favorite Folk Songs - This version comes from an album I purchased that was factory sealed. Being that this album was typically handled by children, it was neigh impossible to find a decent copy. When I saw a factory sealed version on Ebay, I jumped on it. The sound quality is fantastic. It sounds like it came from a CD and not an vinyl album. 57-58 Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House - Coming Soon - I recently added this track to the page, but was originally not going to include it. My original thought was that it is not related to the park, but in actuality, it really is. The sound effects from this album are used just about everywhere throughout Disneyland, and not just in the Haunted Mansion, so it really is closely tied to Disneyland's history, and should be included. This one is going to be tough to edit. Even though the album has been released digitally, very little if anything was done to remaster it. There is tons of background noise and also many editing mistakes. I am going to do my best to perfect this album, but it is going to be a lot of work. 59 -60 - March Along with Mary Poppins - Coming Soon - I originally ordered this album exclusively to use for my planned extended 1971 version of the Main Gate loop which I will eventually be posting over on the Welcome to Disneyland page (Chapter One). Then I decided to post the entire album on my Disneyland Records page as well, because of its interesting history as a practice album for bands trying out to play live in Disneyland. I am waiting for my pal to convert this one to digital format, and he is away this month, so it is on hold until June. 68 - There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow - This is another newly thought out addition to the page. I was not going to include it, but decided to go ahead, because it is a uniquely edited medley that is not something you would hear in actual show, as posted on my 1960's Tomorrowland page. Since it is something a little different, I decided to green light it. I did not have the actual album, but had access to someone else's recording. The sound quality was pretty bad, so I used it as a template and was able to replicate the album very accurately using my own source materials. Came out very nice. 69 - Monsanto Presents: Miracles from Molecules - This again is something I did not have on the page until recently. Unlike "Beautiful Tomorrow" I was planning on eventually adding it though. The reason I did not have it on the page is because I did not have a copy of the album, and did not have a reference recording to know exactly what was on the album. Then I recently found a recording of the album posted on a Disney blog I frequent, and was then able to accurately replicate it using my own library of source materials. 78 - It's a Small World - Popular Recordings - Another late entry, this is two versions of Small World that were released on Vinyl in the early 70's - The first version is very unique. It was recorded when Walt Disney World was about to premiere as a special theme song for the new resort. It was a 45 single with a song from the Aristocats on the flip side. The other version is from the Mike Curb Congregation. It was featured on the album from 1973 called "It's a Small World" - but none of the other songs on the album are specifically related to the park, so would be odd to post the entire album. So I decided to make a fun little medley of these two versions of the song, rather than post the actual entire albums they came from, as the other content has little to do with the park. 79-80 - Country Bear Jamboree - I was dead set against posting this album on my Disneyland Records chapter due to the fact that the exact same thing can be listened to over on my Bear County page. After thinking about it more and more, I realized that this soundtrack, as a album, is historically significant, and really needs to be included as part of the Disneyland Records page. So I made an exception to my general rule, and posted this in two different places. However, one slight difference is the order of the songs on side B - The Bear Country chapter version has them in random order, and the Disneyland Record's version is the same order as the actual album. 81 - America Sings - As with Country Bear Jamboree, I was not going to include Side A of this album because it is already posted in another chapter, 1970's Tomorrowland. For the same reasons I added Country Bear Jamboree, I had a change of heart and decided to include America Sings. Side B was already posted, so I just added side A. However, there is a slight difference. On my Tomorrowland page, the exit music, "Stars and Stripes Forever" is its own individual track separated from the main show, but for my Disneyland Records version, the song is included at the end of the show, as one track, just as it was featured on the album. 82 - Walt Disney Character Parade - Next new addition was something I was also not going to initially include, but decided to be a completionist and go ahead and post it. I did not have my own copy, but found a semi decent version posted on line. I was able to do a pretty good clean up. Not perfect, but definitely acceptable. The problem is that this came from a very thin, floppy album, meant to be mailed like a postcard, so it did not hold up as well as a regular album would. 89 - Kids of the Kingdom Show Album - Coming Soon - Another album I was not planning on using, because I did not even know it existed. While surfing the web I came across this amazing gem on Ebay and grabbed it immediately. This is something on hold until June as well, because my pal is out of town and will not be able to record it for me until then. I am very excited to hear it. I have one song from this album already posted on my Parade page, that someone shared with me a long while back, "The Glorious Fourth," but the sound quality is not great. Now I will have a crisp clear version, plus several other wonderful songs. 90-91 A Musical Souvenir of America on Parade - Coming Soon - Another late addition, this is essentially going to be the exact same thing I have posted on my Parade page already, so I was not going to include it initially, but like America Sings and Country Bear Jamboree, I changed my mind because of the historical significance of the album. ------------------------ Fweww! A lot of new content like I said. As mentioned above, I have been purchasing a lot of expensive vintage albums on Ebay, so another reminder, if you are able to contribute, donations are always appreciated. The link below with take you to my Paypal account. Every little bit helps! http://disneychris.com/donate.html Well, that is all for now. Hope you all enjoy the new audio, and there is much, much more on it's way. So stay tuned for more!
March 28, 2015 High time for an update. Lots to report on on this time... After my last update, I was continuing to add more to my Disneyland Records page, as planned. My friend who is converting my vintage record albums to a digital format has been sending me more completed files, and at first my prime objective was to get those files edited and posted to the site. I have since added the album "Yachtsmen High and Dry," tracks 44-45 on this page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/134-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-21.html However, the next album I began to edit sent me off on a major side track. The album is called "Walt Disney Song Parade." This record is actually a collection of songs from Disney films that are described by Jiminy Cricket as songs coming from Disneyland. These songs are split up into four segments, each one being tied to one of the themed realms in the park. At the start of each segment there is a fun theme song about that particular land. The four songs are all I have posted from the album currently on my Disneyland Records page, and they came from a very bad copy of the record that I attempted to clean up as best as I could. However, now I have a much cleaner copy of the entire record and it is my plan to replace the current audio with the complete album. Meanwhile, I went ahead and edited all the "Land" theme songs in advance of the rest of the album, because I wanted to post them on my Central Plaza page. It was always my plan to use these theme songs on this page to represent the different gateways to each land. As I was working on this small side project, from the planned agenda of working on the Disneyland Records page, I decided to just bite the bullet and get this entire chapter done. One of the reasons for this is because, in its current state, it was the one chapter with the least amount of completed audio posted on it. I knew I had a lot to add, and that is why I had separated it from its original location, which was initially part of the Main Street USA chapter. So I have now set up the entire chapter for all the planned additions. All of the pictures and liner notes are in place. The chapter is visually complete. I just need to add in all the new audio. I have feverishly been working on this. Check out the newly revised page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/150-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3b.html There is a lot of new tracks to discuss as you can see, but for now I will just fill you in on all the new additions that the audio has already been completed and posted. On my next blog update, I will discuss the rest... Track 5 - Popcorn Wagon - This is just a fun little track I decided to add for thrills and giggles. The song I chose is called "Popcorn Popping in the Apricot Tree" and is complimented by fun sound effects. The idea came to me from the "Sounds of America" 1961 Disney TV special in which they actually show a popcorn wagon and someone munching popcorn as you hear the popping and crunching sounds. I thought to myself, "neat idea" and decided to do my own version. Track 13 - Plaza Pavilion Hawaiian Bandstand - This music comes from an album pointed out to me by my friend RocketRods. The band playing is called The Kahauanu Trio, and after some research, we confirmed that this group actually did play at the Pavilion. So this track is pretty authentic to what music you would hear at this restaurant. Before the Tiki Room and Tahitian Terrace were added, this restaurant was entered through the side facing the Hub, but the eating area was on the back side of the building on a patio facing the Jungle Cruise. So technically this was part of Central Plaza. That is why I am placing it on this page. I will eventually also be doing another version on the Adventureland page, with different songs. Tracks 14, 17, 21 and 26 - Adventureland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland and Fantasyland Gateway - As mentioned above, these four tracks include the theme songs from the "Walt Disney Song Parade" album. Each of these tracks start out with the Walt Disney introductions from the album "Walt Disney Takes You to Disneyland" which lead into the theme songs. They actually match up very well, since they are all recordings from around the same time period. Track 15 - Adventureland Native Drum Loop - This audio is what you would hear as you passed into Adventureland in the earlier days, playing on a continuous one minute loop. It was retired, I am guessing, in 1963 when the Tiki Room opened. It includes great sound effects from the Jungle Cruise and a beating drum. I repeated the loop three times to capture what it sounded like, in park. Track 18 - Frontierland Stockade Loop - This is the song you would hear as you passed into Frontierland. I am not sure when it was first in use, but I know it was still playing in the park up until the early to mid 90's - This is a much cleaner version of the song than I had previously posted on my Frontierland chapter, and this time, I repeated the loop three times to capture the way it would be heard in the park. Track 20 - Edison Square - I decided to also try and represent attractions that never came to be as part of the audio collection on my web site. This is a good example of that. As you may or may not know, this was an earlier incarnation of the Carousel of Progress, and was meant to be a walking tour rather than a moving theater. The scene heard on my site is act one, representing the American home at the turn of the 20th Century. There are some similarities to Carousel of Progress, but some very unusual differences. I took audio from two demo recordings and mixed them together, removing all indications that this was taken from non-finalized recordings. Track 22 - Monsanto House of the Future - Queue Area Narrative - To represent the House of the Future, which technically was located in Central Plaza and not Tomorrowland, I used a rare piece of audio not included in the version of the narrative widely circulated on the web. From the sound of it (and I am only making an educated assessment) this segment sounds like what you would likely hear before the actual tour of the home began, as a sort of prologue used in the queue area. Since the queue area was outdoors and just off the hub, I felt this track would be appropriate for the Central Plaza chapter. The main tour will remain on the 1950's Tomorrowland page. I also added some fun 1950's era background music to this track, tying into the theme perfectly. Track 24 - Alpine Gardens - Sounds of the Matterhorn - This track is just sound effects, pure and simple. I have other variations of this audio elsewhere on the site which do incorporate music, but I wanted a pure sound effects version to represent the actual audio you would hear in this area, before it became Triton's Fountain and then Pixie Hollow. As far as I know, there was no specific music used for the Alpine Gardens area, so the sound of the Matterhorn and the Abominable Snowman was the sole atmosphere audio heard here. To me, this has a musical quality all its own even without music. Track 27 - Castle Drawbridge - When You Wish Wish Upon a Star - This track is exactly the same as a track posted on my "Original Fantasyland" page. I plan to do something different with the one posted on the Fantasyland page, so eventually they will be unique to one another, but for the time being this is a duplicate. The Central Plaza version will remain unchanged. In addition to all the Central Plaza goings on, I did add one more track to my Disneyland Records chapter. Track number two. This is something really special, the theme song to the Disneyland TV show, with lyrics. It came from a very rare Little Golden Record published in 1954 or 55. I know you all will recognize the medley, but it is great to hear the words. I posted the flip side to this record as well, which is a lovely vintage version of When You Wish Upon a Star. I also replaced track number one on my "Disneyland in TV Land, Your Host Walt Disney" chapter with the Disneyland theme song from the album, without the flip side. I was very unhappy with the sound quality of the original track I was using in position number one on this page, which was a commercial from the 1950's promoting the Disneyland TV show. I decided to remove it and use this song instead as the lead in to the chapter. However, if I ever do find a better copy of that promo, it will make a return. Unfortunately for now, it was just not good enough for my site. I tried my best to improve the sound, but it was just not possible. I need a better source. Luckily, track 2 is very similar to the track I removed, so its absence is not as major of a loss as it could be. However, as I am a completionist, I would like to eventually find better audio for this, and be able to use it on my site again. I also used the theme song from the album to redo the very first song of the Disneyland Audio Tour. Chapter One, Track One... http://disneychris.com/a-day-at-disneyland.html I added this song to the end of the existing track. Really happy with this, and it is the perfect song to start off the collection with. So, now I am plugging away at getting Central Plaza done. Lots of work ahead as you can see by all the items marked "Coming Soon." I will also be replacing some of the older tracks with updated and improved versions, so there is more work than meets the eye. Once this chapter is done, I will go back to my original plan which is to finish the Disneyland Records chapter, do both TV Land chapters and then, Town Square. For those who celebrate, hope everyone has a wonderful Easter or Passover. Talk to you again soon...
March 7, 2015 Wow a lot has happened on my site over the past few weeks. It is definitely time to update you all. First thing I would like to mention, is that I just reached a quarter of a million aka 250,000 hits to my web site. This includes my old web site, and the new one I created, using a better web host, about a year later. I am astounded by this number. I hope it will grow over time. I recently removed the "Visit Counter" at the bottom of each page of my site because I was informed by a few people that this is no longer the usual practice, and can be considered tacky, and old school. So from now on, I will monitor my traffic and when any milestone numbers are reached, I will just let you all know in my blog, or I will tweet about it. No modesty when it comes to my site. I am very proud of it. I am also very happy about the overwhelmingly positive response we have had over at Mouse Music, the new podcast I am honored to be a permanent part of. Each episode I will host a segment called "Disney Music Archives" where I will present a piece of rare Disney music and discuss its history and significance to the Disney organization. It is a fun way for me to share my Disney music knowledge. So far there have been two episodes of the podcast. The first one was about "Star Wars" and the second about "The Little Mermaid" - Episode three, which is now in production will be about "Beauty and the Beast" - The producers of the show want to cover all the films of the Disney animation Renaissance, and then once they are covered, we will move on to other exciting topics. Hope you all can come over and listen to the show. Here is a link... http://sideshowsoundtheatre.com/mouse-music/ Just one more thing to mention, before I get into the new Disneyland audio (which I know is what you are all really reading this for) I am going to be doing 8 days of all Irish themed Disney songs for my "Song of the Day" feature, beginning on March 10th, and leading up to the 17th, St Patrick's Day. Be sure to check out the special songs I have planned daily. A few surprises are in store. Now, onto the Disneyland Audio Tour... Since my last blog post, I have been adding to my Disneyland Records chapter. When I say Disneyland Records I mean literally "Disneyland" not just the general Disney record label. This chapter covers all the vinyl history of Disneyland the park. Anyway, I have added a few new things, and have vastly improved some existing tracks with far superior source audio. Here is a link to the chapter, so you can follow along... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/134-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-21.html First completely new addition is an album I never knew existed until a few weeks ago. Apparently the in-house Disneyland Dixieland band, known as the Strawhatters, recorded an album outside the Disney label, called "Cotton Pickin'. In case you never heard of the Strawhatters, they were a permanent fixture in the park for years. They originally played at the Bandstand that was positioned on the bank of the Rivers of America, across from where the River Bell Terrace is today, starting in the mid 50's. This bandstand was removed in the mid 60's when New Orleans Square was built, and they began performing at the French Market for a few years until the group was disbanded in the 70's. I always knew they recorded a short album under the Disneyland Records label, containing just 4 songs. I was in fact looking for a copy of that album when I discovered "Cotton Pickin" - My pal RocketRods did a little research, and confirmed that this was authentically them. And the good news is the album was available for digital download. Funny thing about digital downloads though, they are not always remastered recordings. Sometimes they are just taken straight from a vinyl source. Which is what I encountered in this case. So the download did require some noise reduction and de-clicking, but once I made the corrections, the sound quality came out amazing. The entire album has been posted. Tracks 36-37 on the page linked to above. Next new addition is the Disneyland Records storyteller of the Haunted Mansion. I had some issues removing the clicks and distortions in this record, so I put it off for a while. The Small World and Pirates albums have been posted for months, but I procrastinated on the Mansion. Finally it has been posted, and came out very good. I was able to eliminate most of the major issues. These small records are hard, because they were basically considered children's toys, and were never handled well. Finding a pristine unscratched copy is neigh impossible because of that. So I worked with what I had, and overall it came out quite nice. Huge improvement over the original source. Track 71. Next all new addition is the Clara Ward Gospel Singers album. This album was recorded live at the Golden Horseshoe. This group also performed dozens of times at the park, and were a favorite for many years. The album I had was a bit of a challenge to clean up, and some of the 1963 cut and slice editing was pretty choppy too. This is why I put off editing it for so long. I knew it was a challenge to get it right. I did a very good job of removing skips scratches and background noise. I also re-edited the transitions between songs so it sounds smoother and less chopped up. Sounds much more smooth, flowing from one song to the next. Overall, the album came put pretty well. Again, huge improvement over the original source I started with. I also added a fun track on my 1970's Tomorrowland page, featuring the Ward Singers. You may want to check that one out too. It is the song "Down By the Riverside," featuring the version from the album, and the version they recorded for the Disneyland attraction, America Sings. Track 3 on this page:http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/146-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-15.html The rest of the additions are not new tracks, but major improvements on existing tracks. I sent my Kids of the Kingdom album away to be professionally cleaned, then mailed it to a friend in California, who owns professional studio grade recording hardware, and transferred the record to digital. Doing it this way makes a huge difference in the sound quality. So I replaced my first attempt at cleaning this album with much improved audio now. It now sounds absolutely stunning, and jaw dropping. As if a remastered CD were released of this album, taken right from the master tapes. If you already listened to the record before, you MUST go back and hear it again now. Tracks 65-66 I also have replaced Pepsi Presents New Years Eve in Disneyland - track 63 - In this case I purchased my own copy of the album, at great expense, and again sent it away to be cleaned and recorded by my friend in California. Again, WOW, what an amazing improvement. Sounds terrific. This one was a bit more of a challenge to clean up. I think it has less to do with damage to the record, and more to do with the way it was originally recorded. A lot of editing flaws and bad audio. However, I was able to really dig into this and make some major improvements. I am very happy with the sound, and compared to what I had before, total night and day. You have to go back and re-listen to this one too. I also edited an abridged version of the album and posted it on my Holiday Time page. I basically removed all references to Pepsi, and took out the Golden Horseshoe portion. Track 59 on this page http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/137-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-19.html While you are on that page, also check out another track I just added, #58. This is an abridged version of the Bernie Bernard Orchestra at the Disneyland Hotel, New Year's Eve album, and I added the song Auld Lang Syne at the end. Really fun. Another thing I used the Pepsi Presents New Years Eve in Disneyland album for is a fun little new intro for the New Tomorrowland 1960's chapter. Be sure to check out track 1 on this page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/145-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-14.html Back to the records chapter... My next improved audio is the Fred Burri Disneyland Yodeler album. Same friend who is doing the digital conversions for me bought this album, and sent me a copy of his raw file after he recorded it digitally, with permission to share it on my site. Again, I removed all scratches, clicks and background noise. The sound quality compared to what was there before is absolutely stellar. Another one you all have to go back and revisit again. Tracks 32-33 Next improved audio is "The Life of the Party" Disneyland Player Piano, tracks 11-12. In this case, I used the same source that I used for the original version on my site. But, with the higher grade software I now have, I was able to do a much crisper and cleaner edit. Sounds so, so much better. The old version was very muddy. Now it is very clear and sounds lovely. I also purchased volume 2 of this album, and it is being converted digitally by my friend. It will be added to the site very soon. Next, I replaced the Christmas Adventure in Disneyland album, track 25. I found a much better copy of the album to start with, and using my superior software, was able to get a much cleaner version of this. Came out very nice. Another one that requires a revisit. And my next project was a DOOSIE - I replaced my "A Day at Disneyland" tracks, 6-10 - This album was a re-edit of the "Walt Disney Takes You to Disneyland" album released in 1956. A few years later, an abridged version of the album, with additional Jiminy Cricket narrative was produced, aimed more at children than the original. Since I have a CD of the original album, which is music only, I was able to overlay the Jiminy version taken from a vinyl source on top of the cleaner CD source, for a much crisper sound. But to do this is not as easy as it sounds. First thing I needed to do was clean up the CD - There is a lot of background hiss on this particular CD, because it is an older release, before noise reduction software had reached the level it is at these days. Then I also had to clean up some major editing glitches, made back in 56. Some obvious mistakes that had to be overlooked back when editing was done on magnetic tape with a razor blade and scotch tape. So it was a lot of work to perfect the CD to a level I am satisfied with. Next step was to clean up the vinyl Jiminy album. I ran it through my audio clean up filters, then had to go through the album and remove by hand each skip of pop that the filtering missed. I also had to remove some sound effects during simulated crowd scenes that just sounded awful to me, replacing the audio with cleaner sounding "crowd noise" Then I had to lay Jiminy on top of the CD version. I had to re-edit the CD to match the abridged variations from the Jiminy version, had to lower the volume during the sequences where Jiminy is talking over the music, so that it is not abrupt and flows well. And had to match it up so that the music on the Jiminy album matched exactly with the music on the CD, so as not to produce a distorted echo. Then I overlayed enhanced sound effects, such as the gun shots and waterfall noises. I did all this once before, when I posted my original version of this album. But with the new editing software I now have, it needed to be done all over again, because I knew I could do a much better version now. And it came out amazing. So happy with the sound. You all must go back and re-listen to these tracks. So, now I am awaiting my friend to send me the audio for the rest of the albums on that Disneyland Records page. I spent a great deal of my own money purchasing vintage albums, and sent them to be recorded by him after they were professionally cleaned. He has already sent me the first album. Adventureland Steel Band. This one is actually a replacement of the same album I previously had posted, but this is now a much better version. I just posted Side A last night and will be doing Side B this morning. It may be posted already by the time you read this. Tracks 75-76. Side A sounds fantastic. My friend told me that it takes 8-10 hours to do the transfer, per album, so he will slowly be sending them to me. As I get the audio from him, it will be added to the site. He has several albums in his possession. I spent hundreds of dollars on this little project. Two of my records he now has are not the standard Long Playing variety, but are older 78's - These require a special attachment to the needle arm to be able to properly record them. I also ordered that special part and sent it to him. He should be getting it in a few days. Another thing I sent him is the "Your Trip to Disneyland on Records" set. Check out this article for a complete description and pictures of what this is... http://vintagedisneylandtickets.blogspot.com/2011/05/your-trip-to-disneyland-on-records.html Amazingly, I found a copy that has never been played and is still intact, with the discs never having been removed from their casing. The black rectangle at the top of the cardboard folding booklet is one continuous sheet of thin vinyl. The circles have to be cut out by hand, each containing audio, like a regular record would. These are also 78's - Each one is less than 2 minutes long. I have given my friend permission to cut out the albums and record them. Fingers crossed that the audio will be ok. We won't know until we try. As I await the digital recordings from my pal, I am going to go back and work on my Disneyland in TV Land chapters, so keep your eyes out for new additions to chapters 23-24 coming soon. Also, after Disneyland Records and both TV Land chapters are completed, the next task on my agenda is Chapter Two, aka Town Square. I am going to update the entire chapter, and this will include all those Disneyland Railroad tracks that have been marked as "Coming Soon" for over a year. I will finally be getting those done. A lot of people have been anxiously awaiting those. I am glad I waited though, because I obtained much better audio for this over the course of time, and I can do an ever better job on these now that I could back then. Ok, fweww, that is all for now. However I need to mention, and I hate to ask, but if anyone has a little extra, and can make a donation to my site, it would be most appreciated. As I have said, I have been spending hundreds of dollars on new content lately, and could really use some help. As you know I do not advertise on my site, and is free for everyone. Any donation amount is welcome and greatly appreciated. Follow this link to make your donation. http://disneychris.com/donate.html So, stay tuned for more exciting audio coming your way very soon.
February 15, 2015 Gosh it has been a long time since my last blog. That does not mean I have been neglecting my site though. Quite the contrary. I have a lot to update you all on, so sit back for a fun update. As said in my last post, I wanted to change things up a bit and move from the Disneyland in TV Land chapter, and update my Disneyland Hotel chapter for a while instead. I originally was going to just do a few tracks to get rid of some of the slots that have been marked as "Coming Soon" for quite a long time, but I then decided to go for broke, and just get the entire chapter up to date. And so, the exciting news I have to report is that as of today, the entire Disneyland Hotel page is 100% fully updated. What that means is that all of the audio I currently have has been edited and added to the site. None of my chapters will ever be "done," so I do not say the words the chapter is "completed" or "finished" because I do have a list of things I want to be able to add to the chapter in the future, but still need to find the audio in order to make those additions. But if I presently have it, it is currently posted. Here is the chapter link... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/131-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-17.html So let me go through and explain all the new additions to this chapter, one by one... Track 4 - The Monorail Bar: This track is meant to set the mood for what this venue was like. I did this through presenting the style of music that would have been typical in this type of cocktail lounge in the early 1960's, when the Monorail Bar first opened. I carefully selected songs that either had a theme tied to alcoholic beverage, (like the first song "Cocktails for Two") or that just had the right feeling for what seemed right for the time and place. This track is purely atmospheric and none of the music contained therein can be considered historically authentic. But you never know, some of these songs could have played there. Track 5 - Hotel Fashion show: Again, this music is just to set the mood for what these events must have been like. The song I chose is not authentic, but is the type of music one would likely have experienced at this type of hotel event during it's early years. Track 6 - Top of the Park Lounge: Yet Again, this is not authentic, but a replication. I selected the songs in this mix bassd on the vintage photo I found for this lounge, which is posted next to the track on the chapter page. It shows a small jazz ensemble and a female vocalist. The music I picked had the right feeling to match the picture, and is likely the style of music one would have heard there during the period shown in the image. Track 8 - Disneyland Hotel Lobby Music: This music has a little more authenticity to it, but is still not 100% verified. If you listen to the proceeding track #7,the Jack Wagner Orientation narrative, you will hear some of the exact same musical arrangements underscoring his dialogue. The following hotel lobby mix contains many of the same songs, unabridged without overlapping narrative. Keep in mind also that Jack Wagner likely edited the orientation audio presentation together himself. He had a recording studio in his home not far from Disneyland where he made mixes like this all the time. So it is likely he had all this production music in his own personal library at home. Because he was also in charge of selecting background music for the hotel, it is not much of a stretch to imagine he would have pulled music from some the same source materials he used to make the orientation narrative as background music for the hotel when this style of music was considered "Contemporary". Thanks to my pal RocketRods for identifying the tracks and locating the production albums this music originated from. Track 9 - Japanese Gardens: This is actually the original 1980's EPCOT Center World Showcase Japan Pavilion background music. I felt this was the perfect music to represent this area, since it is the perfect sound for this area and it has a strong Disney connection. Who knows, could this be the actual music used? - I cannot say for sure, but I am sure you will all appreciate me throwing in something from EPCOT on my site, since I am often asked to do so. As an added touch, I also added water sounds to add some extra atmosphere to the track. Track 10 - Goofy's Kitchen - Birthday Medley: Now this music IS authentic. It is two of the actual original recordings for the songs you often hear during special birthday events when invited to come out on the floor and participate with Goofy. Missing is the special narrative heard between the songs, but I did not have a good copy of that. Track 11 - Goofy's Kitchen - Area Background Music - This is an authentic replication of the entire loop heard at this venue, using all the original sources. At one time it was used for entire hotel, from about 2010 to 2011 - But after the new Disneyland themed towers got individual loops, the 2010 loop retired to Goofy's Kitchen alone, where it is played to this day. Track 13 - Disneyland Bellhops: This is the authentic group that played on the hotel grounds from the late 80's to early 90's - They have remained together all these years, under the name Pacific Coast Horns. After visiting their website, I found several songs performed by them posted there. Amazing what you can uncover when digging though the internet. Track 14 - The Disneyland Hotel - Resort Area Background Music: This is another authentic replication of an entire loop using actual original source material. This loop was once heard around the entire hotel, from 2001 up to 2010, when it was retired and replaced by the aforementioned Goofy's Kitchen loop. The 2001 loop is no longer used at the hotel today. Track 15 Porte-Cochère - Area Background Music - This is another authentic replication of an entire loop using actual original source material. This loop was once used for the new Fantasy Tower in 2011, but was retired a year later and now is only heard at the car port baggage drop off area in front of the main lobby entrance to the hotel. There are about 5 missing songs from my version of the loop, because they have not been identified as of yet. All of the songs that have been identified are included. Track 16 Resort TV - Disneyland Today In-Room Music: This is an extended version of a track that has been on the site for quite some time. I found a bunch more audio for this, and added about 40 minutes of run time to the original version. This is music you would once hear underscoring a closed circuit station at the Disney Hotels as rolling graphics appeared on the TV screen giving out useful trip info. Track 18-19 Disneyland Resort TV: I wanted to add more of the audio for the programing shown on the closed circuit stations shown at the Disneyland hotels. I now have a good overview of many different variations of this, so it is a much more comprehensive collection than just the one single track I was using before. Also I mixed in the full version of the song "Celebrate You" at the end of track 19. The version from the video was abridged, so I replaced it with the uncut song. Track 20 - Fairytale Wedding Pavilion: - The music for this comes from the popular Disney Fairytale Wedding CD, which is often used at real Disney Weddings as background music. For some added fun I ended the track with "Here Comes the Bride" and the Mendelssohn Wedding March. Track 21 - Steakhouse 55: This track was identified by my good pal kkocka from Mousebits, who does a lot of great work identifying loops. He recorded the loop while dining at the restaurant, and went home and identified all the music using song identification software. So this is an authentic replication of the actual music heard there. Track 22-24 - Tangoroa Terrace/Trader Sam's: - There have been several people who have made it a hobby to identify loop music heard in the parks, and I owe them all a great deal of gratitude. Without their efforts, I would not be able to do what I do. A lot of hard work went into identifying these three loops, and I want to thank all those involved in the project. These two loops (Trader Sam's being divided into 2 parts) are taken from several original sources, and are the authentic versions heard at the Hotel, in full. No missing audio. Track 25-27 - The Hotel Towers - These are also the efforts of those who enjoy identifying Disney loops, and a tip of the hat must go to all of them. Fantasyland and Adventureland are the complete loops with all the authentic songs. Frontierland is missing several songs that cannot be obtained. They have never been made available. These are a handful of instrumentals used for the Toy Story Midway Mania queue. Aside from those, all the other songs are included. Fweww, I added a lot didn't I? Aside from that I added one other track during my hotel project. The recent 60th Anniversary Diamond Celebration announcement event used a loop on Main Street, which coincidentally came from the same materials used in the very same hotel loops I was working on at the time when word got out about it. Thanks to my pal Monorail91 for identifying this loop and making me aware of it. It is on my Holiday Time page, track 55... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/137-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-19.html So now, what's next? Well, I have been spending a bit of money on obtaining some more vintage vinyl. If you check out my Disneyland Records chapter you will see a bunch more "Coming Soon" slots ready for audio to be added. http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/134-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-21.html These are mostly albums I have already purchased, but I have sent away to be professionally cleaned and then to be recorded to a digital format, so will be a few weeks before I have access to that audio. There are a few on that page that I do already have, and my next project is to work on those albums. I was already working on the Ward Singers album (tracks 48-49) at one point, but got tired of doing record albums and moved to another chapter to keep things fresh. So now I will be going back to finish that album. I also made a great discovery. The in-house Disneyland Dixieland group, known as the Strawhatters who performed at the park from the 1950's to the 1970's, actually recorded a full length album called "Cotton Pickin" - Before now, I only knew they released an album under the Disneyland label with just four songs on it, but was delighted to find out they also recorded another full record for an outside label. My friend RocketRods helped me do a little research, and we verified that this is the authentic group. So, I will be adding that album next. Then I have several albums I am going to be redoing, because I now have much better audio clean up software than I had when I did the original editing long ago. These include "Life of the Party Volume One" - "A Day at Disneyland with Jiminy Cricket" and "A Christmas Adventure in Disneyland" Then last but not least, I am going to be redoing three albums I only just recently added. I now have a better recording of the Fred Burri Swiss Yodeling album, so will be doing a much cleaner version, and my friend Pixielated did a much better digital recording of my Kids of the Kingdom album so I will be replacing that as well. I also purchased a copy of "Pepsi Presents New Years in Disneyland" and the version I have now is far superior, so will be replacing that too. The rest of the albums on the page marked "Coming Soon" will be added when I get the digital recordings sent to me by my friend Pixielated, who has been a real pal by doing these recordings for me on his professional grade turntable and conversion hardware. Like i said, the albums are all away being professionally cleaned first. Well, I had no choice but to be long winded in this blog post, because it has been so long sine my last one, and I had so much to report on. Hope everyone's 2015 is going well so far. Stay tuned for more...
January 19, 2015 Time for another update. Not a lot of audio has been added since my last blog, but I have been very busy getting organized and reformatting the site a bit. What I have added since my last report is the completed "Disneyland Pre Opening Report" track which I talked about in my last post. Sounds great considering the extremely poor audio quality of the recording I started with. You will find this on the following page, track number 14... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/136-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-20.html I also added a new track to the Main Street USA chapter. This is a new version of the classic "King Mickey March" which very much captures the authentic sound of the Disneyland Band as they march from Central Plaza to Town Square to perform their daily concert. This recording comes from Tokyo Disneyland, but it is very much the same as what you would hear back in California. I also removed the "Main Street March" track that was located in this same spot. The reason I did so is because the exact same track was, and still is, located on the "Disney on Parade" page. So this was a duplicate post. I wanted to avoid posting the same exact track two times. Here is where you will find the new "King Mickey March" - track 3... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/160-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-3-setup.html I have decided to take a bit of a break from doing TV soundtracks and started work on some revised loops for the Disneyland Hotel. As I started editing the Adventure Tower loop, I cleaned up the background hiss a bit on the "Adventureland Suite" from the 1956 album "Walt Disney Takes you to Disneyland." - In doing so, I replaced the version of this that is posted on the Adventureland chapter with the slightly cleaner version. This is track 2 on the following page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/130-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-5.html One other minor change I made was that I moved two tracks from the "Disneyland Showtime" chapter to the "Disneyland on Parade" chapter. These are two "Blast to the Past parade tracks" I decided to keep all the parade stuff together, rather than split it up. You may also notice that I added a "previous page" and "next page" navigator to the top of each page, as well as a note that the full table of contents is located at the bottom of the page. I wanted to make it a bit easier to scroll through chapters, and I am getting a lot of new traffic to the site, so I wanted new visitors to be aware of the location of the page directory. My mother and I were on the site together the other day, and she was a bit confused about it, so I did this to make it a bit easier bassd on her experiences trying to navigate the site. I then decided to go through my master "To Do" list, which is a listing of all the audio that needs to be edited and added to the site. Since I last made the list, I have obtained a lot more material to add, and wanted to have everything fully organized and up to date. I also needed to make sure I had all the pictures I needed to go with the new audio I will be adding. This turned out to be a major project. I finally finished the list last night, and also now have all the pictures I need set up and ready to go as I add new tracks. As I was reorganizing, I replaced some of the current pictures on the site with alternate images. I did this because I needed to use the original images for upcoming additions instead. So any pictures that have been replaced will eventually be making a return. Here are the final tally's on my To Do list: New audio to add - 500 tracks (Not rounded off - just worked out that I have exactly that amount) While I was going though my list, I realized the huge amount of Fantasyland material I have yet to add. As it is, Fantasyland already had nearly 50 tracks, and with the amount of material I plan to add it would likely exceed over 100 tracks. Therefore I made the tough decision to split up Fantasyland into two chapters. My original thought was to split it up by geographical location, but I instead to decided to split it up in much the same way I split up Tomorrowland... by date. This makes sense because of the fact that Fantasyland was completely remodeled in the early 80's, so the current Fantasyland and the original are vastly different. This split will allow you to now experience both versions as separate entities. This was my thought process in splitting up Tomorrowland as I did, and I feel it will work well with Fantasyland too. It took me several days to add in the new chapter. There is a lot of re-naming of files involved in the process and it is a very tedious task to squeeze in a new page. I also had to come up with new images and artwork for the new addition, redo the chapter directory, etc etc. Good news is that the new chapter is done and the site is completed updated. Here are the two new chapters... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/170-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-11-a.html http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/141-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-10.html The chapters in their present state seem a bit sparse, but as I add in all the tracks from my "To Do" list, it will make much more sense why the split was necessary, and the chapters will feel a lot more complete. I also have decided to make the cut off date for part one, 1977 - This is because the Matterhorn was redone in 1978, so part two will include the "New" Matterhorn, and part one will include the original version. I will explain more of the reasoning behind why a certain track belongs in the "Original" Fantasyland verses the "New" Fantasyland as I add in new material over time, so stay tuned for further updates. So now that the site is reformatted, and my "To Do" list is updated, I will be going back to doing some Disneyland Hotel loops. So keep an eye out on this page over the next few days as new tracks are added... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/131-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-17.html That's all for now. Talk to you all soon!
January 5, 2015 Hope everyone had a great Christmas, Hanukkah or winter celebration, and a fantastic New Year's Eve. Time for another update. Lots to report on since my last posting. I have decided to divide up my blog into three separate pages, one for each year, since it was starting to get a little long to scroll through it all in one page. I have put a links to the the other pages at the top of each page. I hope this makes it easier for you all to navigate. I have continued to add several new tracks to the "Wonderful World of Disney" chapter... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/156-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-22b.html The missing "Wonderful World of Disney" main title has been added. I received the DVD with the needed audio the day after Christmas, and added it right away. Now I have every version of the Disney anthology program main title included, from 1969-1990 - It is fun to listen to them all in order to see how the music evolved over the years. I am not 100% satisfied with track number 8, which is the 1980's syndicated version of the main title. I could not find a good audio copy, and did my best to improve what I had to work with. I fixed it up a little bit more since i first posted it, and added a slightly improved version, but I am still not 100% happy. If anyone has, or comes across, a better sounding copy of this please let me know. Next addition I made was the remaining tracks for "From Pirates of the Caribbean to the World of Tomorrow" - I added an extended version of the "Pirates of the Caribbean - TV Tour" which now includes the introduction and opening day festivities, leading into the ride through. I also placed my original, ride though only version, over on my New Orleans Square chapter. So now you can hear both versions. You will find the original on this page, track 15... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/133-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-6.html I also added the complete Tomorrowland segment from the same show, which includes the entire introduction, opening ceremonies and People Mover tour. I previously had this audio placed on my 1960's New Tomorrowland chapter, but it did not include the intro or opening ceremonies, and I edited out part of the Flight to the Moon segment. So this new version is complete and unabridged. I still have the original edited down variation posted on my 1960's Tomorrowland page, however, it is now a much improved and all-new, with better audio. It is track 3 on this page... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/145-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-14.html I still plan to redo track 10 of the Wonderful World of Disney chapter. After I first edited it, I found much better audio for this TV program. I used that audio to do tracks 11-13, and you will notice a major difference in the sound quality when you compare them to track 10. I am going to work on other projects first, but a track 10 redo is on the future agenda. It will basically be the same thing as it is now, just a lot richer in sound. My last addition to this chapter is track 20, which is from the episode "Disneyland Showtime." This is a behind the scenes look at the making of the Haunted Mansion, narrated by Kurt Russel, and followed by a ride through of the attraction. Fun stuff. In addition to the aforementioned, I also made two new additions the the chapter: "Your Host, Walt Disney"... http://disneychris.com/15-disneyland-soundtracks/136-disneyland-audio-tour-chapter-20.html First new track is the complete Disneyland segment of the 1957 Disneyland TV episode "Disneyland the Park, and Pecos Bill." It runs about 25 minutes. This one was very difficult to edit. When I removed the background hiss, it left a residual issue with all the "S" sounds, and I had to go through the entire 25 minute track and manually remove every single one of these harsh "S" sounds. This took me days of hard work. But I am quite satisfied with the end result. The track is a whole lot of fun. It is track 34 on the page linked to above. My final new addition is a much improved version of track 1 on the same page, "Disneyland Television Announcement." This one was extremely difficult to get to sound right. The original version I posted left me very unhappy. I just could not get it to sound acceptable. After working on "Disneyland the Park" and Pecos Bill" I learned a new little trick on my noise reduction software, and this allowed me to redo the track with much better results. I am glad I was able to improve this, since it is the track that leads off the whole chapter, and having it sound so inferior bothered me a great deal. So now I am working on another track from "Your Host, Walt Disney" - the 1955 "Disneyland Pre Opening Report." This episode aired only days before Disneyland opened. It is a great time capsule of how Disneyland grew from a dream to a reality, and it is narrated by none other Winston Hibler, the voice behind Disney's classic True-Life Adventures. There was a major issue with the ending to the audio I had to work with, as it abruptly cut out way before the music was over: The song is Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, as sung by a 1950's style chorus. So I looked for an alternate version of the song that matched the original as close as possible, so that I could just replace the audio with a complete song. What I came up with is the 1971 Mickey Mouse Revue attraction from Walt Disney World. It sounds perfect. I can't wait to finish editing this track so you can hear how it came out. Well, that is all for now. My new year's resolution is the get all 300 plus additional tracks I have in my queue completed by July. Not sure I will make it, but I am will do my best. Fingers Crossed! So stay tuned for more...
Questions, comments or suggestions? Contact me at DCLyndon@gmail.com or Twitter @DisneyChris73
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