MPSE Wavelength

66 I M PS E . O R G to get believable performances from Japanese kids speaking in Japanese. But I managed to grab other takes, and different mics from different coverage to make it into stereo, and combined stereo and surround and kind of panned it all around. We managed to cover all the kids' walla with just production sound, and it was all believable. When I don't have time to go out and record my own sounds, I look for independent libraries. I try to watch the film first and try to listen to sounds, thinking of what can be used. Not just in little ways, but like, "if I pitch this down, will it work?" It's kind of a reverse process. The right process is to record the sounds you're thinking of, checking what's available and thinking of what can be used in your film. But sometimes it gives you amazing results, like something you never thought would work and you think, "Oh, this can work!" So that's one of the ways to approach it for low- budget indie films. EM: Do you have any go-to plug- ins for reverb and EQ that you find help library sounds fit better into the natural environments and sound more realistic? SRC: I was a plug-in freak when I worked in Korea, but when I came to USC, they didn't have a lot of plug-ins at that time! They only had Digidesign EQ, a bundle plug-in they provided in the programming, and a Euphonix console. So I converted my way into a simpler approach to plug-ins. I started to only use the fader, EQ, and basic reverb. Then USC changed their consoles to D-Control, and the Digidesign EQ was made for that interface, so I started using Digidesign EQ for a while and that's still my go-to EQ. I think I'm probably the only one in this town to use it. But I still use it because that's what I used to use on that interface to carve and use other filters. I use Pro-Q 3 sometimes now too, which is an amazing plug-in, but I

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