43 minute read
Live Sound News & Notes: Mouse on Mars
Live // news & notes
Mouse on Mars Get Creative with Meyer Sound’s Spacemap Go
Bewake Sudios, Berlin, with 14 UP-4slim compact loudspeakers bolstered by two USW-210P compact subwoofers.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Meyer Sound
Electronic Duo Explores Spatial Sound at Bewake Studios in Berlin
Bewake Studios in Berlin has become the first recording facility to install a multichannel monitoring system fully outfitted with Spacemap Go, Meyer Sound’s tool for spatial sound design and mixing. By offering this unique capability, Bewake looks to become a magnet for electronic musicians and sound artists seeking a laboratory for developing spatial sound designs that can be quickly scaled up for live performances in clubs, galleries and festival venues.
The installation of Spacemap Go was prompted by German electronic music icons Jan Werner and Andi Toma, who have redefined artistic conventions since 1994 with both their Mouse on Mars duo, as well as individual projects. They have been in residence at Bewake Studios since late 2018, and have occupied an exclusive sub-rented space and operated under the moniker Paraverse instant film cameras, which have enjoyed a popularity resurgence in recent years, the drive-in movie theaters of old are also experiencing a revival in 2020. But that boom hasn’t always been sparked by patrons flocking to catch the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
Case in point, Sully Erna and Aaron Lewis, frontmen for the hard rock bands Godsmack and Staind, very recently wrapped up “The American Drive-In Tour,” a 13-date, coast-to-coast run of “unplugged” concerts, many of which were staged in classic ’50s-era outdoor cinemas. To best reinforce every acoustic musical nuance and every word of intimate banter between these “old friends” of 25 years, Denver-based concert sound company Brown Note Productions chose to carry an L-Acoustics K2 system for the tour.
Produced by Danny Wimmer Presents, the promoter behind popular festivals like Studio. Their facility has a separate connection to the 50-square-meter main recording room—where Spacemap Go is available—which is shared with Bewake’s other clients.
“Andi and Jan first experienced an earlier version of Spacemap Go at Moogfest two years ago, which started an ongoing relationship with Meyer Sound,” notes Adam Kesselhaut, the studio’s co-founder and managing director, as well as a producer and songwriter. “That eventually led to the installation of Spacemap Go here. Because of the virus restrictions, they have mostly been using it for their own projects, but they have been developing content so we expect they will use that in small events, inviting a few select people. I know they are really itching to get going with Spacemap Go, to make some cool, crazy stuff and get other artists in here to experience it.” Sacramento’s Aftershock, Daytona Beach’s Rockville, and Louisville’s “Trifesta” (Bourbon & Beyond, Hometown Rising, and Louder Than Life), The American Drive-In Tour ran from early October through early November. Marking the first time that these two musicians have shared a stage, each stop of the nationwide trek featured an impromptu setlist of each artists’ hits, choice covers, and many private stories and laughs.
According to Brown Note Productions President Ryan Knutson, the choice of P.A. was simple yet elegantly effective: arrays of eight L-Acoustics K2 were flown on each side of the stage, while eight KS28 subs were horizontally spread out in linear arrangement on the ground below. Two ARCS Wide, one each at the far left and right corners of the stage, delivered coverage to two small VIP areas, and the entire system was driven via LA-RAK II touring racks loaded with LA12X amplified controllers.
The Meyer Sound loudspeaker complement comprises 14 UP-4slim compact self-powered loudspeakers bolstered by two USW-210P compact subwoofers for potent low end. Spatial mixing is effected by two Galileo GALAXY 816 Network Platforms under the control of the free Spacemap Go app for iPad. The system was installed and commissioned under the supervision of Ianina Canalis, Berlin.
“For us it really makes sense to have access to a spatial sound setup in the studio,” explains Werner, speaking on behalf of the Mouse on Mars duo. “You don’t want to go into a venue with what was a stereo mix and then have to take it all apart and adjust it after you get there. You want to start mixing spatially in the studio, so you are listening that way from the beginning,
The American Drive-In Tour Rolled On With Brown Note Productions
Outdoor Concert Events Featured the Voices of Staind and Godsmack
Along with retro-tech like vinyl turntables and
in the eventual environment for the music.” n
“I made the decision to use K2 for its flexibility in pattern control, provided by Panflex, as well as its versatility to be deployed as either a singlepoint-hang or ground-stacked system based on what was needed each night,” Knutson shares. “With only three guys on stage—Aaron and Sully, plus a third guitarist —the stages were relatively small, so K2’s light weight, compact profile, and high output were also key reasons that we carried the system.” n
Live // news & notes
King & Country Celebrate With “A Drummer Boy Drive-In”
Blackhawk Audio Supplies DiGiCo Package for Outdoor Christmas Tour
Australian-born, Nashville-based sibling duo King & Country are currently out on the road with “A Drummer Boy Drive-In: The Christmas Tour” in King & Country monitor engineer Zach support of their first holiday album, A Drummer Boy Christmas. Escobar at tbe DiGiCo SD12
Performing 20 concerts between November 12 and December 20, Joel and Luke Smallbone’s show was backed by six additional multi-instrumentalists on stage and King & Country FOH engineer Ralph the sound reinforcement gear and expertise of Rivera at the DiGiCo SD12. Blackhawk Audio, which is deploying a pair of DiGiCo SD12 96 consoles for FOH and monitors each night.
Maintaining the same socially distanced drivein show format that has become “the norm” for 2020, the current, largely outdoor tour is stopping at a variety of locations across the southern U.S., including arenas, fairgrounds, and drive-in movie theaters, as well as iconic sites like Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry House, and Pensacola’s Five Flags Speedway FOH engineer Ralph Rivera and monitor engineer Zach Escobar joined the band on this tour.
Connected via fiber, both the FOH and monitor consoles are paired with SD-Racks, each loaded with seven 32-bit “Ultimate Stadius” Mic Preamp modules, five 32-bit DAC modules, and two AES output cards. A DiGiGrid MGB interface at the house console allows Rivera to connect to his laptop for live multitrack recording of all the shows for virtual soundchecks using the Waves Tracks Live platform. Similarly, the SD12 96 monitor console is equipped with a DMI-WAVES SoundGrid expansion card for multitrack recording when desired. on stage. There’s also a trombone, a second drum kit, marching drums,
Although there are eight musicians on stage, the input count is and tube bells.” higher than might be expected because nearly every band member is a Escobar is generating a dozen stereo monitor mixes—eight for the multi-instrumentalist. “Everyone in the band pretty much plays every performers, plus four more for backline, playback tech, spare/guest mix, instrument, and four of them are also background vocalists,” says Escobar, and himself—all of which are being heard on JH Audio JH13V2 PROs. who has been with the group since January 2020. “Our guitar player will “Every mix for every member is different for every song, so the quicker I can jump to the bass riser and play there for a few songs, then jump down to get to a fader, the better,” he adds. “Because we’re a one-truck tour where the synth station. Our drummer plays keytar for a song, and our bass player ‘space is everything,’ the SD12 puts a decent fader count into a small form plays cello, mellophone, and marimba, so there’s a lot of moving around factor that is good for me and great for our truck pack.” n
Shakespeare Theatre Renamed for Tom Patterson
Stratford, Ontario, Venue Updates With d&b A Series Rig
The d&b audiotechnik A-Series rig at the Tom Paterson Theatre.
In 1952, with a $125 grant from the City Council, the late Tom Patterson set out to establish a six-week Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. Now, 66 years later, the Stratford Festival operates yearround and has welcomed 28 million theatergoers, generating billions of dollars’ worth of economic activity for the city. In 2020, to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Stratford Festival dedicated a new theater to Patterson.
“The old version of the Tom Patterson Theatre which this replaces, was built into what used to be, at various times, a casino, concert venue, curling club, and badminton club; and so because of the odd shape of the building, it evolved into a long runway-style thrust stage,” says Peter McBoyle, longtime Festival Sound Designer and audio design consultant for the project. “The shape of that stage, although not conventional for theater, was loved by actors, directors, and audiences, and the goal of the new 600-seat Tom Patterson Theatre was to keep the shape and feel of the old stage as much as possible but put it in a modern context.”
Knowing the room, he chose a d&b A-Series augmented array. “The tight vertical coverage pattern of the A-Series (30 degrees) and the control you get arraying them with small splay angles allowed us to really address these challenges,” notes McBoyle. “We were able to get the coverage where needed and have it drop off dramatically where not required. We originally started the design of the system around the d&b T10 which is what we have at our Festival Theatre, but the Tom Patterson Theatre just doesn’t have the height to deploy line arrays. So, the A-Series was the perfect tool for the applications being somewhere between line array and point source.”
The system was installed by Horizon of London, Ontario, in conjunction with the Stratford Festival IATSE crew. McBoyle was the system designer and also verified and tuned the system. Michael Duncan is the head of sound for the Tom Patterson Theatre and he worked with McBoyle on the design and oversaw the installation and commissioning throughout the project.
The main system consists of 5 flown arrays of A-Series each with two AL90s in a vertical array. Three of the arrays sit downstage center to cover the downstage end of the curved audience seating. The other two arrays hang further upstage to pick up the coverage from the downstage arrays to provide even coverage of the entire audience seating area. In addition, there are two 21S subwoofers flown above the center of the stage to provide even LF to the entire venue. 26 x 8S loudspeakers were installed as FX speakers (16 as surround speakers focused over the audience and 10 in a new overhead position. All d&b cabinets are powered by 30D and 10D amplifiers. Control and configuration were made simple with the d&b R1Remote control software.
Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the theatre has not yet been used as the entire 2020 season was canceled. n
WE’VE GOT THE PROSCOVERED. PRO Look. PRO Build. PRO Results.
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RUPERT NEVE DESIGNS
BOB KATZ, MASTERING ENGINEER
LUCA BARASSI, ABBEY ROAD INSTITUTE
on the cover
Jimmy Jam The Mix Interview & Terry Lewis
After four decades of hooks and hits, music’s most influential production duo is ready for its next act
By Sarah Jones Photos by D-Nice
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have spent just about their entire lives making hits. The duo met as high school students in Minneapolis; in 1980 they formed funk/R&B outfit Flyte Tyme, which evolved into The Time and led to their association with Morris Day and Prince. But by the early ’80s, their performance careers took a back seat as they became sought after as writers and producers.
In the ensuing decades, Jam and Lewis produced chart-toppers with Boyz II Men, Usher, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Human League, Lionel Richie, Luther Vandross, Karyn White, George Michael, Elton John, and, most famously, Janet Jackson, in a partnership that began with 1986’s blockbuster breakthrough Control and continues today.
Ever explorers in the studio, they defined the sound of New Jack Swing, always creating at the cutting edge of technology, squeezing every ounce of soul out of machines like Roland 808s, Linn Drums and Oberheim synths as they shaped that sleek, sophisticated, signature sound that feels as fresh today as it did four decades ago.
Along the way, they’ve earned five Grammys, 16 Billboard Hot 100 Number Ones and more than 100 Platinum certifications; they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and won the Legend Award at the 2019 Soul Train Awards.
But their imprint goes far beyond songwriting and producing. They’re businessmen, philanthropists and artist advocates, in their own work and in Jam’s role as Chairman Emeritus of the Recording Academy.
This spring, the duo will release Jam & Lewis Volume One, a compilation of original music that’s been 35 years coming. The record showcases legendary R&B artists at the peak of their craft, including Usher, Mary J. Blige, Boyz II Men and Toni Braxton; the first single, “He Don’t Know Nothin’ Bout It,” featuring Babyface in fine slow-jam form, was released in November. The album is a celebration of the iconic musicians who shaped modern R&B, it’s an ode to the craft of songwriting, and it’s scorching hot.
Mix sat down with Jam and Lewis to learn how their relationship has evolved with technology, how they guide creative collaborators to their full potential, and why they’re finally ready to step into the spotlight as artists.
How have you been working this past year?
Jam: We’ve been using everything from Zoom to a whole bunch of different things. Brant Biles, the engineer will set up at our studio when we’re doing mixes. We’ll be listening to the audio that he’s playing; we’ll be on headphones or on speakers and we can make little tweaks and little suggestions. We’ve been finishing the record like that for the most part—which has been cool, actually. It allows you to concentrate on it in a different way, which is kind of interesting.
We have been doing some projects where we actually will go to the studio and all work together, socially distanced and masked. Mostly, we’ve just been utilizing the technology. Lewis: It’s the age of traveling without moving. The main tool we use right now that’s the simplest is probably Audiomovers Listento, which is just a plug-in–based app that you plug in on a fader, and then broadcast. There’s another really good one called Sessionwire that works really well, it’s just harder to set up.
This new record has been percolating for a while. Did the recording sessions take place pre-pandemic?
Jam: Yeah, a lot of these songs started pre-Covid. The seeds of the idea actually started 35 years ago. We were getting ready to start working with Janet on what turned out to be the Control album; we thought we would do a Jam and Lewis album of some sort, and we’d started working on tracks for it. When we thought we were done, John McClain, who was the A&R person at A&M Records at that time, came to Minneapolis, we played him “Control” and “Nasty” and “What I Think of You.” We’re playing him all these records that we think are hit records, we think are good records. And, like all A&R people, he says, “I just need one more.”
We said, “Let us play you some stuff from our album that we’re working on.” About the third track in, he goes, “Wait, that’s the one I need for Janet.” We said, “No, that’s for our album.” He said, “No, I need that for Janet. Play it for her, and if she likes it, give it to her.”
So the next day we went to the studio, we just put the track on, we didn’t say anything to her. She’s listening and we’re watching her listen. When the song goes off, she goes, “Who’s that for?” We said, “Well, you, if you want it.” She said, “Oh, I want it.” That song ended up becoming “What Have You Done for Me Lately.”
So, that basically launched her career and basically ended ours. Well, it didn’t end ours, it postponed ours. Our album, anyway.
That was in 1985. In the interim, we would
get with certain artists who we thought would be great to work with and we’d say, “Hey, let’s do a song together.” Then we’d do the song and the artist would go, “Oh no, we’ve got to keep this. It’s too good, I need this for my album.”
We finally got selfish about three years ago, when we got inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. We called a bunch of the same people we had been trying to call, and said, “We need to do this for us now.” Finally, it’s coming to fruition.
The music feels like such a celebration of artists of an era, but it also feels modern and it sounds like an album. How do you preserve an artist’s essence while keeping things cohesive when you’re working with such a breadth of talent and styles?
Lewis: The easiest way to state it would be, understanding what the key ingredient is in a record, which would be the artist. We tap into the artist, and we write based on that, and we produce based on that, and then we finish based on where we are in time. The technology kind of dictates where we are in time, the sounds, and all of the different things that you can do.
One thing great about Jimmy Jam, he is the texture guy. He can do infinite layers of things. Sometimes I call it the kitchen sink approach. You can’t really recognize what it is, but it feels right.
I think that’s always the effect that you shoot for. It’s not necessarily what sounds good, but what feels right. And then we try to write songs that reflect where the artists are in their lives. To me, style wins over everything. That style is so important because you know, when a record comes on, you can recognize who the artist is right away by how they approach that song. That’s what makes a star a star, or a superstar a superstar. Jam: There’s an elegance to the album, I think. We’re treating the music with the highest reverence we possibly can, and that can be in the form of the traditions of songwriting. It’s not like you know in the first four bars what the song’s going to be. The song kind of lays out luxuriously. It takes you on a journey. I think songs should do that.
Did you always envision making guest artists front and center?
Jam: What we do is, we write and produce. We do play the instruments, and we shape the songs, produce the songs, write the songs, arrange the songs, and so on. That part of it was really what
we felt was our strength. The idea was, find artists that we loved working with in the past, or artists who we had never worked with that we wanted to work with.
Then, the intent was to give songs that, first of all, we loved, but also would make you remember why you fell in love with that artist for the first time. What was that song that made that happen? Let’s do something that gives you that feeling. It doesn’t have to sound like a song that they did before, but it just gives you that feeling.
You’ve clearly found so much inspiration in music technology. How has technology informed the way you work together?
Lewis: It’s kind of a twofold thing. It brings an ease to working together, but it also brings an uneasiness because it gives you so many different ideas for what you could do, so the possibilities increase, and then you’re having to sort.
In the past, being confined made you make decisions based on the moment. You didn’t leave it to chance. We would mix down the background to make sure that the stems all sounded like we liked it, the day that we did it, instead of going back and having the engineer change the balance.
Now, with more possibilities, you can do more with less and you don’t always need to be in a pronounced space or the studio. That part of it is really fantastic, but I think technology complicates things sometimes when it doesn’t need to. We’ve been doing it long enough where we know how to let the technology only do what we need it to do, instead of taking it to the next step. With that in mind, the record that we are making now, I don’t know if 20 or 30 years ago we could’ve made. Jam: We didn’t know enough. Lewis: Still, it’s about the people. The one thing that we’ve always said is, buildings don’t make hits, tape machines don’t make hits, people make
hits. So how you interact with people is always the catalyst that we start to build from.
As technology gets more complex, it can sometimes be challenging to find that balance where your tools are serving you, not the other way around—especially when the lines blur between production and performance.
Jam: With that in mind, even with drum machines, we always tried to keep a human element to it in some way. We would never really sequence whole tracks; we would sequence maybe a beat of some sort, but then there would be fills that would happen that we’d play live.
The whole idea of a loop-based song simply being a two-bar loop or a four-bar loop playing throughout the whole song, that really never was the idea. Even if we were going to do that, we’d always add what we call “pings and zings.” We’d always put in live percussion, cymbals and things to keep it human.
For us, it was always finding the balance between those two things and thinking of the parts as performances. To me, there’s a magic in that, that we love.
We never were scared of technology because Terry was great. I remember, back in the day, before DAWs were really happening big time, you had... What was the one you had? Lewis: Soundscape. Jam: This thing was the slowest, most glitchy, crazy... It was horrible and I kept going, “Terry, Terry, what are you doing, man? You’re wasting your time.” Terry was like, “No, no, I’m going to figure this out.” I remember when we got a Synclavier—at that point, it was the digital tape machines, it was the Sony machines, the Mitsubishi machines—and our engineer Steve Hodge said, “Don’t get a digital tape machine. In five years, it’s all going to be hard disk. There won’t be a tape at all.”
I remember Sonic Solutions, we had that. Then, of course, Pro Tools. All of a sudden, rather than going to The Mastering Lab with big, half-inch tapes, we went with a little DAT. At one point, we just went with a little hard drive. The fact that we were watching that evolution happen and being a part of it, has been so cool for us. We couldn’t have come up at a better time.
At the end of the day, I don’t care how good of a plug-in you have, you just get a good guitar player, with a good amp, and mike it, and that’s exactly what you want. The ability to be able to do all of those things is what Terry’s alluding to when he says 35 years ago we couldn’t have made this record. Because we just didn’t know enough. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. Lewis: It’s about understanding all of those things. You have to have a reference to start with. When we started, there were no drum machines, so we know what drums sound like in the raw. We know what they sound like miked. We know what synthesizers sound like, we know the different timbres that they give. That can hamper you, too; by knowing, you don’t venture out into the other space. We’re fearless because we know it’s okay to go outside that space; we don’t really try to stay in the box. At least we know what the box is.
Are you as hands-on with tracking as you are with programming?
Jam: Yeah, because, once again, it’s about
experimentation. That’s the reason we built our own studio. The advice we were given was, “No, don’t build your own studio.” But for us, it was like, “Why not have a place we can go to anytime we feel creative and just work?” There was an engineer who basically walked out on us at one point, so we had to learn. We would blow up headphones and blow out speakers. It was trial by error. But it was important that we were selfsufficient, that we felt like we’re not going to ever be dependent on someone.
A quick story about Control. We engineered that album ourselves, but it was because we didn’t have an engineer. The tape machines back in the day, whenever we would record with Prince, we’d always notice that Prince recorded everything in the red on the VU meters. So, of course, when we started recording our own stuff, we said, “We got to do it like Prince, we’re going to put everything in the red.” At the time, everybody was using Studer machines and either SSL or Neve boards. So, you know, we’re hard-headed; we get an Otari machine, we get a Harrison board.
We get all of our equipment together, we’re recording everything in the red. We call [longtime engineer] Steve Hodge and say, “Come up to Minneapolis and mix this record.” He puts on the first song on the 24-track, and we’re all proud of ourselves. He goes, “Who recorded this?” We were like, “We did.” He said, “Everything’s all in the red.” We said, “Yeah, Prince taught us that; he records everything in the red.” He said, “Yeah, but what kind of machine was Prince using?” I said, “I think it’s an MCI.” He said, “Well, here’s the thing. That machine is set up for zero is zero. So if you see zero on the VU meter, it’s zero. Your machines are set for plus six. So that means that zero on the VU meter is really plus six, so the fact that you’re pinning the needles, you’re way out of whack here.”
We were like, “Can it be saved?” He said, “Oh yeah, it’ll be fine. I’m going to teach you guys how to record.” It was a mistake that we made that Steve Hodge saved. The next album we did, that he came up and showed us how to record, was the Human League album [Crash]. It was so much of a learning experience, but we were very hands-on. We would loop vocals and things, we had the Publison machine... I used to DJ, so I was like, “Can’t we just run the vocals over to a half-inch tape and then I could just wild sync it like a DJ? We don’t even need SMPTE code, and we can put it back in.” We were doing all that kind of stuff; it was like a bunch of happy accidents.
Jimmy, in your keynote at a recent DDEX conference, you spoke about the importance of album credits. Credits were a big part of your own music education. Industry efforts to standardize metadata aside, how can we educate music lovers to be curious about the people behind the scenes?
Jam: Yeah, that was our education, that’s how we knew who Steve Hodge was, we knew what Larrabee was, all of those things that shaped our decision-making process of where to record, and where to mix all of those projects. That all came from looking at liner notes on albums. I do think people want to know who made a record. We’re living in the information age; that should be readily available. Lewis: Especially in a world where music sells everything but itself. Music sells everything, so I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be appropriate to at least acknowledge those who make, create, engineer, whatever, the music. Who should bear the cost of that? There’s got to be a couple pennies somewhere to put the credits somewhere. Jam: The other thing we’re missing, though, is what I call the ceremony of music. It used to be that effort went into getting music. You used to have to go to the record store, look through the records, pick the one you want.
There was ceremony in getting that record home, taking it out. It had a feel to it, it had a smell to it. You looked at the label going around on the turntable. All of that was distinctive; all of that was going into your mind as you were listening to the song. Then, you picked the album up, and as you’re listening, you’re looking at the liner notes. You’re seeing all these great names of all these musicians, and all these engineers, and all these writers, and all these producers. It makes the experience important.
The way we get music now is, we hit a button, and boom, it’s in our phone and it’s in our earbuds. So there’s not even a thought that it might’ve taken 12 people to make this record. You’re not really giving it the reverence that it deserves.
How do you know when you’ve finished a song?
The way we know when a record’s done is always when we can’t wait to play it for the artist. If it’s not feeling like that, it’s not done yet. We’re just enjoying the process of doing it. Terry always says, “I don’t want to reach the destination, I just enjoy the journey.”
So we’re just on a journey, and we’re having fun. We joke that we want to be the oldest best New Artists. n
THE RESONATING BODY IN SOUND OF METAL Music and Vibration, With Silence and Deprivation
By Jennifer Walden
Director Darius Marder’s award-winning debut dramatic film Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios) explores the struggles of heavy metal drummer Ruben (Riz Ahmed), whose life changes course abruptly after he loses his hearing.
Much of Marder’s experience in the film industry has involved documentary work. Most notably, he lensed, directed and edited the 2009 documentary film Loot (which won the Los Angeles Film Festival Best Documentary Feature award) about two WWII soldiers trying to recover stolen valuables that they had hidden during the war.
That documentary background is evident in Sound of Metal’s cinema vérité style. The opening scene is of Ruben and his girlfriend/lead singer Lou (Olivia Cooke) mid-performance at a nightclub. Ruben is sweating, teeth bared as he attacks his drum kit with controlled precision. But he’s not miming his way through the part. He’s actually playing, as is Lou. And a multi-mic setup is capturing the tracks for use in the final mix.
“What you hear is what you see,” affirms supervising sound editor/sound designer/ composer Nicolas Becker, who has worked on films including Gravity, Arrival, Ex Machina and American Honey. “We knew this would be very important for the audience to never question the diegetic aspect of it. When you put the audience in that position, afterwards they let go and don’t question other things. They just totally get into the story.”
No matter the project, Becker’s approach to sound is to start with what’s real, to “immerse myself in the real environment,” he says. “I put my body in the same kind of condition to keep the emotion of the sensation, and I think that was the link with Darius [Marder] as a documentary filmmaker—that first he worked with reality and then moved to a more fictional world. He has this idea to first immerse himself in the real environment, and that comes with real sensations.”
Becker’s post sound work begins with visits to the set so he can “feel the real mood of what’s happening on the shoot,” he says. While there, he captures field recordings “to nourish myself and the film with reality.” He uses those recordings to quickly construct sound for the realistic [nonsubjective] moments in a film. “I never start with effects or the weird sequences but always with the real world then I can understand how to weave the real with the fiction. I think Darius and I have that in common, that way of working.”
SOUND DEPRIVATION FOUNDATION Becker and Marder first met up for Sound of Metal in Paris at IRCAM (a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound), where they could be sealed inside the dead-quiet space of an anechoic chamber.
“We were in there for 20 minutes, with the lights switched off. We weren’t able to see or hear anything,” Becker recalls. “You are able to listen to your body movement. You start to hear your tendons and heartbeat and the pressure of your blood and the hiss in your ears—the level of your audition. This was our first experience together of silence.”
This physical experience provided valuable
PHOTO: Courtesy of Heikki Kossi Foley artist Heikki Kossi, left, and sound designer Nicholas Becker, in Finland, 2019.
PHOTO: Amazon Studios Ruben sits for his first hearing test in Sound of Metal.
direction for how Becker could express Ruben’s hearing impairment through sound in the film. Becker also relied on first-hand descriptions of how cochlear implants compare to natural hearing from people who have undergone the procedure.
Instead of processing sounds with EQ and compression, Becker chose to use nontraditional recording techniques and tools to gather real sounds for Ruben’s experience of hearing loss in its varying degrees.
“I have a lot of weird sensor mics, like the Brüel & Kjær three-axis accelerometer, which captures vibrations, geophones and contact mics,” Becker says. “With those, I’m able to capture surface vibration. I worked a lot with hydrophones because the body is something like 70 percent water, so I think the hydrophone used to record sounds underwater made sense.”
Becker worked closely with Foley artist Heikki Kossi and his team (Foley mixer Kari Vähäkuopus and Foley editor Pietu Korhonen) at H5 Film Sound in Kokkola, Finland. Together they built a “stethoscope microphone” using a basic stethoscope with added mic capsules in both ear-tips to capture body resonance.
Kossi says: “I tried a contact mic and it was okay, but the stethoscope mic had an organic feeling that was totally different. I moved my body and tried to find resonating parts, with or without a heartbeat. I also used this same miking technique for recording the resonation of different objects, looking for possible resonation that Ruben could feel.”
Becker points out that instead of artificial filtering, “the processing was the flesh on Heikki’s bones.”
The stethoscope mic also came in handy when capturing Ahmed’s own body movements onset. “There was a sound booth in the scene when Ruben has a hearing exam with the audiologist,” Becker explains. “That was very quiet, and we did a recording session in there with Riz [Ahmed]. I created a whole library of movement sounds with him during the shoot.”
Because body resonation sounds were key to expressing Ruben’s experience inside his head, Becker and Kossi often discussed ways to capture resonance and sonic textures. For instance, when they wanted the audience to just feel the resonation of Ruben’s footsteps, Kossi used Schertler DYN UNI P48 mics inside his boots.
“We tried to focus on performance and organic elements of the sound more than heavy processing and many layers,” Kossi explains. “My favorite memory on this project is Nicolas saying to ‘imagine that you’re drawing a portrait and if you draw one line and do it right it looks like someone’s face.’ One line! That is a huge demand for performance.”
That level of simplicity requires detailed execution. Kossi credits help from his team at H5. “With this kind of film, where we really need to be aware of the different worlds and perspectives, the planning is the key thing. Pietu [Korhonen] kept note when spotting the cues, and Kari [Vähäkuopus] did a great job of recording different perspectives. It’s teamwork for sure,” says Kossi.
MUSIC AS VIBRATON In the film, Ruben is welcomed into a deaf community where they encourage him to accept
his condition. He slowly begins to find his place among the residents, and in one scene he is sitting at the bottom of a metal slide and a child is sitting at the top. They make a game of tapping out rhythms for each other to repeat. For that sound, Kossi used an eight-foot long metal tube. But instead of miking the tube, Kossi used the stethoscope mic to record its metallic resonance as it traveled through his body.
“It was interesting to hear how the huge vibration of the tube turned into body resonation,” says Kossi. “The resonation is the language; it’s how Ruben and the small kid communicate together and feel the connection.”
Being a composer on the film as well, Becker chose to enhance the Foley slide sound with a unique instrument called a Baschet Sound Sculpture—a large metallic instrument created by French brothers François and Bernard Baschet in the 1950s. “It’s like a really weird, big metal flower and you activate the metal
PHOTO: Amazon Studios Actor Riz Ahmed at the residential home for deaf students, teaching his peers drumming through vibration.
Foley artist Heikki Kossi, with stethoscope, performing some of the interior sounds for Sound of Metal.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Heikki Kossi
Lead singer and girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) helps Ruben through his ordeal with hearing loss.
through a crystal bar,” says Becker. He also used it in combination with Ruben’s metal band performance to create “internal music for Ruben” during a bout of severe tinnitus at the start of his hearing loss.
Metallic sources were important sonic elements for Sound of Metal. Ruben played in a metal band, yes, but there’s also this idea of resonance and resonating—physically and emotionally. Metallic sounds (like life) can be pleasing, overwhelming, and sometimes harsh.
Near the end of the film, Ruben sits alone on a park bench in Paris. His cochlear implants magnify the sound of church bells ringing nearby. It’s an intense, painfully irritating jangle
The resonation-slide setup for recording the metal slide communication scene in the Foley room at H5 Studios, Finland.
PHOTO: Amazon Studios
that Becker created by splitting the sound of bells into three different sonic layers (transients, harmonics, and noise) using a standalone application from ircamLAB.
Becker says: “Each part of the software has a slightly different filter to recognize or separate different layers of sound. When we reconstructed the sound, we had cut everything into pieces before putting it back together, kind of like Frankenstein. It was very difficult to re-create what the cochlear implant would send to the nerves. The fact that we were using specific tools to separate the sound into layers, as opposed to using EQ or other tools that worked with spectrum and dynamics, made a huge difference.”
Immersion into a real physical experience and discovering the sensations and emotions that come from being in a specific reality are such an innate part of Becker’s process that it even influenced his choice of editing and mixing environments for Sound of Metal. He decided to do the majority of his sound editing in Los Angeles at the studio of his good friend Mario Caldato, Jr. (former producer of The Beastie Boys).
“For me, it was important to be in that kind of noisy environment, in a music studio listening to people playing all the time,” he says.
In contrast, the final mix was finished in a quiet desert environment devoid of sound, just outside Tepoztlan, Mexico, at the post production studios of renowned director Carlos Reygadas.
“It’s an incredible and beautifully wild place—an artistic bubble,” says Becker. “I feel it’s important to create an experience of work that is linked to the film. I think about where we should do the film, where we should edit it and mix it, in which environment with what people around. I think this has a very big impact on the way you work.” n
PHOTO: Scott C. Nathan
The live room at Mid South Audio. Note the half-cylinder Flex 48s on the wall and the custom clouds overhead.
World-Class Recording at Mid South Audio
Leading Production Company/Integrator Has an Ear for Analog Sound
By Tom Kenny
PHOTO: Scott C. Nathan Front and rear-wall views of the spacious Mid South Audio control room.
The recording studio has long proven a gateway into the entertainment and technology industries at large. How many kids in the late 1970s picked up a guitar, recorded a song, pieced together an 8-track analog studio in their hometown and went on to be a live sound mixer? How many students enter recording schools each year with visions of working at Abbey Road and wind up heading business development at a game company?
In the early 1980s, Delaware native and bass player Kevin Short had a 16-track analog studio that he soon grew into an event production house, staging company and ultimately a leading mid-Atlantic audio-video-lighting integration company with reach across the country. On September 28, 2020, on the actual date of the company’s 31-year anniversary, Short opened a new 20,000-square-foot retail and showroom space for his company, Mid South Audio. True to his roots, he also built a brand new, worldclass, Gavin Haverstick–designed recording studio.
And he did it during a very tough year, a year in which the event and production industry collapsed and while it has sometimes been tough to make ends meet, he has kept all of his employees employed, even shifting some of his production crew during the day to help with construction and wiring and building acoustic clouds.
“This is how it all started 30 years ago,” Short says, speaking from the new control room in early December. “The first thing in this whole history was a studio with 16 tracks. The rest is new for us—we've never done retail or a real showroom. We have done integration, of course, but we are doing so much more, and we wanted to kind of be revitalized. So, we built this new place. And we built this studio and brought in Frank Marchand to make it work. He is so respected in the area, and he has contacts with bands up and down the coast, and around the world.”
“Kevin was definitely thinking ahead when he decided on the studio, to have a place that sounds good, that's big enough to handle eight or nine players at the same time,” says Marchand, who has had a many and varied audio life, most recently on the road mixing the great Irish band “We Banjo 3”. “We blew the doors off with our first session. I had nine A-List players on the floor, all in Nashville style, and we were tracking live. To be able to do that and then add the video content, it's really turned out to be a blessing in disguise.”
HAVERSTICK DESIGNS Today the 3500-square-foot recording complex sits at one end of the 20,000-square foot warehouse space and consists of the large live room with a piano booth and additional iso, a 20x15-foot control room and a second, smaller mix-production studio that also has access to the live room. The original plans were only slightly less ambitious when studio designer Gavin Haverstick of Haverstick Designs, Carmel, Ind., was brought on board in mid-2019.
The relationship between Short and Haverstick goes back nearly ten years when they met at a conference, and Haverstick had done some minimal work on the previous Mid South Audio studio, as well as collaborating on a number of house of worship and event-space integration projects over the ensuing years. Haverstick,
pleased to see a 20-foot structural ceiling height, suggested removing a few of the rectangular spaces and opening up the live room just a bit more.
“It was an empty shell, which is nice,” Haverstick recalls. “The back wall of the live room is about 16 feet tall, sloping down to about 13 feet at the front of the control room. There's a soffit trap that goes around the perimeter between the wall and the ceiling that is stuffed with insulation and has a pegboard facing. This allows us to control the low end without over-absorbing the higher frequencies. There are also barrel diffusers on the upper walls —they’re great at trapping low frequency energy and still scattering the mids/ highs, keeping some liveliness there. Down below, those are the Flex-48s, which is a product that I designed [and patented] which gives you the ability to convert it from an absorber to a diffuser on command. Depending on the application, you can make the room more lively or more dead just by taking the Flex Shield in and out. They have those in the live room, the piano room and also the control room.”
The Flex-48, built by Acoustical Fulfillment and first installed in Jake Peavy’s Dauphin Street Sound Studios in Mobile, Ala., is a key component in Haverstick’s desire PHOTO: Scott C. Nathan
Studio engineer/manager Frank Marchand, left, with MSA founder and owner Kevin Short at the Audient console.
PHOTO: Dave Chambers
to provide clients with what he calls adaptive acoustics. “The Flex-48 was born from me constantly going into rooms where people were saying, ‘Yeah, in this iso room I'm going to record drums, vocals, acoustic guitar, mandolin’—15 different things. And I'm like, ‘Well, the room should sound different for each of those, right?’ The Flex-48 was really a tool that I developed to handle these situations. The concept of adaptive treatment or variable acoustics has been around forever, but there wasn't really something that was available from a manufacturer as an off-theshelf option that was easy to implement.”
ANALOG-DIGITAL CONTROL ROOM Another prominent acoustic feature is the series of custom clouds hanging throughout, fabricated by the in-house team at Mid South Audio throughout the spring, after the partial shutdown.
“The primary function of the clouds is to offer bass trapping and diffusion,” Haverstick explains. “The wood slats help to bring some reflection back down to the performer. They’re about 9 inches thick and suspended down from Studio B the ceiling approximately production/ 12 inches. There's a mix room prominent cloud in the at Mid South control room. The front Audio. half of it is absorptive to catch the first reflection points off the speakers. Wood slats on the rear of the cloud help to scatter sound for those in the rear of the room.
“The room actually slopes up to the back wall, sort of the reverse of the way it slopes down in the live room,” Haverstick continues. “There is a deep bass trap that's right above that diffuser array on the back wall; I think at this point it's probably four feet deep or so of insulation. Then we have the Flex-48s in there as a way to get diffusion on the rear wall, while also absorbing the low end, which is always helpful in these spaces. The Flex-48 has a peak absorption coefficient of 0.99 at 100 Hz, with good absorption between 80-250 Hz, a range that causes problems for many small rooms.”
The console choice was an Audient ASP824, chosen for its analog path and its ease in controlling DAWs. For monitors, Barefoot Micro27s, chosen for their mid-field performance, as they made an early decision to avoid soffit-mounted speakers and rely on the compact power of the Barefoots. A second, adjacent studio handles additional mixing, voice-over and production demands. Both studios are based around separate Pro Tools systems and controllers.
Opening night in September was a huge and rousing success, with all safety protocols in place, a live band on stage, the retail showroom wide open and a live tracking session throughout the evening featuring A-list talent, many of them flown in for the evening.
“It’s got a really large feel,” founder and owner Short says. “I mean, the room just feels good to record in and track live. On opening day, we had eight positions out on the floor all doing their thing and playing live, recording all at once. The record came out sounding really, really good.”
Yes, it’s been a tough year, and Short and team certainly didn’t need to go to such lengths. The integration and installation side of his business had been booming, even during the first ten months of the pandemic. And, let’s face it, recording studios aren’t on the list of Top 10 Moneymakers in 2020.
Still, Short is a smart man. And he has passion for sound and music. He knows that, while adjacent to the major metropolitan centers of the East Coast, his is more a destination facility, two minutes from the ocean and in a quiet, rural area, with all the conveniences of home. It’s ideal, he says, for a band looking for an isolated, private recording experience, or for local talent looking to access world-class space with high-end gear and talent. n
