What were some of the scores that you heard when you were young that made an impression?
I grew up in the time of Star Wars — fantastic music and fantastic performances — and I remember one of my older sisters being into The Beatles. I listened a lot with headphones, and those albums were the most incredible things that I'd ever heard. I somehow figured out what an engineer was, and I wanted to be one.
How did you end up in this field?
I did the usual "engineer" thing of playing in bands, as well as messing around with synthesizers and tape loops in high school. I was taking private music lessons, but I was also into theater lighting design. I went to university for photography, filmmaking, video art, and sound. After some feature film work, I ended up getting a job at a studio in Toronto called Manta Sound, which is sadly no longer in existence. It was a world-class, five-studio facility that had a big recording room for film scores. I remember the first day, just being a fly on the wall with a massive film score being recorded. It felt super intense. There was all of this preparation and tension; so many people, deadlines, complexity, and tape machines. I thought it was crazy, but I wanted to do it. There were six staff engineers at Manta who were all great. One guy was mostly a rock guy, and one was mostly an orchestral film guy. Each engineer had their favorite sessions to do, but they each worked in all of the different rooms and were versatile engineers. That really opened up my eyes to what was possible. I was there for about five years.
In what capacity?
As an assistant engineer. When they hired any assistant engineer, they would say, "Look, to be clear, there's absolutely no chance of you becoming a full-time staff engineer in less than six years." It was very old school. But there was a very healthy spirit of competition between the six assistant engineers to see who could make these multiple tape machines lock up faster, who could have the most detailed notes, and who could be the most organized. I was a third engineer for six months or so. They took their training very, very seriously. That was really the beginning of everything; of getting a taste for surround sound, different styles of music, and what hardware did. Sometimes guys would stay after work to listen to subtle sonic differences between different hardware, such as compressors, for example. Manta was where I learned a lot. Eventually I became the right-hand man of Gary Gray, the staff engineer who was doing most of the film scoring. I worked with many of the top composers, including Marvin Hamlisch, John Debney, Angelo Badalamenti, and Howard Shore. For a period of time there was quite a bit of scoring happening in Toronto, because the exchange rate was favorable. I left Manta when it dropped to only one film project a month. That wasn't enough for me. I did TV commercials, rock albums, and everything in between, but I'd really had enough of the TV commercials. You learn to be very fast and very good with the clients, but in the long run I knew that my heart was in film scoring. I quit and backpacked around Asia for a few months. I ended up in England and was doing some engineering there. I then landed a very cool opportunity with the Banff Center for the Arts [in Canada]. I was engineering there and also doing some teaching. I ended up doing quite a lot of recording sessions that were also simultaneous "live to 2-track" mixes. That's a great discipline. You really learn about reverb and how different speakers work in different rooms. You live and die by your decisions, but there's a great feeling in being done by dinnertime. Someone might do some editing after the fact, but it's basically done.
You can't change it.
Sometimes I'd do live to 2-track, but also run a multitrack so I could go back and do a remix in order to compare and contrast. Living in the Canadian Rockies was fantastic; it's rarified air. It's a very special place. The arrangement with Banff is that no individual can hold that position for longer than two years in order to keep it fresh. I ended up in L.A. after that, and had a great opportunity to work at Ocean Way Studios in Hollywood. I'd just turned 30. I had been a first engineer for a while, so what I did might've seemed like a step backwards in taking an assistant engineer position. The payoff was that I was working with incredible engineers, as well as learning a ton while working with Eric Clapton, Porno for Pyros, Michael Jackson, and film projects with Ry Cooder. There were insane hours and weekly all-nighters, but it was Ocean Way. After about a year there I really wanted to get back to the film world. The film world tends to be a little bit less crazy. You might start work at eight in the morning, as opposed to eight at night. I got a job at 20th Century Fox's Newman Scoring Stage in large part because Ry Cooder recommended me, without my knowledge! He made a phone call, and I didn't even know. For Ry, it's all about the music. I have a big respect for Ry. Their Newman Scoring Stage that had been under renovation for many years. That was the ideal job for me. I hustled and got into the film union, which wasn't easy; but I had enough film experience to get in, and I became their in-house scoring recordist. I took care of all the teams that came in for these super complex film-scoring sessions. It was insane complexity, with 100-piece orchestras and multiple rigs of every sort that you could imagine. I landed the job at 20th Century Fox and I was there for seven years, until I went freelance. I worked on 150 movies, or so, at Fox. I was working with great people and I learned a lot. There were some very intense hours, and there was pressure, but that gave me the confidence to strike out on my own about ten years ago.
Was it difficult to come from Canada to live and work in the States?
Right from day one, 19 years ago, I was able to get a work visa, as I brought a very specialized set of skills to America. That led to Permanent Residency and now I'm an American citizen, so I guess I'm staying. [laughs]
You were then available as a freelance recording engineer and mixer for film scores?
That's right. For film, TV, and the occasional album. I do a lot of video games too, as well as the occasional film trailer project.
We listened earlier to a cue from the movie Elysium. It's intense! Who's the composer on that?
His name is Ryan Amon. I recorded the strings, brass, and some solo instruments at Abbey Road and then I mixed all 101 cues here at my studio, Clearstory Sound. It's all dense and complicated. It had to be mixed in a way so that it just dropped into the movie. They've got to deal with dialogue and sound effects. I have to mix so they can just push up the fader and the score sounds awesome.
You recorded in Abbey Road Studio One?
Yeah. 62 strings, 15 brass, and a few solo instruments. Everything else you hear in that film score — including all the big cinematic drums — are virtual.
What's it like mixing in surround?
It's a lot of fun, because it's a big canvas to mix onto. I'm always very carefully going back and forth to check my fold down from my 5.1 score mix to my stereo mix. The stereo mix is for the score album, but it is also used by the composers to get future jobs. A movie will also make its journey to airplanes, DVDs, and laptops. The score also has to sound good in stereo. That's one of the many reasons that I'm very, very cautious about making sure that my stereo fold down sounds great from the beginning.
So you have to know that it's not phasing out in a weird way.
Yeah, absolutely. There are many techniques to make a 5.1 score sound great when folded down to stereo. One key concern is the level of the center channel. Often I'll adjust the fold down a little bit from cue to cue, just to make sure that the phantom center sounds right. Then there's the surround and the subs — they all have to be considered. On a big film, like Elysium, on the widest cues I was delivering thirteen 5.1 stem mixes of music, plus the full 5.1 score mix.
For each cue?
Yeah, for each cue. Not all of them have 13 stem mixes. The layout on that score delivery was live strings 1 and 2, live brass 1 and 2, and then big drums 1 and 2, little drums 1 and 2, pads, vocals, miscellaneous A, and miscellaneous B. In this movie they did very little tweaking to my score mix. What I handed off to them was very much what they used. I just wanted to give them the control if they wanted to turn up one thing a little bit in the final dub.
I'd imagine that they also might want to drop some of the elements down in volume for a second for impact in the final film mix.
That's right. I was in touch with the music and dialogue re-recording mixer, Christopher Scarabosio, who was great to work with. He told me that one of the things they did in places for an effect was to roll all the top end out of the score for a moment, because Matt Damon had an explosion near his head. It's like that whole underwater thing — everything goes really dark for a second and then comes back. They did that a couple of times.
It's all about the drama when you're supporting a movie.
Exactly. People might think that music mixing in surround is easy, like, "Just put the delays in the rears and put some reverb in," but there's a lot more to it. One thing we have to avoid is what's called the "exit sign effect." You wouldn't want to put a really active snare drum part only in the rear surround speakers, for example. If you're watching the movie, it's like, "Wait, what's that?"
You look back at the exit sign?
Yeah, exactly. We don't want to take people out of the movie.
What kind of techniques do you use during mastering?
I've got a whole lot of great analog gear, including a Crane Song STC-8, Neve Portico II, A-Design EM-PEQs, API 5500 EQ, a Kush Clariphonic, and the [Dramastic Audio] Obsidian 500. It's like an SSL bus compressor, except better.
It looks like one too.
There's an A-Designs Hammer, the [Dangerous] BAX EQ, and the Dangerous Liaison. I love that box. It's great.
It lets you set up different signal chains and route them. It's stereo, right?
Yeah, it's stereo; but it has memory, so you can take patches in and out, as well as reverse them to see what sounds better. You can store it then. It can be switched instantaneously.
I only see a little patchbay here. How do you route all this gear?
I knew that question was coming. Who likes patchbays and cables? They're unreliable, over time, because of oxidation and such. I have only a few analog things on the one patch bay, and those things tend to get printed back into the Pro Tools session. One entire rack of gear is all on the Liaison. I've also got three of the TC Electronics System 6000 [audio processing units].
And three Bricasti Design M7 reverbs too?
Yeah, I've got some great reverb going on. My interfaces are 80 channels of Avid HD I/O, which is hidden out of the way. Almost all of the outboard hardware is hardwired to the 80 channels of I/O.
You can patch into them through Pro Tools?
Exactly, through the I/O setup, using inserts in Pro Tools. That works really well. It means I don't have to use a patchbay when I recall a session.
With film soundtracks, when you're recording a live score, what sample rate are you at?
Sometimes 48 kHz, sometimes 96 kHz. I deliver 48 kHz for film and TV s with almost no exception.
24-bit, I assume?
Absolutely.
You mentioned that you do a lot of video game soundtracks.
Definitely. They have hours of music, and they are produced to a very, very high standard. I've worked on Call of Duty: Black Ops II and I do a lot of work with Blizzard Entertainment, who produce World of Warcraft.
Do you ever play the games?
I play some games, but I don't have the time these days.
They're selling great.
