BLOG: The Art of The Mix

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Driving to Skywalker Ranch has become a regular pilgrimage over the past two years. The country roads north of San Francisco become ever windier the closer you get to the ranch, which was built thirty years ago by George Lucas as an idyllic creative campus.

I’ve used these country drives to plan the work to be done that day, thinking through the sound design of Alternative Energy, Mass Transmission, and Art of War during visits over the past ten years to mentor under Gary Rydstrom, the leading sound designer at Skywalker Sound.

Most recently, my visits to the Ranch have been about Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra, an animated film the journeys inside instruments as they’re played. Early in the project, Gary and I storyboarded the film with animation director Jim Capobianco. Then we’d gather there to consider the musical score, the art, the motion graphics, and various other elements of the film.

The last step, the topic of this column, is mixing the symphonic score.

That’s how I ended up in the room with two of Hollywood’s best sets of ears. Gary is a legendary sound designer, having one seven Oscars for his work on Spielberg films; and to handle the mix, he brought in Shawn Murphy, who mixes all the John Williams scores.

To sit at the mixing board between these legendary listeners is quite an experience. When not figuring out how to bring out a particular instrument in the mix or accentuate a piece of sound design, Gary and Shawn reminisce so casually about mind-blowing projects (last month, it was about the upcoming Spielberg remake of West Side Story). For this project, we were mixing the studio recording of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra made the month before (see the previous column about the magic of recording an orchestra during Covid).

So, what happens at ‘the mix’?

The mix is when all sonic elements are brought together. For a pure audio release, such as my opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, that means integrating all the various microphones – close on individual instruments, singes, section mics, room mics. My music also comes with electronic beats and sound design, so these mixes are complex beasts. But an audio release only requires one mix – the CD or digital album.

For Philharmonia Fantastique, we need both an album mix and a film mix. That’s because people often listen to an album and a film on different systems, and because a film requires a more dynamic mix than a traditional audio album. For example, when the film’s Sprite flies inside the flute, the film mix brings up the close mic on the flute; or when the bassoon fills the entire screen like an alien spaceship, we add some low subwoofer to accentuate the bassoon’s role as the bass of the woodwind section.

At Skywalker, we mixed on the main mix stage, with Shawn and I at the board, and his assistance Erik in the editing room nearby. Erik is the master of the edit domain, the person we go to when we need to dig up a different take of a particular passage. That mostly happens when there are issues of sync: when a percussion hit isn’t lining up with something in the film, for example.

Philharmonia Fantastique presents very intricate sync issues because it features close-ups of instruments being played as we hear them. So, a year after the film was finished, thousands of miles away in Chicago a bunch of musicians had to perform exactly in sync with the fingers of a flutist. The handful of times things were slightly off, well we just called Erik in the editing room.

We finished the mix on Friday; took a lunch break; and then came back onto the mix stage to experience the film from start to finish. Conductor Edwin Outwater joined us at this point, and we both couldn’t stop smiling at hearing the full orchestra come together.

Coming together, after all, is the key thematic of Philharmonia Fantastique, a celebration of the ways an orchestra unifies its diversity of instruments and people. Perhaps we took for granted how magical an orchestra is before Covid; but now, the majesty of the medium will be especially appreciated.

I drove back through the windy roads of Marin with a smile, tapping the beats of the film’s finale on my steering wheel. Bringing this to life during the past two years has been one of the most fulfilling creative experiences of my life – and I can’t wait for Philharmonia Fantastique to premiere next season.

BLOG: Recording in a time of COVID

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So many fascinating revelations have occurred while recording  Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra this month with Chicago Symphonywith conductor Edwin Outwater.  The soundtrack for this 25’ animated film, which journeys inside the orchestra to see how instruments work, is a vivid concerto for orchestra.  Recording an orchestra during Covid is no small feat – and a real-world illustration of the film’s key theme: the orchestra as a beautiful example of “coming together.”

All film scores are recorded with a click track – i.e., a metronome – to ensure tight synchronization between music and images.  For safety reasons, we’re recording in smaller groups – in this case by instrument families – and then putting everything together in post-production. Our recording engineer Shawn Murphy is a master at this, having just recorded Spielberg’s West Side Story (and several other films) in this manner.  The Jedi-knight skills aren’t only required in the studio afterwards; the engineer also needs to set up the sessions so the players are as comfortable as possible. 

photo: T. Rosenberg

So Shawn and his assistant Erik Swanson have made it possible, for example, to play back the violins while the low strings record, or play the brass when the woodwinds lay down their parts.  That’s crucial for pitch and texture.

 

While there are obvious challenges to recording in isolation, some advantages have become obvious with this project. Because the film’s Sprite flies inside various instruments as they’re playing, we need some very close mic’ing of specific instruments. (The film’s poster art shows the Sprite inside the cello, for instance.) Spreading out the recording sessions over five days allows us to take the time to capture those close-up sounds.

Additionally, it’s interesting for the cello section to lay down its part without the brass blasting over them, allowing the cellists to really focus on their sound. One possible pitfall is precision obsession: in some orchestral tutti passages, players lean into their instruments more aggressively than they do when isolated. The orchestra rages euphorically at the climax of Philharmonia Fantastique, and we’re encouraging players to add grit to their sound at those moments.  The accumulation of those intense instrumental textures are what makes a climax so thrilling.

After a year without orchestras, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion during the first session with violins.  Just hearing them tune provoked a visceral emotional reaction; it’s been so long since I’ve heard a section tune.  The lack of public discussion about the plight of the performing arts – especially when compared to, say, restaurants – has made the pandemic especially challenging for so many artists. It’s nice to be back with an orchestra I love, finding creative ways to make music again.  Let’s hope orchestras look to September 2021 as a time to come back together in big ways.  While that may be a challenge, it’s so crucial to the well-being of our collective cultural psyche. Orchestras are defined by the act of coming together, so let’s look to them as we emerge from this long year.

Photos by T. Rosenberg

BLOG: World premiere: Undistant

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Something remarkable happened this month: a new symphonic piece was actually premiered. Under the baton of Maestra Marin Alsop, the São Paulo Symphony gave the world premiere of Undistant, a lyrical response to the social distancing of the Covid era.

The piece’s life began with a conversation last May between me and Marin, who has brought many pieces of mine to orchestras around the world. She asked if I’d compose something reflective and hopeful, a piece that could celebrate the necessity of true human connection.

Undistant follows a journey of past, present, and future: beginning with the distancing we’ve experienced over the past nine months, it looks towards the return of human contact in the coming year. Scored for chamber orchestra and electronics, the piece opens with the cold sound of digital stutters from communication platforms (Zoom and Skype), then slowly warms up with the bloom of a long melody that shares the first three notes with “Ode to Joy.” (The isolation of Covid seems reminiscent of the isolation of Beethoven’s deafness, and his most famous tune is the ultimate hymn to human fellowship.)

To vividly illustrate the concept of distancing, the piece scatters several of the musicians around the hall: a group of woodwinds in the left balcony, some brass in the right, and the strings and percussion onstage. As the orchestras emerges in a haze of digital static, these three ensembles drift closer and closer together. The work culminates in an ecstatically lyricism, with the digital world (electronics) disappearing.

The very fact that I had to hear the premiere online, sitting in California, enhanced the basic thematic of the piece. Traveling to Brazil was unfortunately out of the question given all the restrictions, but I found the experience of tuning in quite moving. In fact, several years ago the São Paulo Symphony gave the Brazilian premiere of another work of mine exploring distance: Mass Transmission, a choral work, sets transcripts of families speaking over the first long-distance radio signals.

The past year has been especially challenging for orchestras, a medium that is all about people coming together.  As a symphonist, I continue to be fascinated by the way orchestras allow so many people to collaborate in real time – but that defining characteristic has kept many orchestras shuttered during Covid.  But recent advances in medicine and politics offer real hope in the inevitable return of live music, and that hope is what Undistant is all about.