MIX 525 - Sept 2020

Composers Will Bates, Piers Baron ★ Classic Tracks: ‘Let the Mystery Be’ ★ Remote Audio for ‘Mrs. America’ September 2020 \\ mixonline.com \\ $6.99

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The PostPandemic Future Of Sound Post-Production 14/08/2020 13:11

All specifications are subject to change without notice. Copyright Š 2019 Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.

TH E TR U E A RT O F M A STE R I N G Audio mastering is a specialized art and, for nearly 25 years, WaveLab has been the expert solution for realizing the true art of mastering. WaveLab 10 takes this to another level, with a range of new and updated features that bring even better workflows to mastering professionals. Video playback support, extended external effects support, enhanced undo/redo history, multi-track recording, updated Audio Montage with inspector, inline editing reference track and a major track list overhaul, plus live input stream recording and other enhancements make WaveLab an even more essential tool for mastering studios, producers, sound designers, musicians, broadcasters, archivists and many more.

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09.20 Contents

16

Volume 44, Number 9

FEATURES 16 The Future of PostProduction Sound

MUSIC

TECHNOLOGY

8

32 New Products: Spotlight

BY JENNIFER WALDEN

Composer Will Bates: Analog and Electronic, Tied to Mood and Time

BY LILY MOAYERI

on Sound for Picture

34 Review: Radial

Engineering HDI Direct Box

SOUND FOR FILM & TELEVISION 30 Sound for Film &

Television News & Notes

BY MIKE LEVINE

10 Composer Piers

Baron: Driving Action Sports Films

BY LILY MOAYERI

22 The Period Sounds (and Pandemic Challenges) of Mrs. America

BY STEVE HARVEY

12 Classic Tracks: “Let the

Mystery Be,” Iris Dement

BY BARBARA SCHULTZ

BY STEVE HARVEY

H9000 Avid PT | HDX Expansion Card

BY BARRY RUDOLPH

40 Review: MAAT

thEQblue12 EQ Collection

DEPARTMENTS 6

26 A Taste of Chicago: Periscope Post & Audio Opens in Hollywood

36 Review: Eventide

From the Editor: Forget the New Normal; Normal Is Now Relative

BY MICHAEL COOPER

• “Stranger Things” Season 3 Goes for Emmy Threepeat

42 Back Page Blog: The New Studio Protocols; Mixing Live at the Drive-In

BY MIKE LEVINE AND STEVE LA CERRA

On the Cover: Periscope Post and Audio, which opened in Chicago out of the CineSpace complex back in 2013, has built out a companion Hollywood facility with three Dolby Atmos stages, color correction, and room to accommodate 30-person editorial/creative teams. From post through distribution. All with a bit of Midwest attitude.

Photo: Christopher Alvarez.

Mix, Volume 44, Number 9 (ISSN 0164-9957) is published monthly by Future US, Inc., 11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10036. Periodical Postage Paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Mix, PO Box 8518, Lowell, MA 01853. One-year (12 issues) subscription is $35. Canada is $40.

All other international is $50. Printed in the USA. Canadian Post Publications Mail agreement No. 40612608. Canada return address: BleuChip International, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2.

• Dallas Audio Post Opens Dolby Atmos Stage • Re-Recording mixer Jonathan Wales

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Vol. 44 No. 9

September 2020

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CONTENT VP/Content Creation Anthony Savona Content Director Tom Kenny, thomas.kenny@futurenet.com Content Manager Anthony Savona, anthony.savona@futurenet.com Technology Editor, Studio Mike Levine, techeditormike@gmail.com Technology Editor, Live Steve La Cerra, stevelacerra@verizon.net Sound Reinforcement Editor Steve La Cerra Contributors: Strother Bullins, Eddie Ciletti, Michael Cooper, Gary Eskow, Matt Hurwitz, Steve Jennings (photography), Sarah Jones, Barry Rudolph Production Manager Nicole Schilling Managing Design Director Nicole Cobban Design Director Lisa McIntosh and Will Shum ADVERTISING SALES VP/Market Expert, AV/Consumer Electronics & Pro Audio Adam Goldstein, adam.goldstein@futurenet.com, 212-378-0465 Janis Crowley, janis.crowley@futurenet.com Debbie Rosenthal, debbie.rosenthal@futurenet.com Zahra Majma, zahra.majma@futurenet.com SUBSCRIBER CUSTOMER SERVICE To subscribe, change your address, or check on your current account status, go to mixonline.com and click on About Us, email futureplc@computerfulfillment.com, call 888-266-5828, or write P.O. Box 8518, Lowell, MA 01853.

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All contents ©2020 Future US, Inc. or published under licence. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used, stored, transmitted or reproduced in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher. Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All information contained in this publication is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept any responsibility for errors or inaccuracies in such information. You are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to the price of products/services referred to in this publication. Apps and websites mentioned in this publication are not under our control. We are not responsible for their contents or any other changes or updates to them. This magazine is fully independent and not affiliated in any way with the companies mentioned herein.

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Current From the Editor

Forget the New Normal; Normal Is Now Relative I’m getting on an airplane Saturday morning, a little less than 24 hours from now, for the first time since January, and to say that I’m filled with a wee bit of anxiety and trepidation would be a massive understatement. And yet … I love to travel! I want to go stay in a hotel for a couple of nights, have dinner in a restaurant with some friends from Chicago, go to Nashville to see John McBride and Pat McMakin, visit with family in Bloomington and Indianapolis.

But those dreams haven’t felt real for months. I’m a hardcore advocate of masks and limiting all unnecessary contact. Being smart. Staying at home.

Haven’t had a haircut since early February. Wearing a mask to talk to my daughter from 12 feet away, on the six visits we’ve had over the past six months. She lives four exits away. I say, Let’s get this thing under control!

I want to move around like I used to!

Now I’m actually getting on a plane, and it feels anything but normal.

I’m guessing that it won’t for a while.

I’ll be flying a quick 50 minutes from Oakland to LAX, then jumping in a cab and heading to the Overland Gate at Sony Pictures Studios to visit with Tommy McCarthy and his team in post-production. There are people on the lot these days, certainly not as many, but work has started again. Protocols are in place. Eight different departments at this point know that I’m coming, and I’m glad that they do. I have my own QR code, temperature check, disinfectant wipes and cloth coverings at the ready.

I’m even bringing a second shirt for a day trip. Sony is taking the pandemic seriously, and so am I. And we’re both still working as much as we can, in whatever ways we can. Where to find lunch might be a problem, even in the heart of Culver City, but I can worry about that later.

Technically, I don’t really need to go, and I realize that I might face criticism for doing so. But I feel that it’s important right now, following six months of Zoom sessions and Google Meets, to go say hello. Sony Pictures Studios has been Host Partner of the Mix Presents Sound for Film & Television event every September for the past six years. Of course, this seventh edition, taking place September 25-26, will be virtual, but to cement our commitment and partnership, I’m flying down to film an opening and closing video for the virtual event, alongside Tommy McCarthy, in the Cary Grant Theatre. We’ll be letting the audience know that we wish we were all together, and that we will be again one day soon. The simple image of being at Sony is important to me. When the going gets tough, relationships get us through.

And because I’ll already be on the lot, I’m also scheduled to meet with the entertainment division of Sony, which has been working on technologies related to immersive playback and headphones. For the Mix

6

event, they will be showcasing their technology; on Saturday they’ll be taking measurements of my ears, on video, to demonstrate the process for their presentation. I’m damn excited! This is what work used to be like!

Yet I have to admit, I have small amounts of anxiety tied to every stop on my daylong itinerary. We will be smart, we will practice social distancing and do everything “right,” but the anxiety is still there. I’ve been thinking, “Is this the new normal that everyone is talking about? Is this what we have to look forward to in taking what used to be a simple flight to L.A. to do some work?” Then just before I started to get depressed about the whole idea, words of wisdom arrived from my daughter Molly.

I’ve mentioned before that I come from a large family, one of 12 brothers and sisters. When I left home for college, I began receiving the Family Letter, which my parents wrote every single Sunday to update the children away from home. For 40 years. Since then, some 35 grandchildren have been added to the list, along with friends and other family. Recently a thread started about the concerns of going back on the job in education, social work and health care, as more than a few in the family are teachers and health care providers.

Molly, a midwife in Toronto, chimed in with her sympathies for the decisions everyone was facing, and humbly offered some words of wisdom from the pandemic front. She spoke eloquently of the oddities in not being able to touch an expectant mother, of how she would sometimes pull down her mask from across the room, below her face shield, just so they could see that she had a smile. She fought to locate PPE in the early days. And she still fights for it today. She is being called into more and more home births.

She has not stopped working; babies are still being born.

Her overriding message was of hope, of a “relative new normal.”

You’ll get used to the PPE protocols, she said, and you’ll get used to the anxiety of interaction—that goes away over time. The important point, she said, is to get through the early days and embrace the changes that are necessary. Then never stop learning and adapting.

That’s my daughter. I’m proud of her. And I’ll be carrying her words of support on the plane tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll all be seeing each other in the near future.

Tom Kenny Editor, MIX

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Music Composer Will Bates in the Fall on Your Sword mix room with API 1608 console and a well-curated instrument collection.

Composer Will Bates Analog and Electronic Source, Tied to Mood and Time

By Lily Moayeri

W

ill Bates went through inadvertent, self-taught sensitivity training while scoring Hulu’s docuseries Hillary and the Netflix miniseries Unbelievable. Both works, real life and based on real life, respectively, deal with people and matters that require a subtle touch in all aspects of the storytelling, especially the music.

While Bates has plenty of feature films on his resume, since moving his longstanding music and post-production company, Fall On Your Sword, from New York to Los Angeles, he’s become adept at handling documentaries, most recently The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley and Crazy, Not Insane. The British born and bred Bates has become even more of an

8

expert at handling series with The Magicians, Sweetbitter and In the Dark, to name a few.

“Whether it’s a documentary or a narrative, I tend to start every process in a similar way,” says Bates from the North Hollywood headquarters of Fall On Your Sword. “I’m very inspired by sounds. Sounds are what give birth to my melodies. Even if a score isn’t piano-led, I’ll have moments at the piano to come up with a melody or chord sequence that is intrinsically connected to a character. Then I’ll depart from that and discover melodies and sounds based on what I’ve come up with in that initial process.”

One of the attributes of documentaries is the amount of music, which is typically a lot more more than for a scripted features or series.

In the case of Hillary, about Hillary Clinton, a character that, as the four-episode docuseries says is “admired and vilified,” director Nanette Burstein was careful about how the story was presented. Much of the subject’s political career has happened in the public eye, and Burstein wanted to be mindful to not intentionally lead viewers in a particular direction.

The narrative moves along two interweaving timelines, one from Clinton’s past and one from her present. In both instances, Bates kept the music constant and almost inaudible, percolating under the story. When the story becomes too dark, such as losing an election, the music works in the opposite way, bringing some lightness to the tone. During the high points

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Bates, the multiinstrumentalist, on vibes.

The Fall on Your Sword mix room where Bates puts music to picture.

of the story, the tone remains understated, not falsely amplifying an already positive mood. “[Burstein] wanted to connect the two timelines, subconsciously leading you from one to the other,” says Bates, who was brought in after about 75 percent of the picture was locked.

“I found a melody for the archival sequences in the first episode. [Clinton’s] idealism, childhood, high school, everything she did in college and graduating, there was a lightness to it. To justify the media’s response to her throughout the years, I found myself taking a sledgehammer to those melodies, tearing them apart to their simplest forms and using atmospheric beds for the more current timeline.

“I used a granulizer, Make Noise Co.’s Morphagene, which is a modular synth,” he explains. “I fed a bunch of melodies into it that we had already decided on. I sliced everything up and started making tonal pads out of them using the Freeze function on Mutable Instruments Clouds. I use those as a bed for references, melody springboards for the more contemporary stuff. If you heard the two pieces of music side by side, they’re born from the same DNA, but not very identifiable melodically. It’s a way for me to reference something that’s happened before and move toward something new.”

In the earlier timeline, Bates tapped his background with the saxophone and incorporated clarinets and other wind instruments alongside the piano. In the later timeline, he employs analog synths such as the Yamaha CS80, which he puts to amps and mikes from across the room, in order to blend the electronic sounds with the acoustic ones.

A confirmed Apple Logic user since his days in the University of Westminster’s music program, Bates is a fan of outboard over plug-ins. Having amassed a collection spring and plate reverbs, as well as tape delays, he prefers to get out of the box as often as possible. Bates also has Patti

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Smith’s Yamaha CP70, which her piano player had MIDI-retrofitted; he uses this as his MIDI controller when writing strings, or he turns to Analogue Systems French Connection, both of which help him extract something more expressive out of the electronics.

Fall On Your Sword’s 24-channel API 1608, with 500 Series EQ modules, is used mainly as a line mixer. “Every instrument is running through each channel,” Bates explains. “I’m using a lot of MIDI, so a lot of this old gear is CB-gated and everything goes through it. I can run that through that reverb, and then I want that old one to go out into that reverb and that one to run through that amp and pick it back up in here. Having a board has allowed me to use those assignments.”

When Bates was brought in for Unbelievable, picture was 100 percent locked. It would be his preference to get involved earlier, even as early as the scriptwriting phase, or at some point when the process is still fluid so the editor could potentially cut to a rhythm Bates has created for a scene rather than him trying to hit certain beats at certain moments. Seasoned music supervisor Liza Richardson, whom Bates had worked with on the series The Path, suggested him for Unbelievable.

The miniseries is based on a Pulitzer Prizewinning news story about a series of sexual assault cases. The central case explored is that of “Marie,” who is charged with lying about her assault. The other side of the story is represented by two strong female characters, detectives who solve the cases, including Marie’s case. As with Hillary, the material is specific and the story must be told carefully, with a light touch, including the music “I found myself having to pull back a lot,” Bates says. “The performances are so powerful, there was not a lot I needed to amplify. When Marie is remembering, for example, her way of

dealing with what she went through was to pull out—almost this out-of-body experience. Sinking it too much into despair and darkness wasn’t true to the story. There needed to be this possibility that she can find the strength to deal with this horrendous thing.

“Marie constantly having to retell the story of her assault is an example of her fragmented memory and the reason why she starts to fall apart,” he continues. “From the beginning, I would have these looping passages that would fall apart the more they repeated. That’s an example where sound gave birth to the melodies. Marie’s very simple melody that happens throughout the series was born from one of those loops.

I used my upright piano, picking the strings.

When there are electronics, they’re very cold and kind of clinical, but her stuff, her frailty, her melodic pieces, you can hear fingernails on the strings. I wanted that paradox of having these very specifically human sounds against this electronic, cold stuff when the police are there.”

Unbelievable has contrasting scores: frail, delicate and vulnerable for Marie, strong and confident for the detectives, who do not immediately show up in the eight-episode series.

Bates’ intention was the avoid the predictable sounds for a police procedural. Instead, he came up with the idea of human-played percussion, creating simple rhythms to be used as building blocks for those moments in the series.

His friend Mathias Kunzli came to Fall On Your Sword with 50 to 60 pieces of metal objects, bells and gongs, which they laid out or hanged up around the studio’s multiple, multi-function rooms, often recording them being played at different tempos. Bates also used MIDI mallets, with which he programmed super-fast beats.

“I put the MIDI mallets around a few objects then manipulated the objects and changed the resonance while this mallet is playing an inhuman, rigid pattern,” he says.

“That was a fun, weird tool to have: human versus rigid, inanimate manipulation. That’s the job, isn’t it? We’re all searching for some new sound.” n

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Music // news & notes Composer Piers Baron Music Provides the Narrative for Action Sports Films

By Lily Moayeri

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he is given the edit with nothing but the sounds of the bicycles. For this he creates a fluid piece that fits within the film’s movements rather than music over the top. “I start making click tracks in Ableton,” says Baron, whose Los Angeles-based home studio centers around a MacBook Pro and Yamaha NS10 speakers (“for when I don’t have time to be second-guessing my mix”), plus the “super-responsive” Hedd Type 20 speakers for contrast.

“I do multiple tempo click tracks across the film so I can work out the pacing,” he continues, noting that in action sports films the picture is typically final when it comes to him. “I automate the click to give me a tempo for mapping. Or, I’ll go to the crescendo end and play chords on the Korg D1 piano, then back to the start and work out how minimal that needs to be, then to the middle with synth noises or quirky sounds to figure out the flow.”

At this point, Baron removes himself from the studio and develops the idea in his head, making notes on his phone. He does this for a day at a time, giving himself time away from the computer screen, which is not a creative place for him. Says Baron, “It’s important for each project to have its own sound palette. If I have enough time, like on Accomplice, I spend a week making synth patches. I get different-sounding plug-ins for different parts, really experiment and make weird sounds. Even if you only come up with five sounds, you could splice those and use them a few times.”

Baron started in music with guitar, selftrained at a young age. He shifted to producing drum ‘n’ bass as a teenager, gaining respect and traction in that space. Both served as solid training ground, as all of the sounds heard on Baron’s scores, including the vocals, are made by him.

Besides the Korg D1, he relies on Imaginado’s multiple-oscillator DRC synth, and for more

Photo: Arto Saari @artofoto

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s essential as music is to any viewing experience, be it features, series, documentaries or video games, too much or too little of it can be distracting. In the case of action sports films, every moment of the visual has score attached to it. With next to no dialog, the music is the narrative.

The person who, arguably, knows this best is Piers Baron, who since his 2013 score for Nike Snowboarding Never Not Part 2, has become the go-to composer for action sports films.

Baron’s scores fit seamlessly with both the minimal dialog and the emotive sounds of skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking and the like. Among his highlights are Jetman Dubai: White Feathers, an 11-minute heart-soaring experience from the point of view of two jetmen; The Flat Earth from award-winning director and cinematographer Ty Evans, renowned for his stellar work in skateboarding films; and David Blaine Live, for which Baron wrote the music for the respected magician’s live show, composing on headphones while watching Blaine’s rehearsals.

“It is a lot,” says Baron of the amount of music he is expected to compose for any of his commissions. “But it also gives you creative freedom to get away from the pop structure. What connected with me musically at a young age was early Metallica. It’s song-based, but it’s experimental in chord structuring. That lends itself to constantly evolving and changing while having a theme running through it. I like the idea of parts of the score referencing themselves throughout the film. I find it really ties things together for the viewer.”

This lines up with the nature of the films Baron scores. On a number of occasions, his own music is what’s been temped to picture, which makes things a little easier. Other times, such as on his latest work, Teton Gravity Research’s seven-minute mountain biking film, Accomplice,

complicated sounds, Serum. He has SUBPAC plus Soundtoys and iZotope products on hand, as well as Ableton’s built-in plug-ins. But he will also use Metric Halo ChannelStrip, which includes a distressor, limiter, EQ and gate, as well as Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch.

“You can put any sound in PaulStretch and time stretch it to infinity,” Baron says. “Some of the weirder sounds in my soundtracks that I have in my head, I’ll make on the microphone and put it into PaulStretch. I stretch it backward and forward, add reverbs and delays and pitch it up and down and turn it into something that doesn’t sound like any other instrument.”

While Baron is given a lot of leeway to incorporate his aural vision into the film, what works best is when there is collaboration with the filmmaker. “For each genre of action sports, there are internal, audience-specific factors that you have to be really clued up about,” he says. “Accomplice, for instance, for two minutes we added very minor sound effects against [cyclist] Graham Agassiz riding through the woods with no music at all. When I first heard that idea, I said, ‘Two minutes, that’s quite a long time.’ Once it all came together, it made the ending huge. It wouldn’t have had the same impact if we hadn’t had the silence. That was definitely something I was skeptical about. The director said, ‘Trust me, this is going to work.’

And it did.” n

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Music // news & notes Classic Tracks: “Let the Mystery Be” Iris Dement’s Breakthrough Track With Producer Jim Rooney

By Barbara Schultz

T

favorites from the start, was “Let the Mystery he first time producer Jim Rooney Be,” DeMent’s gentle, tongue-in-cheek obserheard Iris Dement sing one of her own vation on the origins of life, and afterlife. songs was around 1991. He was in the office of MCA Nashville music exec Renee Bell, Some say once you’re gone you’re gone for­ and she shared a recording of DeMent singing ever and some say you’re gonna come back “Our Town” live. As the singer/songwriter’s Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour if in sweet, lilting voice filled the room—telling sinful ways you lack the song’s nostalgic story of small-town life— Some say that they’re comin’ back in a garden Rooney thought, I missed that boat.

Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas I think I’ll Some weeks earlier, the producer had been just let the mystery be invited to see DeMent perform on a night of Kansas City writers at the Bluebird Café. “So, Dement and Rooney both came away from I went down there but the place was packed,” their meeting with a list of songs for her to reRooney recalls. “I was squeezed in almost all cord, and Rooney took a little time to consider the way to the bathroom, and I could barethe best way to capture all the freshness of Dely see the stage in a mirror that they’d put Ment’s ideas without belaboring up behind the bar so you could "We got together at my apartment and sat them. He realized that a smoothlook around the corner. Two or at my dining room table. She was very shy, and running session would hinge on seathree other people played, and it soned support, so he enlisted a band wasn’t inspiring. I just didn’t hang she really hadn’t performed a whole lot. She’d around.” done coffee houses in Kansas City where she was of A-list musicians, and engineer Rich Adler, whose credits included Soon after his visit with Bell, from. She’d had very little experience playing Johnny Cash, John Hartford, Dolly Rooney met DeMent at Jack’s with other musicians.”

Parton, and more.

Tracks, the studio where Rooney “Jim put together a band that was was based at the time. DeMent —Jim Rooney very sensitive to what she was trying had come in to sing harmony on an Emmylou Harris track, and Rooney learned that Harris’ steel guitar to do, in terms of the tempo and the dynamics of the performances, and it player, Steve Fishell, was set to produce DeMent’s debut album. Hear- made the process as natural as possible,” Adler says.

DeMent’s core band on the album sessions included Stuart Duncan ing her sing in the studio, Rooney again said to himself, “Boy, I really (fiddle, mandolin), Pete Wasner (piano), Mark Howard (acoustic guitar), Al missed a big boat.”

“A month or two passed, and I got a call from Ken Irwin at Rounder Perkins (dobro), and Roy Husky, Jr. (upright bass). Both Rooney and Adler Records, and he said, ‘Would you be interested in working with Iris recall Husky’s talents with great admiration. Husky, who died of lung canDeMent?’ I said, ‘Well, yes I would! But I heard that Steve Fishell was cer in 1997, was revered not only for the musical foundation he gave every going to do that.’ Apparently, it hadn’t worked out with Steve Fishell, so session, but also for his leadership and rock-solid chart-writing skills.

“Roy made charts for every song he would play on in the studio,” Adler I was glad to get another chance. But I’d still only heard that one song.”

To get things rolling, Rooney and DeMent set up a one-on-one meet- says. “Even in the rare cases when somebody would come in with charts ing. “We got together at my apartment and sat at my dining room ta- already made, Roy made his own chart anyway. He made these charts on ble,” he recalls. “I said, ‘So, play me some songs.’ She said, ‘Do I have to?’ three-by-five index cards that he carried around in his shirt pocket.

“Sometimes when the other guys were making their own charts, if they I said, ‘Well, I don’t know how else we’re supposed to do this.’ She was very shy, and she really hadn’t performed a whole lot. She’d done coffee got to a spot in a song where they either couldn’t make their charts fast houses in Kansas City where she was from. She’d had very little experi- enough, or there was a little bit of ambiguity about what the chord changes were after a run-through, people would go over to Roy and check his chart ence playing with other musicians.”

One of the songs that DeMent played for Rooney, and one of his because he always had it right. It was no wonder everybody wanted him on

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their sessions.”

“Before we went in to record the album, Iris and I got together with Mark and Roy at Jack’s Tracks, just to get her comfortable working with them,” Rooney explains. “Then, the day before we were going to record, Iris and I were comparing our song lists, and hers had changed. I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, Iris. What happened to ‘Let the Mystery Be?’ She said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.’

“I said ‘Well, I know! That’s why I’m working with you. I think that this life is a mystery. And anybody who thinks they’ve got it figured out is either a liar or a fool. I want that song.’”

DeMent conceded, and the following day, Rooney, Adler and the musicians settled into Cowboy Jack Clement’s Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa. “I had recorded Nanci Griffith there, and John Prine,” says Rooney. “That’s a nice big room—a wonderful room for acoustic music—where everyone could sit in a circle, and you get a wonderful blend.”

“Jack had one of the earliest versions of what we would now call a pretty established, sophisticated home studio,” Adler says. “He bought a large home, a couple of miles from Music Row, and he converted the entire attic of the house into a studio. It was

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Photo Charlie Grace

Producer Jim Rooney with Iris DeMent at Jack’s Tracks

Engineer Rich Adler now owns and operates Sound Wave Recording in Nashville.

unusual in the respect that there was no window— no visual connection—between the control room and the main studio space. Whatever communication took place between the studio floor and the control room was all over the microphones and the talkback system.”

The Cowboy Arms was equipped with a Sound Workshop console and a recently acquired Studer 24-track tape machine. Adler recalls that the studio had a limited inventory of outboard gear, but he carried a rack of his own, including several Pultec EQP-1As and an EQP-5, and an ADR Compex compressor/limiter that he especially liked.

Adler also brought along the Neumann U87 mic they used for DeMent’s voice. He says he learned from earlier years in his career, working on staff at Universal Recording in Chicago, how to take care of his microphones, and how no two U87s necessarily sound the same.

“I had a U87 that I’d had rebuilt here in Nashville by Fred Cameron, and it was in really

good condition, with the capsule replaced,” Adler says. “On the originals, the diaphragms were made out of material that was seven microns thick. The capsule in my U87, the material was three microns, and it sounded unique. I really liked that on vocals.”

On acoustic guitars, Adler says, “At that time, I frequently used guitar mics with a tight cardioid pattern, such as the AKG 451, but on this session I think I used Neumann KM84s. I had several of those that were really good guitar mics. I would place them four or five inches up the neck from the sound hole to avoid getting a boomy sound, especially in a live situation.”

On Husky’s upright bass, Adler used a micDI combination. “I still have that mic—a Sony C38B, one of their first solid-state mics,” he says.

“The direct feed was either from the pickup that he had in his bass or sometimes I had a clip-on pickup that I would use, in case there was a note that wasn’t speaking distinctly. That was just to slightly augment the microphone track. The

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Music // news & notes mic was the main sound, and I used a Pultec equalizer as well as some kind of compression that I can’t remember—those pieces were part of getting a really good bass tone.”

“The sessions were all live and they happened very quickly,” Rooney says. “Mark [Howard] and Al [Perkins] split the solo. Mark does the first

part and Al does the second part. The only overdubbing we did later was for harmony singing. Iris has this quality of emotion in her voice where you know you’re capturing something special, and I must give Rich great compliments here for doing that. You have to be ready to go when an artist like Iris is recording

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and not be messing around with technical details like microphones or earphones that don’t work.”

DeMent’s first album, Infamous Angel, was released in January 1992 to critical acclaim. The liner notes featured a short appreciation by the late John Prine, with whom DeMent later recorded several duets.

“One night after receiving a copy of ‘Let the Mystery Be,’ I was listening to the tape while frying a dozen or so pork chops in a skillet,” wrote the ever humorous and brilliant Prine.

“Well Iris DeMent starts singing about ‘Mama’s Opry,’ [Track 10 on the album], and being the sentimental fellow I am, I got a lump in my throat and a tear fell from my eyes into the hot oil. Well, the oil popped out and burnt my arm as if the pork chops were trying to say,

“You have to be ready to go when an artist like Iris is recording and not be messing around with technical details like microphones or earphones that don’t work."

—Jim Rooney

‘Shut up, or I’ll really give you something to cry about.’ Of course, pork chops can’t talk.

But Iris DeMent’s songs can. They talk about isolated memories of life, love and living. And Iris has a voice I like a whole lot, like one you’ve heard before—but not really.”

The songs on Infamous Angel are still great fan favorites, and the production team of Rooney and Adler carried on working with Dement to make her second record, My Life.

Rooney also produced DeMent’s fourth, Lifeline, and continues to work as a folk musician and producer. Adler now operates his own studio, Sound Wave Recording in Nashville.

The song “Let the Mystery Be” recently got a second wind when it was chosen as the theme song to season 2 of HBO series The Leftovers.

“That’s not something she pushes for,” Rooney says. “It just happens because her songs are so compelling.” n

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The

Future

of

Post-Produ Work has been getting done, and production is slowly picking up again, but most agree that after six months of shutdowns and changing protocols, any kind of new “normal” will include both in-person sessions and remote collaboration.

C

haos is a catalyst for change. And Covid-19 has certainly created chaos in the film industry. Productions put on hold; remote workflows hastily arranged. The logistics of “How can we…?” evolving into efficient solutions. This pandemic has afforded the opportunity to change, so what will professionals do with it?

The door for remote sound editing has been open for years, and Covid-19 delivered the kick that forced the industry to seek new ways of working in teams. Since March, big post-production sound facilities have been busy adapting their spaces, adopting new workflows, and developing

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safety protocols in preparation for re-opening.

But for many sound editors with home studios, it’s been business as usual. That’s because the remote editing infrastructure has been steadily growing. The industry just needed a reason to fully embrace it.

Gearty calls their collaboration process “oldschool.” It’s not complicated or complex. He talks on the phone with the editor, sends over materials via their assistants, gets feedback and then works through ideas. He says, “For me, it’s absolutely far more creative and far more valuable for the production for me to be on my own.”

As for a home studio, that’s certainly an investment, but consider that the quality and affordability of audio tech is ever on the rise.

“The industry as a whole has embraced the JBL 7 Series speakers with compression horn drivers as a solution for a quality monitor that can perform at the level that mixers are used to on dubbing stages,” says re-recording mixer and post-production technologist Eric Hoehn at Post2.0. “Pro Tools software and plug-in packages are becoming more nimble, more compact. HDX cards are no longer necessary to run 768 voices. It’s a subscription voice pack now, and a nice iMac Pro can do the trick,

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duction

S o u n d and actually outperform those HDX systems in certain ways.”

For Hoehn and Wylie Stateman—partners at Post2.0, Topanga, Calif.—remote editing and collaboration is their daily routine. Hoehn states, “This crisis is accelerating the use of tools that already exist and have been battle-tested in many ways over the years.”

Rob D’Amico, Avid’s Director of Product Marketing for Audio Solutions, affirms: “To help optimize remote workflows, our goal now is to educate. A lot of the products and solutions that we offer today, and new products we just went to market with like the Pro Tools HDX Thunderbolt

3 chassis, the Avid S1 control surface, and the Pro Tools|MTRX Studio, with those you can really build out a home studio for a very affordable cost and guarantee that same level of quality from a home studio that you’d get in a traditional studio.”

Adam Lebowski, Avid’s Product Marketing Manager for Audio Solutions, says that Pro Tools, by design, supports the rise of smaller environments participating in bigger workflows/ bigger productions. He explains, “With Pro Tools as a common platform, we have built-in foundational competencies that are already set up for collaboration and interoperability. That

By Jennifer Walden

common thread between systems allows for a level of consistency and compatibility that is crucial to the audio post workflow, and has been for a long time.”

Avid’s Pro Tools Cloud Collaboration— initially positioned for music production — is an existing capability that allows multiple editors to simultaneously work on the same session.

Over the years, this capability has been utilized in some workflows for audio post. For instance, a Foley recordist in one location could share their recordings with a Foley editor in another location to cut and sync to the picture while the Foley session is happening. “It’s not an end-to-

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The Dolby Atmos home studio of Ruy Garcia.

end workflow for audio post but there are pieces of Cloud Collaboration that have a very high value for remote workflows,” states D’Amico.

PARABOLIC, WB AND REMOTE ADR Pro Tools is certainly the backbone of Parabolic NYC’s approach to recording remote ADR and massive loop group sessions, which they’re able to do in real time and to picture. Their biggest group session so far has been 15 actors simultaneously, all located in different cities across the U.S. Owner/supervising sound editor/ re-recording mixer Lew Goldstein says, “A big part of this process was being able to do things in real time. We’re hearing the talent in real time so we can help them adjust their configurations level-wise, their proximity to the microphone, and the environment they’re in. We spend a good half-hour to 45 minutes getting each of the talent situated, so that when we start recording there isn’t a significant difference between each of the individuals.”

Parabolic’s setup uses two types of

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connections: the talent connection and an observer connection that allows the directors, producers and creatives to be a part of the session. The observers can see the recording session to picture. And they can communicate with the talent and engineer in real time. It took Goldstein weeks to perfect his method from a technical standpoint—finding the right mix of third-party applications that could interface with Pro Tools and pass audio and video back and forth between them.

“That was the original big battle that took me quite a bit to solve. And that’s what makes the whole system work,” he says.

Then, with the help of Dann Fink—loop group director and co-owner of Loopers Unlimited in New York City—Goldstein perfected their process by doing numerous test sessions with talent in different locations. “The key with this whole thing is to make it simple,” he says. “It has to be simple enough that I can explain it to my mother and have her do it. Being able to implement it and make it work was very important. You can sacrifice a little bit of the sound quality, but if you can’t do it at all then it’s pointless.”

Another huge consideration was making it Covid-19 safe. Parabolic put together recording

kits to send to talent—appropriate mics, preamps, and audio interfaces packed into separate Pelican cases that are stored in New York and Los Angeles for fast delivery. When the kits are returned to Parabolic, “they go through a serious cleaning and sterilization process. We have a decent Covid-19 protocol for how the equipment is sterilized,” Goldstein says.

At WB Sound’s Burbank facility, they’ve also developed a proprietary method of recording remote ADR, called “ADR… At A Distance.” It’s also a self-contained kit shipped to the talent that requires minimal setup. With ADR… At A Distance, the ADR mixer has control over the remote mic preamp gain and headphone levels.

Picture is sent in real time to the talent, and the filmmakers view a latency-corrected video stream that provides high-quality video and audio in sync. As with Parabolic, WB Sound’s goal was to make their remote ADR process mirror the studio experience as closely as possible.

Additionally, WB De Lane Lea in London developed “Alfred,” which Kim Waugh (WB Executive Vice President, Worldwide Post Production Creative Services) describes as “a new, innovative workflow platform that gives the client complete control of their content, anytime, anywhere in the world, through a fully integrated,

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editor/re-recording mixer Ruy Garcia has worked with Technicolor-PostWorks NY as a freelancer for five years, and in that time he’s built a home studio that mirrors the capabilities of Rob D’Amico, Avid his studio at the PostWorks facility—including Director of Product mixing in Dolby Atmos. But huge advantage of Marketing for Audio Solutions his personal studio is just being at home, he says.

“That time spent on commuting or setting up is now available to spend on the project or with your family. I grew up in Mexico and we used to always eat together as a family. That was a big part of our upbringing. I enjoy being able to do secure, cloud-based system.” For a worldwide that with my daughter and wife every day—just studio like WB Sound, with locations in Burbank, being able to check in and say, ‘How are you New York and London, having access to content doing? Do you need help? Is your homework from anywhere at any time is a big step forward going okay?’ And then I can go back to mixing. into supporting a distributed workforce.

Those little moments are priceless.”

“This period, in a way, has been a fortunate Gearty agrees: “I don’t have to commute, so experience for us because it’s driven us to look already I’m happier. And, I can get up at 2 a.m. at how we could perform alike activities in a with an idea and start playing with it. It’s ideal distributed fashion—meaning, working from for the way I work. I’m more goal-oriented so remote locations or from home studios,” he I’m better at doing that when I’m continues. Our talent and artists have on my own. You’ll get more out of made investments in gear and WB "Creativity is no longer confined has made significant investments to a vendor-facility model. It’s going to me that way than by putting me in a box from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. But it’s during this time to help with the be distributed around the world, and funny, because I do miss the work distributed workforce. That is, having we’re going to work in a more environment of a studio and going workstations and interconnectivity co-located data system." across the hall to talk to the Foley and processes and technologies in — Wylie Stateman guys and saying, ‘Hey, let’s try this.’ place so that a number of activities— But you change. You schedule that.” like picture editing or sound editing— C5’s Foley team—Foley artist Marko Costanzo part of the equation.” could be done in a remote fashion.”

Having technology and workflows that allow and Foley mixer George Lara (nominated for sound artists to be independent of a traditional a 2020 Emmy for ‘Outstanding Sound Mixing’ DECENTRALIZED GLOBAL WORKFORCE It’s a way of working that Stateman foresees as studio environment “is going to allow for more on Amazon’s “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”)—has the future of the post sound business. He says, recognition for what sound artists contribute been Covid-19 safe from the start even though “Creativity is always going to be the main driver to a production,” adds Stateman. “It will allow they don’t have a remote-based workflow. Lara for content producers. Creativity is no longer us to make better use of time and these new is in the control room and Costanzo is on the confined to a vendor-facility model. It’s going to democratized materials that are not solely in the Foley stage. Each room has an individual air be distributed around the world, and we’re going hands of vendors and large capitalized facilities.

“This opinion comes from five years of to work in a more co-located data system.”

Hoehn, his partner at Post2.0, adds: “This crisis experimenting with this decentralized way of will accelerate the elimination of the geographic working,” Stateman continues. “In the past six requirement of doing this work. People in LA, months, we have been proving out this model people in New York and London—these hubs that it’s not a competition between science where sound editors and mixers traditionally and technology. It’s an effort to take future have gathered—they won’t be limited to those technological advances in audio software and places anymore. We hope it creates a situation communication tools and apply them in a novel where people can start working anywhere they way to doing better-quality work and to having an approval process that makes sense for our want.”

A global workforce would open up the post clients. It’s not as facility-dependent. It’s more Eugene Gearty, sound sound talent pool, which WB Sound plans on artist-dependent.” supervisor, re-recording engineer diving into with eyes open. Waugh says, “It’s all about our people, our talent. One of the greatest THE HIDDEN BENEFITS AT HOME priorities to come out of this pandemic has been A major benefit of a decentralized approach is a rallying cry from all of us at Warner Media a better work/life balance. Supervising sound and Warner Bros. that we must really address diversity and inclusion—that is the future of our business. We have to be defiant in how we act now to confront the ills of the past, to confront discrimination, and it’s a key social issue for all of us in the community.

“When we talk about ‘how it’s been,’ well, we’ve had technical challenges and innovation, but we’ve had social change of the realization that the only way this magnificent work is completed is by people,” he continues. “Anyone can buy the gear, and we can innovate and invest. but it’s really about the people. That’s why I bring that to the forefront. It’s so important for us to talk about. We’ve had a lot of hardhitting conversations and soul-searching about the composition of people that make up the post production community itself. So, that’s front and center for me alongside the ongoing challenges of how we represent our filmmakers and producers and deliver content. It’s an equal

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Wylie Stateman, Post2.0

up having just a couple of weeks to fulfill an intricate score. We seem to be always rushing to meet some looming deadline, so that part— having extra time—is welcome.”

Post sound is the last step in the process, so (the lack of) time has always been an issue. When productions do start up again, a decentralized post sound process could help.

Hoehn says, “Having your teams spread out across multiple time zones globally can increase your productivity from an eight-hour day to a 24-hour day.”

“We call it ‘chasing the sun,’ this 24-hour creative workflow,” adds Stateman.

lawn,” says Gearty. “So I’ll finish up a scene and go mow the lawn. And when I’m mowing the lawn, I’m constantly thinking about things to try. And when I’m done mowing, I go up to the studio and do it. It’s so much better. It’s like being goal-oriented instead of being time-oriented.”

But what about mixing? And getting the directors and producers to see and hear the content properly for approval?

CHANGES AND APPROVALS According to Hoehn, there needs to be a clear understanding of what is trying to be achieved in order to mix appropriately for that medium. conditioning system. They even have separate He asks, “Are we working toward completing entrances to the building. “We’re in a Foley content that will play on Netflix or on Amazon, THE TECHNOLOGY-TIME RELATIONSHIP bunker,” jokes Lara.

Costanzo says, “We have an advantage over There are tons of collaboration tools to support a streaming on TVs, tablets and through soundother Foley teams that have two artists or decentralized creative process, like: Evercast for bars? And how do we get directors and the peomore in a room and work in tandem. They had streaming audio and video in sync, Source-Con- ple in the approval chain to have the right techto figure out how to change their workflow to nect (and its various components) for remote re- nology with the right hardware to participate?”

Garcia—who finished up the mix on the something that we’ve been doing for years— cording and mix reviews, Zoom for face-to-face Apple TV+ series “Dickinson” in his working as a single team. Our way home studio when Technicolorof working is already safe in these “I’ve always been an advocate of PostWorks NY’s mix stage closed due times of social distancing.” having more time than having more to Covid-19—says that PostWorks The biggest impact so far has been money. Limits can be creatively set up a remote workflow and Apple a positive one—more time to do the helpful, but it’s fundamental to be able sent Blu-ray players and Dolby work “and the flexibility to jump to discuss and digest your choices."

Atmos soundbars to all the creatives to different projects in a flip of a involved so the mix review process dime thanks to the Pro Tools HDX — Ruy Garcia would be more consistent across platform we record with,” he says.

Lara and Costanzo have been working on The exchanges, Slack for keeping conversations and different listening environments. The clients White Tiger for sound supervisor Jacob Ribicoff at notes organized, Resilio Sync for sharing assets screened the content on their own and then Technicolor-PostWorks NY, Stillwater for sound and folders among multiple team members, and submitted their notes.

“In a way I prefer it because you’re able to supervisor Paul Hsu at C5, and Mosquito Coast Aspera for large file transfers between studios.

Of course, the faster the Internet speeds the focus on the whole arc of the film instead of for C5’s sound supervisor Ron Bochar. Lara says, “We get full control of the movies or shows and better these tools work, especially when uploading. having a bunch of reactive moments, with bursts we break down the spotted sessions so we can So another option is a co-location facility that of, ‘This I like and this I don’t like,’” he says. record expediently and feed the different projects offers rentable rack space to house your media “Instead, we can feel the emotional rhythms to Foley editors on both coasts so they can meet server and provides a 1 Gbps internet bandwidth. of the story and understand how they work, their respective deadlines without sacrificing time “You can host your entire media server and have recognize what is accentuating performance your team connect to it through Resilio Sync, for and what is helping with dynamic impact. You’re or the quality of the sound.”

With movie release dates being pushed back example. You can set up an entire distributed IT as U.S. theaters remain closed, Garcia was also backbone with huge amounts of upload/download afforded more time to spend on a film. He’s speed,” says Hoehn.

But rather than committing to specific currently working on A24’s After Yang with director Kogonada.”Thanks to the festival technologies right now, Stateman says, they “are deadline opening up, we’ve had extra time to committed to an idea. The idea is that work is work on nuanced moods and focus on a more no longer indexed to time spent in the office. beautiful and detailed sound design,” he says. It’s a creative experience and a collaborative “I’ve always been an advocate of having more experience, and we want to employ any of the time than having more money. Limits can be tools that will help us get there.”

Technology is there to support the flow creatively helpful, but it’s fundamental to be Eric Hoehn, able to discuss and digest your choices. You of ideas, not define the workflow. Creativity Post2.0 notice that with music composers, even with happens all the time, not just in the studio. huge resources and expectations, they’ll end “There might be a time when I have to mow the

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Bringing It Back Slowly, One Step at a Time

Kim Waugh, WB Sound Executive Vice President, Worldwide Post Production Services

able to understand why it should sound one way or another, and appreciate the full shape of the sound and the show.”

Oscar-winning re-recording mixer Tim Cavagin at Twickenham Studios near London has had a similarly positive experience with their remote mixing feedback process. On a recent project, the TW1 mix team was sending mixed reels to three different continents at the end of each day for the execs and the director to review. Then they’d send their notes back to Cavagin the next day.

He says that pre-pandemic, with the director, editor and execs in the room, “they may have been used to hearing the sound mix in a certain way over the previous months. Now, with just the key sound crew in the room, we have been able to explore and present our preferred approach, which may not have always been possible with a full room. I’ve missed having that extra-close relationship you can create with everyone in the room together, but at the same time, I’ve also enjoyed the certain extra freedom it’s given us in the mix.”

At Parabolic, Goldstein sits alone on the dub stage and sends a live feed from his console to the creatives who can listen over headphones, laptop speakers or TV speakers. “We’re mixing for the medium,” he says. “If a lot of people are going to be listening over the laptop, for streaming content, then it’s now easy for the client to listen to the mix on a laptop. I can make mix adjustments accordingly and the client can put their headphones back on and check it. The client has control over how they listen to the material.”

“We are capable of sending anywhere from two tracks of audio up to 64 tracks of audio,” he adds. “We’ve already done a remote 5.1 mix session, and we have an upcoming Dolby Atmos mix session that I’m hoping to transmit in Atmos for a remote mix review. I’m excited about experimenting with that.”

Current and emerging technologies

At Formosa Group in Los Angeles, sound and music editorial have largely transitioned to a work-from-home model, while on the mixing side, the dub stages have remained open for the mixers with almost all client participation happening via remote collaboration. That has held true for ADR, too, with the mixer on the stage working with the talent remotely.

That’s changing, though. “Since June, there has been a small client presence on the stages for review and approval of work,” says Matt Dubin, Formosa Group’s Executive Vice President.

Dubin finds that while these remote workflows have enabled the process to move forward, there is frequently a loss of efficiency and momentum. “To that end, I anticipate that there will continue to be an incremental return to the studio environment,: he says. “While some aspects of remote collaboration may persist, I feel that the ability to get back to the ‘team sport’ of sound will prevail and that our industry will gravitate back to the facility-based paradigm as we hopefully see a decline in the Covid-19 caseload through effective Public Health management and/or an effective vaccine.”

TW1 (Twickenham Studios)—located outside London, in the borough of Richmond—has already reopened their facilities to welcome a major Hollywood production. They recently recorded full crowd ADR on A Gift From Bob— the follow-up feature to A Streetcat Named Bob—on the Theatre 2 Mixing Stage. Each of the six voice artists in attendance had their own mic and a sectioned-off, six-foot space.

can support remote editing, mixing, and collaboration. But it feels like there’s something missing—a human connection of sorts. Waugh agrees: “It’s hard to beat the experience of going to a theater and having that social interaction of people laughing alongside you. That is the theatrical experience,e and you can’t get that when streaming content in your home. There isn’t the emotional energy surrounding it.

When I think about remotely cutting picture or sound and remotely mixing in different fashions, I think, ‘What do we lose?’ Because it’s all about human emotion and adding emotion to the content. So, ‘What do we lose? And how will that be defined?’ We’ve gone from oneon-one interaction to really a technological

Reopening was possible after the introduction of stringent “TW1 Studio Safe” measures that include: social distancing on all their stages, facility-wide mask and glove usage by staff, routine daily temperature checks and Covid-free self-certificationformsviatheTW1app,following on-set and in-theater protocols established by an industry task force and government guidelines, having a bio-fogging specialist on standby to treat each space being hired by productions, installing localized sanitation stations at each studio entrance and all doors around the facili ty, rigorous new cleaning standards using earthfriendly products, and more. Their approach is a good example of how other studios might tackle reopening in this pandemic era.

Twickenham Studios’ new Managing Partners Piers Read and Jeremy Rainbird feel that “with the measures we have introduced at TW1, we think it is a perfect place for people to reboot various sound and other post-production projects. With the demand for content and the need to entertain people through these turbulent times, we want to enable creativity and ideas to come to life safely.”

TW1 mixer Cavagin concludes: “I feel Twickenham has adapted incredibly well. So much so that after a few days it felt like the new norm. Piers [Read] and Jeremy [Rainbird] have gone over and above, working with the team to make TW1 as safe as possible. I actually wonder whether this remote style of mixing will become the usual way in the future, especially when costs are of great significance.”

interaction. I don’t know if we are wired that well to adapt that quickly to be creative in that fashion, working that way.”

Will there be a return to a studio-central way of working post-pandemic? Or will a decentralized approach be the way of the future?

WB Sound sees a hybrid approach as being the new norm, combining the campus environment with the option for artists and filmmakers to work remotely, “as opposed to always having to be in a specific location on a specific day,” says Waugh. “The investment in these tools will allow for flexibility that has been fairly rigid in the past because of security controls, bandwidth, streaming, and communication tools.” ■

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The Period Sounds (and Pandemic Challenges) of Mrs. America Scott Gershin and On-the-Fly, Workflow Workarounds

By Steve Harvey

H

ollywood was a couple of weeks into pilot season when Los Angeles County announced its “safer-at-home” order in midMarch in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Productions were stopped in their tracks as cities and states nationwide issued stay-at-home mandates. Of the 56 pilot episodes ordered by the five broadcast TV networks this year, the Los Angeles Times reported, only one got made before much of the country went into lockdown.

The shutdown has been devastating for the industry, of course. According to the report in the L.A. Times, pilot season, which runs from late February through early May, is worth an estimated $500 million to the entertainment industry. But what about those shows that were already being broadcast, with episodes for future airing still in the post-production pipeline?

Scott Gershin had been working as the Sound

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Supervisor on Mrs. America since the beginning of September 2019 when the March lockdown order was announced. “We had two challenges,” he says.

“First, we needed to finish editing and mixing the show to make our air dates. Secondly, we needed to finish shooting ADR, Foley and walla group for episode eight and we hadn’t done anything for episode nine. And episode nine was big. We had completed mixing four episodes before the pandemic and had edited three additional episodes ready to be mixed. We remotely mixed the last five episodes.”

Mrs. America, an FX miniseries from Canadian TV writer and producer Dahvi Waller, known for her work on Desperate Housewives, Halt and Catch Fire and Mad Men, is the story of the battle between feminists and anti-feminists over the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s. The show, which initially aired on Hulu, was recently nominated for 10 Emmy Awards, including for lead actress Cate Blanchett and supporting actresses Uzo Aduba, Margo Martindale and

Tracey Ullman.

The ERA was introduced in Congress in 1923 to codify equality between men and women in an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But it was not ratified by the legislatures of 38 states, or three-fourths of the total, as required by Congressional convention, before the deadline, so the ERA was reintroduced in 1971. It was passed by Congress, endorsed by President Nixon and by 1977 35 state legislatures had approved the amendment.

Mrs. America follows the so-called second wave of feminists, such as Gloria Steinem (played

by Rose Byrne), U.S. Representatives Bella Abzug (Martindale) and Shirley Chisholm (Aduba), and writer and activist Betty Friedan (Ullman), and their efforts to push the amendment past the 38-state threshold. They were ultimately thwarted by the anti-feminist forces arrayed behind housewife and grass roots organizer Phyllis Schlafly (Blanchett), who came to be known as “the First Lady of the Conservative

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Scott Gershin in his home setup, where he sound supervised and hosted a few of the final mixes during the “shutdown weeks” of post-production on Mrs. America.

Photo Courtesy of Fox Entertainment

Movement.” Ninety-seven years after the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced, it has yet to be ratified.

LOOKING BACK AT THE ‘70S Gershin, a veteran sound supervisor, sound designer and mixer, surely needs little introduction. He was Founder and Executive Creative Director of Soundelux Design Music Group and Executive Creative Director/ Supervising Sound Designer and Mixer at Formosa Group before joining Keywords Studios and creating the Sound Lab. His credits over the past 30 years encompass films such as Nightcrawler, Book of Life, Team America, Shrek, American Beauty, Hellboy 2 and Pacific Rim and games including Valorant, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Doom and Gears of War. He has a list of awards as long as your arm.

The directing and producing staff of Mrs. America came from feature films and premium television, says Gershin. “Creatively we had similar sensibilities and approach. We wanted to create a lush sonic landscape that immersed

you into that period of time. The people and the debates were real. I ended up doing a lot of research. A lot of the historic events were on YouTube. I was amazed at how well the actresses depicted their characters. I wanted to do the same with the soundtrack. I was living in New York during that period of history, so I knew the sounds of that time and place. My instinct was to have rich, realistic background sound effects.”

During production the actresses were wearing hard-sole shoes on wood floors. “At times there were these gems of production sound that were so great-sounding. I said, ‘I want to use more of that!’ I wanted that realism, that sound,” Gershin explains. “I didn’t want it super-clean and sterile.

I love when Foley sounds like production, not sterile and lifeless, not exactly the same, but has personality. And if it blends with production, you won’t even know it’s Foley.” He brought on Andy Malcom’s Footsteps team to shoot the show’s Foley tracks.

“To me, Foley glues the dialog to the character more,” he says, adding that it grounds the character in reality. “However, there’s a part where Gloria gets into her own head; the character loves to dance, and in that scene, I wanted to get away from realism as she escapes into the music. I wanted her to float. So we transitioned from reality, hearing distant New York, the television, Foley and movement, to surreal, and mixed out all reality leading to a flashback. It’s all about contrast. If our tracks were Spartan before, after the transition and

flashback it wouldn’t have been as effective.

There wouldn’t have been enough contrast.”

As for the dialog, he says, “I wanted to bring something a little different to the show. It’s a show about women, so I needed the sound of lots of women, in different environments and sizes. This is the 1970s, so it’s not just the general sound of women, but women with different vernaculars, ages, accents, locations, political views; conservative women, liberal women, black women. I wanted to try and replicate the sonic languages of the show to make sure that the walla group and crowds were speaking as they would in the 1970s. It’s a period piece, even though it wasn’t that long ago. It was a different day, a different slang.”

WOMEN’S VOICES, ALONE AND TOGETHER There are no real sound libraries of women’s voices, Gershin discovered, so he had to re-create and record all the crowds the show needed. “I was trying to see if we could get it done on the set, but they just didn’t have the time,” he reports.

He booked time at one of the former Todd-AO stages in Hollywood specifically because of its sonic properties.

“I hired the Loop Squad,” he says, which is headed by Mark Sussman and Patty Connolly.

“We were always auditioning and figuring out who would be the best actresses in any given episode. Sometimes I’d want an older voice, sometimes I wanted a much younger voice, or a number of black actresses to portray the

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REMOTE WALLA AND ADR Gershin was able to finish editing and listen remotely to the show in his well-appointed, 7.1-capable facility at his house. “I was able to prep all the material here before it went to the stage,” he says. “But we still needed to shoot the walla group for episode nine. We needed to find actors that had recording rigs at home.

Some of the actors barely had anything. They weren’t sure how to record, or what sample rate to record at—or what a sample rate is.”

The background voice actors—as well as some of the principals, who had to re-record or change some production track dialog—had a variety of gear at their homes, he reports. “They had a large diversity of technologies and mics. Some had shotgun mics, some had large-diaphragm mics and others had mics, like the Apogee, connected to phones or iPads. I had to customize their setups a little bit,” he says. A lot of it was educating the actors on how to record, what recording levels

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Photo Courtesy of Fox Entertainment

women that surrounded Shirley Chisholm and the variety of characters that represent the diverse viewpoints at that time.”

The challenge was to place those voices into a variety of acoustic spaces: convention halls, big parties, small parties, stadium singalongs and other scenes. Rather than use a shotgun mic to record, as would be typical, he says, “I had four or five different mics that I brought in, depending on the session, which I strategically placed around the room—Sennheiser 8040s and 800s, DPA 5100s and Sanken CSS-5s and WMS-5s. I wanted to use the room acoustics to help define the space I was trying to re-create, so I had the actors perform all over the room: in different corners, back to back, two feet away facing the wall, running in circles. I was able to use the room to help take eight, 10, 15 women and make them sound like a hundred.”

For the show, Gershin and his team worked out of Sound Lab’s space in Burbank. “[Scoring composer] Mike Post’s old mix room is my edit room,” he says. The room shares a wall with Stage 6—Post’s former recording room—where Chris Minkler mixed the dialog and music for Mrs. America while Andy King handled effects.

As the mixes came together, he says, “We would playback scenes and episodes in my room, which is set up like a giant living room where I have a huge array of different types of speakers, to make sure everything was translating correctly. The mixers did a fantastic job.”

Then along came Covid-19.

to use, a lot of trial and error, working through distortion and proximity effect issues.”

With no two home situations being alike, Gershin had all the actors set up in their closets, where possible, to minimize acoustical differences. “Everybody had unique setups. Some actors built tents. One actress had a giant box she put her head into creating a pseudo iso booth.”

Gershin conducted the sessions—literally, he says, as you might a group of background singers— via Zoom, distributing picture to everyone as a separate feed. “I was sharing my screen and they could shoot against that. They would send me their material and I would listen to it. Ten plus actors recording individually, so every take was 10 tracks, at least. And I was doing a lot of different takes.

That ended up being hundreds of tracks.”

Since most scenes take place in large rooms, Gershin was nervous that the different ambiences of the various home recordings would be tricky to match up. But with some judicious processing, everything worked out fine. “I had to find each person’s acoustical problems and address them,” he explains. “There was a lot of EQing, processing, pitch manipulation, et cetera. But I had to be careful with compression, because that would bring up the room ambience, which in this case I didn’t want. Then I’d add a couple of different reverbs and send it off to the mixers.”

Reverb was added according to the effect that he wanted, he says, adding, “I would sometimes use the sound effects of distant crowds to simulate the reverb and size in episode nine.

Overall, since I was recording the loop group with specific acoustic signatures, I didn’t want

a lot of reverb to be added in the mix. I wanted to hear all the special details. I wanted words to slightly poke through different parts of the scene, creating a slight spatial shimmer and movement. I like contrast between defocused sounds in back and focused sounds in front. I would place a mono on the left and a different mono on the right, so you hear all these little percolations. When you add reverb, it would smear and defocus the sound; however, sometimes I wanted it to smear. But most of the time I wanted details to poke out like you were overhearing a conversation.”

Gershin remotely recorded a character who plays the mother of Alice, a fictional character played by Sarah Paulson, who was talking to Alice on the other end of the phone. The character’s timing had to be exact, as the picture had already been cut against Paulson’s performance.

“She had a great rig on her phone,” he says.

“While I directed her on Zoom, she would record it and then send it to me right away. I would put it in my edit and see if it worked.” If a line didn’t fit, Gershin would apply time compression and other techniques and send it back as a guide track so she could hear the rhythm in which it had to be read. “This was all in real time.

Without Zoom and the internet, I don’t know what we would have done.”

FIGURING OUT WORKFLOW ON THE FLY Indeed, the post sound team constantly found ways to meet the challenges of working remotely during lockdown. “Every day there was a weird problem that had to be solved,” Gershin says.

“We kept finding creative, last-minute, off-the-

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The walla group surrounding Gershin at Todd-AO, in the early weeks of post-production.

cuff ways to get the show done. Many times, the discussion was, ‘Can we keep things going?’

Usually, the answer was, ‘I don’t know, but let’s keep going until we can’t.’”

During the final mixes, “I was working with the mixers from my house. The two mixers were the only people on the mixing stage,” Gershin says, noting that there were a few times where a

line of dialog from the walla group would need to be fixed because it wasn’t appropriate for that specific time period of that scene. “I would quickly call up that actor, we would record them and they would send me the updated line. I would quickly edit it at my house, deliver it to the stage, and before we finished notes with the clients the line was remixed into the scene.

Turnaround was usually 15 to 30 minutes.”

To manage playback and notes from the film makers during the review part of the final mixes, “We ended up looking at different technologies,” he says. One solution was Streambox, an IPbased video streaming platform. “We were able to securely broadcast to myself, the music editor, the show runner, producer, directors and picture editors. In addition, after our online live sessions, we would also send out Quicktime videos and they could watch and QC at their own convenience both in stereo and 5.1.”

To consolidate the mix, ADR, music and editorial notes, they used a [cloud collaboration] program called Airtable to communicate with each other. “We all would review and prioritize the notes, then the mixers, the music editor and I would address the notes, then have everybody come back for final playback and additional fixes. We would refer to this as our ‘Brady Bunch’ moment.”

For Gershin, one of the high points of the show was the compliment he got from showrunner Dahvi Waller. “She said, ‘I just watched episode nine and I can’t tell the difference between that and the other episodes.’ At the end of the day, we made it all work out.” n

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Periscope Post L.A. New Sound and Color Facility Opens in the Heart of Hollywood

By Robyn Flans

W

hen Michael Nehs, co-owner of Periscope Post and Audio in Chicago, was contemplating opening a facility in the Los Angeles area, his industry friends told him to make sure he brought his no-bullshit Chicago attitude with him and not to get sucked into the “game playing, phony, name-dropping, asskissing mentality of the Hollywood contingency.”

No chance of that. Nehs won’t undercut someone else for a job or undersell himself. He says that Chicago mindset of his accounts for integrity and directness, which Periscope general manager Ben Benedetti confirms: “Mike is honest, straight-forward and completely sincere.

Underneath his tough exterior is a heart of gold. There is no bullshit with Mike, no hidden agenda. Just a commitment to providing the very best services available. He is one of the hardest working men I have had the pleasure to work with. He will absolutely go the distance to make sure the clients get what they need. You always know where Mike stands.”

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Nehs met Benedetti in 2015 while Benedetti was senior vice president at Westwind Media in Los Angeles. “We immediately hit it off,” Benedetti recalls. ”He is extremely ambitious, which I like a lot. He is not afraid to make extremely bold moves, which I like even more.”

Nehs was bold enough indeed to not only have gone ahead and opened a facility in the heart of Hollwood, where post houses abound aplenty, but has the no B.S. audacity to assert that his facility is the best because it offers all services in one place. Even though Nehs detests the phrase “one stop shop,” that is what Periscope boasts.

“We have 40 production office rooms in that building, we can house writer rooms, and we can house post-production teams,” Nehs says. “That team can come in during production, they can bring dailies in and we can do dailies at night, and it is ready when that editor walks in to the building, that edit can go directly over to color, right down to the stage, and we can deliver it to every network they’re working with and on every platform. Those producers never have to leave the building. They have one location.

“And the great thing for them, also, if they’re

mad or pissed off about something, they can just go down the hall and bitch about it. It doesn’t matter if it’s dailies, color, audio, ADR, mix—they get to bitch to the same guy. They don’t have to drive across town. They literally walk down the stairs and say, ‘Hey, guys, we got a problem.’”

CHICAGO ROOTS Nehs has always managed his problems well. In 2009, the former independent film producer who specialized in financing, turned producer, then to post supervision, who fell in love with postproduction, had just started construction on a post house in Chicago at the end of 2008. They were 85 percent complete when the recession hit, and the bottom fell out of the local market. He lost everything. Except his wife. “Which was the most important thing,” Nehs reflects.

He found a new business partner in Jonathan Bross, and together they rebuilt and Periscope Post & Audio was born. They discovered Cinespace Film Studios, a subsidized entertainment production complex in the city of Chicago, and they won the bid with their adventurous post ideas on August 26, 2013.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF “EMPIRE” Periscope landed its first major gig when hired to do all the music recording for the hit Fox show “Empire,” which is shot in Chicago, mostly at CineSpace, and then they started doing all their ADR. A relationship with their assistant directors and producers generated ADR jobs on two more shows.

Periscope only had one 12x14-foot live room at the time, with three shows going, recording both music and ADR, so they began construction on three more audio rooms, three video editorial rooms, two color rooms, a dailies bullpen, a new transfer room and rooms that float as needed inside the 7,500 square foot space. The new audio rooms were built inside of from the 2,500-squarefoot auditorium which sat in the center of the building. It took a year and a half because they had to keep working through the process and couldn’t afford to have construction going on during key times of post-production.

During those 18 months, Nehs started taking trips to L.A. to meet with prospective clients, charming them with that Chicago attitude. Before he knew it, he began to get calls from producers working in Chicago needing dailies done.

Then Nehs began to get calls from executives and producers in Los Angeles suggesting that he open a place in L.A. His retort was, “Why would I want to do that?” Their reply was, “We’d love to

Periscope Post & Audio Co-Owner Mike Nehs.

have you here.”

Nehs decided to meet the challenge. Despite the fact that there is a lot of competition in L.A., he knew he was coming in with a reputation. So he began to look at buildings around town in 2016. It took close to three years.

Nehs recalls that over those three years, in seeing more than 100 buildings, everyone’s opinion of the prime location kept changing.

Should he be in Santa Monica? Marina del Rey? Burbank? The Valley? Culver City? Hollywood? It became a moving target, a real conundrum.

FINDING THE RIGHT SPACE Then, as fate would have it, Nehs received a call from a Hollywood post house that was looking to sell around November 2019; he booked a flight for the next day. A couple of his network studio friends took a walk through the facility with him, and they said if you build it, we will come. So Nehs called his business partner, and they struct the deal and began to build right away.

The existing mix stage had been most recently used as a screening room and color room; it had to be converted into a Dolby Atmos re-recording stage. And while they were originally informed that it was “ready to go, essentially turnkey,” there was not one mixing board in the entire building.

Nehs had an Avid S6 dual-operator console surface sitting in a box, waiting in storage. They began construction immediately, knowing they had a show coming in that would start in six weeks.

Dolby arrived and told them they had to shrink the room by three feet. They moved the front speaker wall, put the fabric up on the walls while the crew was in the middle of the room building the S6, which needed a day of updates. Dolby tuned the room that night, and the next morning the guys who were setting up the S6 were leaving as the mixers were coming in to start mixing

Photo: Christopher Alvarez

“We’re literally on the lot at Cinespace; people can walk their hard drives over to us, the actors come over between set ups for ADR, the location is perfect.” Nehs says.

The task at hand was convincing producers and creatives not to follow their usual pattern of shooting and then taking the production to complete in L.A. or New York. For locals, Chicago’s Periscope Post & Audio made sense because they could sleep in their own beds, but Nehs wanted to appeal to out-of-towners. So he and his team started proving themselves project by project. In one instance they were presented with a film that had been released seven years prior that producers wanted to re-release, but much had been lost.

“They asked, ‘Can you guys do this? We need it in 5.1. All we have is a mono track for dialog and a mono track for sound effects.’ And we said, ‘Sure,’” Nehs recalls. “And then we all looked at one another and said, ‘How do we do this?’ The answer is always yes. Unless we absolutely know it’s no. That really raised our level, if you will, for people outside of Illinois to recognize that we would go the extra mile to make it happen.”

A sense of style greets visitors as they enter Periscope Post L.A.

Netflix’s short-lived musical “Soundtrack.”

Nehs didn’t do that once, he did it twice. Stage C—a smaller Dolby Atmos stage geared toward home theater—came about in exactly the same way as Stage A. The board went in, they turned on the amps, Dolby came in, tuned the room, they tweaked the board and the mixers for the CBS comedy “The Unicorn” came in the following morning to work in the room.

“That’s kinda the Mike Nehs way,” Nehs admits with a laugh. “I’m the type of guy who, if you looked at me and said, ‘Mike, if you had another mix stage, I would dump this show on it,’ I would look you square in the eyes and say, ‘I’ll see you in six weeks, let’s get it done.’

“We knew we had to get the stages done fast, the first priority was stage A,” Nehs continues.

“We enlisted Kaiser Construction for the build.

We sat down after the walk-through and we discussed what we needed and then we shared the good news of our deadline—six weeks. After a few good laughs, Kevin Kaiser said, ‘Let’s do it.’ It was the fastest build I have ever seen and the room sounds amazing and is built right. This wasn’t a throw up a few walls and call it a stage, it was a gut job, down to the studs and a full rebuild.

“There was no surprise when we decided to start stage C, and I looked at [Kevin Kaiser] and said, ‘Ready to do it again?’ My team has booked the room starting in six weeks.’ We all laughed and got to work. Our third stage, stage B, was like a vacation with no deadline. Our clients are our top

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Photo: Christopher Alvarez

Periscope Post & Audio - Stage A. Periscope’s mix stages (and color rooms) provide clients with a spacious critical listening/viewing environment allowing for enough room for proper social distancing between mixers, colorists and clients alike.

Photo: Christopher Alvarez

THE PERISCOPE TEAM “We put together a really strong team in Hollywood between our mixers, with Ron Eng, Rick Ash and Fred Howard, and our colorist, Kevin Kirwan.

Kevin did eight seasons of ‘American Horror Story,’ he did ‘Spongebob Squarepants’ since the pilot,” Nehs explains. “We’ve been able to bring together these veterans that people know and bring them into a new facility, and it is new. We basically gutted this thing and built it to 20192020 specs.”

Shortly after they opened, in addition to “Soundtrack” and “The Unicorn,” they had their first big success providing complete services for Lena Waithe’s new show “Twenties” for BET/ Showtime. “We provided everything for that show, from the writer’s rooms, production offices, cutting rooms, dailies, final color, and mixing,” recalls Nehs. “The producers loved it, and we are excited for their return for the second season of the show this fall.”

Periscope then finished up Hulu’s “Love Victor,” a few features and pickups, and suddenly Nehs realized that he needed yet another room. So Studio B—another Dolby Atmos stage—emerged from a former green screen stage that Nehs was happy to replace. Studio B is now the largest of the three re-recording stages

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The spacious ADR room, which can host up to six voice actors, at Periscope Post L.A.

While constructing Studio B, the team had to widen the room, and in the process, found out the ceiling to the second floor was sagging and if they removed a certain post, the ceiling might collapse.

“We had to put in engineered beams,” Nehs says. “It became a whole ordeal, to the point where when we put the beam in, we had to force the doors off to the three rooms above it and shave the bottoms off so they would fit again. That’s how much sag there was on the floor above.”

AND THEN CAME COVID­19 Periscope was busy. Shows were being picked up for second seasons and then Nehs experienced his second major hurdle. Everything shut down.

But like the first time around, it didn’t stop him.

There were still projects they could work on such as “Feeding America,” all filmed by comedians with cell phones and different cameras to raise food for Americans, and a Penn and Teller special they did from their home.

And in the meantime, Nehs did extensive research on making Periscope’s environment

Photo: Christopher Alvarez

priority and if they need a room in six weeks, they will have a room in six weeks. Sure, it’s stressful, not just on me or my GM Ben Benedetti, but on everyone. The whole team feels it, but I believe stress drives success. Maybe it’s a midwest Chicago thing, maybe it’s just a Nehs thing, but one thing is for sure, everyone has risen to the occasion to bring Periscope Post & Audio Hollywood to life. That is what a great team does, and I’m proud and grateful to have such amazing people around me.”

Periscope Post & Audio L.A. has edit and small-stage mix facilities to accommodate 20-plus members of visiting sound crews.

safe for his clients. He installed hand sanitizing stations in both the Hollywood and Chicago facilities, ordered logoed PPE, UVC lighting for hard drives and S6’s and all things they wouldn’t want to spray down. Focusing on safety for cast and crew, they’ve been managing to work their way through this challenging time.

Benedetti knows these are challenging times, but reiterates Nehs’ claim that they are prepared because they are, quite simply, the best in town: “We have a tremendous amount of horsepower and talent that we can harness in every area,” Benedetti sums up. “We are the only post facility in Hollywood that can provide complete top-tier services in both picture and audio combined under one roof. There isn’t a single part of the process we can’t tackle. And our infrastructure is so robust we can also easily support any remote application that might be necessary in today’s world, where the health and welfare of the creative team is more important than ever.”

Adds Nehs: “We’re ready for the tsunami of work that everyone is expecting to be coming up in the next couple of months!” ■

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Netflix’s “Stranger Things” Goes for Emmy Three-Peat

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hen the Primetime Emmy Awards are handed out in midSeptember, the sound team for “Stranger Things” will be looking at the possibility of a rare three-peat. Seasons 1 and 2 both won Emmys for Outstanding Sound Editing and were both final nominees for Outstanding Sound Mixing. Chapter Eight: The Battle of Starcourt, the finale of Season 3, is again nominated in both categories.

While much of the crew remains intact from Season 1, including the anchor of the sound crew, supervising sound editor Craig Henighan, Season 3 saw the arrival of a new re-recording team, with Will Files on FX, and Mark Paterson on music and dialog.

“I had already been a fan of the show, and in working with Craig over the past few years I had a pretty good idea of what it was all about,” Files says. “Neither Mark or I had ever worked in episodic before, but it seemed that this season the Duffer Brothers were interested in working with a mix team that had worked mostly in feature films. This was also the first time that Mark and I had mixed together. I guess Craig sort of served as matchmaker.”

Henighan has served the show as sound editor, supervising sound editor, sound designer, re-recording mixer. For Season 3, anticipating that everything would need to be bigger, he concentrated on sound supervision and design.

“Season 3 is certainly bigger, and when I say bigger, in our world bigger is more about frequencies,” Henighan explains. “We didn’t back up a dump truck with 100 more monster effects. It was more about developing sounds and creating dynamics. By Episode 6, we realize the Mind Flayer is for real, so Will and I had to figure out how these new, huge monsters would jump out of the speakers. We did some interesting things with frequencies, and then on the dub stage I know Will would play with distortion to make them feel like they’re jumping out at you.

“But it’s not more tracks or being more complicated,” he continues. “It’s editing down to the core sounds and monster roars, not overcomplicating the frequency ranges. Hear what the music is doing, and get out of the way.

Or by adding dynamics in the track, by getting quiet right before the roar and setting up the pacing for the whole track. It’s apparent loudness. We spent a lot of time making sure the dynamics are there.”

Chapter Eight is the Battle of Starcourt, and it’s the season finale.

Of course it’s big. But it will likely be remembered as much for its music sequences. Much of the identity of the entire Stranger Things universe is tied to the nostalgic, ‘80s-style, synth-driven score by composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (who won an Emmy in 2017 for Original Main Title Theme; not to mention Nora Felder’s thricenominated music supervision). Then midway through Chapter Eight,

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Re-recording mixers Mark Paterson, left, and Will Files

“Stranger Things” sound supervisor, sound designer Craig Henighan

the strains of The Neverending Story enter in a complex, montage scene, unexpectedly.

“It came almost from left field in the middle of the episode,” Paterson says. “You have production recordings form different sets, with different tempos and pitches, and you put them together to make one song out of them. Then split-screen; it’s quite complicated, but it came together great in the end. We have to mention Dave Klotz here, the music editor, who flirts that boundary between editor and composer. By the time we got to the show we had a good plan and a solid mix. Then we add the futzes, which to me adds to the humor.”

Nobody can predict what makes a show a hit. If they could, we’d have nothing but hits. But the Duffer Brothers are universally praised by all on the team for fostering a sense of collaboration, from the moment they brought Henighan in to look at script and preliminary art for Season 1, Episode 1. It hasn’t changed since.

“For Season 3 we spotted the show every week at Netflix together,” Henighan says. “Almost all of the department, going through the episode, watching scene by scene. And adding comments. When you talk about collaboration, that family atmosphere the Duffer Brothers let us be a part of is a huge, huge thing.”

“The first day Will and I met the brothers, there were 20 people in the room, and they would hit Play,” Paterson recalls. “That’s quite impressive.

They care about every aspect of the show, not just sound and picture. It’s a very positive approach.” ■

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Blue: 100% Cyan, 25% M

Dallas Audio Post Adds Dolby Atmos Stage Dallas Audio Post has rebuilt its main mix room to enable production of soundtracks in the latest immersive formats. Now equipped with a total of 29 Meyer Sound cinema series loudspeakers, the world-class facility is among a very few that have been certified by Dolby for working with both the theatrical release and home entertainment versions of Atmos.

“Our main mix room is smaller than major Hollywood dub stages, but larger than most facilities dedicated to mixing for the home,” comments Roy Machado, owner and creative director at Dallas Audio Post. “Fortunately, we had a very talented team working with us, and we managed to thread the needle and make it work for both formats.

That gives us extraordinary flexibility in meeting the demands around here, where you have to be a jack of all trades. We produce an exceptionally wide variety of content for the broadcast, streaming and theatrical release markets—everything from sporting events, feature films and reality TV to documentaries and corporate videos.”

For this stripped-to-walls renovation, Machado relied on the same companies responsible for the room’s 2013 upgrade to its first Meyer Sound system. Architect for both projects was Francis Manzella Design, Ltd. with system specification and final tuning on this round by Miles Rogers of Meyer Sound and Bryan Pennington of Dolby.

The new loudspeaker layout retained the three Acheron 80 loudspeakers for LCR channels.

Four more HMS-10 surround loudspeakers

were added to the existing complement of eight, along with eight all-new HMS-5 surround loudspeakers for the height channels plus two Amie-Sub compact cinema subwoofers for bass management. Power for LFE was bolstered by doubling the number of X-800C cinema subwoofers, from two to four.

“Before Atmos, having full-range surrounds wasn’t that critical,” Machado says. “But now,

with your bass-managed signal set to height and surround, you need to translate the same quality and textures from the front screen channels. And Meyer Sound has achieved that. You can take a sound from the left screen channel and pan it anywhere in the room and it sounds exactly the same, which is almost shocking.”

Machado is particularly enamored by the petite HMS-5 surround loudspeakers added for the height channels. “I was not only amazed by the SPL output, but with the way Meyer could tune them to match the character of the HMS10 surrounds. They sound spot on, just like their larger cousins.”

The room’s Avid S6 console is now augmented with a new MTRX HD audio interface and SPQ speaker processing card. In addition to Dolby Theatrical and Home Theater Atmos, the facility offers 7.1 and 5.1 surround as well as stereo mixing. ■

Re-Recording Mixer Jonathan Wales For more than three decades, Warner Bros. ReRecording Mixer Jonathan Wales has created audio magic for numerous feature films, documentaries and television shows. As content creation and technical specifications change, Wales finds himself having to adapt to newer audio compliance standards across a variety of platforms. Most recently, he worked on the Warner Bros. movie Dr. Sleep and the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why.” The one mixing plug-in that Wales finds himself using more than anything else is NUGEN’s Halo Upmix. “That software is in all my templates,” he explains. “Halo Upmix is incredibly valuable because it is highly compatible when you take the resulting mix and fold it down to different formats.

them to exist. They prefer to do If I use Halo Upmix for Atmos, it is whatever they feel is creative. still valid when we then take the 7.1 They need us to figure that part output. You can’t use a plug-in that out without getting in the way of does something cool in one format, what they’re trying to achieve.” but then actually messes up your Although his projects range work in a different format, to the in size and scope, Wales typically point that it doesn’t sound right utilizes a Pro Tools workflow. anymore.”

He mixes on an Avid S6 console When it comes to Netflix and feeds it from Mac Pro projects, Wales relies heavily on Re-recording mixer Jonathan Wales workstations. “I can map the NUGEN’s VisLM loudness meter to ensure compliance. “VisLM tracks the timeline plug-in on the S6, and put parameters on faders, as we’re working, which allows you to get a really making it easier to dial things around in a dynamic good idea of how making changes will affect way. The plug-ins obey all the rules and in terms where you are,” he explains. “Most directors of functionality are very stable; we have never had don’t care about loudness specs and don’t want any significant problems.” ■

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Tech Steinberg SpectraLayers  and the Power of AI

Steinberg SpectraLayers 7, the latest update to this visually based audio editing application, brings with it some potent new editing capabilities powered by Artificial IntelligenceI algorithms. The Unmix feature is perhaps the highlight addition. It analyzes a mix and splits it into component layers, each consisting of an instrument or vocal part. Not only can you Unmix tracks into stems, but you can also separate your stems into tonal, noise and transient components. Steinberg also used AI to beef up SpectraLayer’s pattern-recognition abilities. Now you can identify a specific sound and then have the software find and select each instance of it throughout an audio file. The Voice Denoiser allows you to clean up vocal recordings by attenuating all non-voice components detected by its AI-infused code.

And new AI-based repair processes include Clip Repair, Click Repair and Hum Reduction. Some of the other changes include improvements to the Playback tool and Transform tool, a new Transform selection mode and upgraded ARA 2 layer management. SpectraLayers Pro 7 ($299.99) is the fully-featured flagship. SpectraLayers Elements 7 ($79.99) has a reduced toolset but is still powerful.

new products

as well as allows users to regulate low-frequency content and fine-tune surround mixes, without the possibility of phase warping.

Clear-Com FreeSpeak Edge Now Shipping Following extensive field tests and final engineering testing, Clear-Com is now shipping FreeSpeak Edge, its most advanced wireless intercom system, featuring more control and configuration options thanks to advanced frequency coordination capabilities and intuitive design features in the system’s transceivers and beltpacks.

Applications and environments include sports stadiums, live events, military installations and broadcast facilities. FreeSpeak Edge uses audio-over-IP AES67 connectivity, an advanced 5 GHz chipset with a proprietary radio stack development optimized for intercom, and exclusive RF technology based on OFDM. The band’s higher frequencies mean there is more bandwidth for data, which allows for finer control, additional audio channels, lower latency and better audio quality.

FreeSpeak Edge can be combined seamlessly with FreeSpeak II 1.9 GHz and 2.4 GHz systems, supporting three wireless bands across a single unified communications system.

Nugen Audio Surround Suite

Krotos Everything Bundle

The Nugen Audio Surround Suite offers a complete set of tools for upmixing, downmixing and multi-channel sound reshaping for sound for picture, including: Halo Downmix (allows users to easily deliver projects in both stereo and surround formats without compromise); Halo Upmix (with unique center-channel management and switchable dialog extraction, and SEQ-S (users can spline match and morph independent EQ transitions. This includes dynamic and static pass filter effects; seamless transitions between differing environments; and creative morphs and tempo-locked effects), as well as ISL, a true peak limiter (provides TPlim control to automatically adjust transfer curve parameters for minimally invasive brick wall protection). The kit offers full access to surround balances, clear visual feedback and individual surround channel access,

Those who work in post-productioin know about Krotos, and the Krotos Everything Bundle combines the company’s full plug-in catalog with the complete Krotos sound library collection. The Everything Bundle includes: Dehumaniser 2 (a powerful vocal processor for easily producing creature, monster, robot and other extreme vocal sound effects), Reformer Pro (for designing textures by automating and performing sound effects in realtime, using the world’s first Dynamic Input), Weaponiser Fully Loaded (for layering, variations and weapon sound design), Igniter Full Tank (real-world or sci-fi vehicle sounds) and Concept (intuitive drag and drop modulation and a swift patch-building workflow for cinematic effects, composition, and music with the first Krotos soft-synth). IT also includes the complete Krotos sound library collection, including Battle Bundle, Trailers, Whooshes, User Interface, and Magic libraries for Weaponiser and our inspiring Elements Bundle, Clothes & Materials Foley Bundle, Krotos Bundle 1 and others for Reformer Pro. Over 184.8GB (36,085 sounds) are included.

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DPA  CORE Micro-Shotgun as Plant Mic The new 4097 CORE Micro Shotgun Microphone from DPA Microphones, released in late May initially as part of a podcasting kit, features the same sonic qualities as the company’s supercardioid 4097 CORE Choir Microphone, though optimized to pick up speech from a distance.

Consequently, it has quickly found a home in film and TV production. Configured with both a MicroDot connector and an adapter for wired or wireless applications, the shotgun was built to withstand harsh conditions, such as water, wind, dust, heat and cold, among other familiar filming challenges. The supercardioid 4097 CORE Micro Shotgun offers a highly-directional pickup pattern as well as low self-noise, with DPA’s acclaimed flat off-axis frequency response. With speech intelligibility at the top of DPA’s development requirements, the 4097 CORE Micro Shotgun features 16 mV sensitivity and is capable of handling high SPLs.

Grace Design Updates m Monitor Controller With firmware Revision 1.0.4, Grace Design has enhanced the functionality of its m908 Monitor Controller in several important ways. First, the room correction EQ functionality has been upgraded to 12 parametric bands per speaker channel, or variable numbers of bands per channel totaling up to 85. Plus, architecture for all room correction and bass management filters have been revised to fixed-point, 64-bit type, which provides for improved low-frequency noise performance. “Because we developed the m908 system architecture based on an ARM processor running embedded Linux, functionality improvements and system upgrades can continue to be released and easily installed into units in the field,” the company said.

AvidPlay Teams Up With Dolby Atmos Music Longtime technology partners Avid and Dolby have teamed up on an integrated DIY music distribution application that provides independent artists, producers and record labels the ability to easily self-distribute their music in Dolby Atmos to streaming services Amazon Music and TIDAL. To get started, artists and labels subscribe to an AvidPlay distribution plan through the free AvidLink app for mobile or desktop, and then upload their completed Dolby Atmos Music tracks and artwork.

Subscribers then create songs and albums using any compatible Dolby Atmos enabled digital audio workstation, and then

upload their music to the AvidPlay dashboard to manage their tracks and albums and see how much money they’re earning from each song. AvidPlay is a DIY music distribution service designed to assist artists and labels (who keep 100 percent of their rights and earnings) by enabling simplified distribution to more than 150 major outlets like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and TIDAL, including automatic distribution to streaming outlets added in the future.

Shure Introduces SLX-D Digital Wireless System The SLX-D Digital Wireless System is the digital replacement of Shure’s popular SLX system, complete with new mechanical designs, exceptional audio quality, more reliable RF performance, streamlined setup, and more. End users get greater channel count than SLX, smart rechargeable options, and simplified ease-of-use. Outstanding signal quality and digital modulation lets users navigate crowded environments with high spectral efficiency and dependable RF. The system enables operation of up to 32 channels per frequency band. SLX-D is equipped with Guided Frequency Setup and a Group Scan feature that lets users set up multiple channels more efficiently by assigning frequencies to all receivers automatically via Ethernet connections. Specs include: extended 20 Hz to 20 kHz range (mic dependent), 120 dB dynamic range, 44 MHz tuning bandwidth (region dependent), up to 10 compatible systems per 6MHz TV band; 12 systems per 8 MHz band, easy pairing of transmitters and receivers over IR scan and sync, and up to 8 hours from 2 AA batteries or optional Shure SB903 rechargeable battery.

Symphonic Acoustics Debuts XV Ultra High-End Studio Monitors Symphonic Acoustics has unveiled the new 2X8V ultra high-end monitors, the result of a longtime design and manufacturing collaboration between the company and several industry legends, including George Augspurger, John Storyk and others. Ideally suited for mixing and monitoring across a range of genres, each pair of monitors ships with a world-class power and DSP package that can be customized and tuned to accommodate just about any listening environment. While the 2X8V features proprietary designs in collaboration with George Augspurger, Symphonic Acoustics has curated a power and DSP package from select manufacturers to create a best-in-class monitoring system without compromise. Published specs were not available at press time. The 2X8V is made in the U.S.A. and begins shipping September 1. n

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Tech // reviews Radial Engineering HDI The Ultimate Direct Box, From a Company That Knows How to Build Them

By Mike Levine

R

adial has a reputation for making products that are built ruggedly and well-designed. Among their best known and revered devices are their numerous and varied direct boxes. They have active, passive, digital and tube models, and offer a variety of form factors and price points.

But with the HDI, which Radial describes as a “high-definition studio direct box,” the company has put out a unit that exceeds all their others in terms of features, quality and price. The company is hoping the HDI will be attractive not only for studios, but also as a key part of high-end onstage bass or acoustic instrument rigs.

When they were planning the design of the HDI, Radial didn’t mess around. They handed the project to Senior Design Engineer W.C. “Hutch” Hutchinson, who had formerly worked for Neve and Manley. The design he came up with not only handles the conventional duties of a direct box with aplomb but also functions as an instrument preamp. In addition, it gives you creative control over the signal, allowing you to dial in distortion, presence and optical compression.

TAKE A LOOK The HDI is a standalone, 2RU half-rack sized unit in a metal chassis.

It comes with mounting ears for installing it singly in a rack or sideby-side with a second HDI. The unit is loaded from an I/O standpoint. On the front, it sports ¼-inch TS In and Thru jacks. An adjacent Hi-Z switch offers a choice of high or higher impedance (200 KOhms or 2 MegOhms), each of which can offer subtle tonal differences depending on the type of pickup of the connected instrument.

On the rear are two XLR outputs: One is standard mic-level and the other goes through a preamp and is line-level. Having the line output gives you the option of avoiding the mic pre of a mixer or interface by going through its line in. The Line Output also has a Pad switch that reduces its level by 15 dB to avoid overloading

audio interfaces with lower input tolerances. Both the Mic and Line outputs feature their own Jensen transformers.

The Processed Output is a ¼-inch jack that sits next to the Mic Output. It allows you to send a processed signal to an amp or other high-impedance device.

Two other inputs reside on the back panel, including a second ¼-inch jack that mirrors the one on the front, which takes priority if both are connected. The final input is a 1/8-inch mini jack that’s compatible with modular synths.

The HDI is the only Radial DI with a built-in power supply. You connect it to power with an IEC cable, not an external adapter.

DIAL IT IN The front of the unit offers three knobs and a series of switches that allow you to control the HDI’s various functions and circuits.

A VU-style meter displays the Output level.

Although the unit is quite complex under the hood—it features four parallel circuits—the user interface is relatively simple. You control most of its functionality with the three knobs, Level, Color and Presence, all of which interact with each other to some degree. You don’t need to be a tech nerd to set the HDI; a little experimentation can get you a wide range of sounds.

The Color knob is the key control for altering the sound of the unit. When it’s turned down, the HDI is a clean and extremely quiet, active DI. As you turn it up, it starts to bring in the rich harmonic distortion generated mostly from a custom Jensen transformer and tube-emulation circuitry.

The amount of distortion is not only controlled by the position of the Color knob, but by how high you’ve set the Input level.

The latter functions essentially as a drive control when you have the Color turned on. With both Input and Color cranked, you get a substantial amount of saturation. On an electric bass or guitar,

"Although the unit is quite complex under the hood—it features four parallel circuits— the user interface is relatively simple. You control most of its functionality with the three knobs, Level, Color and Presence, all of which interact with each other to some degree. You don’t need to be a tech nerd to set the HDI."

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MORE WAYS TO TWEAK A three-way toggle switch governs the opto compressor. The bottom position is off; the middle position gives you an 8:1 ratio, and the top about 12:1. The level of the Input knob also drives the amount of compression. A red LED lights when you trigger the compressor.

If you have the Color control set above 12 o’clock, the compression shuts off automatically.

Radial figures you’ll get natural compression from the distortion that you get with the knob above half. Particularly for bass, the compression can be quite useful to knock down higher transients and even out the performance.

The three-position HPF switch lets you turn on a highpass filter, which only affects the signal that goes through the distortion circuit. It allows you to roll off unwanted low-end content that can be caused by the distortion circuitry. The three-way switch lets you choose between off, and cutoff frequencies of 80Hz or 120Hz, with a gentle roll-off.

You also get a ground lift, which is standard and necessary on a DI box, and a large Power switch.

For a full-bodied, clean sound, I set the HDI with the Color turned off, and a bit of Presence dialed in and the compressor on to tame my inconsistent dynamics. With different combinations of the three knobs, I was also able to get a variety of usable sounds, both clean and distorted.

I wish I could have tried the HDI on an upright bass with a pickup. I would imagine that if you recorded the HDI and the output of a mic and blended the two, you could get an excellent sound. The Presence control could be useful to bring out the right hand, in particular, which can sometimes get lost when miking.

Another use on upright would be if you were recording an ensemble live and trying to avoid bleed. If the pickup were of good quality, you could probably get by with the DI part alone, thanks to the stellar sonics of this unit.

I also recorded many DI electric guitar parts (using a Strat or a Tele), to which I later applied amp modeling plug-ins. The HDI sounded excellent, particularly on clean tracks where boosting the presence added some subtle shine.

The HDI’s impact on the sound wasn’t that noticeable for tracks where I added distortion or overdrive from an amp-modeler.

Although I liked the compressor a lot for bass, I found it to be a little heavy-handed for electric guitar. The attack and release settings (which you can’t adjust) are not ideal for guitar—particularly for single-note parts, which had their transients overly squashed.

BASS AND ELECTRIC GUITAR I tested the HDI in the studio on several different instruments. All sounded excellent through it, but electric bass was probably the most impressive. Whether going through the mic-level output into a preamp or line-level into a line input, my Fender P-Bass sounded richer and fuller than it did going straight into the instrument inputs on any of the audio interfaces I tested it on.

OTHER INSTRUMENTS I also used the HDI to record pedal steel, which is an instrument that’s often taken direct or direct in combination with a miked amp. Here, once again, the unit shined.

Most pedal steel parts require a clean and clear sound, and the HDI, with its high-quality sonics, was a perfect fit. Like with clean electric guitar, the Presence circuit was handy for some subtle brightening. What’s more, a little bit of

it sounds a lot like playing through a distorted amp.

The Presence control gives you more uppermid and high-end emphasis. It functions almost like a wet/dry control for the distortion, cleaning up the sound to some degree as it’s turned up.

saturation from the Color circuit sounded good to add subtle grit for certain parts.

Finally, I tested the unit on a Taylor acoustic and a Beard resonator guitar, both with piezo pickups installed. In the studio, I always opt to mike these instruments, but the HDI would be an excellent addition to my rig for live work.

Going through it, the pickups sounded the best I’ve ever heard them.

I would imagine that the HDI would also be excellent for the direct recording of synths and other electronic keyboards.

BE DIRECT For a commercial recording studio or a high-end personal studio, the HDI would be a worthwhile investment. Its ability to capture rich-sounding electric-bass parts would improve the sonics of every track it is used on. Its versatility for other electric instruments will have you reaching for it regularly.

With its high-quality and lofty price point, one could draw an analogy between the HDI and a sports car. It’s not a necessity, but if you’re looking for ultimate performance and features you can’t find elsewhere, it’s hard to beat. n

PRODUCT SUMMARY COMPANY: Radial Engineering PRODUCT: HDI WEBSITE: https://www.radialeng.com PRICE: $799.99 PROS: Active direct box with premium-quality components; distortion circuit built in; builtin opto compressor; Presence knob allows for tonal variation; easy to set; extremely impressive sound, particularly for electric bass; built-in preamp allows for processed line-level output; wide variety of I/O; Jensen transformers CONS: Pricey; no control over attack and release on compressor

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Tech // reviews Eventide H9000 Avid PT | HDX Expansion Card Quad-Core ARM DSP Runs 16 Effects Simultaneously

By Barry Rudolph

I

ntroduced in 2017, the H9000 is Eventide’s ultimate multichannel audio processor, with eight times the processing power of the company’s H8000. The H9000 features four quad-core ARM DSP modules on plug-in boards. ARM DSP modules (Advanced RISC or Reduced Instruction Set Computing) future-proof the system. When faster and more powerful technology becomes available, it will be easy to update the H9000.

The powerful quad-core ARM DSP will run 16 effects algorithms simultaneously that can be configured in any combination in either series or parallel effect chains, called FX Chains. Eventide calls their effects processors an “algorithm”—be it a 2016 reverb, pitch changer, 8-voice harmonizer, or even a compressor, limiter or overdrive effect like its popular CrushStation.

The H9000 has four separate FX Chains, and each runs up to four of any of these algorithms. There are 1,700 algorithms to drag-and-drop from a searchable browser window, and most, but not all, operate at up to a 96kHz sample rate. The H9000 supports sample rates: 44.1, 48, 88.2, and 96 kHz, and there is no reduction of DSP power or algorithm count at higher sample rates.

AVID PT|HDX EXPANSION CARD The new Avid PT | HDX Expansion Card ($999) is the third expansion card offered by Eventide for use in H9000 systems. It follows the Audinate Brooklyn II Dante ($999) and the 32-channel MADI Expansion card ($799).

Because Avid does not license its DigiLink technology, like all third-party interface manufacturers, Eventide has reverse-engineered it using standard chipsets. If you do not use any Avid Interfaces at all, there will be $300 third-party DigiLink I/O connection fee. These come with the purchase of an Avid HD interface and may be purchased for a non-Avid box. Only one DigiLink license is required per system, regardless of the number of HD devices.

The H9000 has three rear-panel slots for installing up to three of these expansion cards in any order or combination. Each card slot is capable of 32 channels of I/O for a total of up 96 channels of simultaneous signal processing.

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H9000R AND EMOTE The Eventide H9000 has a full set of front panel controls and nested menus available using a color display, while the H9000R (used for this review) has a blank front panel and sells for about $2,000 less; otherwise, they are exactly the same.

Both the H9000 and H9000R can make use of use the Emote remote control software. It runs on your computer and connects to the H9000 by way of a Cat-5 cable or over Wi-Fi using an included USB dongle plugged into one of the unit’s USB jacks. Emote affords easier and more precise control; it is required for using the H9000R. All configurations, programming, I/O, setup, IP networking, storage, recall and managing of all effects, chains and the routing of any number of network-connected H9000s can be done easily with Emote running in your DAW. Emote session data is saved directly into the H9000, or an external 32GB USB stick (included) and plugged into the H9000, or saved directly to your DAW computer.

The Emote plug-in version runs AAX, VST or AU Native on Macs and PCs. Emote will run standalone at the same time as the plugin. Using Emote standalone you may develop (or just tweak) effect chains, save them, and open them within your DAW session with the plug-in version of Emote.

A NEXUS OF I/O, AND MORE The H9000 comes equipped to be a 16-channel audio interface, and its three I/O card slots greatly enhance the standard complement of the rear panel analog and digital I/O connections.

There are two USB 2.0 connectors that “mirror” the front panel jacks and a single RJ-45 jack for an Ethernet connection to your own local area network and/or the Internet for downloading software and firmware revisions and updates.

The H9000 also comes with eight channels of analog Direct I/O—actually a programmable 8 X 8 patch bay. Its operating level is switchable between +4dBu and -10dBv and is available on two DB25 connectors. You can store external analog routings such as

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microphone preamp outputs to compressor or EQ chains etc. The Direct I/O does not connect to the H9000’s FX Chains.

The Emote software configures the analog Direct I/O, the 8 channels of AES/EBU digital audio, the 16-channel USB DAW interface, and more. Eventide has plans for additional analog Direct I/O via the expansion card slots.

Stereo I/O is covered by XLR AES/EBU input/ output connectors, stereo S/PDIF RCA jacks, optical ADAT Light Pipe connectors, and a stereo pair of analog input/output XLRs. There are the standard trio of MIDI jacks for real-time adjustments of various H9000 algorithms using a MIDI controller, and both Word Clock input/ output BNCs. Finally, there are two TRS input jacks for connecting footpedals or auxiliary switches, or a combination of the two, plus two more jacks for connecting relay (hard closure) signals.

The H9000, when suitably equipped with I/O expansion cards and owing to its enormously powerful DSP, would work as a centralized nexus for digital effects processing in a multi-room recording/mixing/post-production facility.

Eventide is working on a hierarchy permissions layer software update to lock certain areas to prevent changes to FX Chains by unauthorized personnel.

LET’S GET TO IT I installed a beta version 1.2.4[7] of the Emote software into my mid-2010 dual-four-core MAC Pro. I have other networked devices in my

studio, so I also connected a Cat-5 cable from my Netgear ProSafe 5-port Gigabit switch to the H9000R’s Cat-5 socket. The H9000 is selfconfiguring and does take some time for this to happen when I first boot up for a day of Pro Tools sessions. The H9000R has a network status LED that will stop blinking when it is connected.

Part of the boot-up wait time is my old computer, but I had no problems running Mac OS 10.13.6, Pro Tools Ultimate HDX 2020.3 and 64GB of RAM and a SSD system drive. Inside the computer are two Avid HDX cards, a UAD-2 PCIe Octo Accelerator card, plus an AMD Radeon 580X video card to drive two displays. No Smoke Yet! I already have one HDX card connected to four Avid I/O boxes—two HD192s (primary port) and two AVID 1616s (secondary port) for the maximum of 64 channels of I/O per card.

The second HDX card is connected only to the primary port of the H9000R’s Avid PT|HDX Expansion Card, for 32 channels.

The Avid PT|HDX Expansion card has both Primary and Secondary Mini-DigiLink sockets plus a pair of Loop Sync in/Out BNC connectors. When installed, the H9000 behaves exactly like any Avid HD analog or digital interface. One quirk I noticed is that sometimes when I launch Pro Tools, it will push a dialog that says the number of interfaces has changed and will quit for a restart. But after that, the system is solid.

Just as with any Avid HD interface, if you

already have one HD I/O box connected to an HDX card, you can daisy-chain the H9000 by connecting it to your first I/O box’s secondary socket for an additional 16 channels. The total I/O channel count cannot be more than 32 per DigiLink socket back on the Avid HDX card.

I then also broke into the Loop Sync path with BNC cables connected to the in/out BNC sockets of the expansion card. The H9000R makes the fifth I/O box in the loop sync chain at my studio.

FINALLY TESTING THIS BEAST! I wanted all of the H9000’s processing power easy to use and completely available and understandable to other music mixers using my studio. I programmed using the standalone version Emote. Unlike the plug-in version, its GUI is resizable and even easier to see—especially for elaborate and complicated patches.

My Pro Tools I/O setup now shows routing for E and F interfaces within my Pro Tools template. I added 16 stereo effects chains each with stereo inputs and outputs (32 channels). I used Pro Tools’ new Basic Folder Tracks feature for organizing and hiding all 16 of these stereo Aux effect returns. I put a single instance of Emote on an unused stereo Aux fader just outside of the collapsed set of the Folder Tracks. That way I would not have to spill out all 16 stereo effects returns every time I wanted to tweak a parameter in Emote.

Emote divides the H9000 DSP into four separate effect chains called FX Chain 1, 2, 3 and 4. Each

The front panel controls and rear panel connections of the Eventide H9000, introduced in 2017.

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Digital and analog I/O on the card.

chain has access to any of the 32 input and output channels of Pro Tools I/O, and you may have up to a maximum of four algorithms wired in almost any way within each FX Chain. There is a lot of flexibility and this is just one way.

A UNIVERSE OF EFFECTS I wanted FX Chain 1 to be four separate conventional send/return stereo reverbs each with stereo sends and returns. There is a search function in Emote. You can search by Effect Type, Eventide Product Type (effects from H8000, Eclipse, H9 etc.), Instrument type (be it a bass guitar or piano), Source Character (either Monophonic or Rhythmic), and by the number of inputs/outputs (I mix in stereo, so all my H9000 effects are stereo, but a person working in Dolby Atmos or in surround could define their search for effects with up to eight channels).

I spent nearly a whole day “dragging and dropping” in every single algorithm into FX Chain 1 to audition and just hear what they do. This is really a universe of effects and treatments! I especially liked that the routing and patching remains in place when I substitute one algorithm after another. If you work at 96 kHz, a warning dialog comes up to say the selected algorithm will not work at 96 kHz. For building FX Chain 1, I dragged in four algorithms. I selected SP2016 Reverb, Hall, Plate and Latin Cathedral. I then “wired” the algorithms’ inputs and outputs by click/drag virtual patch cords between various access points. The algorithms are color-coded to indicate what kind of effect they are—reverbs are dark purple, for example. I liked that it is possible to wire parallel inputs or outputs to several different I/O channels simultaneously for very elaborate patches.

I set up FX Chain 4 for wildcard algorithms that work as inserted effects rather than send/ return effects. Stored with the same name as the session, I could recall these particular setups in Emote. I had four stereo processors such as all the (green) modulation effects that are most in-

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tense-sounding when used as an inserted effect.

Each has an Edit button to adjust parameters including Wet/Dry controls.

OUTSTANDING DSP I found using the H9000R and Emote wonderful! But there is a learning curve. Once I acclimated to the “Eventide Culture,” I was programming seemingly impossible effects and configurations. My mixing clientele are superimpressed with the effects I come up with so quickly.

With the PT|HD I/O card, you may program any configuration of inputs and outputs to suit your project’s needs, from stereo mixing up to large Atmos channel counts. There are 5.1 algorithms, 8-channel pitch changers, many outstanding reverbs, delays, and harmonizer effects, plus many outstanding premade chains of effects you can drag in and audition.

With up to 96 channels of simultaneous signal processing and a generous complement of analog and digital audio I/O, and with such an open DSP architecture, the H9000 with the PT|HD I/O card is now the perfect platform for Atmos, surround sound and large-track-count music score mixing, and/or high-quality music mixing work.

This is an all-professional system that will become very popular and in demand for multiroom Pro Tools mixing and post facilities that can share its immense power and awesome algorithms. n

PRODUCT SUMMARY COMPANY: Eventide Audio WEB: www.eventideaudio.com PRODUCT: Eventide H9000 Avid PT|HDX Expansion Card PRICE: $999 MSRP PROS: Up to 32 additional channels of Eventide algorithms CONS: A bit of a learning curve for the H9000

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Tech // reviews MAAT thEQblue12 Digital Renderings of 10 Classic Analog EQ designs—Plus Two Mods

By Michael Cooper

M

AAT thEQblue12 is a digital collection of 10 classic analog EQs—not simulations of hardware products, but digital constructs of their fundamental equalization circuits—plus a couple of proprietary alterations thereof.

You might not know it, but constant-Q equalizers from two EQ manufacturers may produce significantly different EQ curves from one another even when identical parameter settings are used. The same goes for proportional-Q equalizers (which, unlike ideal constant-Q filters, change their bandwidth proportionally as you boost or cut). It’s the shape of these equalizers’ curves, plus any band interactions and inherent harmonic and phase distortion, that mainly determine each equalizer’s sound and practical applications.

In designing thEQblue12, MAAT decided to forego the impractical task of modeling the harmonic distortion intrinsic to every analog equalizer under the sun. Instead, the plug-in gives you super-clean, minimum-phase reproductions of their EQ topologies; 80-bit, double floating-point internal calculations are used, and THD+N is reportedly in the range of 24-bit quantization4/18/20.

Sampling rates from 44.1 to 384 kHz are supported.

A lite version of the plug-in, thEQblue6, provides half as many (six) EQ topologies but is otherwise the same. Both cross-platform plug-ins support AAX, AU (Mac), VST2 and VST3 formats. V2.1.0 of thEQblue12, reviewed here using Digital Performer 10.1, uses a (dongle-free) cloud-based licensing scheme that also allows for working long stretches offline. (Note: V2.1.0 is not compatible with DP 9).

12 PARAMETRIC BANDS thEQblue provides 12 Sections (EQ bands; see opening graphic).

You can set a Section’s frequency control as high as 80 kHz and select among nine freely assignable parametric filter types for each band: bell; 1st- and 2nd-order low and high shelves; and 1st- and 2nd-order low- and high-cut filters. Depending on which of the 12 topologies you’ve selected (globally) for the 12 Sections, max gain is 12 to 15 dB and max cut 12 to 18 dB (but you can cascade filters for more gain). The shelves and cut filters (along with the bell filter) each provide a Q control, allowing you to create resonant boosts and cuts at filter cutoffs, and overshoots in shelving filters, like vintage analog EQs do.

Double-click in thEQblue’s graph (in the GUI’s center) to create a node for a new Section; a pennant will appear alongside the node, displaying controls and pop-up menus for changing the Section’s frequency, gain, Q, parametric filter type, assigned audio channel,

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and solo and bypass states.

Nodes can be dragged to graphically edit frequency, gain and Q (the latter by option-dragging); select multiple nodes at once to scale those parameters in the resulting grouping of Sections. Most of the same controls for each Section—all except the Solo button— also appear below the graph. Click on the Topology button in the lower-right corner of the GUI to switch, using an associated popup menu, the filter topology for all 12 Sections at once. The first 10 topologies in the menu are serial equalizers, which I’ll describe right now.

Commonly used in mixing consoles (including the SSL 4000E) and outboard gear, the Classic Sym topology is a symmetrical EQ that produces a nearly (not exactly) constant-Q bell, useful for surgical applications. Classic Asym is an asymmetrical “Old Skool” EQ that was used in some legacy analog products; it boosts like Classic Sym but cuts more narrowly.

Proportional 1 features proportional-Q filters like those used in Pultec, Maselec and Avalon equalizers and the Neve 1081; considered by many to be more musical than constant-Q filters in mixing and post-production, this filter topology features wider bells at gain settings below 6 dB, and narrower bells with greater gain boost or cut. Proportional 2 is similar to Proportional 1 but produces greater changes in bandwidth both above and below 6dB gain settings; employed by the Neve 88, its suggested use is for vocals. Proportional 3 is also like Proportional 1, except it produces extra-wide bell curves when using less than 3 dB of gain; Millennia Media equalizers reportedly use this topology.

Const-Q Asym and Const-Q Asy R are both asymmetrical, constant-Q topologies. Const-Q Asym is akin to EQ used in some American products, including mixers; it boosts like Classic Sym does but cuts very widely like Proportional 3. Const-Q Asy R is similar to Const-Q Asym but features mirrored boost and cut. Const-Q Invers is a symmetrical constant-Q topology that MAAT simply states is similar to Const-Q Asy R. Const-Q New is one of MAAT’s two proprietary constant-Q topologies (the mods mentioned in the subtitle of this review); it preserves exactly the same bandwidth when boosting less than 6 dB. Const-Q Ideal is MAAT’s other proprietary constant-Q architecture, one that’s similar to Classic Sym but has exactly the same bandwidth at any gain setting—an attribute impossible to achieve in the analog realm.

In all 10 of thEQblue’s serial equalizers, each band can be independently assigned to work on any of the following stereo or mid-side audio channels: stereo, left only, right only, mono (L+R, or

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thEQblue provides 12 EQ bands, nine freely assignable parametric filter types and 12 EQ topologies; 10 of the latter can operate in mid-side mode. The spectrogram that underlies the EQ-curve display can be disabled to conserve CPU resources and reduce clutter.

and the graph’s y-axis (amplitude range), using mid) or difference (L-R, or side). thEQblue also provides two vintage-style, different controls.

Other features include a concealable input parallel-connected equalizers (in which all bands are connected in parallel to the same input, and meter (only visible if the spectrogram is their outputs summed). Parallel FF-FB features a enabled), three-segment signal-present meter (always visible), outputfeed-forward/feed-back gain control (adjustable circuit found in highTRY THIS up to ±12 dB) and basic end graphic equalizers To learn how thEQblue’s topologies sound preset management used in mastering (think different from one another, set one or more system. Oversampling Massenburg and Sontec bands to have +6.0 dB of gain and a Q of 0.71, and then switch from one topology is bypass-able, and products), but adjustable to another while listening to the same it’s conveniently with parametric controls track. All 12 EQ topologies have been automatically defeated in thEQblue.

The normalized by MAAT to produce the exact same curve at these particular settings, if operating the plug-in Parallel LC topology— but they will nevertheless sound subtly at other than 44.1kHz the “LC” in the name is different from one another, reflecting their or 48kHz sampling electronics shorthand differences in circuit design. frequency. for the inductors and Customizable autocapacitors used in its analog counterpart—is akin to what’s used in gain, true-peak numeric readouts for I/O the Manley Massive Passive, also oft used in levels, a virtual keyboard that helps you mastering. The two parallel equalizers can work snap an active Section to a musical note’s on the left or right channel alone, or in stereo. frequency, and up to 24 levels of undo and Thankfully, you can give all 12 topologies custom redo complement the feature-rich GUI, which is thoroughly and clearly explained in the names. expertly written user’s manual. The only thing I found lacking is an input-gain control for FEATURE-RICH thEQblue’s graph overlays a bypass-able managing headroom; MAAT plans to add this spectrogram that shows recent aural events feature in an update. thEQblue sounds really clean, clear, in multiple colors (corresponding to their amplitudes) at its bottom and older events in uncolored, smooth and precise, without the grayscale above. You can set the input source for edginess and smearing many EQ plug-ins the spectrogram’s analyzer to be the left, right, exhibit. Depth and soundstage preservation mid or side channel. You can also zoom the are top-notch. Those commonalities aside, graph and spectrogram’s shared frequency range, the 12 topologies all sound subtly different.

To decide which one to use on a given track and where time allowed, I often made EQ tweaks in one topology and then cycled through closely related topologies—thereby changing the intrinsic bandwidth and Q on all active bands—to decide which flattered the most.

For example, in mixing and post-production sessions I often switched among the three Proportional topologies, which I liked for their relatively narrow focus when using high gain settings. For more broad and gentle mastering strokes, I liked switching between the two Parallel EQs to see which worked best on the current track; Parallel LC made tracks sound very subtly fuller and bigger, while Parallel FFFB sounded comparatively tighter.

It’s the exhaustive selection of EQ shapes and subtle flavors that make thEQblue12 so adaptable to every pro audio application imaginable. And, most important, the sound quality is outstanding. n Michael Cooper is a Mix contributing editor.

You can hear some of his productions at www. soundcloud.com/michael-cooper-recording.

PRODUCT SUMMARY COMPANY: MAAT PRODUCT: thEQblue12 WEBSITE: maat.digital PRICE: thEQblue12, $389; thEQblue6, $239; thEQblue6 upgrade to thEQblue12, $189 PROS: Smooth, pristine sound. EQs suited to every application. Very flexible, featureladen GUI. Mid-side functionality. Excellent documentation.

CONS: No input-gain control (to be added in a future update).

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Tech // back page blog The New Studio Protocols; Mixing Live at the Drive-In Mike Levine: Mix Technology Editor, Studio Practice Safe Session: I was recently invited to play dobro for a recording session at a studio not too far from me. It was the first such call I’ve had since Covid-19 turned everything upside down. “It will be safe,” the producer said. “Only the client, the engineer and I will be there. We’ll all be masked, and everything will be sanitized.”

My initial thought was to accept. But then I thought about how Covid-19 spreads so much more easily when you spend extended periods of time in enclosed spaces with other people. So, I told the producer that I’d rather work remotely, and that I have a nice setup and will get quality results. Thankfully, he was cool about it and agreed.

Unfortunately, not everyone involved in music or audio production can work from home. If you do have to be in a studio with others, there are a few things you can do: Testing: In a perfect world (which ours certainly isn’t), everyone could get tested close to the day of the session.

Check at the Door: Studio personnel could do temperature and bloodoxygen (via an inexpensive Oximeter) checks before admitting anyone.

Masks, Masks and More Masks: It goes without saying, whenever possible.

Pre-Record Scratch Vocals: Have the singer remotely record it to a click, fly that into the DAW session, and the band can listen to it as they record.

Be Careful With Vocals: Put the singer in a vocal booth, if you have one, or a separate room if you don’t.

Wipe It Down: Sanitize the studio before each session in which others are present. Wipe down door handles and any other surfaces that participants are likely to touch. Disinfect the bathroom.

For more information on guidelines for reopening a recording studio, visit the Recording Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing website.

Product of the Month: 2getheraudio Space Duck 1.01 Space Duck, a ducking delay and reverb plug-in for Mac and Windows from 2getheraudio, has two main sections: Delay and Reverb. They’re stacked vertically, and you can turn them on and off individually. Experimentation is part of the fun and the process with this product. You can open either a monoto-stereo or stereo instance of Space Duck. Global controls include a knob for the amount of dry signal, a master volume, an output limiter, and meters for dry signal amount and output. The Delay section features standard controls such as left and right Time (free or synched to tempo), left and right or linked Feedback, and delay Output level.

Then there are the more creative features such as Fractal, which lets you dial in a resonant filter, and Mod, which adds modulation.

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Steve La Cerra: Mix Technology Editor, Live Live at the Drive-In: Back in July I had a gig. Normally, that would be a completely unremarkable statement (especially in summer), but in 2020 it’s a small miracle. Our last show was in March, and—as is the case throughout the industry—almost all of our summer bookings were canceled. I’ve already lost count of how many shows fell off the calendar, and keeping tabs on it is too depressing anyway.

This show was part of the Drive-In Live series at the Cheshire Fairgrounds in Swanzey, N.H. The promoter converted an empty field on the fairgrounds into a parking lot, arranging it so that cars were spaced 10 feet apart and parked in a staggered arrangement to facilitate social distancing.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had more anxiety about doing one show, and it was mostly about the tour managing aspects of the gig. Technically speaking, we were very well taken care of by Ryan Burhans and the folks from Paddle Out Productions (Medford, Mass.). All of the stage crew wore masks (most wore gloves, as well) and respected social distancing guidelines, not to mention the fact that they were on top of their game.

The show itself went over very well, and along the way I learned a few things. Hands down, cue monitors at FOH beat the idea of using headphones, which (a) inevitably will be laid upon a table or console that may not be clean, and (b) will mess up the loops on your mask. Many of us have already learned that eyeglasses fog up when wearing a mask; and ear fatigue is now redefined as the soreness behind your ears created by the loops. To minimize foot traffic, only working personnel were allowed backstage (no guests).

There are a lot of variables involved in determining whether the drivein concert concept is a sustainable business model. But those of us who are trying to scratch out a living sure do welcome the work, at least for the next few months.

Product of the Month: Waves FIT Controller for eMotion LV1 Co-engineered by Waves Audio and MIDI control manufacturer MIDIPLUS, FIT features 16 channels, each of which includes a 100mm motorized, touch-sensitive fader; a rotary encoder with push-to-switch; Mute, Solo, and Select switches; and a scribble strip. The 16 rotary encoders can control preamp gain or pan (per channel), with their function shown in the display. A dedicated Master channel provides a 100mm motorized, touch-sensitive fader, a touch-and-turn rotary encoder that can control any eMotion LV1 parameter, Mute and Solo switches, and a “User” button that sets the 16 channel Select buttons to a user mode. FIT is expected to ship in Q3 of this year at an MSRP of $1,200. ■

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