Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/756621
24 During the pre-production phase, I contacted the Post Editor, Jenny Barak, to determine what they wanted. Although the live records on the pilot episode had been done as full multitrack recordings, Post used an eight-track sub mix to capture the essence of the performances and greatly speed up the mix-down process, and this is what they wanted me to deliver. With the time constraints of television being what they are, they felt they could trust me to give them the elements in a partially mixed format. This was fun as I have more than twenty years of ex- perience mixing more than four hundred top live- touring bands, starting back in the '70s with War and Earth, Wind & Fire. My concept with the sub drum mixes was to get a fat sound with plenty of low-end, presence on the snare and air on the cymbal. Essen- tially, to target different frequency bands with each instrument so the Re-recording Mixer could still manipulate the separate instruments by frequency ranges. I also panned everything to different degrees, which facilitated the separation. At the recent Mix magazine MPSE CAS event at Sony, I had Re-record- ing Mixers come up to me after our Music Playback Panel to tell me that is often what they will do with summed tracks, which was very cool to find out. Gary Raymond back in the day on Rock Star I did the drums as a stereo sub mix and all the vocals and solo instruments as iso tracks dry. Some of the bands had very large track counts, so in some cases, I provided guitar and keyboard sub mixes as well. We also had multitrack iso's on everything, so Post was able to mix efficiently and still have complete control over levels and effects on vocals and key instruments. The entire recording we did was the onstage concert performances. As Jeff and Donovan explained, we de- cided to have all the offstage "acoustic" performances recorded by them with conventional boom micro- phone techniques. The only crossover was that we had Don Coufal with his boom to record the room sound during the stage performances so Post had some to play with. For dailies, we fed production the stereo mix that also went to the house speakers. I had about sixty hours of prep time before we started shooting as there were many aesthetic decisions re- garding the look of the equipment. I had provided all the dress and practical concert sound equipment for Almost Famous as I have a lot of Pro Sound gear from my concert-touring days. It was decided that the look would be contemporary, so that dictated flown arrays with digital boards. However, the Art Department took liberties based on aesthetics.