With these projects you must always be under a set deadline.
That's part of what I really like about what I do: the deadline. Even if it's for a game that goes on for a long time, there is a real feeling of gratification when you work really hard, being really focused and intense, and make something awesome.
With you being freelance, are composers requesting that you might be a good choice for any given project? How does the work come to you since you're not on staff at a studio at this point?
It's almost always the composer who hires me. Being freelance allows me the opportunity to plan my own schedule and to be able to pick and choose what projects to work on. Having my own 5.1 studio certainly helps because I have the freedom to quickly recall my gear, so I can slot in smaller projects among the bigger jobs. I appreciate this freedom now, but it was certainly a leap of faith leaving my staff position at the scoring stage at 20th Century Fox because it was a great job! With that said, although there is more of the business side to deal with when working freelance than staff, I have a more personal relationship with the composers that I work with. There's more of a sense of collaboration. It's fun to have someone in my studio who is working together with me to get cool sounds and musical vibes.
With a score that was created with virtual instruments, those are all rendered as stereo files?
Yeah. I don't deal with the raw MIDI tracks and instrument plug-ins.
Could anyone at the mixing stage even handle that? Or would it be too much extra?
There are way too many variables.
I can't even imagine.
I have done some mixing in Logic and DP, and occasionally, I'll mix at a composer's studio, but I really try to avoid it. I don't have access to all of my awesome outboard hardware boxes with Pro Tools HD's zero latency hardware inserts, and composers' control rooms often have sub-par acoustic listening environments. And dealing with MIDI: "Oh, the wrong patch loaded" or "I didn't back up far enough to get the mod wheel change." It's too crazy.
So in a case like this, you are getting a lot of stuff in stereo.
It's pretty much all stereo audio tracks that I'm getting, but mics that I, or anyone else records are generally mono audio tracks.
Do you ever tear things down to a single channel and use it in different ways? How do you approach it to get everything done quickly?
Sometimes I tear it down. It's really about using the tools we all have: panning, EQ, and compression. Sometimes I'll split a stereo sound into mono and then treat the better sounding side. If you stack a bunch of stereo stuff together, it can end up as mush.
It just becomes mono, because it's all stacked.
Absolutely. I want to get clarity, punch, and definition, but also size and excitement too. For example, I generally don't want the composer's generic reverbs. I have a lot of really nice hardware reverbs. Plus, if I start to pan an individual sound to one side and the baked-in reverb is pulling hard to that one side, it really telegraphs that something isn't quite right.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
It's always a conversation between the composer and me. Sometimes cool effects are baked into a sound, and they should be. Sometimes I'll do tempo locked pans to individual sounds. I love PanMan from SoundToys. I was bugging SoundToys for years to do that plug-in. When they finally released it, I was thrilled.
It's so fun to pan that into a reverb or delay. It's moving, but it's also creating this haze behind it. I do that quite a bit for spacey effects.
Absolutely. Sometimes some score elements can be a little bit static. PanMan and some of the techniques that you mentioned can be fantastic just for livening things up, triggering certain patterns off the Tempo Map and stuff. I always use the Tempo Map in Pro Tools. It's fun to give certain instruments a little more excitement.
Are there things that you've done to meld, say if you've got virtual strings and live orchestral strings recorded, to bring them to a place where they're closer?
That happens more and more these days, and I've done a lot of what is called "hybrid mixing." Sometimes the film or video game doesn't have the budget to hire a full orchestra and we record only a small group of musicians. Sometimes I'm given 100% virtual sounds. I'm lucky to have had experience with live and virtual instruments of all sorts. I often use virtual strings to make the string section sound bigger and more exciting, for example.
It can add aggression and tonality.
Yes. There are so many ways to go. Composers sometimes ask me which sample library is the best, but the truth is that I love to get as many different sample libraries as possible. It's not a case of what's best but of what is wanted and needed. Take the strings, for example. I'll get the rosin out of one sample, the fatness out of one, the body out of another, and I'll pan, EQ, compress, and layer them all very differently. Then I'll use some common hardware reverbs to make it sound great.
It's always a trip. I've done bits of that, and I like that feeling, things supporting each other and melding. It's really interesting.
Yeah, it's fun.
I always wonder when I watch a movie whether the audience knows when a whole section is virtual. I always wonder how they feel subconsciously maybe. No one's listening like we are at the movies anyway, but I always wonder how that affects people.
I totally agree with you. I think that real sound and real instruments can affect you in an emotional way that you might not be aware of. It brings a production value, an elegance, and a lushness. It's great. It's why people still hire live musicians.
How much mastering do you end up doing at this point?
Quite a lot. One of the great things about freelance is the variety, and I record, mix, and master all sorts of projects from the traditional to the way out there. And the way out stuff is not always for avant-garde projects. For example, the two Breaking Bad score albums I mastered for composer Dave Porter and Sony Music are edgy, ambient electronica. My projects are all over the sonic map.
I talked to an engineer once doing film stuff, and she said that she just couldn't take the violence. She was working on sound effects and stuff for slasher movies or something, and she just couldn't take it. That's an interesting thing. Is that ever a consideration for you, like what the content of the movie is?
I can see that. Music directs and guides your emotions, but a slasher film's sound effects confront you, which is great for the movie, but I don't think anyone could spend every day being confronted by sound that way. I'm grateful that I've been able to make a career of just music. I did do a bit of dialogue and sound effects work at the beginning of my career, but it's not for me.
Has anyone tried to hire you to mix albums lately?
I do some album work, but often albums don't have the budget that they used to, so I'm spending a lot of time these days on bigger projects that have the budget. Mostly film and video games. Not so much TV lately because of the extreme deadlines and endless revisions involved. TV can mean writing and mixing an episode in three or four days. This means that the composers and their assistants have to be pretty self-contained. They have to navigate revisions and approvals from producers and there's just no time to work with someone outside the composing team.
