Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487666
58 W I N T E R 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y It makes such a huge difference in the way the audience perceives the show. It's not like a typical TV show that has constant drones and loops. It's like a feature film every week. We would go in and do pick-up sessions and re-score if there were any considerations in terms of dramatics or composition. [But] yes, it was like a feature. When you are doing the scoring mix after the recording session, how big is the room that you're in? Well, recently I've been using a room at Fox, which is called the Barbara McLean Stage. It is actually a kind of small dubbing stage that was specifically outfitted for music mixing as well as small dubs. The engineer who was in charge of building that stage was Marc Gebauer, our technical engineer at Todd-AO scoring, and is probably the most experienced scoring engineer in the business. When Mark built that room, he included all the facilities we would need for score mixing; multiple rigs, great acoustical design, great sounding monitoring. It's just the right size of room where you get the scale, but you don't feel you're swamped by a large room. A lot of the last couple of years, including the tail end of West Side Story, was done in that room. I like working there when I can get in. Otherwise, of course, we mix in the control rooms at Fox, Sony, and Warner Bros. when we need to. And there are several composer studios where we can put the capability into those rooms to do mixes as well. We've worked in small rooms, and our friend and colleague, David Gray (of Dolby), developed a small room formula with us way back in the '80s when the matrixed surround mixes were being done, and a lot of it was monitor compensation for small rooms. It compensates for the proximity of those speakers to the mix location, which was very helpful, and it meant that we could actually size up our mixes from a fairly small control room to a large dubbing stage and not suffer. I would, first of all, hand up to David for figuring this out early on. Do you feel like the change to digital has helped or harmed film music? It's a knife that cuts both ways. We all loved the analog patina; the sound that we got with the analog machines, either with or without noise reduction. I was a big fan of 15 ips [inches per second] Dolby SR, which was our last analog multitrack format. That was a great sounding compromise which kept the noise down and kept the sound spectacular. And when you didn't elevate, it gave you lots of headroom. It was a great format. We made the transition around 2005. We were trying very hard to stay analog, but we couldn't. We just couldn't get the tape anymore, and so we started doing early 192 kHz, 24-bit recordings and Pro Tools. We still to this day get resistance from editors about that, and about how it "makes their life miserable." My philosophy has always been, the better you start out, the better you wind up. You can hear it. If you start out at 192, you stay at it through the editorial process and the re-recording process, and then you down-sample. But the other thing is that most of the digital systems now have pretty effective sample rate conversion capability. Conversion in the box is not always the highest quality, but it's certainly getting better.