Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535880
74 M PS E . O R G set. I have an office near set, but I don't actually go on set all the time. Every once in a while, like once per season or something there'd be something where they'd say, "Wow, this is gonna be your problem soon. So, you might want to come and see what we're giving to you." So, I really did work closely with picture editorial quite a bit. In editorial with the Carol Burnett scene, she'd be performing live and then there's a cutaway to the dressing room, and then they cut back to her performing. I remember having to do that in-between dressing room edit many times, because every time they recut that scene, I had to make the song work in the dressing room and back again. We couldn't show it to anybody without that working, so I remember recutting that many times. DB: After you've done the hard work of tempo mapping, like an entire scene, and then they go in and cut it or start dropping frames or start changing shots, how do you adjust? AK: Oh yeah. That's the job. A music editor's best friend is the Pitch 'n' Time plug-in. Though I do most of it by hand, that reshaping. That's why I feel that one of the most useful job skills as an editor is the willingness to revise. Because editing is all about doing it over and over and over again. You can't just say, "Well, they recut the picture" and get stuck with a cue that doesn't work anymore. There's always a way to change the edit and you just have to do it again. DB: The "searching for a cab scene" really stands out because it ends on such a button. Were you just pushing and pulling a couple of BPM's here and there, or making minor or major edits? The whole scene was very frenetic yet felt rhythmically consistent. AK: I did have to do a lot because I just remember at the mix them deciding they wanted to move the whole song. [groans/laughs] Yeah. So all those things that I planned with the music just weren't in the same places anymore. Also, this time they'd told me that they didn't care about hearing everything they were saying to the cab drivers and I thought, "that's so weird, 'cause they always want to hear everything." And of course, when we got to the mix, they were like, "I can't hear what they're saying." [laughs] So that had to be changed. And then when we moved everything, it messed up the line. "Our daughter's gonna be on television!" I really don't remember exactly how I put that line back in the clear, but I did do a lot of very, very tiny edits to make things speed up so that you couldn't tell I did anything. Also, it was often very hard to get them to decide on songs that play in the background. So, when we had to change those songs, I often had to bring four or five choices to the mix and Ron had to mix them all in, to present to the showrunners. So sometimes we were basically using the mix for music auditioning. DB: That takes us to Ron and the mix. RB: So, the editors have been doing their work, and they finally start feeding it to me. I'll lay out generally what's in my mix session. Sara would start giving me about 10 minutes of dialogue at a time. As soon as she got done with something, she'd send it to me, and I'd start to get it together. Sara and I have been together for a long time doing this, so we have a shorthand of arranging the tracks. Like all the "club" or stand-up scenes are on one set of tracks. The performance mic had its own kind of world that I had to put it through to make it sound like it was coming out of a microphone and coming out of a speaker system. Mathew's right, we did get audio from the stage mic that was used on set but we didn't always use it because it's not as crystal clear as the lav that was on her. So the lav would get processed to give it that sound. Sara delivered her dialogue edit to me, which she'd checkerboard from scene to scene to scene. I had four auxes so I could send the dialogue through four different chains. So, every time I'd go to a different scene, I could do a different reverb on it, do a different ending for it, basically do whatever I needed to do for any particular part of the dialogue. I'm kind of a lazy guy when it comes to ADR. [laughs] ADR came to me as its own tracks, and I'd take it all because I'd potentially have to try all of them. If they wanted to hear six versions? I'd have them ready. And I'd build them into my dialogue track. I didn't treat them as their own separate thing, which was one of the reasons that I think it integrated so well. We'd only use what we needed of the ADR. Sometimes it was only the last word in a phrase because sometimes they did swallow their final words. Then Ruth would give me the general walla, the basic bed but also the shout-outs or call-outs. You might see a character that looks like they're actually talking, and Ruth would figure out what they were saying, or at least close to what they're saying and it looks like it's