Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/54443
Unsung AUDIO GEAR to creating music for the show. "When we're writing music for Biz Kid$, our turn around can be a day. I might only have the singer for less than an hour, so if I have to create har- mony parts to second things out, I can do that. Also, if I have to change the melody, I can, and a couple of times I had to do that. I've physically had to change what they were I'm doing pitch correction, I love all the things you can do within it. I love the way you can take notes and stretch them out, or make words longer. You can change the internal vibrator fluctuation within it as well. There are so many different things that Melodyne does, and they're all so great." SPLASH Peter Levin is co-owner of Splash Studio Bad Animals's Thomas McGurk: Celemony's Melodyne Editor 2.0 helps him create the perfect pitch. singing and because of Melodyne, I could do it and still make the deadline. Melodyne also allows me to take parts of songs and turn them into MIDI so that I can have different instruments playing what the recorded piece was as well." McGurk is usually limited on the amount of time he has with the talent. Often, perfor- mance energy and clarity are more impor- tant than perfect pitch. For him, Melodyne can handle much more than any pitch and time corrections he might need to make. With Melodyne, he is able to go back and write music for a song the actor had already recorded. "We have actors that have to sing on camera, and in reality, I really only get them in the studio for 35 minutes. So, with the severe time restriction, it's more impor- tant to get a great performance. Afterwards, I can use Melodyne to fix any pitch issues. "Another thing I used Melodyne for, which was really cool, was a scene they had per- formed where we had to put the music in later on. Basically, I took the singing that the actor did, which was not really in a particular key, and brought it in to the key of the music that we put in underneath afterwards. That was totally cool because it was all about the performance, and I could make him sing in whatever key I needed him to. That's the kind of thing we could not have futzed around with and been able to do as quickly as we could now. It probably would have taken a long time to do." From simple pitch correction, to the seemingly impossible re-write, McGurk is never disappointed with Melodyne. "When 38 Post • February 2012 (www.splash-studios.com), located in the Chelsea area of New York City. Splash is a full-service audio post facility. In addition to editing, mixing and sound design, their ser- vices also include on-site Foley and ADR, as well as Dolby and DTS theatrical print mastering. They work with such clients as TLC, Discovery, Nickelodeon and Con Edison, as well as on feature-length films and documentaries. Levin, the primary mixer and sound designer at Splash, has been using Sound- miner (www.soundminer.com) for the past seven years. He remembers the days before he started using Soundminer, when sound effects searches were tedious and time con- get your fingers on things quickly, is — I don't think I can stress it enough — the job. And Soundminer is something that is designed to do that thing really well." Soundminer is a digital audio assets man- ager and sound effects/music search engine that does more than just organize your col- lection. Soundminer uses the metadata attached to each digitized sound file to pro- vide relevant and instant search results and then allows you to preview those effects right away. With the latest version, Sound- miner V.4 ($899/pro), you can also view/edit the waveform of each file, edit metadata, spot to Pro Tools/Nuendo, apply VST plug- ins, import QuickTime movies, batch convert files, and so much more. Recently, Levin relied on Soundminer to help him efficiently complete the sound design on a Web campaign for Con Edison, the power supply company for the metro New York area. "We work with them pretty regularly on these two- to four-minute vid- eos for their power conservation campaign. There is a lot of sound design involved in that. It is a great opportunity to be like a suming. "I remember when sounds lived on CDs. When you needed a sound effect, you went to your library and that meant going to a book, and looking up the type of sound you thought you wanted. Then you'd have to find the right CD, load it into the player, listen and decide that wasn't really the type of sound you wanted. So you went through the process all over again. When you found what you wanted, you either recorded it off the player or ripped it off the CD. It was a very slow and time-consuming process to get sounds." Now, with hundreds of Gigabytes of digi- tized sound effects, Levin is able to use Soundminer to instantly search through and preview all of the effects in the vast collec- tion at Splash. He can listen to effects right away, narrow down the choices, and send the sounds, or even just selected parts of the sounds, into his session quickly and easily. "As a sound designer and mixer, I use Sound- miner all the time," he says. "We are a post company. There is a ton of stuff we are work- ing with. How you organize your thoughts creatively is critical to being able to function as a creative person in this field. That ability to organize yourself quickly and easily, and www.postmagazine.com Nylon uses Anthony DeMaria Labs ADL 1000, which has a simple two-knob design, a VU meter and two toggle switches. Japanese brush painter. You have one shot to make it great, and the client is sitting right behind you. You have to design and mix these videos in a couple of hours. Sound- miner is my go-to tool for that. Since these are live action with animation and animated graphics, it's very sound-design intensive and I couldn't do it without Soundminer." Though Soundminer offers many features, Levin uses only a small part of the program. "I probably use only 25 percent of what the program offers, but I really use what I use and I don't have to think about it. If I need to find a sound and manipulate it in some way, choose a part of it, find it easily, then that's what Soundminer does so great. At the end of the day, I use it as a glorified database, but it's a database that's designed specifically for audio professionals. It's just well thought out." WHITE DOG Curt Bush is the owner of White Dog continued on page 46