Creative Cribs: John Paesano Composer of Marvel's 'Daredevil'

today's cribs has an epic feel a man who is redefining what it is to go Big John Paisano is here thanks so much for having us this is a wonderful space thank you how long have you been here just over almost two years now right I used to be much further away from home right away as you know driving around in Los Angeles take a lot I used to drive an hour and 40 minutes to work every day and I said I had two kids and I was like the hell with that yeah I'm getting closer to home so I move towards the water and Here I am now here some and when building a space like this what is your kind of I imagine you've worked at several different facilities and so what is your kind of okay now I'm not gonna do that you know what is your kind of criteria well I wanted you know the big thing for me was comfortable right you know I wanted to feel like I didn't want it to feel like it was a music studio I wanted it to feel like it was a living room like it was a room in a home where it was warm where you could sit down and put your feet up and feel Carter I mean you know what we do we work with directors and producers yeah I want them to come in I want them to feel comfortable I want them to be able to tell me how great my music 90% of the time they don't give me a bunch of notes but I just wanted to be I wanted it to be set up for comfort you know I wanted it to be more of a more of a viewing room than a studio you know sometimes Studios can feel really cold you know mixing boards you know speakers and I didn't want to be so centralized around that stuff I wanted to you know more about furniture and tables and wood and books and piano you know and so that was kind of the goal of it it's not when I studios you walk in you feel like your ears are being sucked through your nostrils so nobody got it's got an ambulance to it yeah I mean all of that was what kind of went into making it I mean you know the other thing too I wanted it to you know I do a lot of I work in a lot of different genres whether you know whether it's you know video games feature films television whether you know episodic network stuff too now the subscription based on Netflix they're all different they all require different workflows they require different amounts of people that are working on the team for them all the schedules are all over the place so I needed to also have a space that I could grow a little bit have a couple other you know writers and assistants with me here as well so the way that we the way that I created this based on will I'll take you through it is when I when I created it and built it I didn't want to dedicate space for a recording space but I still do reduce some recording here so the way that I did it was I built a lot of writing rooms but I made each room modular meaning that we can record it here but have a control room be in the other room and we use the TVs and cameras to communicate and each room with the players so at any moment I could turn this space into a live room and then go over in Braden's room and record from in there and communicate with players in here and vice-versa and vice-versa so everything's wired into this central machine room in here right and from here we can patch and do whatever we need to do the first thing I notice is is just a solitary pair of speakers yeah do you work in 5.1 do you my god but I actually have the rear oh yes you do and I have a sub I used to have a center and then I got the ATC's and I was like I'm not buying another center channel to throw a dialogue through or just a reverb return into my center so I do I work in quad ok and I work in quad mostly because of you guys creating all these great sample libraries with all the mic positions and everything so I couldn't get away with just doing stereo I really don't mind working in stereo in the mock-up phase sometimes it's a little bit with the amount with the amount of stem sometimes that I have to deliver and even now we're delivering stems too even for our mock-ups we're delivering stems to the editing Bay for a lot of directors that I work with you know younger guys they aren't afraid to work with 5:1 stems or quad stems and they want to be able to have control over stuff in their avid and so sometimes they say oh can you deliver us you know 10 stems or whatever now so we we we kind of have to do it sometimes so sometimes working in stereo makes it a little bit more jawoll quad is is great because it's your stereo at the front you don't get in the way of dialogue nothing in the LFE and then you've got yes the only thing I do miss about my center channel is that I used to love throwing my dialogue through of course you know it just gets it out especially when I'm doing play backs with directors and all these things whether it's quad or a 5-1 or the technical side of all this stuff is so important when it comes to you know getting all these things happening you mentioned you love to work with musicians and under most circumstances will work with live musicians do you tend to completely swap out your your sample content with what the live players play or is it a mixture of the both I use everything right I know I mean you know so what do samples bring and what do the musician's bring in your mind well samples bring control you know the the such control with samples that control and choices you know the great thing about MIDI is that I'm able to program in a line and I'm able to swap out a bunch of different feels a bunch of different tones textures ideas mic positions playing styles techniques but the MIDI still all stays the same I might have to adjust some volume curves and some things like that but it gives me so many choices to you know to put up against that programming and and put up against picture and see what's working you know recording a player is linear you know you record them and what your record is is what you get sure you can have them try different things and do dip but time is money and we're on budgets and you only have a certain amount of time to grab what you need to get so to be able to have that time to really experiment with the samples is huge I mean that's that's one aspect of it you know there's there's obviously that that side of it the other side that samples bring on there's a size two samples that I think is really hard to attain that players can give you there's you know especially like when it comes to things like brass and winds and and things of that nature choir those are physical instruments to play you know the human voice or blowing through a bunch of and would and you know these are physical things that have to happen so when if I want if I'm doing a huge brass melody and it's got a huge you know five second sustain at the end of it and a Jamaa so and you know it might be unrealistic but hey that's the sound I'm going for and and that's that's what it is the orchestra to me is just another color in my palette it's not the final color for me especially the scores I write you know I'm I kind of came up as a traditional writer but this is this is what I grew up writing on which all this stuff I mean when I was when I came into this business it was early 2000s late 90s made early to think right around 2000 I got to LA and the sample libraries I was going i when i was submitting rios on projects i was going up against guys who had budgets and they were recording live music and i had to figure out a way to make my mock-ups sound as good as some of the live stuff and that was the only way I could try to compete with people so I just worked really really hard I'm trying to figure out a way to make all these libraries sound good why do you so still enjoy working with the live players what does that bring oh the queue I mean the human our the the human interpretation of music I mean I you know I can give a string part to three different players and they all have their own interpretation of how that part plays the weather how they're leaning into an attack or how they're releasing it how do they you know how do they their vibrato they're it's very personal you know you don't you know when we do you we try to capture I think as much as that as we kind of with sample libraries but every day every time a player RIA tacks a note for instance on a scoring session it's just a little bit different and all those little kind of imperfections if you will you know add to a performance you know and I think that type of stuff is really hard to figure out a way to have a computer we trigger it's you know who knows what the future brings but let's hope that we never get to a point where that gets replaced no I see sampling is an interface yeah I see there's different you may something you can do the impossible but for me I don't know I think with a lot of students Peter there's a lot of an analysis of the sound the theory the technique but I think people shouldn't be analyzing the sound they should be analyzing how it makes you feel yeah and that's that's indescribable you know yes they said I've used someone who said samples will put the hairs up on your your arms yeah life players will make you cry that being the difference for yeah no it's true I mean that's not that's a great analogy it's a it's it's almost indescribable I think what humans bring to music the one thing it's just different you know I mean it really is it's it's it's a magical experience I mean it's every single time I do a scoring session it's like you know I grew up playing sports a lot and I remember you know before a big football game you would you would have this energy and this excitement and that's how I feel before scoring sessions and it would never get old you know and you always it's um it's it truly is a magical experience I mean especially being a film composer I mean I love being on the stage when that director finally gets to hear that score being played for the first time it's one of the greatest parts of being a film composer is watching that kind of experience and it's all because of the players you know it's all because of the players kind of bringing all that stuff to life but when I'm writing with samples I am writing with the intention that this stuff's not going away we're just gonna make it better and I think you mentioned about the kind of the Fear Factor with directors you know you can't make these things sound too different you know when it hits the dubbings theater it can send them into a blind oh yeah there you go greatest this is what I signed off on yeah and the beauty of it is - and I think - good mock-ups bring safety to the studios like if I brought a studio in here and I played them you know kind of a shitty mock-up and my name wasn't Hans which is not and Han says incredible mock us he's probably bad example to use but don't Williams yeah like if I my name doesn't carry the same weight obviously as some of those guys so I have to piss has to sound great because that makes them feel good and that allows them to give me a big chunk of money to go and record a live session so it all kind of works with together you know and that's the other things that samples do they allow they allow the the director the producers the studio executives to hear what's gonna happen on that scoring stage and that's huge I mean that's invaluable because that makes the scoring session very enjoyable for to me because when I go to that scoring session nothing Crazy's gonna pop up they aren't all this I'm gonna hear a cue and go whoa like what is going on here they've already heard it they've already given me notes on it they've already seen it to picture the everyone goes to that stage and there's this kind of atmospheric it's just light and fun and unless the film's in major problem you know trouble ORS I am and I've been on those too but I mean for the most part when we show up on that stage it's everyone's having a good time and and everyone kind of knows what they're getting so I really enjoy I really take good care of my mock-ups for that reason as well because when I get to that stage I want to know that they're happy and they know what they're getting and the you know it's all about the client and making and I think a lot of people don't realize that about this business it's it's an art but at the same time - it is a business you know these people are making movies they're making lots of money with them there's they're spending lots of money on them they're selling them you know the the soundtracks of business I mean everything about it has a monetary component to it and it truly is a business and and we just got to make sure that that process is also kind of looked after and taken care of so well should we talk about your process what do you you've got two screens here that is it two different computers or okay so three screens right back in the day I'll give you my kind of rundown here because I've recently changed up my whole entire workflow I used to use a multi system where I would have one dog rig then I would have a bunch of sample rigs you know yeah gigas or in then it was took they turned into Vienna's and I would kind of have you know one perception the orchestra and them you know they would just get bigger and bigger as more libraries came out and as computers got stronger and stronger I started realizing I just got to the point where I hated aya my whole thing was more computers more headaches one would go down I'd have to shut down my session figure out the problem troubleshoot it and you know how it is in our business time is money and we're always under crazy deadlines and you know you're down for an hour it could be brutal so I got really tired of I kept trying to find a way to shrink my system and you also find that it may renders you totally reliant on here being here you have to be here with all of your setup you can't tell yeah anywhere else that's definitely part of it I mean that was that was part of it although there is a component of me to that I do I don't have like a like a room in my house I like being here when I'm here I'm working when I'm at home yeah I'm at home I kind of have this like you know strict division between church and state so to speak so so what I did is I started researching what's our biggest limitation RAM right the reason why we need all these computers cuz it's all about voice count and loading things into RAM and with the invention of solid-state drives and and fiber and all this stuff the drive situation became less of an issue then it all became about RAM so I started looking into these computers that could load mass amounts of RAM in them these HP workstations called Z stations z84 TS you could load up to 2 terabytes around whoa into a computer now these computers are meant for you know doing high floating-point computation stuff in the oil industry running satellites doing all these they weren't really made for music but I wanted to figure out a way how do I get all of these samples into one system and so I looked into these computers and I talked to some people over at HP and I said have you know have you guys been using any of this stuff in the I actually first noticed them I do I do a show for DreamWorks How to Train Your Dragon it's for them yes and I noticed that'll add that DreamWorks all these computers they were using all these HP computers and all their animation departments now I was like what are these Z stations and so I looked into him and I and I found out about him and yeah they were these computers and you could that they were workstation class computers servers basically but yeah so you could load they run on these xeon processors and you could just load a ton of ram into them and they're all ECC equipment err correcting equipment because like when you're running satellites you can't have computers just crashing you know so they're very stable computers now you know a software might crash but the computer never goes down I mean this I've had my computer running now I think for like two years it hasn't even froze up on me it's just been solid it's just been up and running and a matter of fact I think a lot of times that's how they suggest you run them so I got these computers I loaded them up with RAM and I think I have around you know 600 gigs of ram in them or something and I can load 2 terabytes if I want it's expensive and the cool thing is at least the computer like you would a car or expensive computers but you can likely some like you would like a three-year lease like you would on an automobile or something and I that's how I started so I moved everything internal so my whole entire pallet now is all internal one computer I open up Cubase and everything's there for me and I'll show you don't start off with my template like this but like you can see all my libraries are all loaded and so what I do is I keep them loaded like this but instead of having everything activated I deactivate all the tracks I don't open my session and everything's just loading forever it would take like 15 minutes to open the template if I had yeah you know that much stuff loading then that's one of the downsides of having the upside to it is everything on it everything is on its own track so if I wanted to take a giant you know Valhalla reverb and throw it on my French horns yeah I can do it and it doesn't affect my French horn bus you know I mean so having that you know having that control over every single track separate is huge for me the big thing for me and I'm sure that many people haven't experienced this again going through that little dance that we've got to do with directors is when you're doing run throughs with these slave systems yeah is if you don't have the MIDI information that you pull up a queue and it doesn't sound like how you saved it down yeah with it being internal it comes up identical all the time I mean that and I take that for granted now but that was one of the biggest that was the other thing too because there's nothing worse than ripping up the key like that playing it back and strings are really loud it drives me crazy and I got to a point where I just start printing everything before them cuz you can put it in Pro Tools but yeah I mean you can you confuse confidence now to do all that but having that separation is one of the other thing that's really great so the way that I normally start off on my template now and this is a cool little feature of Cubase I'm logic might have this note to you I can remember because I used to be a logic guy and I switched over to Cubase a couple years ago what was the reason for to see that was one of them I mean that's that's I switched actually while I was on Mac verse I'm like I am constantly switching you switch I mean I I love technology I'm always looking for shortcuts I'm always looking to see who's you know what's a Pro Tools has retrospective recording now oh I wonder if we can record in Pro Tools now you know I mean like I'm I'm Kai and it drives my assistants crazy you know they think I'm a nut bag and because of nice we're going to repo I'm the guy who like an update comes out and I do it in the middle of the road yeah yeah so I'm brave so but normally when I start normally when I start off my sessions I do it like this nothing I used to work in these giant templates and what would happen is I found that I would always come in and I would always go to my mutes and oh yeah my foot Tando I would just make sense shapes I would do the same thing over and over again and now when I'm like this it forces me to look at a scene and go like well what it what should I do here and like what do I hear you know I mean beef and you do this long enough you develop muscle memory to just go to the same stuff and go to the same sound and go to the end now I found that now my orchestral palate is always pretty straightforward that's why I don't have things in my template like evos and like I those are things that are experimental to me that the orchestra is almost now like the last thing I think of when I start writing stuff I'm always thinking of like I'm just fair patches or you know enigma patches just like any crazy sound or library or thing that is gonna like give me some inspiration to start a sequence and then the orchestra usually starts making its way in as now sometimes I start out for the orchestra depending on what the film is or what the score is but I like starting with a blank palette because it kind of forces me into this creative space so I'm interested so you're running everything internally in your in Cubase I do slave my video there's a great a really cool program called video slave okay that I use and I used to run a separate Pro Tools rig over here and all my and I used to use the system where all my channels would run into Pro Tools and Pro Tools would kind of act as a hardware mixer yeah but these days now with the way computers are and now that you can run Pro Tools native and all this stuff I just when I'm done in Cubase what the cue I just export all my tracks and then bring them into a Pro Tools session and deliver them so I don't I don't do like the live bounce in real time thing anymore in hosting my video so I just spend MIDI timecode to this program it's called video slave okay it's a really cool program you can you can have like I could have a hundred different videos in here okay and depending on what your timecode is it will switch automatically the videos so like I don't have to like if I open up a new session and it says some cue that's in real - it will automatically go to that real amazing and then when you you're working you've done say one in ten the kind of bleeds into one in 11 do you put one in ten in there so you can hear it or you can yeah you can do that or else I'll bring it into here you know I mean like I'll either bring it into Cubase or whatever you know if I'm trying to figure out if there's like some sort of handshake that needs to happen I'll do I mean it's all kind of fluid it all depends on you know is it easier over here is he I really this is mostly just for picture I do run my dialog and like visual like sound oh sorry sound effects and temp track through here and you have control over that sup and you can mute and unmute the other really cool thing about this program is you can create streamers and hit points so if I wanted to create like let's say I had a hit right here something that I wanted to put a streamer on and I want I know that it's gonna go right there and I want to last for five seconds I can put it there and so now like when it's you know when it's when it's playing a long hair do you have a preferred reverb that you use for orchestral right now I'm using a lot of the exponential audio internal stuff the biggest reason why is because I was I used to use Hardware reverbs but because we're doing a lot of stem printouts I need to open up a lot of them / stems so I started using a lot of internal and the exponential Phoenix verb is when I use when the R to R kind of my two reverbs choice if I had endless amounts of if I was like IO and I would have you know Bert Kassie's lined up and lexicons and I still fit but like I said we don't really mix here so I leave all that expense to my mixers so they can they can spend all the money on that sub I don't need to so yeah so for the most part I'm just using internal I think that's something that's nice about this room is it's not kind of rolling with tech you know it's yeah it's just it feels like a writing space was time I really you just don't need as much now then you used to back in the day you needed so much stuff and now with native doing this thing it's so nice what they could make remember you said you know the osc stuff it all like I just all the touchscreen stuff it's like and now that the libraries are all kind of going into this world it's so nice to have all these like little knobs and it's just very clean yeah I'm a big clean person but also you know the difficulty I have with all of my synths every day is that you look at it and you go I've got too much choice so I'm just I stand up but I think what's nice about again you're talking about this liquid process this guy's Martin or might not be on your desk next year yeah is it's like I'm gonna use this I wanted one mono and I wonder one poly you know and like I wanted one polyphonic synth one monophonic sense I might get other ones but I might never have more than two up yeah it's kind of like my breaking point it's interesting the sub 37 I'm really good things about that it's great it's great and they have a cool it has a really cool interface for it that kind of interfaces with it from the sequencer so it's kind of like it's vintage but at the same time - you have some you know recall on these things is always the most difficult thing working you get a director over here and you spend all day doing this thing and he says oh it's great but can we tweet this and then before you know it you're trying to figure out how the hell are you recreated so in our world now if you're doing like an album or stuff these things are much more friendly to use but in our world it's you know we're at the whim of it's not about what we want for these movies it's all about what you know six or seven other people want so we constantly have to I always tell people I'm like well you know I'm a cabinet maker people come in and they tell me what type of cabinet they want and what color they wanted and what type of hardware they want on it and we build it for him and we'd be rich it and yeah and we try to say you might want this color but this definitely goes way better with your wall color the recall abilities ik is a key factor cuz it's not just okay well you just print it and that's fine yeah because you know 109 one and ten one M 11 they might remove cut out one yeah ten and one I know 9 1 M 11 or a semitone apart yeah yeah yeah I mean the the Novation I just I mean it's very powerful I mean this this one can sound like thirty different sense I mean it's really it's really powerful it sounds incredible and it's polyphonic you know I mean having a polyphonic synth you know a piece of hardware is great also latest from Oxford whatever that means yes it really is I mean it does sound amazing though it really check that up yeah it's one of their it's when it's one innovations newer ones so and it's they're they're all USB which is nice so they kind of have they kind of blend into this world I had a profit last year it was almost like two vintage I'm like I couldn't even like figure out a way to like work it into my workflow it was just like take too much time for me to deal with it yeah yeah I look at guys like Conor like junkie and something like watch these guys work it's just I'm just not from that era you know what I mean so I kind of these are a little bit more friendly to me through Wow so then like so basically what we did here is all the rooms kind of are all wired into this room and it's so funny now because we do we do can you imagine like a machine room from like 15 years ago it would be like with all the console I mean this is kind of it it's like a couple here's my computer you know it's like one computer you know it's you know 600 gigs of ram in it but it's you just don't need a lot anymore but like yeah everything kind of is coming in through rj45 cables and patch Bay and then what we want is we have these floor boxes that connect with ELQ O's and every single one of the rooms so at any moment like I said we could take Braden's room could be used as a recording space we could record players in here be in my room on during the recording session here in communicating and vice-versa if we wanted to you know use my room instead we could and then there's actually a third room over here that's also wired in as well so it kind of gives us as modular you know capabilities of being able to not really have a dedicated recording space but still allows us to kind of have some flexibility when it comes with that stuff because at the end of the day it's all out kind of maximizing for writing I had the goal when we set out the belt the place was never really to make it a pure recording facility okay yeah and then and then we have like a third room over here this is Roger so I should shut rocha I'm Christian yeah so this is my dream so this is a third room and then again same kind of setup with the alcohol and even though we could record in here we never would because Roger probably wouldn't let us I'm just Rogers an avid rock climber every time and then we'll come in it will be climbing on the side of his wall over here so yeah I sold it just another third room another writing room they're all kind of Braden's actually we're not come to think of it we're all PC based yeah yeah but there was a point where where Roger was the only PC base guy in here and now we're you actually have all gone to the dark side so yeah so but but all the rooms are more or less kind of wrapped because of each other we all kind of use the same setup same template same DAW and then we just have our common area it's so lovely yeah but a really nice setup

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 41,515

Rating: 4.9308176 out of 5

Keywords: Netflix, Daredevil, Marvel, Maze Runner, Composer, Playstation, Detroit: Become Human

Id: hHDPTx5iq_A

Length: 28min 52sec (1732 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 17 2018