Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521715
46 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Summer 2024 are the front lines of the Sound Department. From the First AD to the Camera Operators to the Set Costumers—everyone loved David and Zach and never hesitated to tell me so. The very first machine I ever recorded sound on was a Nagra 4.2. Those who know, know why I fell in love with sound mixing. And now I was about to mix a movie where a character would be using a reel-to-reel quarter-inch tape recorder as a very important prop in telling the story. While it's incredibly easy for post sound to manipulate our tracks and make them sound like phone calls, or Nagra recordings, no sound nerd in their right mind is going to pass up an opportunity to record those instances live and as realistically as possible. All of this to say, I bought a Nagra 4.2 for this film. To avoid the headache of needing to digitize the tape recordings, I sent a mix from my Cantar X3 through one of the mic inputs of the Nagra, and then took the line output of the Nagra and fed it back into my X3 as an iso track simply labeled "Nagra." Now I could send anything I wanted to the Nagra and record and digitize it in real time. I had made the switch to Shure Axient wireless about a year before I started on The Bikeriders. I cannot express how grateful I was to have their rock-solid technology on my side for this film. There were times in which my receivers would be very far from the transmitters, and either the RX or the TX or both would be in motion on motorcycles or in follow vans. The range that we got with the ADX1 transmitters set to high power of 40mW was not only impressive, but absolutely necessary. Of course, we were wiring actors, but we had another very loud "character" to deal with—the motorcycles. When the "hoard" as I called all the bikes, was riding together, a boom pointed at the group was next to useless. The bikes were so loud and it just sounded muddy and messy. You couldn't pick out individual bikes, and so the hoard lacked interest. It didn't sound as impactful as when you were standing on the road, hearing them in real life. I wanted to record as many separate bikes as possible. As any biker will tell you, each bike has a unique sound, due to how it was built and customized by its owner. I wanted to try and grab those unique sounds, but of course, a day of bike-only recording was out of the question for the schedule. I had to find a way to record the bikes while we were already rolling on other scenes. My solution was to take a Shure ADX1 transmitter and turn on the -12dB pad, as well as set an offset of -5dB. I then used DPA 6061 microphones with the heaviest wind protection we could fit on them. We would use butyl tape (Joe's Sticky Stuff) and mount the transmitter/mic package on the underside of the bike's seat, with the mic "pointed" toward the exhaust (as much as one