Audible Genius Podcast
Being a musician today can mean so many different things. In the Audible Genius Podcast you’ll hear the stories of the people who live, work, and play in today’s vast music landscape. And through their experience see just how big the world of music truly is.
Audible Genius Podcast
Unveiling the Hidden World of Sound Mixing in Film and TV with Steve Morrow
Ever wondered how your favorite movie or TV show manages to capture pristine, impactful sounds despite challenging shooting conditions? Join me as I chat with Steve Morrow, a veteran sound mixer in the film and TV industry, who shares his captivating stories and techniques about production sound mixing. From clean dialogue recording in noisy backgrounds to the perfect audio capture for musical performances, prepare to uncover the hidden world of sound in film and television production.
The podcast takes an intriguing turn as we delve into the art of live recording for film music. Explore intricate techniques such as playing pre-recorded tracks via performers' earpieces and using impulse responses to create the illusion of live performances. We also discuss the struggles of on-set live vocal recording, the intriguing challenges of capturing car and engine sounds, and the critical role of sound effects editors. Discover Steve's innovative solutions for mitigating background noise and learn how he collaborates with cinematographers to maintain a consistent ambience.
Finally, we discuss the fascinating process of recording symphonies and the role of earpieces in providing actors with live audio. Get insights into mic placement tricks and how Steve manages to capture perfect sound regardless of the circumstances on the set. This episode is perfect for anyone interested in the complex, yet intriguing world of sound mixing for film and TV production. So, buckle up and get ready for an audio journey like no other.
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Welcome to the Audible Genius podcast, where we take a behind the scenes look at being a musician. I'm Joe Hamlin. Today I'm talking to Steve Morrow, an accomplished sound mixer for film and TV. We'll be talking about the art of recording dialogue and sound during a shoot, which is a fascinatingly complex and uniquely challenging process. We'll dive into the work Steve has done on films like A Star is Born, babylon and LaLaLand to explore the intricacies of recording live music performances for film. Let's get started. All right, steve. So you are a sound mixer for film and TV, and when a musician hears the term mixing, they think of a very different thing. So can you tell me what exactly does a sound mixer do in movies and TV?
Speaker 2:So there's obviously a bunch of different sound people on movie and TV. My job is the production sound mixer, so I'm the guy on set recording the actors talking. The main audio that you hear from me is coming out of the center channel in the movie theater, so that's voices, dialogue, things of that nature. So we're put into the on location shooting scenario. So mobile recording, everything is brought in and taken out the same day. Okay.
Speaker 1:And, like you know, I always obviously know that's a thing that happens in movies, right? Yeah, sure, we hear the people, but after having just like random conversations with you about it, I realized just how difficult and complex it is. I mean, like, what's difficult about doing this? What are some of the difficulties?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean some of the, you know, a lot of the time the louder the location, meaning like closer to the airports, closer to the freeway, just like in real estate, it's cheaper, right, and it's cheaper to film in these noisy environments, not because they're noisy just because they're near more industrial areas. And so you'll have this beautiful scene of two people sitting on a blanket in the park having a picnic and just off camera. You know, behind the camera is the freeway and we don't see that as an audience but you may hear it and so it's our job to really, you know if we can speak up well in advance and say you know, there's a noisy freeway there, we shouldn't shoot there. But 90% of the time they've already picked it, they've already paid for it, they're just going to look and see what you can do about it. So then you deploy different techniques. You can. You can radio mic them. You know you can get a boom nice and close Most of the time outside.
Speaker 2:Now with a multi-camera, you know you're not shooting just one camera at a time, you're shooting, you know, two or three at a time.
Speaker 2:You tend to use a lot of radio mics and depending on how you mic them and how loud the actor is, that's how quiet the ambience is. So the challenges are that you know, and then and then you also have these like Ford vs Ferrari. If you watch that movie, anytime we're at the, the racetrack, the wind is going like 40 miles an hour, but these guys all have very short haircuts and t-shirts on, so you don't see the wind in frame, you don't see it at all. But you have a wind tunnel and you have a little microphone on an actor that you now have to put a big fur ball on so that you can get rid of the wind, but you can't see that in camera because otherwise it ruins the effect that you're watching a movie. So those are some challenges where it's like it's not super obvious to the audience and and there's noise all over and the goal is to just get it as clean as you can. Wow.
Speaker 1:So if, if the actors say had long hair, and it's obvious that there's wind blowing, would you be a little more forgiving, like you would allow some of the wind sound into the recording?
Speaker 2:Ish, but not really. I mean like it would at least let the audience know hey, there's wind and so we all are comfortable with that sound, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like I said, like in the park, the audience is watching this, this beautiful, you know, picnic in the park, and it's kind of like wait, what is going on? And why is there all this noise, you know, whereas if you turn around the camera and you see the freeway going in the background and they're sitting there talking, then you go, your mind automatically goes. Okay, I get it. You know there's a freeway there.
Speaker 1:Okay, got it Okay. So you know, there's like a little bit of a little. You could allow a little bit in there and it's okay.
Speaker 2:It won't confuse the audience Okay.
Speaker 2:Like we did this. I did this TV show years ago called it was. It's on the show. It's on Hulu now it's called Casual. Casual TV show is called Casual oh my gosh, what a great show, so Casual.
Speaker 2:We shot a lot of the time on a street called Ventura Boulevard and the cinematographer and I had lots of chit chats about it and Ventura Boulevard is like a main artery in Los Angeles. It's like all the traffic goes through there and you can't close it down and we were a tiny show so we didn't have the money to close it down. And a lot of the time you'd shoot on the sidewalk of two people coming out of restaurant talking and you could frame it where you just see down the sidewalk or you could frame it so you could see the cars driving by and the cinematographer and I worked together and I said, hey, if you could shoot two cameras, you know, over each person's shoulder, so that the edit is going back and forth and it's just real time editing. You don't have to. You know you're not looking one direction and turning around looking the other, because every time you do that sound edit it changes the ambience because it's a different time and different space and time and life right.
Speaker 2:Different cars are going by at the same time, and so him and I worked together close to get two cameras looking opposite directions at the traffic while the actors are talking at the same time. And then all of a sudden you know the show works perfectly, because the actors are talking over the cars, the cars are in the frame, everything makes sense, and so you watch that show and not one line of dialogue was re-recorded in the entire I think five seasons, four seasons of that show, because we were able to do things like that, where it's like, no, you're on a real street, you don't have to show the traffic, because if you show the nice, you know, sidewalk, you know you have to fix the traffic noise. You show the traffic, you don't have to fix it, that's so cool.
Speaker 1:You really have to think about, like when you're recording music, like in a studio, you don't have to think about what the listeners seeing it's pure audio but you really have to think about what the person seeing and how they're going to connect audio to that sense, their sight sense.
Speaker 2:Yes, and also that, by the way, transitions perfectly into why sometimes musicals feel really wrong when you're watching them on TV. So you'll watch, you know a movie about. You know people singing in a park, but it sounds like they're singing in a recording studio, because 90% of the time they are. And so there's tricks. There's tricks to make that sound more real, which we've done throughout the years. But when you're doing a musical, in the whole world ambient changes into the sound studio, the sounds you know where you've recorded, pre-recorded, all these, these vocals. The audience gets thrown. And that's why musicals are hard to digest sometimes, because they just don't seem real.
Speaker 1:So, like you did, la La Land, for example. So all the actual music, the vocal recordings, that was done in studio.
Speaker 2:So a movie like La La Land was kind of 50-50. Emma Stone or yeah, emma Stone's vocals were all recorded on set live. So like her big audition scene, that's very powerful. And her and Ryan Goslin, you know, playing piano in his apartment singing their song together. That's all live between the two of them. Ryan Goslin on like the the, the Pier by the Ocean, that's playback. So he's just lip syncing what he pre-recorded. All Emma Stone's roommates, you know, dancing around the apartment were recorded, pre-recorded and then playback and they would. They would lip sync, you know.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So that's, that's an example of like, it's like a 50-50,. You know, like Emma, even Emma Stone's vocals in the roommate song were sung live on on set because you're able to mix match some of that so the audience doesn't get fully wiped out, thinking, well, this is just a giant music moment, you know Okay.
Speaker 1:So so, like recording the other person on the set, you're getting some of that like real room ambience to mix in with Emma's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you get some real room ambience you get, and it's really up to post-production too to be able to blend in some ambient sound from the set you know because it's really easy to turn a knob off on the set recording and say, no, we haven't pre-recorded. But you know that will throw an audience pretty easily nowadays, you know because we're all we're all used to hearing real stuff.
Speaker 1:So if you, if you have a scene where you recorded the singer in the studio in order to make it sound like it's in the space they're actually moving in, do you literally just record just some empty like ambient space and then layer that on top later on?
Speaker 2:Now we actually have. There's a couple of techniques you can do. A lot of the time at least in the last couple of years, I've been able to convince the director let's at least try it live. We have the pre-record. We can play the pre-record in their ear, you know. So they'll have a little earpiece that looks like a hearing aid. That's, you know, pseudo AM, fm-ish quality. It's not great, but it's not. It's not terrible, it's enough that they understand the music and will record them live.
Speaker 2:Now, whether that's used or not, it doesn't really matter, because now you have that track of live and sometimes it's easy to go from you know, dialogue, dialogue, first line of vocals in the song, all live, and then they can mix in the studio recording and kind of fade out of the live stuff and then, right at the end of the song, fade back into the real vocal onset and then that tricks the entire audience into thinking the whole thing was live. So you can mix and match. But then there's the reverse, which is like a star is born, all the music, basically all the music in the movie. The actual instrumentation was done in the studio but all the vocals were done live on set. And then what we would do is we would do an impulse response in the venue, and so that is a bunch of sounds. It's basically like you know your old car radio that had like church in hall one, hall two, you know, you had the different EQs that you could set.
Speaker 2:We're generally making. We're basically making a custom version of that on set. So we'll send tone through the whole house, we'll ring the room and we'll have different microphones and through you know a program, later we'll pull it all open and say, okay, this is how big the room was, this is how noisy it was, this is how much slap there is. And then you add that EQ, that custom EQ, to the pre-recorded music, the instruments, and now, all of a sudden, instead of it sounding like it was in a quiet recording studio, now it sounds like it's in an arena that was custom.
Speaker 1:So you apply the impulse response to an EQ or a reverb or both.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, you do it to everything. I mean the vocals you do it to. Yeah, you just name it. You do it to everything.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's interesting because you know, in musicians we use, like in mixing and stuff, we use impulse responses for reverb primarily. Would you apply it to an actual EQ effect and then put that onto everything?
Speaker 2:Well, it depends on. I mean, no, basically the music is pre-recorded and pre-mixed, but you'll take the impulse response and you'll apply it to the music so that it sounds like it is coming from the venue that you're actually filming.
Speaker 1:And is there a specific tool that you use like a plug-in, a software, a piece of software that does that in the end?
Speaker 2:We don't on set. What we do is we just record it. Let them unzip it later, right?
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:Okay, I think it's a verb. What is the? I'm sure it's a very standard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of those. Yeah, because that's great. Like you said, you can get an actual room, like it's not a digital recreation of some kind of room, it's a deliterate room imprinted upon the audio right.
Speaker 2:And, like you know, star's Born. We went everywhere and so we did. We rung the room everywhere. We even rung a room at Coachella, which you know if you've ever been in the middle of the desert. We put this pulse out that, like you know, the whole stage started shaking because you start with super low end and you go super high end, right, it's like high frequency, and so stage is shaking and finally, when it gets all the way to the high end, everybody's plugging their ears and you can hear it bounce off the mountain six miles away, like 12 seconds later. It was like oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:And so we have that reverb and it's just like you'll never use that for anything other than that scene, because it's such a ridiculous distance.
Speaker 1:So you had to do that. So like at a time when there was no one at Coachella early in the morning or something you had to.
Speaker 2:Well, what we did is we filmed Coachella in between the venues or in between the weekends. So Coachella happens during a weekend. So we would film Monday through Thursday and then Friday. They would have the concert all the way till Sunday and then we come back on Monday. We only did it live. The opening of the movie is live during Stagecoach, which happens two weeks later, right before Willie Nelson came on. So there was 40,000 people in the crowd. Oh God, bradley comes out, he does the opening scene, the opening song, and that's the audience. And if you really look close enough, some of the audience is a little confused at what's happening, because they've been there all day drinking and all of a sudden Bradley Cooper's out. And, by the way, when he's singing, he's singing live, but we're not projecting it to the audience. We're trying to keep all the music secret right, because this is two years before the movie comes out. We have Lady Gaga, we have Bradley Cooper singing live and if you project it through speakers then the whole gig is up. Everybody hears it.
Speaker 2:So only the people in the first row or two can actually hear him singing the rest of, just because they're close to his voice. Wow, okay, and that's also why you do the impulse response, so that you can blast it out to the audience and make it sound like in the theater, make it sound like it was going wide.
Speaker 1:So you did the impulse response then, when the audience is there or when no one, we did it we did it without the audience.
Speaker 2:Okay, we were able to do it throughout the week. So that was like a certain stage that we just you know we're able to do so everyone was there at that stage to see Willie Nelson and suddenly Bradley Cooper and Lady.
Speaker 1:Gaga come out and they they see they're singing, but they can't really hear them, unless it's just it's just Bradley Cooper at that point.
Speaker 2:Okay and then we also did the same thing at Glastonbury in London, you know, and that was in front of 120,000 people. Wow. But you can't. You know it's hard to get like, just like with anything. If you do it all CGI just looks fake right. So it's like we can jump out in front of you know, a band, because they have a 10 minute Changeover from one band to another and they give us, you know, three or four minutes of it and we run out there and we plug everything in real quick and we hit play and we have a little Pro Tools. You know on my laptop that I've given a cable to the front of house guy and, you know, and he plays it through the wedge in front of Bradley and that's it, nothing out. You know, we tell him don't put his microphone out, but give me the feed, and I take the feed and we hit record. Yeah, we're yelling. Yeah, I mean, it's pure chaos. It looks like we are absolute. It kind of looks like we're a bunch of idiots, but we're running around.
Speaker 1:So you're working with the front of house. Engineer that was there doing the.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he would have like, yeah, he was on the side of the stage and I'm like, hey, I need a feed from that microphone. He goes here, you go, and I just grab it, plug it in, great. And then here's the feed of the playback and I hand it to him. And so he and I said, just play it through that wedge speaker right in front of him, not out through the house. Okay, great, but he's gonna say a speech real quick to the crowd. Can you put that out? The speakers? You got it, you know, and then that was it.
Speaker 1:That is so cool. So was, so the audience was just sort of confused, but were they kind of into it, or yeah?
Speaker 2:They were kind of into it because, like, well, for glass and berry, what we learned, that we learned a lesson from Stagecoach, which was the opening of the movie glass and berry, was the very last thing we filmed, really Okay. And we learned the lesson that if the audience doesn't hear anything, do not react to me anything. So we had a in one of the songs he has a guitar solo which doesn't give away any song at all, like there's, you know. So we just said to the front of house, I said when I, when I point to you, bring the guitar up through the speakers, and he's like okay, cool, you know. And so here comes a guitar solo, point to the guy. He brings it up and there's Bradley Cooper, you know, even though he's just playing, he's pretending to play the guitar. The audience doesn't know, and so they're freaking out because Bradley Cooper's rocking out on this electric guitar.
Speaker 1:Okay, oh, so you're, you have a pre-recorded by a guitar player. We have everything yeah, and he's pretending to play and. I think he's actually playing. That's the only part this up, that's that is chaos and you never know, yeah, I that's. That's really fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's how you get those big crowds. You know the look of the huge crowds.
Speaker 1:You have to shoot it in front of crowds you know, you only get that one chance, whatever that little ten minute or five minutes, we were supposed to get ten minutes and we had three songs to do and we show up and they said, hey, we're running along, you guys have three minutes.
Speaker 2:And Bradley went oh, okay, great, got it. And we all flew out there. I mean, it was like four of us that just flew out to glass and berry just for this right. And it's all sudden, like you have a Third time, and he goes well, I guess we're only doing one song. And I said, well, you only need what like 30, 40 seconds of each song. Yeah, I said, let's just do 30, 40 seconds of each song. We'll just go one song at a time, we'll just play it through and then you'll have all three. All right? Yeah, let's do that. And so we would. You know, it was like play 30 seconds. Okay, next song, you know, hit the button. It's okay, I was chaos, but it was fun.
Speaker 2:Lars of Metallica right, lars, but he was one of the camera operators. So Bradley was like Lars, you're my buddy here, grab this camera and follow me out on state. You know, because we had a, we had a camera crew, but we only had an operator for one camera and we had two cameras there, and so it Bradley's like I. We got an extra camera. Lars, come on, you operate this camera.
Speaker 1:Because he just happened to be standing there.
Speaker 2:What happened to be there? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did you run into any problems? We mean other than that problem of oh, it's only three minutes. Did it go as smooth as it could go? Were there any hiccups that popped up?
Speaker 2:I mean it went as smooth as it could go. We got a taxi cab from Bath, england, to Glastonbury, which is, you know, 45 minute drive, and our taxi cab driver is gonna stay there all day. He doesn't know what's going on. He's just been hired for the day and I'm with the, the studio executive and myself, his wife and my wife we all the four of us came together and all my gears in the back of his taxi cab. So I was like all right, we're gonna go scout. You know, we have to go check in at the various departments at Glastonbury. Make sure that we're all good. We check in, we go the stage, we understand, we come back to the cab and the Cab is locked, the cab driver is gone and we're like what is happening? There's, there's 200,000 people here. Where is this guy? And he is gone for the next hour and a half.
Speaker 2:We had 10 minutes before we had to be on stage and I looked at the producer, said I think I'm gonna have to break this guy's window. He goes yeah, yeah, give him another minute. And then, yeah, let's just break the window and let's grab the gear. And, sure enough, within like 30 seconds the guy shows up. We're like dude, where have you been? Open your car, I need my gear, let's go. That was the only real hiccup, but that was one of those things it's like okay, I mean, our option is to break this guy's window beyond. That will be fine.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but we didn't have to, so that's good.
Speaker 1:Well, that's cool, that is very, very cool. Do so. You said, like a lot of times when you're doing musicals, the dead giveaway when you you said you're adding the like the ambience is at the beginning in the end. So it's like transitioning from having like people talking with ambience to a Recorded yeah, that's a full-blown music playback, right. So once they're in the middle of the song, you'll just kind of shift over to the studio one and the audience won't even notice that You've done that.
Speaker 2:Well, the post-production will do that, so my job on set will be record them live the entire time. We did a movie called Was it the prom and the prom was a hundred percent music playback is you know, they would talk, talk, talk and play back and they would. They would sing it right.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And post-production did an amazing job blending it to the point where it's like it's really well done and you don't really hear a huge difference in the playback versus the live. But that was a scenario where we would have loved to get the first you know line of the song at least live on set and then go straight into playback and get the last line so that they could do the blend. But our director, he was like that, don't want to do it, don't need to, you know, and he had done tons of musicals and he was comfortable with the way that that sounded. So that was how he wanted to do it, which was totally fine. I mean, that's, that's always a director's choice. Our job is just to give them options.
Speaker 2:Here's your options, here's what. And a lot of time the directors go. I don't know anything about sound. What should I do, you know, and you go. Well, here's your options, you know. Do you want it to sound like Straight playback, musical, you know, fantasy moment, where it doesn't really matter, or do you want it to sound more real and we just happen to capture the performance? Yeah, you know. So it just depends on the movie, you know, like a star is born, you had to do it live right, otherwise it's just like that's cheesy, you know.
Speaker 2:And then a movie, like you know, the prom, it's fantasy, it's, it's, you know, the lighting's changes, everything goes to rainbows. I mean it's great, but it's not based in reality, so it doesn't really matter as much.
Speaker 1:Okay, another one of those context. What the audience? Yeah, in the content.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like if it's totally ridiculous, it's fine. You know it's fine to be ridiculous.
Speaker 1:So now you said sometimes a director will be really open because I'm not sure what to do. Do you ever run into a situation where a director or someone Feels very strong about how it should be done and you know it's gonna be a major problem if you do it that way?
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, I mean, you have, you have certain discussions. It's like no, that's not, you know. It's like you definitely know what works and what doesn't, but your goal is always to give the director what he wants right.
Speaker 2:But also understand why he's asking the question that he's asking, or whoever is asking that question. You just go, okay, hold on, let me. Let me think about this. You know, okay, so you want this, this and this to happen. You know, and sometimes they don't realize that what they're asking for Is the wrong on the technical side, the wrong thing, and so it's kind of your job to say, well, technically, here's the reason why we do it this way. You know okay.
Speaker 2:But you could definitely have personalities where they just don't want to talk to you at all and you just go, okay, you know, it's your movie, you know, and you write notes and you call the editor and you say here's what's going on and you know there's almost nothing you can do at that point. You just go, that's. You know, I'm a. You know 95% of time I'm a technical position. You know there's only 5% of time where I get to be Artistic and make choices that will affect the product. The rest of the time I'm just kind of following what they want to do and make sure that I'm doing it on a technical level correctly.
Speaker 1:Okay, do. Are there certain habits of actors, maybe the way they speak or the way they move, that make them some harder to record than others?
Speaker 2:Oh for sure, like the newest, the, the latest, you know, acting trend is to whisper and to mumble everything you know. And back in the day you know, if you wanted to be heard as an actor, you came from theater and you would speak and you would, you know, pronunciate. Now it's like, and it's like what did he?
Speaker 2:just say, and it's your job, and you'll have a microphone like four inches from his mouth and you'll have a love on his you know, on his collar, and you're like you're mixing between the two just to get some semblance of what did he say? Okay, great, and so it's. It's also very difficult because if you're sitting there reading the script while he's talking, you understand exactly what he's saying, or he or she is saying. But if you listen to it without that knowledge of what they're saying and sometimes I try to do that where I just go Okay, you know, I'm not gonna follow along with what he's saying. I'm gonna listen and see if I can understand what he's saying, because the director knows the script, the script supervisor knows the script, everybody knows what he's saying, and so our minds will fill that gap. So it's my job to say oh, did you really understand?
Speaker 1:what he's saying there.
Speaker 2:It's a little unclear to me and sometimes they'll just say, yeah, yeah, no, I totally get it, and I go okay, and then I walk away and I sit back down. You know, and sometimes if they understand what I'm saying I'm like it's a little unclear Then they'll say, yeah, I'm gonna have them speak up a little bit, you know. And then they'll say, hey, can you speak up? And? And that that helps out, that oh wow, so you'll.
Speaker 1:There'll be times where you're like you're live mixing between an overhead mic and a Lavalier, like yeah, in the moment.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah, like most of the try, so on set. If you think about like I don't know if you've ever watched like a gold mining show when they pull like thousands of yards of dirt to get a little teeny nugget right and the teeny nugget is what they're after, well, my job is that thousand yards of dirt. I'm trying to get as much Audio as possible. So I'll run eight, 12, 20, 30 tracks of audio, which is individual microphones on people, on boom poles, planted microphones, everything on set, and I'll record it. Everybody gets their own channel. Every, every, every single microphone is recorded on its own thing and then I'll be mixing.
Speaker 2:Now, if I screw up a mix, it's okay. The only people that are hearing that are the director and everybody on set and the editor who has to deal with it later. But they have the individual tracks. God. So we have multi tracks so that can just pick it up or grab it and pop it in if I screwed up. So my job mixing is for one, to make the dailies, which is what the studio and the director and the editor Edit with and listen to make that sound good. But also it allows me, as the record is, to understand oh, okay, everything is good, or those mics all sound good. Because if I just put every fader up, who knows what's happening, right, you just somebody scratches their their shirt while somebody else is talking, it's totally fine, because that's not on. The guy who's talking is Mike.
Speaker 2:But if you hear it and you're not sure what that is. So that's why you live, mix as you go, production side, and so I'll do bonus things like oh, that's that, that creaky door is really cool, like on the color purple. We have, like this, really cool, you know, hinge door that has this really creaky like spring on it, and nobody ever talked while it was happening, but man, it sounded cool. So we just put a mic right on it and we would record it every single scene. If somebody come in, come out, you know it's like it's there now.
Speaker 2:Whether post-production uses it, sifts through it and finds that little nugget of gold, that's up to them, you know they may have the perfect creaky swinging door that they just like to use, and so that's their, that's their, you know choice. I just my. My goal is to give them as much information as possible, overload them with with tracks, and then they can sift through it and find, find the load of nuggets.
Speaker 1:Got it. So the live mixing is more for the people hearing it now and, like the dailies, big people to review. But but the guys that are actually be mixing it later down the road they get every raw track.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I mean, let me be clear, like TV.
Speaker 2:A lot of times they'll use your mix, like if your mix is good, they'll use it right, because why? Why remix something that sounds perfectly good? Tv has a shorter post-production schedule. They're week to week. They're really fast, so sometimes they don't have time to remix the entire thing. Motion pictures they're gonna remix everything you've done because they have months and time to do it. One director, jason rightman him and I have done a few movies together, like dozen or so, and he's a guy that whatever I give him on set, it's only gonna change 10% in post, like his post. People and I, we all talk and it's like Whatever I end up giving him in that editing room is what he's gonna stick to. And if they try to clean it or fix it too Much, he, it bothers him and he goes no, no, that's not what it is, let's just. Let's just listen to the, to the set track, you know, and that's interesting. So you have to be careful in what you give or don't give, depending on the director.
Speaker 1:Oh, Got it so well. Sometimes you have some tracks, like you said, you have a bunch of mics. Well, sometimes you'll just be like I'm not even gonna give them this one, this one's useless or you have a sense for what they will need and won't need.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like well, on color purple, there was all these, like you know, antique cars, old-school cars from the 20s, right, and then the movies set back then, so we put mics on all the cars that they're driving around. But I'm just tracking that. I'm not even gonna put it in the mix because I'm my focus is the dialogue. So I make sure that the microphone sound good. They're at a good level, I can see them moving while the scene is happening. But I'm not putting a mix because my goal is dialogue. But the bonus material that I'm giving post is these cars, whether they use them or not their choice right.
Speaker 2:Okay, but I don't give it to them, then they don't have the option of using it.
Speaker 1:Right, do you accompany when you, when you give all that stuff to post? Do you have like notes that you give them Just like, oh, watch up at this, or I recommend this, or anything like that. Just thought, yeah, it's not so much a recommendation.
Speaker 2:It's more like you know it's a. You know scene 82, apple or scene 82 a, has these 12 tracks. Here's what's on track one, two, three, four, five, all the way through 12.
Speaker 2:Okay and then if there's an obvious, like you know, an airplane flew over during the take and they moved on. I'll write airplane director was aware, you know, to say, hey, you know, there was an airplane on that one, that's okay, we're moving on, okay. And you just put it down as a note saying you know, director was aware there was an airplane, and then you send it off. I don't necessarily say hey, I think that this is good for this track and this is good for that, because there's a script supervisor who is next to the director and they're watching the scene and he goes oh, I like, I like the opening two lines from this take and I like the other two lines from this take, and so that's what the editor Will go through her notes, her him notes, and go oh, that's the, you know, here's what the director was thinking, and they'll edit it and decide.
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Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I mean you have your tricks, like if somebody's wearing a tie. Next time you watch TV show with a tie In it, like a TV show, look at the tie knot and you'll see like a Quarter inch bump out or a half inch bump from the tie to the fabric. That's not natural when you tie ties against each other. So a lot of sound people will put that bump in there, put the microphone in there and gives them a good protection. Now I try to avoid it because when you're doing a movie and that bump is on a 50 foot screen, all of a sudden it's a five foot bump. You know, and it's very obvious what you, what you've done. So there's other techniques of doing it where you don't see that bump and that's what we go with. But that's like.
Speaker 2:You know there are definitely things that work and definitely things that don't work. You know you've tried, like the collar of a of a shirt. You know, put it in the collar and it's like, no, that just doesn't work. Well, I hear it. But then you get the skin scraping against the fabric. Or if they have a beard, you know the the hair scrapes against the beard. It's you know. You know what's gonna work and what's not. And so you definitely have things like button-up shirts that are tight, brutal, brutal to work with, you know, because it's just like the fabric is stiff, it's against their body and any, any kind of movement that they do is just like a scratch, you know. And so it's like, yeah, you know what's gonna work and what's not, after after you've done it long enough, and you have your tricks, yeah.
Speaker 1:What if they're not wearing a shirt? What if it's a shirtless scene?
Speaker 2:so we had a scene, we've done it all. We had the scene and babysitter to, where the main care one of the main characters, the shirtless, the entire movie, you know. And so what we would do 90% of the time is wait for his close-up to get a mic in there. But if we had to mic him a few times because there was this giant wine, he's yelling for the girl come out, come out, you know.
Speaker 2:And he's like shirtless and we put it in his belt, buckle the law of his belt buckle which was like there's no way this is gonna work, but it's the only place we can put it and he was game for it. We're like you know, mic'ing his crotch, you know this belt buckle and we're like all right, and he was totally fine with. He's a good. He's a good guy, nice actor, and it sounded great. I mean for the wide shots. It sounded amazing. It sounded like we had a mic pretty close to him, which we did.
Speaker 1:That's pretty funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's like yeah, but when you have those things where it's like their shirtless, then that's when you have a nice conversation with the cinematographer saying, hey, this guy doesn't have a shirt, we can't mic him. Can you make sure not to shoot? Because sometimes what they'll do with two cameras is they'll shoot a super wide shot and They'll zoom in on a couple actors to get their coverage and it's like, hey, can you not shoot the close-up? At the same time you shoot the wide shot on the guy without a shirt Because we can't get a mic on them. And you know what 90% of time they go. I totally get it understand and sometimes I got sorry, dude, your screwed, nothing I can do. We're behind schedule. We have to shoot it. He's got. Okay, you know, and then that's what you do.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, it sounds like you have to have this perfect balance in your personality of Advocating but also being flexible, like being a stickler, and being flexible to say yeah, I mean you have to be able to get it good, but also understand that on a film set, if there's 200 people, there's three of us for the audio and there's, you know, 297 other people for just the visual Costumes, locations, you know, makeup, hair, lighting, everything is for the visual. There's three of us for the sound. In post production it flips right. There's a colorist and a color timing person for the video or for the for the visual, but then there's like 150 people for sound, right, so it's like it's like a post.
Speaker 2:But that's the thing. Like on set is there's just a small amount of us that have to protect the audio and and everybody else who. They're not against you, it's just they're trying to do their, their art and if you're in their way you get run over. So there's a way of like. You know, it's that simple thing. If you just treat people with kindness, they'll help you when they can, whereas if you go in there and say we need it this way and x, y and z, it's like, yeah, okay, maybe that works, but they're not really gonna help you in the in the long run.
Speaker 1:You know Okay so it's like they know the audio is important, but they can't help but put all their focus on the visual, because that's just the people they are doing. That's their thing.
Speaker 2:And some cinematographers are super like. They get it. They know what we're doing, so they'll help us out with with Easier lighting and you know, because sometimes you have a perfect scene where you want to boom somebody but you know shadows in the way Because of the lighting. Okay and there's some. So you know, like everything, everything is against you, not in it and not in the on purpose way. But you know, production sound is one of those things. It's like you're not in the studio. It's not about you, you know you're just you're just like run over Sometimes interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What I remember, you tell me, was that one of the tougher films getting sound was up in the air. That took place in an airport. Yep, what was what's so difficult about an airport? Just the constant background noise.
Speaker 2:Yes, the background noise, there's jets taking off every you know minute or two. Okay, because anytime you have a scene where you're filming one person and you turn around, you film another person, you cut back and forth. The ambience is what changes? What's the obvious difference? Okay, and so they have to blend that, or you have to make sure that you're covered. You know you're, you'll be recording a scene and you go okay, take two had a lot, you know how, the airplane on this line, you know, and so you have to think about it like, oh, but we have four other takes where that line is perfectly good, you know, and so you just have to always check in with the director and make sure that he understands. Like on take two, these three lines are terrible, like you're not gonna want to use them.
Speaker 1:Oh, Right, I understand, you know. Got it because when so they're shooting, let's shoot a scene like, let's say, a conversation between two people, five, six times, and then later on the editor mate might take okay, line one from this, this take, line two from that take. They'll kind of piece it together.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, it's not just one take going back and forth, it's like you know.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's all over the place and and sometimes it'll be a visual from one take and audio from a different take On to the same, you know. So it's like, right, okay, full on editing. All over the place, yeah.
Speaker 1:Got it. So you can't say like have, like a, suddenly there can't be a sound of an airplane taking off, like cutting halfway into the sound of An airplane. Take up when they switch to take two for the answer Exactly.
Speaker 2:You know but what you can do if say, the director's like oh my god, I love, take two, and that the airplanes killing. What post-production will do is they'll add an airplane Prior to that edit in, so then there's that, what there is that way to fix it, and you just go, okay, well now there's an airplane through the whole scene, which is fine, because in this moment we need that airplane to match in that moment.
Speaker 2:Good, they can't report and you're an airport and it makes sense and contextually to the audience. Airplane airport got it.
Speaker 1:It sounds like it's such a fascinating puzzle and it's got to work between you doing the live and the post guys down it.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, if you think of, like you know, any podcaster and like NPR report right when they go on location and they're like we're here at the airport, it's like you hear, like you know, you know, and they have all the ambience going and it's to set your mind to understand. Oh, now I'm at the airport, but it's just a even though it's not even a visual thing, it's an audio thing and they're setting that and I bet you 90% of the time that's just an edited in sound effect of an airport.
Speaker 2:They didn't go to the airport and just happen to catch the perfect ambience, right, but they're doing that to set the story. And the same thing happens with the visual. If the visual and the audio match, totally fine. You know it's like oh, we hear airplanes, we're at an airport, got it. You know the audience is cool with that. But you're at, like, the Getty Museum, and it's a beautiful day and all of a sudden you just have a you know helicopter flying over randomly. That has nothing to do with the story. The audience is gonna go. Why that helicopter fly over? You know, cuz, cuz. You're only putting things in movies that that tell the grander story.
Speaker 2:Okay you know, and if it doesn't mean anything like you'll watch a movie, you go wait. Why did that just happen? And sometimes it never gets cleared up and it's confusing to the audience because we're all used to being told Information in a movie like here's what you need to know as an audience member to enjoy this movie, and if there's something in there that doesn't make any sense or doesn't fit in anywhere, you go wait. What? Why did that?
Speaker 1:happen. Do you find that stuff usually obvious? Like Getty example is obvious. We're at a peaceful scene at a museum. A helicopter shouldn't be in there. But, are there a sometimes subtle background noises that wouldn't seem like they'd be a big deal until later in context. It's like, well, that's so weird, like is it. Is it always easy to catch those wrong things?
Speaker 2:It's always easy to catch the wrong things. Here's your brain at least my brain goes uh-uh, something's wrong. You know, like change that. Yeah, I think it's pretty easy to figure out because you well, we all do we watch a movie and go, that was weird.
Speaker 1:Something's not quite right, you know. Okay, that's fair. Oh yeah, all the audience is gonna do it, naturally, then so will you. Yeah, exactly right yeah okay and I'll fix it. So, okay, can they just in post? If push comes to shove, can they just somehow kind of like I know there's like audio processing tools in music, but they can. They say like we have to get rid of this airplane sound. There's no other way to do it. They have tools. They could just like come cut it out of the audio in a sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there's great, there's some great noise reduction tools. Yeah, I mean, there's just a ton of tools for cleaning audio, cleaning Scratches, cleaning, ticks, cleaning, you know RF interference like, because the real world is rough on sound. Right, the real world is tough. You, you have an actor who's talking. All of a sudden, somebody, you know, some police Walkie or some emergency channel, turns on that hasn't been on in weeks and just scrambles the take, you know, and you're just like what, what was that? And you have changed frequencies and like, you know, because the little transmitters that are on the actors are, you know, 30 milliwatts. They're teeny, tiny, you know, compared to everything else around you. So it's like, yeah, I mean everything. So post-production has gotten very good at cleaning. You know RXing, you know all that audio, and it's the same stuff for the music industry as well. It's just, you're just cleaning, processing the information, yeah, oh cool.
Speaker 1:Now you did the most recent Fast and Furious movie, fast X.
Speaker 2:I did the.
Speaker 1:LA portion. Okay, okay, did that pose any unique like just it being so car oriented, does doing something with a lot of cars pose unique challenges?
Speaker 2:Cars are a pain in the butt, to be honest, like you have a scenario where now you're like 90% visual, like 99% visual.
Speaker 2:Who cares about the sound? So? And there's all the different tricks in the cars and you know they're noisy and things like that. So it's like we had the scene where they're doing, like you know, donuts in the Dodger Stadium parking lot and we could do the normal thing, which is, well, I'm in charge of dialogue, so I'll put a mic on an actor and that's all I'm gonna do, you know. But to me I thought, well, that's a little boring, let's try to amp it up. We have nothing else to do. The guy's not talking in the car, he's just doing donuts. So let's try to record the engine and the car sound right.
Speaker 2:So we put two microphones at the back of the car, you know, but they're little avaliers because you can't. You know, in the grand world you'd have big microphones and everything going, but we're filming at the same time, so we have to hide them all. So we put a portable recorder in the car, we wire up two microphones into, you know, from the back bumper, which is gonna get the sound of the screeching tires and the exhaust, and then we put a microphone in the engine compartment to get the revving and the different sounds of the engine. And then you have to know, okay, this is all super loud stuff, so you gotta crank it down before you hit record and let them go. And we did, and we recorded it and it's like it's a really cool sound, you know.
Speaker 2:But there's also, by the way, 10 other fast and furious movies that have pre-recorded engine sounds and sound effects, and there's an entire guy that that's what he does, right, the sound effects editor. So it's not like he's just gonna take our tracks and go, oh, these are perfect, cut and paste done. You know he'll probably look at ours and go okay, good reference, let me read you, let me find these sounds somewhere else.
Speaker 1:Oh God, okay, I was wondering that, like how much of that of the sounds in a movie like that are the actuals recorded on set and how much are just cut in after the fact?
Speaker 2:Probably very little, probably very little, like we did Jason Bourne, the Las Vegas strip chase scene right in that movie and we shut down the Vegas strip for like six weeks every night, from eight PM until six in the morning, and one mile at a time, and we would just do the chase through the whole thing. And there was two sound guys it was me and my buddy Rich. We recorded everything. We put mics in places you shouldn't put mics because basically there was no actors, right, it was all stunt people and they're gonna crash cars. And so we're like, let's put a recorder in that car, that's gonna get. You know it's gonna get T-boned, let's hear how that sounds, you know it's like. So we recorded all this cool stuff and it sounds amazing, right, all these cars flipping and crashing. One car actually flipped by accident and we just kind of opened the trunk. We're like, yeah, it's still in there and we grabbed it Anyway. So it was just one of those things where we're like, ah, it still works, all right, perfect. And then you watch the movie and you're like, nah, none of that made it. They didn't use one ounce of our sound. We were there for six weeks for nothing, just collecting a paycheck, but it was fun, you know.
Speaker 2:But that's the thing I mean. It's like post-production, that's their job. Their job is to, you know, because the way the movie is played in America they're gonna play the original tracks, right, but in France they're gonna dub it in French and if they don't have all those sound effects and all the music, all you know, stemmed out by themselves, not connected to the American voices, then the movie changes drastically in a different country. So really our main job is that, you know, the American version of the dialogue and any sound effects that we get they'll use, but they'll clip them out and they put them in a, you know, in a different track, cause if they play with our track then it gets wiped out in any foreign version. So it really is their job to make sure everything is completely isolated, separated and new sound effects, or else you know, you mute the American voice and all your sound effects go away. Wouldn't work.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, that's interesting, that's interesting. Yeah so you don't take that personally, of course. It's just the way it is. Oh God, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, our job is the dialogue you know I mean, I just find it funny, cause it's like oh, all right, we also did the same thing for Transformers. We went to Peru and we filmed for 10 days Transformers, the stunt unit, and we showed up. We're like, all right, so how many actors we got? They're like, no, no actors, just the cars. Okay, just the cars driving down the hill. Yep, big chase scene. Okay, cool, all right.
Speaker 2:So the first day we're running around, I'm putting time code in the cameras so that they don't have to hit the slate. It'll just automatically be sunk up with time code with our recording, right? Oh, okay, to make everything as easy as possible for post-production. And we mic the cars and we're doing all this stuff and we're chasing it and we're at like 14,000 feet, barely have any oxygen. But we're doing all this fun stuff, right, let's just enjoy it. And so we hit record, we bring it down, we're done with the day, bring it over to the DIT, the digital imaging tech.
Speaker 2:Now they're the person that takes all the footage and puts it all together with the sound and spits it out and puts it to the editor and she goes oh, none of your time goes working. I was like, really Well, that's weird because we checked it, she's like well, we're shooting at 22 frames Now, normal shooting is 24 frames. So when they shoot at 22 frames it basically mutes the time code track, which makes every, all the actions seem that much faster you know, 10% faster, okay which makes it seem really fun and exciting. But they can't sync up the sound and there's no point because it would be out of sync anyway. Even if they sunk it up at the beginning of the take, it'd be out of sync by the end of the take.
Speaker 2:So then we sat there and we're like okay, are we gonna be doing 22 frames the entire 10 days? And they're like, yep, okay, well, let's change our strategy, let's just mic the cars so we just every day we would pick okay, here's the Porsche today, we'll mic the Porsche, get a stunt driver to drive it up, bend down the mountain once, and you know fast, you know he's a stunt driver, he's gonna do his fast, and then that'll be our recording. And then we'll come back the next day. Okay, the next day let's get the you know the tow truck driving up and down the mountain once. I mean, it's like we were there for 10 days. Who knows how much of it any of it they used, because at this point now it's just wild track of these cars that they've already recorded from seven other movies.
Speaker 1:So when you're deciding, you must have a lot of gear right.
Speaker 2:It's just way more than any human should have. Yeah, so it's an embarrassment.
Speaker 1:Do you know exactly what gear you're gonna need before a shoot, or do you just have to bring a lot for like a just in case kind of thing?
Speaker 2:It depends on the movie. But, like for the Peru movie, I knew what I needed. I knew we were gonna be mobile. You know, you kind of talk to the producer or the production manager and say, you know, what are we shooting, okay, great, and then you go with it that way. So you generally know, I have one case with me with a bunch of stuff in it. But you know, for like a musical, if we're doing a musical, we bring everything. The entire truck is loaded with stuff.
Speaker 1:Really For a musical, huh.
Speaker 2:For a musical is at the hardest right, because you're recording everything and you're playing back and you have earpieces and you have speakers and thumpers and all sorts of extra pro tools, rig and all sorts of stuff that you're doing on set that you don't normally Right.
Speaker 1:It's because of the music part, adding a whole layer of complexity. Yeah, the music part.
Speaker 2:And also, like while you're filming the movie, sometimes they'll say, hey, this song needs to be, you know, one verse longer this song needs to be. You know, give me eight more seconds in this moment for this lighting cue, because I need to get the camera from that door to this door and the song is too short and it's not like you can go. No, the song is what it is, just figure out your shot. You go okay, eight more seconds, got it. And then you have a music editor sitting next to you and he'll sit there and blu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-tink. There it is. What do you think? Yep, that'll work. And then you move on. Wow, you know. And then everything gets edited in post and that'll change again. In editing, you know, the song changes and shortens or speeds up, depending on the depending on the edit.
Speaker 1:You once told me that sometimes there'll be multiple people, like during a music, during a music scene. There'll be multiple people on screen, but they may not. And they'll have, like any, or monitors, but they may not all be hearing the same thing, like you'll give different actors or dancers different audio. Yeah, so how does that work? Why would they not all be hearing the same thing if they're all working with the same song?
Speaker 2:Okay, so a movie, babylon, Margot Robbie, in the opening, you know, big number, I guess, the big party scene, you know there's a 1920s jazz band-ish kind of thing on or big band kind of thing on the stage, and it's a big party and she's supposed to have this like epiphany moment where she's, just, like you know, the center of attention. Well, we have professional dancers that have, you know, choreographer an entire routine, because the camera is very fluid, so it has to go through the crowd and there's specific things that the camera sees, and so you have to. You know it can't just be random dancers in the corner, you know they're going for it. And then we also pull in Margot Robbie, who you know is listening to. She wanted to hear a different song because she doesn't want to dance to the same beat that the dancers are dancing to and that the parties dance to.
Speaker 2:She's her own, you know she's dancing to her own rhythm in the movie. So the dancers get one song, she gets a different one. And then that's how you create this, like she's just on top of the world dancing to her own beat versus, you know, being the same person in the crowd. And the way you do that is. You know you have different. You know, just like any other dance, you have different channels of of earpieces that everybody's hearing one thing and then she's hearing her own thing, so she has her own channel.
Speaker 1:So how do you hide the earpieces, or you know the ones that are actually in the ear.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the earpieces are the size of a peanut and they fit in the ear canal. There's no wires coming out, there's no nothing that there's a battery receiver, the whole thing is in there. And then what we also found out through doing it over the years is they have tan and a brown color. And, to be honest, no matter what skin tone you are, your earhole is dark. Right, it just. It's not weird and tan, it's just dark. So if you use the brown color earpiece and you put it in your ear, it just hides, it's invisible. And then also with women, sometimes their hair goes over their ears so you don't see it. You have to also change it from shot to shot. You know, if the camera's on one side of your head, you put the earpiece on the other side. When the camera turns around, you have the actor switch it to the other side. So you're trying to hide it as much as you can. And then in those moments when it's very obvious there's an earpiece in their ear, visual effects takes over and paints it out.
Speaker 2:But that's expensive, so you always try to avoid it. But you queue in the visual effects people on set. You say, hey, by the way, they're wearing an earpiece, it's in this year. Here you go and they go okay, great. And they mark it down and then in editing, if they see it, they go, okay, they could just erase it pretty quick.
Speaker 1:That's crazy that everything is in the size of a peanut, because my experience with the inner monitors is playing live on stage. You know it's a very visible thing in my ear. It wraps around my ear and there's a wire going down to my waist where all that other stuff is like a, you know, like a little box. But all of that is just inside that little peanut shaped yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's also why it sounds like it sounds. I mean it's not like it's not horrible sounding. You can definitely hear the music, but it only goes to a certain volume. You know, like Lady Gaga likes her earpiece at top volume, whereas like Joaquin Phoenix likes his at the very lowest volume, and so each, each one is individually. You know you can tune each one to different volumes so they're not blown out each other's ears or making somebody can't hear it versus somebody can only hear it. But yeah, I mean they, they sound slightly worse than FM radio, right, better than AM, worse than FM, okay, and and that's just what it is. But it's because you don't want all the wires and all the stuff hanging off actors, because you know visually it just it's not, it doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it takes the viewer out of the movie, right? It's like. Oh this is a movie, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like there's a bigger piece and now you have to VFX their entire half their head.
Speaker 1:It doesn't make sense, have you ever found yourself in a movie doing a job and you're? You feel like you're weighing over your head. You're like Whoa, this is something unfamiliar, or do you always feel like it's something you can reach, that's close to what you've done before?
Speaker 2:I mean no. I mean there's definitely times where you're just like, holy crap, how I'm going to do this.
Speaker 2:You know how am I going to do this I did the Leonard Bernstein movie called Maestro that's coming out in the fall. That was overwhelming because I had never recorded a live orchestra. There was a whole. We did the London Symphony Orchestra, the LSO, and we also did the London choir London, like you know, symphony choir All at the same time. It's a historical, you know, recording and we did it at a, at a cathedral, like a 400 year old cathedral, and we recorded it live, while he's conducting, you know, and it's just, it's just the most amazing recording.
Speaker 2:But you know, I had like three or four years to think about how are we going to record it? How does he want to do it? What's he going to hear? And it just becomes like yeah, it becomes like, you know, and also, by the way, things can change very quickly on set and you have to just be able to change with it. It's like, yeah, you've, you've made a plan, but you know the director wants something different in that moment. You have to change, and Bradley Cooper often changes on the moment because he'll see something or he'll notice something and he'll go oh, this is going to be better if it's this way.
Speaker 2:And then that's going to change gears, and that's that's, that's how you you have to adjust.
Speaker 1:So, in Maestro, you're recording a full Symphony performing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 62 tracks of 62 microphones and you have to record a Symphony in the way that a Symphony is recorded and you also have to record you know Dolby Atmos, you know microphones and other microphones that will work well in the theater so that you don't just feel like you're listening to an orchestra out of you know a stereo recording. You want to hear full Dolby Atmos recording of a of a Symphony.
Speaker 1:And are you also recording dialogue in these scenes, or is it pure music?
Speaker 2:There's dialogue also, like at the end of the the orchestra. He'll run off stage and talk to somebody real quick, and so you're also recording the dialogue at the same in the same take.
Speaker 1:Okay, Because I was wondering. Like you know, they record symphonies, for you know music recordings all the time. I would have just assumed they would have gotten like some recording engineers that do that for a living. Yeah, and then had you do the dialogue.
Speaker 2:Well, we did have, so we do that. I mean, that's a good point. It's not like, okay, Steve, go ahead and record that. It's basically like, okay, steve, here's what we want to do. And then what we ended up doing is called we called the London Symphony Orchestra's classic sound company in London. And they're the ones that came in. They said, okay, here's how we normally record it. We're like, great, let's set that up. And they would set the lines and set all the mics. And then we would say, okay, in addition to that, we want Dolby Atmos up here, we want this over here, we want this over here. And then we had, like, I bring certain microphones of my own to record.
Speaker 2:You know different ambiances and different perspectives. You know some MS stereo recording microphones, some quadrphonic recording. You know ambisonic recordings. You name it because, like I said, you can't. You can only get it live once. You know, if you don't get it, then you're not going to get it again. So we'll overdo it and then let them piece it down later. But yeah, no, you bring in people, you talk to them. But you also have to realize, well, you know, being the head of the sound department, the director is going to look at you, not at classic sound. So you have to be able to communicate with everybody and have everybody understand what they're doing.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, they need a movie-minded audio guy running the audio Exactly so they can communicate and you know what this needs to be Right.
Speaker 2:And so for the last couple of years you do the research and go, okay, orchestra recording, you know here's what we need to do and here's how this is going to work. And then you go, oh shoot, there's going to be these huge stands everywhere, you know, because there's got to be microphones everywhere, you got to talk to the director. Is this something you want? You know.
Speaker 1:Well, that must have been fun to do something new, right Like was it cool? To kind of stretch your mind and explore.
Speaker 2:It's a total blast to do new things. But that was the most stress I think I've been. Also because you want to do the best job you can because you know, you know the director I did, you know Star is born with him. He's a passionate guy and you want to do the best you can for people that appreciate what you do for a living. And so I stressed myself out to the point where I actually got like a fever blister on my eye. I went. I went partially blind in one eye for like four months. It's all healed now. But I went to the doctor I said I said, hey, what's going on? He goes oh, it's stress, you just have to do something less stressful. And I went Okay, well, I'm about to start a Joker to the musical with Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix singing, you know, on set live. So I guess I'll figure that out because that's like that's the stress.
Speaker 1:Do you have any tricks or habits to help yourself? Have looks like the least stressed, most stable state of mind to do your job.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I think, to be honest, like you know, my, my wife, is a very good, she's a very good person. I used to be more stressed and more quick to be annoyed and quick to anger, I think years ago, and she's she's helped me like just be, just be mellow, relaxed. There's nothing like we're not caring cancer here, like it's just a movie at the end of the day is for pure entertainment, so like if you're treating people with kindness and you're just like, you're calm about everything and there's always an answer to everything. That's just how I move forward, like nothing's going to end your career by one thing and so that's it.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean you, you obviously can't just show up not knowing what's going on. You have a plan, you make a plan. So I think, yeah, I mean also, I just I try to leave it. When I leave work, I don't. You know, I used to, at the beginning of my career, really think about oh, I could have done this better, I could have done that better, I should have done this, I should have done that. It's like that still happens from time to time, but for the most part, you try to leave it behind and you come back the next day, just fresh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just find that's an interesting mental paradox where if you really want to do a good job at something and you have to right this is high stakes, this is a big deal you have to do it well Inside your mind. You got to be a little more laid back about it. It's sort of funny Like you almost have to take it easy and hear so that it can be amazing out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, we had. I mean, we had, we had, like a perfect example is we had this piano. So, on set, what you really have to do is, when you're doing a live piano on set, you have to be able to mute the piano but still record what they're playing, and so you can. You can do this bunch of different ways. You can have a digital grand piano which you can tap into audio wise and you can record what they're playing, but it's not coming out of the piano itself, it's basically coming out of like a Maddie Maddie. You know connection, and so you're, you're taking the signal, you're processing it, you're playing it back through an earpiece so they can hear what they're playing, and then they're singing live, because you you have to get the vocals clean of any music. Huh, I know.
Speaker 1:Are they playing an acoustic piano, like a piano that's sending sound up into space?
Speaker 2:Okay, Yup, and there's a digital interconnection in there that you actually like. Pull this lever out. That gets rid of the hammers to not, but when they're hitting the keys now, all of a sudden it becomes a digital piano that has.
Speaker 2:MIDI connected to it and the MIDI is transmitted to us. We use our computer to send back the sound of whatever that you know. Whatever the plug in is Right, so they're playing an area piece and then they can sing live while playing the piano. And the piano's not over, you know, because what if the piano's untuned? What if they don't want to use that part of the piano? What if they want to change the music later? They have the lyrics clean, the vocals clean, but the piano's not.
Speaker 2:So in our movie Joker 2, you know, they had a specific piano because digital grand pianos are kind of like, you know, slick and glossy and nice looking. Well, if you have a piano in a movie, it's probably not that. So we had a company convert the piano to a digital piano from like a classic, you know cool classic piano, and so it was kind of like I'm not going to say it's Jerry Rigged, but there was a moment when you know the pianist is playing and God got kicks the piano because her character kicks the piano and when that happens the MIDI signal to us went weren't and just freaked out and just kind of stopped playing and the pianist, who is her regular piano guy, was just like continuing to play. She continued to sing, she didn't hear the music, but she could hear the keys that he's playing because just the physical noise of the you know, touching of the keys. And they just kept it together and the computer went and like four seconds later, computer picked back up and continued to play the music and we were just like whoa geez. But that's one of those moments where, like we know she's going to kick the piano. She probably didn't know she was going to kick the piano, but it just messed up the whole signal. So what are you going to do?
Speaker 1:You can't plan for that, that's cool yeah, so you just let it roll off. That's very cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1:Well, Steve, I could talk to you for hours about this stuff. It's so fascinating and it's just. It's the same but different. When you compare it to music recording, there's so many parallels, but then it's just. Also, the context is totally different. So I really appreciate you sharing this with us and I think it's awesome.
Speaker 2:And to the two people that are still left listening. Thank you, I'm just like that aren't related to either of us.
Speaker 1:Well said, well said. Thanks again, steve.
Speaker 2:All right. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for listening to the Audible Genius podcast. Now, as you listen to these musicians stories, you may find yourself wanting to make your own music, or maybe you already can, but you feel the need to brush up on fundamentals fill in some gaps. Well, I've got some super effective and engaging courses that help aspiring digital musicians find their voice and create music they love. And these courses are more than just a series of videos. They have interactive challenges in a music software environment where you actually create music as you go and get real experience.
Speaker 1:The first course I recommend is building blocks, where you'll learn beat composition and music theory in an online music studio. Check it out at audiblegeniuscom. We also have Centorial, an award-winning course on synthesis, where you'll learn how to create your own sounds with a synthesizer. Check that out at centorialcom, and both of these courses are designed by yours truly and the team here at Audible Genius. So if you've ever had a desire to make your own music, I highly encourage you to check them out. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.
