Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/830490
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y S P R I N G 2 0 1 7 41 because it has so many rooms. At the time, the music industry was thriving in the studios, so a place like Westlake was like Grand Central; everyone came through there, artists, musi- cians, engineers, producers. On any given night, you could walk out into the hallway and see the best of the best in the world hanging out, comparing notes, catching up, and trading stories. It was a fantastic place to learn and to meet people. At what point did you make the decision to shift from being on staff at Westlake to going freelance? After three great years, mostly as an assistant working long hours. Even though I was earning overtime, the base rate was designed to make you want to leave if you became successful. By the time I left, I was the first call for all sessions, so I had made a lot of great connections and contacts at that point. Were you doing tracking, overdubs, mixing, or sequencing— or some of it all? I was doing a little of everything, yeah. Each session had dif- ferent needs and the job was basically to get things done. I was always happy to have all my skills get used every day. How did you first become involved in live broadcasts? I had met Tommy Vicari at Westlake in a Quincy Jones ses- sion. He invited me to work on other sessions with him, and we hit it off. One day, he called me and asked me to replace his brother Danny Vicari, because his brother was out on tour with Bobby McFerrin. So of course, I said yes! The TV show was the Academy Awards. So I was really lucky. I was Bill Conti's assistant, and helped Tommy with the orchestra in the pit. The learning curve was VERY steep, but it was also such an amazing opportunity. I just gave it my all and, thank- fully, at the end of the day, they liked me enough to invite me back the following year. Did your relationship with other mixers lead you to be called for the high-profile projects you currently work on? Absolutely. Tommy was the first to call me for a show, but a relationship with Westlake also led to another call from Michael Abbott, who hired me for my first job post- ing a TV show. Michael brought me onto other shows he was involved in, such as the Grammys. Through the Academy Awards, I met Ed Greene, who invited me to work with him on a LOT of shows. That led to the Super Bowl Halftime Show, and shows in China and around the world. Mixers such as Pat Balztell and Paul Sandweiss have opened up many doors, and have also become dear friends as well. Mark King has generously invited me to work with him on several shows, such as Grease Live! Tell us about the kind of work you do on a "typical" broad- cast variety special such as the Grammys? The cool thing about what I do is that each show is different. On some shows, I run the central music playback system for all the prerecorded tracks for all the bands on the show. On other shows, I may run only the typical Booth A2 music play- back system, and in some shows, I run both systems at the same time. I also run systems where I can change the length of the arrangement of a piece of pre-recorded music in real time. This is useful, for example, in an event where the music has to play over a particular moment that can't be locked down, such as an opening-ceremonies torch ceremony or a flag-raising ceremony. Because the music on the shows I work on is critical, I always run redundant systems that go through a proprietary switching system I designed that automatically switches from the inputs of the primary to the backup system in case of any failure in the primary. Relative to a show like the Grammys, where you have a cou- ple of days for prep/rehearsals before air, how was it working on Grease Live! where you had more time but a very dense script filled with musical numbers and lots of scene changes? Grease Live! was all about concentration for the whole three hours of the show. We had more chances to rehearse but not that much more, actually. We make copious notes, and relied on [the cast] to 'perform' the show exactly the way the director and the choreography expects it to go. Another very cool part in Grease was precisely changing the length of the arrangements in real time. That is when it gets fun! Are you also creating the monitor mix for the vocalists or is that another mixer? I was creating several mixes at the same time from my system. One was feeding the broadcast music mixer, Biff Dawes, and another one was hitting the stages, and then channeled to the vocalists and dancers. Yet another mix fed certain areas of the stage for specific purposes. The tricky part about this was keeping track of who was getting what mix. The monitor mixers definitely helped keep me honest! Any "Aha!" moments from Grease? Well, there was a choir that was supposed to be a choir on camera, except that it really wasn't—they were actors pretending to be a choir. So we kept rehearsing with them, because I needed to follow their lead musically with one of these arrangement changes I discussed. They kept chang- ing the way they did it, and I kept getting the wrong cues by looking at them. After a few rehearsals, I realized that I was expecting them to behave as singers and musicians, and they simply were not behaving that way! So, I shut my eyes for that section and just ran the music the way I felt it and, suddenly, it worked! So, for the rest of the rehearsals, I just shut my eyes for that section—and also for the live show! When you're not teaching or on location for a broadcast, what do you like to do? I just had my first baby boy, and we have a Siberian husky that loves to go for walks in an emptied riverbed near our house in Valencia. So my favorite thing to do is to take them, with my wife, for a nice long, lazy walk. My wife and I used to run marathons in LA but now, between our son and our dog, we are in a constant marathon! Congratulations, guys, on your great work on what sounds like a very fun show to be a part of!