CAS Quarterly

C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 43 so I hid an entire horn section on the side of the stage. It was very complicated. [David's] trying to record the tap while I have a band blowing "Bill Bailey" at 85 dB on top of his taps. We had to figure it out. Do we redo the tap? Do we redo the band? What's good, what's not. We have an awesome post team! Annette Kudrak, our music editor, who I've worked with for years, is a miracle worker. I'm so lucky to have her. She was very involved in fixing all of this stuff because there was a lot of fixing [to be done]! And here's the bigger part of this whole shoot for me; Amy our director is saying, "I want a full audience and I want them hyped up!" So, on top of it all, I'm bringing in a PA that's blasting in the room to get the crowd going and I have all that stuff coming back through my microphones and the tap microphones. It was a Hail Mary! Literally [I was wondering], how is this going to work? Well, let's just try to do it and make it look beautiful. The amazing thing is music ended up going down live. I'm guessing there was some serious tight miking and hidden miking? Funny you should mention that part of it! It's 1959-1960s Apollo, and I know I have to record it. So, I rent Neumann M49's, RCA 77's, and RCA 44's and I place them around the band. We're setting it up to do a mic check and Amy walks in and says, "What are those?" "Those are the microphones." "I don't want to see any microphones." And, now the clock is ticking! Now we have to hide everything, and I have a full drum kit, piano, and my crew can't touch the mics or the cables! It was—you know, I'm re-living it right now and having palpitations! [Laughter] Oh, and that was just the first number! Then we do a dance piece into a Jackie Wilson song called "A Woman, a Lover, a Friend," that we recorded live and later shot to our master [with our lead singer lip syncing]. I even had a great recording for the band done in the studio that morning, and I was flipping out because it's so complicated. But Amy wanted to do it live, and she looked at me and said, "Go big or go home." So, we went big! RON BOCHAR CAS: Re-recording Mixer I have spoken with a handful of others on the sound team about this episode and it seemed pretty ambitious. Because there is so much work being done before it gets to you, does that help you focus when you're mixing it on the stage? Most of the time, yes. I come from editorial; I got into mixing through editorial. I know the power of the edit and I know that there are enough tools at the editors' disposal that if you trust them and let them do [their thing], it can make your life as a mixer a whole lot easier. For instance, my dialogue editor, Sara Stern, does that for me all the time. I wouldn't call what I get from her a pre-mix, but the edit is so well laid out, and she's used my template to cut in that, by the time I get the stuff, I don't have to move things around the [timeline] or anything like that. I know that these tracks are the boom, these tracks are the lavs [and so on]. How about the way the music is prepared? The way that music comes to me on Maisel, Annette Kudrak spends an ungodly amount of time working with the material so that I can get whatever they have deemed as live, that they really love. You know it's okay in your two-track picture edit, but it's not gonna fly when we want to be "just on that saxophone" or pan the guitar over there with perspective. So, I've got all the splits too.

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