Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535806
I had no ambitions to be involved in sound at all whatsoever, and still find it surprising that I mix anything, to be honest with you. And it wasn't really until, funnily enough, when I was in bands and with my dad. I was aware of sound because he had such profound hearing loss, and I was his ears. And I was aware of what frequencies did. And my first, sort of sound experience was working with INXS when I was like 23 or 24. They asked me to master their greatest hits album. I went with mastering engineer Tony Cousins at Metropolis. He was great because he showed what 400 Hz and 300 Hz did, and that sort of stuff. I found that quite interesting because I'm sort of science-based. And it wasn't until Cirque du Soleil The Beatles LOVE project which chopped up Beatles tapes—which people thought was disgraceful at the time—I had to mix that because no one would mix it. No one was allowed to hear it. So I really didn't know about anything and I sat in a room on my own and did that. I sort of fell into it. I didn't really think what I did was any good. People then liked it, and so that's how it developed. I'm consistently surprised that people actually like what I do. I didn't go, "Boom, here's the mix," you know? Sometimes I listen to other people's stuff, and I hear stuff that I've produced that someone else has mixed, and I go, "Oh, I wouldn't have done that," you know? I'll tell you, I had an interesting experience. I got really badly concussed skiing last year, and I went to see, I think it was the Let It Be film. I sat there, and I couldn't remember doing it, I was so concussed. And I watched and went, "Oh, this guy's really good. I wonder who did this?" Because I forgot doing it! It was out of my mind, basically. And it turned out it was me that did it. It's the only time I've ever enjoyed anything I've done by being banged on the head! (Laughs) Because now you're listening with a normal headspace, and not in your analytical headspace. My wife hates when I watch things with her because I'll point out things that bother me. Sorry, no, no, I never do that. I switch off completely. With Sonos, if I'm tuning a speaker—which is quite hard, especially if I'm doing an array system—I have to go into this weird sort of scientific space in my brain where I'm just listening to frequencies, but I can completely switch off. I am brilliant at switching off. (Laughs) Had you collaborated with director David Tedeschi before? I did a film called Living in the Material World, which is a George Harrison documentary that Scorsese directed. David was the editor on it. We mixed that with Tom Fleischman in New York. It was the day of 5.1, not Atmos, and I'd mix everything before anyone came in the room. I wasn't delivering mixes to the sound stage. And with Beatles '64, you were sending your mixes to Harbor? We are giving Atmos downmixes to Josh Berger at Harbor. The full atmosphere is there, then the mixes go into the film. I know you've spoken at length about your work with Park Road Post and the de-mixing technology. Can you explain it? This came from actually doing dialogue. Emil is a dialogue editor, and then we said, okay, how can we separate instruments? We developed the technology with Park Road Post Production, starting with [the Atmos remixes for] Revolver, and then applying to various things. I did a video recently using an analogy of cake. You can de-mix stuff, but you can't find stuff that isn't there. So even on the live stuff, sometimes the vocals are too loud, there's no drums at all. Because the way compression works is, it just kills everything. With the de-mix, you can dig in a bit more, but it isn't really that addictive. So I'm dealing with the raw material. But I think it can give me more of an immersive sense of what it's like to be there. That's the thing, and what's interesting about this is that if the footage was super high def, it would probably sound terrible, but it's not. The footage suits it as well. Giles Martin