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42 Post • April 2014 www.postmagazine.com Supernatural Sound under their belts, there are certain sounds they don't need to discuss; they just know what to do. For example, since the pilot, they've used loop group and actors' voices to add human vocals to the sound design. "It gives you a really eerie and unusual sound and a sense of movement you don't get any other way," Lawshé explains. "We have a really talented group of voice actors who do effects for us." Lawshé will even perform sounds himself. When they wanted slowed-down breathing of a dog that shape shifts into a person, Lawshé recorded his breathing for that for an entire epi- sode. "I know dogs really well, so I could basically put the sound in the cen- ter of my chest and give a big throaty kind of pant to the dog," he admits. Lawshé and Meyer keep a library of all the custom sounds they've created for Supernatural. They can quickly find and reuse signature sounds. "When we have a vam- pire, it has a certain type of hiss that's more ani- malistic, sort of like a cat. When we have a were- wolf, I've actually used the sound of my dog for some of the growls, as well as for the invisible hell hounds on the show," says Lawshé. Another recurring sound is a bizarre, throaty growl that happens every time there is a high level demon. "It sounds almost electronic, but it's actually made from a parrot, which is pretty weird," notes Lawshé. One audio tool Lawshé couldn't live without on this show is a portable recorder. He's constantly collecting sounds from the world around him. The werewolf growls are a good example. Using a por table recorder, Lawshé was able to put a mic inches away from his dog's throat as she was pulling on a chew toy. The recorded sound was huge, Lawshé says. "One time we took baseball bats to a pumpkin after Halloween, because you never know when you just might need the sound of good cracks and a big smack. That wound up being a sweetener on top of this monster that was breaking its way through a wall in an episode of Supernatural." Lawshé uses several different portable recorders, but his favorites include the Roland Edirol R-1 and the new R-09HR. Lawshé even travels with them, recently taking the R-09HR to Australia. He particularly likes the gate and compressor on the recorders. "I can set the gate and compressor, put the record- er inside a trash can, and hit that with a ham- mer and the sound would not distort. It just folds over like analog tape would," he notes. Lawshé and Meyer often talk about sounds as their elemental form of fire, water, earth or air. "We get into these philosophical discussions when we're spotting the show. Like, this is a fire but it's for a demon, but does the demon actually burn? Well, it burns but it's not consumed," says Lawshé. They use wind elements for when creatures appear and disappear. They'll use a big gust of wind when someone is thrown across the room. For the breath of the hell hounds, they dou- ble the sound of wind with a horse or a rhinoceros breathing. At times, Lawshé and Meyer will choose physical sounds, like clicks or impacts, to highlight a supernatural event. For example, when a demon's eyes turn black, you hear a mechanical click-clack sound. "You hear that every time their eyes flash between black and normal. It gives you a sense that something is not quite right. If you heard that when you are looking at somebody, you'd freak out," says Lawshé. To give realistic sounds a sci-fi twist, Law- shé uses plug-ins like Serato's Pitch 'n Time, and the INA-GRM plug-in bundle from GRM Tools. Meyer also uses Native Instruments' Kontakt as a sequencer to layer sounds on top of each other. After he tweaks the sounds in Kontakt, Meyer records them back into Pro Tools. Lawshé notes that creating sounds using Kontakt keeps them from being stuck multichannels deep in Pro Tools. "It also allows us to have the flexibility of delivering, in some cases, effects with the 5.1 already set. We can plug in the 5.1 part of the sequence, and have several discrete channels for the mixers to dial around the room as they see fit, to work around the music and dialogue," says Lawshé. Designing for a supernatural series isn't always about what sounds you put in. Some- times, it's about what sounds to take out. When dealing with ghosts, should there be footsteps? For certain "dead" characters, like Bobby Singer, who Lawshé describes as a very earthy guy who wears a trucker cap and weighs about 250lbs, it's ok to hear him walk. "It's not cool if it's a spirit moving across the room, because that's more ethereal," Lawshé notes. Episode 14 this season fea- tures Kevin Tran, a ghost stuck between the living world and the afterlife. As Kevin and his mother are walking up the stairs at the end, there is only the sound of his mother's foot- steps. "When the footsteps are there on the production track, sometimes we just have to cut them out in sound editorial. We have enough rabid fans of the show who would be getting back to us saying, 'Wait a minute — ghosts don't have footsteps.' We have these esoteric conversations, that might go a third of the spotting session, on what can happen, what doesn't happen, and oh, by the way, did we do this before?" says Lawshé. Another important consideration is how the sound design plays against the music. Lawshé and Meyer go through each episode scene by scene with the composer. There are two composers on Supernatural: Jay Gruska, who worked with Lawshé on the series Lois & Clark, and Christopher Lennertz. Both composers have a great shorthand with Lawshé. He says, "We will look at each other and say, 'You go high and I'll go low,' back-and- forth to really create something visceral that affects you right in the chest all the way up to the head. You're not quite sure what's music and what's effects and what part we're doing together." Lawshé likes to add effects to the LFE track when a scene is supposed to be scary. He uses a rumble ahead of the action to cre- ate a mounting tension. "The rumble will come up not only in level but also some- Search, Preview, Download! • Copyright clear / NO re-titled music • Use in Unlimited Productions • NO Account Required • Waveform + Metatag Searching • Special Licensing for Film & TV Royalty Free Music You'll Be Proud to Use! CSSMusic.com 800-468-6874 Royalty Free Music You'll Be Proud to Use! Post Ad-2-7-14_Layout 1 2/11/14 10:55 AM Page 1 continued on page 50 Tattersall Sound & Picture helps create a Victorian- era mood for the horror series, Penny Dreadful.