Editing Star Trek: The Original Series (section)

===Dramatic underscore===
For budgetary reasons, this series made significant use of "tracked" music, or music written for other episodes that was reused in later episodes. Of the 79 episodes that were broadcast, only 31 had complete or partial original dramatic underscores created specifically for them. The remainder of the music in any episode was tracked from other episodes and from cues recorded for the music library. Which episodes would have new music was mostly the decision of Robert H. Justman, the Associate Producer during the first two seasons.

Screen credits for the composers were given based on the amount of music composed for, or composed and reused in, the episode. Some of these final music credits were occasionally incorrect.

Beyond the short works of [[Source music|"source" music]] (music whose source is seen or acknowledged onscreen) created for specific episodes, eight composers were contracted to create original dramatic underscore during the series run: [[Alexander Courage]], [[George Duning]], [[Jerry Fielding]], [[Gerald Fried]], [[Sol Kaplan]], Samuel Matlovsky, Joseph Mullendore, and [[Fred Steiner]]. The composers conducted their own music. Of these composers, Steiner composed the original music for thirteen episodes and it is his instrumental arrangement of Alexander Courage's main theme that is heard over many of the end title credits of the series.

The tracked musical underscores were chosen and edited to the episode by the music editors, principal of whom were Robert Raff (most of Season One), Jim Henrikson (Season One and Two), and Richard Lapham (Season Three).<ref>{{cite book |last=Steiner |first=Fred |chapter=Music for Star Trek: Scoring a Television Show in the Sixties |editor1-last=Newsom | editor1-first=Iris |title=Wonderful inventions: motion pictures, broadcasting, and recorded sound at the Library of Congress |location=Washington |publisher=Library of Congress |year=1985 |oclc=10374960}}</ref>

Some of the original recordings of the music were released in the United States commercially on the [[GNP Crescendo Record Co.]] label. Music for a number of the episodes was re-recorded by [[Fred Steiner]] and the [[Royal Philharmonic Orchestra]] for the ''[[Varèse Sarabande]]'' label; and by Tony Bremner with the Royal Philharmonic for the ''Label X'' label. Finally in December 2012, the complete original recordings were released by La-La Land Records as a 15-CD [[Box set#Music box sets|box set]], with liner notes by Jeff Bond.<ref name="Lalaland_TOS">{{cite web | url=http://www.lalalandrecords.com/STTOS.html | title=Star Trek: The Original Series Soundtrack Collection: Limited Edition| access-date=January 6, 2013 | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130101064424/http://www.lalalandrecords.com/STTOS.html | archive-date=January 1, 2013 | df=mdy-all }}</ref>