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www.postmagazine.com 39 POST SEPTEMBER 2014 For example, Maggie Gyllenhaal's char- acter, Clara, plays a theremin and an odd assortment of homemade instruments. She also samples voices, which are sometimes meant to mock the newest band member Jon (played by Domhnall Gleeson). Director Abrahamson asked Fanagan to push those vocal samples even further. Fanagan used a Line 6 DL4 guitar loop pedal to sample, loop, cut, and process the vocals. He says, "The great thing about the Line 6 DL4 for this type of process was that I had to work 'live.' I fed the production tracks out of Pro Tools 10 into the DL4 and then manipulated the pitch and time. You can very easily flip samples forward or backwards, slow it down to half speed, or speed it up to double speed just using the pedal. I could do a bunch of process- ing with the voice and it still felt it was within the realm of what the band would be able to do on-the-fly." Fanagan also used the Line 6 DL4 on a scene later in the film when a keyboard blows up on stage while the band is playing a show. The keyboard sparks, then catches fire. Fanagan sampled explosions and haywire keyboard sounds into the DL4 delay loop and manipulated them. The DL4's output was played through a PA in a venue and they re-recorded the sounds. "It felt like we were creating sounds you might experience had you been in that venue with the band at the time," says Fanagan. "All those things are really important to what we were trying to express in the film. It was great to be able to play those big sounds through a PA and re-record them and see how it felt." The Line 6 DL4 list price is $349 (but can easily be found for $249). Accord- ing to Line 6, the DL4 is a Delay Modeler Pedal, able to digitally recreate popular traditional and modern delay effect boxes. From vintage analog tape delays and echo effects to modern delay and loop-based effects, it offers 24-bit processing and 1/4- inch stereo L/R outputs. Fanagan easily incorporated the DL4 into his Pro Tools workflow. He says, "It was a very simple line in/line out. I ran a cable with a 1/4-inch jack from Pro Tools into the pedal and then out of the pedal back into Pro Tools." Fanagan likes the DL4's ability to overdub, and its options for changing the filtering, pitch, and direction of the sound on each layer, helping him to easily cre- ate a wall of sound. By playing with the samples 'live,' he could tailor them to the action, similar to what a Foley artist can do when designing a prop effect. "It's a very malleable piece of gear. If you like what it does, it does it very quickly for you. The only way you get to use a pedal like that on a film is when you're working with a director who is open to that kind of experimentation. What was beautiful on Frank was that we were given the time and space to experiment and play." THE FARM GROUP Award-winning re-recording mixer Nick Fry at The Farm Group (www.farmgroup. tv) in London, has spent 23 years in audio post, mixing dramatic TV series, documentary series, and TV documenta- ry films. The Farm Group is a full-service post production company, with several locations in London and one studio in LA. They boast a total of 12 mix stages and four audio-edit suites spread across their studio locations. The iZotope RX 3 audio repair and res- toration toolkit is very popular amongst the mixers at The Farm Group. The RX3 Advanced, retailing at $1,199, includes a variety of tools for cleaning and re- pairing: Dialogue Denoiser for cleaning dialogue in realtime; Denoise to reduce background noise; Dereverb to remove unwanted reverb; Deconstruct to sepa- rate audio signals into two components for individual processing; Spectral Repair to visually isolate and remove unwanted sounds; Declip to rebuild overloaded and Ardmore Sound's Steve Fanagan (right) recently sound designed and co- mixed the film, Frank (far left), relying on a Line 6 DL4 guitar loop pedal. Nick Fry (left) of The Farm Group loves the iZotope RX 3 audio repair and restoration toolkit for projects like A Young Doctor's Note- book (below). FAVORITE AUDIO TOOLS CONTINUED ON PG 46