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Crisp and clean dialogue is key to rockin’ audio for television shows. By Ron DiCesare To understand the storyline of any televi- sion series, the viewer needs to hear and understand the dialogue at all times. Great sounding dialogue starts with a clean recording on the set or on loca- tion.Therefore, it can be said that with most TV series, the audio post production starts right on the set. SPECTACLE: ELVIS COSTELLO WITH… Sue Pelino, VP of audio post production/senior audio mixer at NYC’s Creative Group (www.creative- group.tv), has a distinctive audio trait. For Sundance Channel’s Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… she knows how to make the viewer feel as though they are right in the audience.To do this, she draws on her musical background.“I have been playing guitar since I was four years old,” she explains.“As much as I am a re-record- ing mixer and an audio post mixer, I consider myself a guitarist first and foremost. So getting to work on this show is really a thrill.Working with Elvis Costello and Alex Coletti, who is a dear friend of mine and the pro- ducer of the show, is a dream session.” Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… is recorded live at the Apollo Theater in New York City by Music Mix Mobile’s Jay Vicari and John Harris. “After each episode is taped, the songs — the musical perfor- mances only, get mixed by Jay Vicari in 5.1,” says Pelino. “At the Apollo, Jay records all the individual mics to Pro Tools for each episode. He also provides me with the production hard drives, which is where everything is recorded, including all of the iso-mics for the inter- views. Once Jay is finished with the music mixes, he gives me 5.1 stems that are usually split out as the band, lead vocals, background vocals and audience. “From there, I import all of the tracks recorded from the interviews with Elvis and all of his guests,” continues Pelino.“For about half the shows on Sea- son 2 we used lavs, and the other half we used hand- held mics.We found we liked the sound of the hand- helds better. I import all of the eight audience mics and I will also add the iso-mics from the acoustic gui- tars because Elvis and his guests tend to noodle dur- ing the interviews or play and sing a few bars on the acoustic guitar.” After all of the various imports, Pelino’s assistant, Rebecca Chandler, with whom she works very closely on the show, loads in the picture reference.“Most of the time, that is an HDSR, and we load it in from the tape. She also imports the OMF from the Avid editor. The video editor uses mostly the live line-mix from the show rather than individual tracks.That’s because we totally re-conform the show from the separate mics and the music mix stems.To do that, we look at the timecode from the line-mix on the OMF and then re-conform all the audio to those numbers. Once that is done, then I finally have one big session to mix.” Surprisingly, the audio conform is not as lengthy of a process as it might sound.“It only takes about four hours to build the one-hour show,” says Pelino.“The show is mainly music and it isn’t really chopped up that much. It has a very nice flow to it, but it’s not a The final mix for Spectacle:Elvis Costello With... (opposite page) takes place at Creative Group. typical TV show with thousands of edits. Not to men- tion that Jay and I have worked so well together in the past and we discussed the EQs and mics ahead of time. So, when I mix the show, I am matching the sound of the audience, the voices, the panning and so forth to Jay’s music mix.” All of the live musical performances on Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… are not altered, overdubbed or fixed during the audio post production process.This is an important distinction that helps keep the show feel- ing live and maintaining an intimate feel.“I am very happy to say that the show is done live and there are zero fixes to their live performances,” she reports.“We do not do any auto-tune or correcting, it’s all done as a live performance.We never do any overdubs or cor- rections or anything after the fact. I mean, look at the www.postmagazine.com April 2010 • Post 33