I have to say that the Lord of the Rings soundtrack is probably my favorite movie soundtrack of all time. I have the extended soundtrack collection that includes music from all three extended editions. It's around 3 and a half hours of music total and it's really some of the best I have heard. It's so relaxing. Howard Shore definitely was the ideal composer for LOTR. I can't think of anything I would change and as much as I like John Williams stuff I think the "Fanfare" approach really would not have worked best for LOTR. Does anybody else have this soundtrack and is so what are your thoughts?
I have all 3 of them as well and I do agree that they are very good to just listen to while doing anything especially on the computer. Howard Shore is a good composer he should be making a lot more movie soundtracks. Did they make one that was special for the extended edition? I don't think that they did. I wonder if Howard Shore is doing the music for The Hobbit as well, I would certainly hope so.
There were a few versions of the soundtrack. One version had around 10 tracks per cd while the other had 20 or so. I have the set where each cd has around 20 tracks. There must be a lot of music that didn't make it to the soundtrack I have because even with all three cd's it's only around 3.5 hours. That's way less than just one of the movies (timewise). After doing some research just now I realized that I actually don't have the full soundtracks. There are much longer sets available for around $60 a piece... Most people probably won't find that worth it, but considering that this is some of my favorite music ever composed I'm not about to resort to downloading this illegally. The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring - The Complete Recordings The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King - The Complete Recordings That's 135 tracks and around 10 hours of music for around $180 retail. Who would have thought the music would cost so much more than the movies. What can I say, I have to have it.
Music can cost a lot to make for a movie so this isn't a huge surprise. They did get Howard Shore to compose the music and it is in fact 10 entire hours long that's 10 full hours of professional musicians playing everything perfectly. This was also a very popular movie and the music really helped make the movie better than it would have been with any other music at all. The music was really good...
