Following Joel Goldsmith’s death, one grieving Stargate fan recreated the heartbreaking theme which closes SGU. Recently he found the missing ingredients to correct his original version.

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Timecodes
0:00 – Guest Introduction
2:15 – An Upcoming Tribute
3:28 – An Audible Piece of Music
4:18 – A Tribute to Joel
6:07 – The Recreated “Gauntlet” Theme
8:50 – Reactions
9:22 – The Missing Instrument
12:09 – The Dilruba: The Missing Ingredient
13:32 – Joel’s Music in the 5.1 Blu Ray Mix
14:36 – A Trilogy of Joel Episodes
15:50 – Recreating Complex Music
16:58 – Software Used
18:06 – Thank You, Sergei!

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“Stargate,” “Stargate SG-1,” “Stargate Atlantis,” “Stargate Universe,” and all related materials are owned by Amazon MGM Studios.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Sergei Mukhorin, how are you, sir?

Sergei Mukhorin:
I’m very good, thank you.

David Read:
You reached out to me, I’m trying to remember how… What was the original excuse? Was it about music or was it about something else? ‘Cause I’m having a hard time remembering.

Sergei Mukhorin:
You announced the Joel Goldsmith tribute video on one of your episodes, on one of the shows. That was a sign for me to send you a message.

David Read:
And you had put music together a little bit, but you don’t call yourself a musician.

Sergei Mukhorin:
No.

David Read:
Which I find to be an insult because I’m a fan of your work in honor of Joel Goldsmith. I don’t know if you can square that circle for me.

Sergei Mukhorin:
Yeah, I can. The thing is that I love music all my life and I like hearing it, I like actually playing it, I play a couple instruments. But I don’t really create music. Whatever I tried to create, I don’t like it enough to publish it somewhere online or whatever. But I do like doing covers because I’m a software engineer by trade, by the way, and for me, it’s a complicated task. A little of math, a little of physics sometimes, how to solve this puzzle …

David Read:
It’s a puzzle.

Sergei Mukhorin:
… to recreate a …

David Read:
You have a problem, you create an answer, it’s either right or wrong.

Sergei Mukhorin:
… a music piece. That’s how I do it. I learned a little bit. I know music theory of course, and I went to music school when I was a child. But it’s fun for me, that’s about it. I don’t pretend I can do more, but some of the covers I can do, and I’m very happy doing them. I wanted to share.

David Read:
I am appreciative of you wanting to share because I have been trying to crack this thing for– It’s just the egg that won’t crack. Gauntlet is well-known to be my favorite piece of music that Joel did, and I think it’s a shame because I think that he was really getting started into the golden age of his career and this was one of the doors to that. But it’s never been commercially available, and fans have recreated it online time and time again. I think I stumbled across one of your original ones a while back, and this was years ago at this point. When I put out the call to bring people together to start building this documentary tribute for Joel, it only made sense to reach out to some of the folks who had previous experience in imitating Joel’s music just to get their perspective on things, if nothing else. You found me. So, I’m not gonna belabor this. The Gauntlet piece is one of the more audible pieces of music that Joel has because the middle section is the only thing that’s obscured by Destiny shutting down. And the rest, you can hear… Joel’s having a soundgasm. It’s perfect from end to end. The whole piece of music you can stand back and watch it go. But I have always wanted a clean cut of it, and you went ahead and you did it. Now, this is a new version. Did you completely start from square one for this?

Sergei Mukhorin:
Yes. From nothing. I did a version 14 years ago, actually, basically a few days after we learned that Joel passed. I was in a weird place and I decided I wanna do a tribute.

David Read:
Express yourself.

Sergei Mukhorin:
Express myself, but I couldn’t do a perfect version. And it was not my intention to do it. But I found online that there was a few covers already available at that time. I found online a guy who made a piano version of it. And basically–

David Read:
Without the Dilruba.

Sergei Mukhorin:
Yeah, of course. Just piano. I learned how he did it. I watched the video and played and then learned it by heart. Then I recorded it, added some layers and stuff, but of course I couldn’t reproduce it closely. But the thing is that every version of Gauntlet that is currently available on YouTube is derived from this version of this guy who wrote the arrangement. No one did an actual note-to-note thing. Apparently …

David Read:
Recreation.

Sergei Mukhorin:
… I was probably the first one to do it.

David Read:
Let’s listen. If you are watching this and you’re not completely note-for-note familiar with this piece of music, I recommend that you go back into the last three or four minutes of “Gauntlet” and suffer through it as I do every time watching it, because it’s a hard sequence to watch, knowing the 15 years that we’ve had since. Then watch this. You and I, Sergei, are gonna listen to this together fully for the first time. So, let’s go ahead and have a look.

[playing Sergei’s Gauntlet theme]

David Read:
Yep. You hit it, man.

Sergei Mukhorin:
Thank you.

David Read:
I’m impressed.

Sergei Mukhorin:
It was very fun to do. This is the best thing. I had a few struggles, as you might imagine, especially with this very special instrument that Joel used. It took me three days to figure this out. Three evenings basically. But I did.

David Read:
To find the Dilruba?

Sergei Mukhorin:
Yeah. To find the Dilruba, because I tried to… I took a very high-quality cello with multiple gigabytes of samples and stuff, and it sounds great. It’s not sounding what it’s supposed to be.

David Read:
Yeah, you can’t–

Sergei Mukhorin:
I applied some effects, flange and a guitar preamp, stuff like that. It got better and I’m like, “OK, it’s close enough.” But then I decided to still check and basically took every bowed string instrument in existence, and I went through and picked some up that piqued my interest and found out that it’s … And then we recently figured out that it’s exactly the instrument that he used. I guessed it, but I was right apparently.

David Read:
I went into… Let me see if I can reproduce it here. “What stringed instrument did Joel Goldsmith use to represent Destiny in Stargate Universe?” Here we go. Probably used a guitar. No, no. Don’t do this to me. “Eastern instrument.” Come on. Think it through. Based on this GateWorld interview, he did not specify one– It’s just not gonna do it. But it pulled up the Dilruba in this AI and I clicked on it and it was… Let me pull this here. 2009, October, so this is after “Air.” I’m on GateWorld, I’m sure right now.

Sergei Mukhorin:
Do you want to show the picture of the instrument? Did you get it?

David Read:
I will. And there it is. This is the conversation that I had with him, and I forgot all about it. Then I went and checked and I found the complete audio version of this interview, which was never released. Because of that, because of you, I’m now gonna get to release a 45-minute interview with Joel that no one has ever heard. They’ve only read it. I’m gonna be able to release that along with the tribute that we’re gonna release on Dial the Gate and GateWorld to Joel. So, let’s have a look at the Dilruba, because everyone’s probably very curious about this thing.

David Read:
Let me pull this here. OK. This is a Dilruba. And it is …

Sergei Mukhorin:
If you want …

David Read:
… an Indian instrument.

Sergei Mukhorin:
… I can explain it a little bit …

David Read:
Sure.

Sergei Mukhorin:
… for you and for the audience. It has normal strings like on cello or violin, you can play that with a bow. It’s all standard. But it also has so-called sympathetic strings that you don’t actually play. They play themselves in– I forgot the English word. Basically, they resonate. They–

David Read:
Play in harmony?

Sergei Mukhorin:
Yeah. They resonate and they produce this drone sound. It’s used in Indian instruments a lot. This is also an Indian instrument. This is how it does it… And it’s the sound of an electric instrument with electric pickup. But I think this instrument’s like 300 years old.

David Read:
Is that all?

Sergei Mukhorin:
Yeah.

David Read:
I’m surprised. Probably the modern version of it. 300 years ago. Look at you. Wow. You cracked it, and this is a great piece of music that you’ve been able to recreate. I’m hoping that I will be able to utilize the original in the upcoming documentary that we’re going to do with him. The problem is that the 5.1 mixes on the Blu-ray also share the same tracks with the ambiance. So you have Destiny going to sleep and you have Eli patting Colonel Young on the back. And there’s little things like that, and when we wanna, in this, which is a very rare circumstance, isolate Joel, it’s really difficult to do. And AI gets close to cleaning it up, but it distorts and it muddies things when you try and lay things over. You have done this with one piece of music, and you have done it with another one specifically. And let’s see how my journey on the backend of this stuff goes. But we’re pretty close to releasing this thing. And this is not gonna be the last time that we hear from you. We are going to be doing a bit of an after show with the folks who helped us edit this video. The tribute to Joel. It’s gonna be The Music of Stargate: Joel Goldsmith. ‘Cause there were other Stargate musicians as well, although he did 98% of the heavy lifting. It’s gonna be kind of a trilogy now. We’re gonna have the interview that I did with him on GateWorld that was only text, and then we’re going to do the tributes and we’re going to do the after show with the folks that helped me build it, including yourself. And we’ll share a piece or two of music that you’ve been working on there. This has been great to walk through the last month and a half with you. Rediscovering Joel’s music with you has just been a tremendous privilege. Have you learned anything about what you’re capable of in going through this process? I’m genuinely curious, what has been your takeaway?

Sergei Mukhorin:
I learned a little bit, for sure, because in order to make it sound cohesive, it’s very easy to do music, but it will not be — unless you know what you’re doing — it will not be cohesive, and it will not be… The range could be very strange. And I’m not excellent–

David Read:
Very sterile.

Sergei Mukhorin:
Absolutely.

David Read:
Like an office space or a dentist room. It’s serviceable, but that’s it.

Sergei Mukhorin:
I’m not excellent in that as well, for sure. But I’m learning. I learned a little bit, and I continue to learn. And it’s the first time I did a piece of music that is that complex, because everything else I did was maybe piano version that I played by hands, without any editing stuff like that. But now it’s the next step for me. And it’s a big improvement.

David Read:
What software did you use to pull this off?

Sergei Mukhorin:
I used Logic, which is a very popular software for creating music. I used Logic Pro. For the libraries I used EastWest Orchestral Library. Not only orchestral. They have many things, and they had the Dilruba as well in the library. I’m pretty sure that Joel used it as well.

David Read:
Used EastWest?

Sergei Mukhorin:
Yes.

David Read:
I know that Stargate Worlds used EastWest. I’m not entirely sure if Joel used the same thing as well. Neil will know. I will ask him.

Sergei Mukhorin:
What I’m saying is that I’m not saying he used it exclusively. I’m saying that …

David Read:
No.

Sergei Mukhorin:
… he had it.

David Read:
For sure. Absolutely. He may have actually played it. I wouldn’t be surprised. The dude could pull anything off if he had the time, so it was always … Production was always keeping him going. This has been tremendous, man. Thank you for creating this. It means so much to have this to be able to listen to and to share with fans who have been wanting to be able to hear this in isolation. My tremendous hope is that there will be a release of selections of Joel’s work from the different series in the not too distant future. I have no reason to think that there will be, but it’s my hope that that will be the case.

David Read:
I will be the first person to pony up whatever it costs to get …

Sergei Mukhorin:
I will be the second.

David Read:
… a set of it. That’s it. That’s the stuff, man. Thank you for sharing.

Sergei Mukhorin:
Thank you.