Mixing the Wonder Woman Film Score – Masterclass with Alan Meyerson

hi everyone welcome to waves open sessions I'm Cassidy I'm your moderator how's it going today we are hosting a master class with Grammy winner and major Hollywood film score mixer Allen Meyerson Allen's resume a film score mixes reads like a roll call of big-time Hollywood blockbusters including Pirates of the Caribbean Dunkirk x-men Thor Deadpool Thin Red Line gladiator Batman vs. Superman and they keep going in just a minute Allen is going to open up a session from Wonder Woman it's really really cool so hang in there it's coming so here we go sit back and enjoy [Music] [Music] all right welcome back to waves open sessions before I pass this on to Alan who's sitting just over here we got to go through a couple of things right so the first thing I want to go through is make sure you guys have some in ear monitors like this or just headphones whatever you can they are better than your laptop speakers or your desktop please don't do that because Alan's gonna be explaining things through a very wide frequency range and if you can't hear it you're missing out so make sure you get some good studio monitors or in here okay so that's one of the most important things so go ahead and get that done the next thing is we're going to have a question answer session with Alan and those questions of yours will go through the chat right so you won't see them right away but they will be fed to my computer and then I will ask Alan the questions and we will get to as many as we can all right so last thing before we give it over to Alan we have some prizes to give away which is pretty awesome all right so the first one we have is the o2 z mobius 3-d headphone which brings audio file sound to the world of gaming with built in waves NX 3d audio technology pretty awesome all right so at some point during this master class we will be asking a trivia question and if you think you know the answer you're going to send it via the chat all right so if you have the answer type it in the chat don't yell it at the screen it's not gonna do anything all right so the first person to get it right will win these headphones ok so as soon as you know that answer type it in okay and then the team on the other side of the wall here will be looking at that and then they will send me the winner and later on we will announce it so you got to hang in that you got to watch this but you don't want to miss anything with Alan come on all right last thing a couple more two more we have another giveaway which is a sound grid impact server this thing is really cool because sometimes when you take your laptop out to mix it's not enough power right so you need this server to go with you and you can have all the waves plugins that you want on and so you can run a really cool session I know Alan's kind of after one of these things so it's probably a pretty good thing if he's after it all right so the way we're gonna announce that though and how you win that will be on the Facebook page the waves Facebook page and we won't announce that winner on Friday the 22nd okay so that's this Friday all right last thing before we give it over to Alan is if you go on to the live webcast page on waves calm you will see a special discount code of up to $50 you can use it to purchase any waves plug-in or bundle during the next 24 hours only alright so let me recap $50 any plug-in for 24 hours all right so go there and get her done so now we're gonna get on to the good stuff I want to introduce today's master class on subject of secrets of film score mixing with the man Alan Meyerson thanks Cassidy you got it I think everyone needs a Cassidy to take with them wherever they go my chair just went down hey everyone welcome to Santa Monica studio adamite remote control productions good to have you here and it's been been looking forward to this for a long time we've been talking about this and planning this and here we are welcome anyone on Team Meyerson you know who you are welcome to the show glad you're tuning in so we're here in Santa Monica at Studio M which has been my home for about the last eight years although remote control I've been sort of in my home for the last 24 25 years 24 years since 1994 when I did my first project with actually mark man Tina and then Hans and became sort of my refuge my place and then about eight years ago Hans asked me if I wanted to build my own room I had had a studio in my house and you know the way life goes that no longer was an option anymore so Hans offered me this space and gave me the opportunity to build a space the way I wanted it and I built really what for me is the perfect mix room it's a it's a warm place that not only sounds great but is inspiring to be in and nice place to have clients so you know that's something I'm very very happy with and glad to be here enough of that so originally the idea and if you looked at the ads for this we were talking about taking a mock up and showing you what to do with the mock-up but since that happened my dear friend Rupert gregson-williams who was the composer on the film Wonder Woman and I had a conversation and and he said that it would be great and he would be happy to have me use one of the pieces from Wonder Woman to do for this and I called the record label at Water Tower or Jason Lynn who's an awesome guy and they gave me permission to do it so what we have here today is the opening of the movie and I'm gonna grab the piece of paper because I have not pronounced this right once yet the first cut on the soundtrack album Amazon's it's Emma Sierra Cassidy says I did it right I'm gonna take his word for it which is actually a little bit too long to play the whole thing so I thought I would go back about 20 seconds before the section we're going to talk about and just play some of it I picked the section because and I put this piece particularly for a couple of reasons one it's just a beautiful orchestral piece and it's just got this wide soundscape and stuff and it's got percussion that isn't action music but just sort of drives the thing along and I just thought it would be a nice way to show you some of the things I do and to deconstruct it and to just let you in you know under the hood a little bit so let me play some of this for you right now and I'll try not to talk while it's playing [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] alright let's focus on that part of it it's a lot to unpack there so I went to anymore of it it would be kind of hard to get through it so first of all what I think I'll do is I'll take you through some of the orchestral elements of it and then we'll get into the percussion and some of the individual elements the first thing if you look up here at the top of the session there's a tremendous amount of VCs and the reason I do that is in my workflow I'm able to really build different layouts for different things so that I really sort of take the whole technology thing out of it so really my goal when I work is to get out of techno Fink and into art thing and I basically have a layout where I can like look at just all of my orchestral elements or everything else or you know very very simple so that's just sort of the way the architecture of my session goes and then this particular score was recorded in London at air studios by the fantastic Nick Wallach and you know it's although as much as I'd love to record everything sometimes it doesn't work out in this particular case while this score was being done I was also working on Dunkirk so my I was needed here and Nick who I worked with now for 20 years and I we sort of have a shorthand for for how to do things so as usual he did a fantastic job and so basically we have the orchestra has three passes and if I can show you that we have the long strings I'm just going to jump into it a little bit [Music] and then we have I was told not to talk while the music is playing so I'm gonna try to be a good boy and then we have the short strings the motor if you record guys think of it as the hi-hat you know and then we have just a little part here which is a little accent at one point in the song that had a picture reason for being there which is a string effects which is what they call Neal a combination of basses bowing and striking their strings with a with a stick or the back of their bow called : yo which is actually more bowing and then from there we go to the brass which was basically done in one pass [Music] and then we have one other small element of brass which is just a trumpet thing that's a transitional piece for an earlier section so very nice long delay guys happens sometimes this is you know in my world believe it or not and I'm sure some of you do a pretty small pretty small master I think here we have something like 408 tracks I know that sounds crazy but the truth is most of that is eaten up in the fact that each orchestral pass is like 50 to 60 tracks depending on what it is and the way that this is built if I can show you is by the way if anyone has any problems with hearing me or if my microphones not in a good position just you know just chatted in and we'll adjust it so this movie was mixed in at most and when when I did this one Pro Tools hadn't built a seven one at most object yet so basically what we have here is these four sets of tracks are represent this single stem of an orchestral delivery and we have the basic five one left center right left surround right surround in this case there's no subwoofer involved we didn't use an LF e for the orchestra on this and we can talk about that if you want to ask me a question about that I can explain it and then from there we have this track which is called the wide and in Atmos what that means is in in a theater there's actually a dedicated object where which has speakers just on the outside of the left and the right side of the screen it's a single speaker or a single speaker or array in that position and the beauty of that for custom music is when you mic up an orchestra you basically have five microphones across the front and I can take those outside mics and put them to those speakers so I'm taking the image which is on the screen here and I'm able to just expand it out just a little bit and you'd be amazed in the theater how that translates so so I did that and then this guy is the sides which is you know in a theater they would see the speakers on the sides and then this guy are the height speakers the speakers in the ceiling in an atmosphere not in that most room those can be mixed back in to the rest of it so that's the way I build it when I want to do an at most livery it's changed a little bit because the architecture of the way they do the busing has changed but basically that's that's it and what we did in this one and which is what we see for me is so here on the long strings you can see a balance that really lends itself to long orchestral strings you see a lot of room I have these for my sphere which is ambient mics that are hung way high at air Studios which is pretty ambient I can actually even just give you a hint of that [Music] very nice and ambient and those guys actually have an EQ one on them which is just a little bit of a cleaning up of the low-end and then a little bit of the spot mics but not as much as you would think and then so we send those two in aux and that aux becomes the master and on that aux we I put we me I put plugins on it and the first plug-in you're gonna have pretty much on any orchestral aux is the H EQ which basically is giving me a high-pass and the reason I do that is I want to be able to automate out on quiet sections some of the room Rumble because that really when you're in a room like that and you have six sixty five microphones open and the high strings are playing a harmonic or something really really quiet or a single trumpet or something like that you'd be amazed at how much room tone you get so basically what I do is I put the frequency in automation like that and and if I need to clean it up all I do is I've ride that up for the period and I need it and then ride it back down now I can also do a little bit of additionally cueing in this case I ended up popping up a little bit of like 5k not much just to touch just to touch it up a little bit I didn't need to do that on all the other elements because really the most important element you have with them is the main bed the five speakers and everything else sort of supports it and sometimes for the just to be able to keep DSP under control and you have this many tracks you sort of pick your places where you like that so the next thing I do with long strings which I love and you're going to see this plug-in all over any of my mixes is the Cramer master tape why do I like this so much because it does two things really really well it's just got a big open beautiful sound I always use the same preset I always start with mastering the big and open and then I always make the same changes I one of these days I'm actually going to save it as a default but they don't do that stuff that and I set it to about 350 to 500 milliseconds and I just add a little bit of delay just like the I'm gonna just play you how much I add a solo this track I mean you could barely hear it but if I turn it up you'll see what I'm adding right why do I like using this because it's a multi mono mode so what happens is is it's not changing any of the positioning of the orchestra so the only delay that's delaying what's on the left side is on the left side and so on and so forth around so the image stays stable if I was to put just like a general stereo delay everything gets kind of like mixed down to stereo and then redistribute it out so this keeps everything you know I could use the other multi mono delays but this one I like particularly because not only does it work beautifully for a delay but it's just got a beautiful sound and and if i bypass it you'll see that there's nothing wrong with the sound of it and I'm gonna turn off all the other so that all you're hearing is that 5-1 because you're just hearing a stereo anyway [Music] [Music] just gets wider and warmer and more luxurious sounding a little silkier and that's what this plug-in does on almost everything I use this like crazy I you know I can't tell you how much I love it and then after that always on brass and sometimes on strings I use the Jack Qui Qui tech which to me the low end on this pretext my favorite low end for creating large warm low end where I'm just really want to bring up a sea of low end I'm not being very specific in this section of the song it's not a huge deal but it still adds some warmth to it and again this particular plugin just by the nature of the way they developed it just has a big sound it just makes things just sound fuller and you can see here I own it a little bit of 10k just to add a little top mostly because you know there's a screen involved so the speakers are behind the screen and I want to give it just a little bit of top-end for that so [Music] any you can hear how that just opens it up and now if I just play those for you and bypass all these plugins you'll hear what it does [Music] now obviously we're getting a little bit of game but I can sort of compensate for that you'll still hear how much warmer and richer this [Music] you can hear the imaging just gets better the celli get more defined on the right hand side the strings just get a little bit silkier at all it's all good stuff I mean you just get that so my main string passes that then my next pass of of orchestral stuff is the short strings and this is where we have some fun okay this is you know we want to really think of this as just a motor you know and I'm not so worried about like and by the way all these are just my opinion and you know some of these techniques I use or just my techniques it's what I've developed through the years there's not necessarily a right or wrong it works for me and you know your mileage may vary but what I like to do is that just a little bit of harmonic I'm going to use the word distortion but it's not even really Distortion just a little bit of harmonic content to this because what I want to do is just get it a little edgy so that it pops through a little bit so in this case again I have I have the same high frequency thing in this which I probably didn't need in this and then I'm using the Renaissance ass [Music] listen listen to all those great frequencies it's bringing up and they're kind of like front eNOS it's adding it's adding it's taking the whole sword strings and pushing it a little bit forward for me and then again the jack weaker love this I told Jack this he was a happy with me [Music] [Music] so clearly that's giving it a lot more front-end in edge let's jump down to the brass and by the way there is a little bit of pre records in this so there are some synth short strings involved and not that much of the synth long strings and I'll tell you why I do that because when guys tend to write short strings with since they're they're playing on a sample that's a little bit longer than what a human would play it just doesn't really translate to real but if you take it out you lose something because everyone gets used to hearing it and it becomes part of the the culture of the piece of music it becomes part of the texture so I tend to use short strings and it's not just me I think that a lot of people in general for some composers tend to use some of the short strings just to support that sound so if I was to you know just to give you a quick example of that if I was to take out the face hold on hold on everyone just don't do this clear that do that go back to the short strings actually I'm not using short strings in this I take it back it's been a while since I mixed this okay so the brass is a very very simple a lot of the same rules [Music] in this case all I'm really doing is adding some a little bit of top and bottom with the pultec I mean it just sounds so great in the room [Music] so it's just making a tiny bit larger than life you know she's simple enough it's just it's the room the ambience the Atmos mics and then a little bit of the French horn mics and then a brass overall mic and then you know much less of the spot mics and then just a nice little pultec very very simple stuff very very simple stuff same thing with the trumpets hey Allen yeah can I get in it a little question let's do it okay so dort a ask when you're mixing the music do you take into account how the music will be mixed with the Foley and the dialogue absolutely hey do I take thanks for listening thanks for watching and listening um so I have a pretty good version of the Foley and the dialogue and everything to work with and I'm constantly referencing to that I think of the dialogue is my lead vocal if I was mixing a pop record and although I know that they're gonna mix that more later I'm always sort of like keeping that in my mind where it is that it's very very important it becomes more important when we're dealing with low end and if the Foley not the Foley if the sound effects in general have a lot of low end and the music has a lot of low end well which low end is really going to speak because you know low end you can you know sometimes the sound effects might be based on certain frequencies that don't quite match the music and that's a lot of the reason why I'm very very selective about how I use in LFE you know so I tend not to put anything with pitched based material in there no basis no low end of the orchestra basically I'm putting big percussion moments in there or big sense moments in there and stuff that could be static and that the music would suffer I find if it got pulled out because it's very possible on a dub stage it might get pulled out yeah can we do one more let's do as many as you want okay excellent all right let's see there's been a ton of questions about reverbs but we get to that later right so we'll just do you want to touch on that now or totally I mean let's touch on reverb a little bit and then I know if you want to get back doesn't matter when these we have some bullet points but we could blow them off if you guys want so let's do reverb because there are ton of questions that's kind of what are you using and how do you like to use it really right so okay so we're gonna we're gonna discuss reverb a little bit here so in this case there's no everyone sort of knows I'm a big cast a user it's not a waves plugin so we're not going to talk about it that much but the orchestral reverb is usually a bunch of a cast ease and believe it or not eight into that is occasionally a little bit of delay [Music] so sometimes I like to put a little bit of a pre-delay on my reverb and and because I like to have a little bit of the feedback so sometimes it doesn't work for me just use the pre delay that's built into the reverb I tend to use the Kramer again again I can't tell I can't tell you enough how much I love this particular plug-in you'll see it all over my mixes now I'll tell you what reverb I do love for percussion is the mani reverb and we even got into percussion yet but this reverb is just killer I'm just gonna instead of going through the particulars about the percussion now I'm just gonna play you some of the percussion I'm going to start and stop so you can hear the mande verbs a little bit [Music] so the mani verbs since they're stereo I'd make two I copy them and I make two either I make it as a surround reverb or just usually I just take the same send and create slightly different versions of it to the front and the back and you can see that the front in this case has a medium chamber and the back has a large chamber usually for me with percussion I like using the chamber for orchestral elements I like using the hall and occasionally I'll support it with with a plate sound or something like that it varies but but I always start with a chamber sound I just like the quality I think that just comes from being a New Yorker and everyone you know in my world bob clear mountain was the king and he was famous for using bathrooms and hallways and things like that creating sound so I always sort of try to emulate that I always felt in my life that if I could make something sound 50% as good as a bob clear mountain mix or chris lord-alge ii mix I was doing a pretty good job or any of those Titans but so so the mani verb has been great I also do like the I'm not using it in this session because I don't think it was out before when I mixed this but um I like um the new Abbey Road plates a lot these guys and what I like to use these for now is when I have my my main orchestral reverb sometimes I like to have a second reverb in there that sort of fills the gap in there sometimes you see the shorter or longer depending on what I want and a plate reverb works really well for that so these Abbey Road plates has been really great for doing that because I could use I can created a front in the back using two different because they give you four different plates and I can create like a front in the back and use that I mean reverbs a big question um you know a lot of times on percussion I didn't do it on this because this is pretty gentle but when I really want to get the reverb obvious I'll put a little distortion after it so like on this percussion I might use again that renaissance ax I got a lot of plugins where's that rents emeritus so this guy just makes things pop through a little bit more you get some of those more tones out of it [Music] [Music] [Music] so I love slapping that reverb I love putting something in front of it and adding a little bit of feedback that's sort of an old Abbey Road Trek where they would put a tape in front of him then just add a little bit of feedback just to sort of keep things moving along especially on a piece like this which really just has that forward motion you just want to keep that forward motion going all the time how's that for an answer what else you got I'm actually gonna do the trivia question now what's bearing it out all right here we go people so remember I said at the beginning I'd be doing a trivia question that you guys are going to answer via the chat it's now that time so here it goes I'm going to read the question it's going to show up on your screen here we go usually we use panning effects to position elements in the mix however one of Alan's favorite tricks for positioning a sound in the mix relies on a psycho acoustic effect that is achieved with delay rather than panning tools what is that psycho acoustic effect known as go send it in Alan knows you think that he doesn't get that headphones that's for y'all all right so we're not gonna I'm sure somebody's already put in the answer and I'm sure it's right excellent but I'm not going to tell you who you are yet we got to get back to Alan so Alan right now I could I could drag this on forever but I'm gonna I'm gonna try to move on a little bit here let's just talk about the percussion on a global basis and a little bit so we have a bunch of record of live recorded percussion in here we have two bass drums a djembe and a parmesan which I'm not knowledgeable for exactly what that is you percussionists out there please let me know I mean I know what it sounds like but so we have one bass drum which is just supporting the low end which is actually going to the subwoofer in the mix through an and so it's a bunch of mics obviously it's all live had our studios in this case it's the room mics and a couple of spot mics and what I do is I actually go in there and I line up the spot mics - the room mics so that there isn't a double transients so I'm actually pushing I'm aligning all the close mics to the room and what I find that does is first of all when you're in a big room if you you know for the rules kind of go with 1,100 feet per second the way sound travels is you get about a millisecond two foot so if you're 30 feet away then is 30 milliseconds of delay and 30 milliseconds sounds something like this you know and so you end up with two attacks so you don't want that but if you get them lined up nicely if you measure it and get them lined up nicely you just get a better low-end in a more solid low-end so what I tend to do with percussion is I line up the spots to match the room I pick the room night that I want to be the center of my room sound and I move the spots to that level and in this case after that I'm using this new smack attack which is a fantastic plugin and I'm just adding a little bit of additional transient smack to this particular sound so I'm gonna ask you a question in goodness because somebody asked how do you keep control of the low ends when you're dealing with stuff like Tycho's and double basses and all of that low frequency how are you keeping that in check well I decide what's gonna be the main low end so obviously this guy has a nice long low end and he's gonna really sort of if I wanted to have that heard then I have to make room for it in on other instruments so a lot of times what I do and again this piece of music in particular didn't need it that much because it's a slower piece of music and it's just sort of like you know galloping along is I'll use some dynamic EQ to actually take the low frequencies down when they're not necessary on something has sustained low end or I'll really just feature an instrument like this is mine so in this case I haven't added quite as much low end to it you can see here I'm adding about a little bit of 1k and I'm adding some kind of top but I'm not adding low end in this case I did add some low end so I'm letting him speak the low end and you can also see them doing a little bit of cleaning up of the low end too because there's a lot of things that are low in elements and then from there the the gem base don't have quite as much low-end little pleat child almost more for the color just a little bit of the pulse of the ssl just to make it pop and okay well we don't need totally bad and then there's this parmesan more of the same stuff so then when all that's put together that goes out in aux and this is where it gets fun so the answer to the question how do I deal with the low end is I sort of pick what I want to be my low end and I let that speak through a little bit more than the other instruments and that could mean either cutting some of the low and then the other instruments using a little dynamic EQ or really pointing to the low end on that particular instrument than that it could be the case with percussion or it could be the case with synth sounds orchestral elements - moving forward so all of the slow percussion is going through an aux which is using this PSP plugin because this is just a really great sounding plug-in and then the c6 which is sort of just writing the whole kind of package and is just managing see it's a little flat there I'm able to increase the low end a little bit because it's managing that low end when it's um you know when it gets to be too much this is a really great plugin and then I'm adding just a little bit of the our base which is just a fantastic plugin anyone that's worked with me knows that every single time you see in our base for me it's going to be sent at 42 cycles don't ask me why that just works for me and every time I try to change it I closed my eyes and dial it I end up at 42 so that's the magic spot now in addition to that in this I did some parallel work on it so I have another fader here that has the CL a 76 set really for a very quick release in the slow attack in addition to that an SSL compressor and an SSL channel strip and and I'm just getting a nice amount of compression going in there what I'm really looking to do with this is so bring those two stains up you know like really get without using a lot more reverb get a lot more you know more of kind of the room to fill it out and make it sound just larger and if you take it out you know turn off all the reverb here for a second okay everyone enjoying this we we all hang it on chat me if you're bored when I do that so tax without it see it's just bringing all that great sustain up and everything like that it's allowing me to get the attack from the main guy and get some sustained from this guy and that is really um you know a great way to do that and you know I do it with three plugins not any one of them smacking it because I sort of like that again for this particular cute sort of that gentle approach it's a more aggressive cue then I would be using a much more aggressive approaches and maybe multiband EQs and compressors and stuff like that a little bit more aggressively a more aggressive version of the c6 or even the the one I love to put on and what I want to get aggressive is this guy I just used the multi Maximizer just smack the hell out of it but I just play with a lot of the frequencies and sort of find what I want so that's a quick walk through the percussion cool I think we're gonna announce the winner here do a trivia and then we'll talk about the answer all right cool so guys and gals I started the show by saying that you guys were gonna win something so let me read that question one more time for you and remember we're winning the o2 z mobius 3-d headphones with the built-in waves and x3d audio technology right so here's the question one more time usually we use panning effects to position elements in the mix however one of Alan's favorite tricks for positioning a sound in the mix relies on a psycho acoustic effect that is achieved with delay rather than panning tools what is that psycho acoustic effects known as Alan the Haas effect alright that was the answer and Kevin you won but god I got that right yeah you better you think I'm gonna have to start over this is live so that is correct the Haas effects Kevin you won will we'll get a hold of you we're trying to find out your last name because I'm sure there's a couple of Kevin's out there so hang in there everybody stay in tune because now you get to find out what the Haas effect is it's the simplest thing in the world it really is basically the ear when it hears a sound first it assumes that where that sound is coming from is is its original point of listening so if you have any sound and you delay one side of it then you're going to get the you're going to get the impression that that sound is coming from the side without delay so if I give you say this whoops let me give you the other one actually it's a little bit more obvious on this one so that just sort of sounds like it's in the middle of your head and now I'm going to delay one side a little bit and it just pops to the other side no level changes at all now why is that really interesting because say for example think about a hi-hat in a shaker right and how do we get the hi-hat in the shaker to really speak in the mix well one way to do it is to put the hi-hat on one side and shake the other side masking right you know that's the basic concept of masking well the same thing works with this so if I have two sounds that are sort of competing for the same space in the center if I put the Haas effect oriented to the right on one and oriented to the left on the other you'll get that imaging and they kind of clear each other's space so that's without it's just a little small thing and this is with you can hear how that jumps all of a sudden the imaging is wide and open and so the trick with the hosta fact is when you have percussive elements is that you have to keep your delay times really short so you don't have a double attack but when you have non percussive elements like for example I'll show you I have one up here on the gun okay so it looks like I'm still in solo somewhere oh I see okay so the gong is there and they have this guy right so I have the I have the one side without delay on the right and the side on the left with delay so if i bypass this kind of in the center ish it's not bad right not particularly wide now if I do this now you've really get a sense of it being on one side or wider so you can use this for in two ways you can use this to orient something to one side or the other or you can use this effect to just take a image and turn it into a wide image it's one of the very very effective ways of doing that the Haas effect by Alan Myers bamm-bamm nicely done so what do you what else would you like to talk well let's get asked me a couple questions and I'll go back in alright cool so let me get back to the chat here so CCR asked what are some of the EQ tips to bring out the clarity of each section of the orchestra without guessing at it like do you have a specific like woodwinds stay here this stays here is there any sort of formula to it you know I don't look at EQ as the as the first solution for bringing stuff out of an orchestra I'm really looking for balance you know and if you're talking about an organic orchestral recording obviously the first line of offense is organic balance in the room short of that I'm looking at sort of a blend between the room and the spot mics to see which is going to really draw my attention first and and what's going to like sit in the background and that depends obviously on the music at that moment now if you're talking about you know working with a mock-up or using samples and stuff like that then you can be a little bit more specific I find that sampled strings tend to always be a little peaky around 2.5 k that doesn't really matter what the sample is it just seems to bite at that place to me so I usually take a little bit of an edge off of it right there and woodwinds tend to need a little warming up whereas tends to need a little bit of warming up woodwinds tends to need warming up a little bit higher in frequency brass again is you know to talk in waves talk I the pull up weak tech EQ p1 at 100 or 60 if you just brings right you know all the low brass even the French horns which aren't super low but that's sort of that subharmonic you know dirge to it which just sounds so good and Woodlands you know I actually like the SSL for one of my favorite frequencies on the SSL is 800 so I you'll see on my mixes a lot of tiny bit little lots of little tiny bits of 800 on things when there's nothing else competing for that so with mock ups you can you can do it like that also a great secret for mock-ups and orchestral percussion is orchestral stuff is put an EQ before your reverb so that you can you know and start with a little bit of low end rolled off in the reverb add back as you need low end in the reverb you'd be surprised at how little of the low end you need so I always have sort of a high-pass hitting the reverb I the reverb has an EQ too but I always like to go in there sort of knowing that I can tailor the EQ hitting the reverb a little bit you know in pop music sometimes we EQ the output for me I tend to EQ the input and if I want to do something to the output I tend to use either compression or harmonics and you find that just keeps control of things when you're EQ so it doesn't allow that low end to slip into well that's nice you know if you really want to make a mess in the low end you'd make you know that mess happens in the reverb faster than it happens in anything else so if you can sort of keep that low end clear in the reverb and just use it where you need it then you'd be surprised at how little you need it and you'll be surprised how fast it makes clears up and I guess that piggyback on that is make sure yes Sebastian asks like if you're if you're working with a track that you know like this one has over a hundred and you sit down for the first time how do you just not freak out like what's your how do you get yourself in the zone when you're staring at so many tracks um well the first thing I do is I listen to the to the mock-up I listen to the rest mix and I listen all the way through without even thinking about what my thing is doing and I look at what the intention is of the because you know in film music there's it takes so long to get something approved especially on a movie like this there's so many moving parts there's a director there's the producers there's the editor so the first thing you have to do is have absolute respect for the demo you know and you can't like fundamentally change what the music is you just have to make a bigger better version of the same basic fundamental balance so I listen through to that all the way through and I go oh okay well there's the ethnic woods take over here and the percussion needs to ride sort of quietly and then build up and then you know go back down there so I already have a point of view and then I just start going in and I start macro managing okay so the first thing I do is I look for a balance of the orchestra you know if I have multiple passes I'd look for my short string sound I'm gonna add a little bit of harmonics to it I'm gonna make a little edgy just alone now it's edgy but it's a little too bright so I'm going to deal with that the main orchestra I want to have a I want to have a full sound and how long does my reverb want to be and I build those things so now my orchestra is on two faders I don't think about anything else other than that unless I need at some point and this is for this type of production and you know there's like a movie like Hotel Transylvania which I just finished was all orchestral so it's a different set of rules but so now I I'm no longer thinking of a hundred and twenty tracks right there I'm thinking of two tracks you know and and I get it down to that so first time macro manager and then I get it down to micromanaging it at the end basically my mixes is 8 faders it's it's live orchestra dead orchestra live percussion dead percussion solos since whatever and that's my mix and that's where I do the most of my mix and then when I get to a spot where I go I'd only need more trumpets here I need more French won't hear I just go to that spot I find what I need and I push it up but it's it's funny honestly when you do it long enough it's not as intimidating as you think it is it just sort of becomes what you do you know it enables you to do so much more that I don't think of it as intimidating I think of it as opportunities to do more interesting stuff and it seemed like I just want to reiterate a point that I picked out of that which is let the instrument tell you it needs to be there you know like you kind of get everything in don't overthink just get it rolling and then and then you notice wait I haven't heard the French horn in the last five minutes right and then start to see why and deliver that and but and when I do that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to the ref mix and I'm gonna make sure that that French one was meant to be heard there right you know it's always it's I'm rest mixed crazy with this stuff because I just have to make sure you know I can give you a little do a little quick comparison here it's obviously there's a level difference but so this is this is the ref mix this is all these elements in the reference [Music] now [Music] so I do this so often sometimes I break this button um I swear I sit there on was that your solo button [Music] [Music] so I look at that I go hey I did a pretty good job you know it's the the essence of it's still there but it's a lot clearer it's not kind of muddy in that mid-range anymore like it was on the demo or it's not even a demo that's got all the live perk and everything in it but in the mix it's it's all that sort of been now dealt with and it's much much wider it's it's got a little bit more dynamics and the top-end and stuff but the fundamentals of it are still basically the same and dude is do you find that that's typically what they want to follow the ref and you're typically pretty good or like I said they in this particular style of music when it's the action superhero stuff and there's been so many people involved in making the decision as to what this course should sound like that if you if you go too far away from that you're going to get yourself in trouble so you just kind of stay kind of you know within that realm now if you do something that's like an orchestral like a you know I did Mark Mothersbaugh and I just we did two added Thor and I did the Hotel Transylvania fully orchestral and none of those rules apply because now it's just a performance and now I'm going in there and I'm trying to like detail out the flute section and detail the celli in this section and basically you're doing tiny little rides you know the just like push things but almost all of it is up to the conductor to sort of get it in the room and and the EQ you're doing is you're just doing a soft sort of like you know the H EQ is great for this because it's got great colors you know if I I bring up a little bit of a tight band with a three K and then a super wide shelf I'm from like lower from two K so it's just sort of helping the movement stuff and then I might add like at 80 a shelf and then a bit of a high-pass down at 25 or something like that okay yeah cool well we have you know 10 or 15 more minutes so I want to make sure that you say everything that you want to about the track and if you haven't now's a good time well I have you know I just wanted to show you some of the inserts that I have going on on some of the none a lot of the fun stuff that I have going on in here we have so then this didn't have live choir unfortunately so [Music] but what I used was um a little bit of the aural exciter which sort of just gave it a little bit of just a tiny subtle amount of air you know I could have done it with EQ but it's sort of adding frequencies that wouldn't be there if I just eacute it so I kind of like this plugin for doing stuff with sample choir and stuff like that and then just a tiny bit of delay you know just a little eighth note slap just to spread it out I take it out to sort of it doesn't change much that's actually going through to reverb a shorter reverb too because it's not live it's not in a big nice studio so it's going through something that is a little bit shorter you know it's actually sets a large but it's not that long it's about three less than two three seconds with my slap and then at the same time it's going to a reverb here that's about four seconds even sometimes longer yeah the back one is it six seconds eight seconds and I don't even know and then I did this a while back so that's kind of cool I showed you the Haas effect stuff which was kind of cool this melody stuff here this ethnic woodwind [Music] just a little simple compression just to hold it together a little bit this mani delay kids get this mani delay because you got reverb you got distortion you have a little bit of delay and a little bit of a phaser it's just gorgeous and then this I love this plug-in for this type of music I don't get to use it that much but I was trying to explain it yesterday to to Cassidy and what this thing does is it sort of adds up a teen of the thing it's like when I want to have something that just sounds like it's coming out of something you know like it's coming out of a turntable or it's coming out of a radio it's something that just feels like a performance as opposed to just like I'm sitting in a room I love the way this does it I use it all the time on different kinds of stuff [Music] just rounds off all of those harshness frequencies and stuff like that just I mean I turn off it hasn't no ice built into it all out film music in my opinion they should just turn off all the noise on all the plugins and then you can turn it on if you want to but if they should all start with it off sometimes I add a little Wow and flutter [Music] just a great plugin let me see what else I wanted to show you guys here I don't think this is anything necessary does little pan er I use a lot of eighth note panning we've looked at I think this santoor has a little havi effect on it [Music] so there you go so there's a perfect example coming right at the center and why did I put them on the right why not I just you know the center gets so bogged down and in film you got to remember that the dialogue is in the center a lot of the sound effects are in the center so you really need to let the center have its own space and sort of push the even if you pushing it out 10 or 20 degrees so that [Music] you know if if I could be proud of something in my mixes is I feel like I have a lot of nice open imaging you know not that the other great mixers don't also everyone does but that's sort of how I do it is I try to be a little bit clearer about that so sometimes I just want to again in the process of keeping movement you know this this is actually originally sounding like this which actually is pretty cool but I know it sounds a little bit over-the-top when you listen to it in solo but when you listen to it in the track it really [Music] yeah it's not so bad huh I was saying to Alan yesterday that when you put that machine and you heard the left and the right hand layer which really started to make it sound really nice opposed to it just being like this you felt the handsome right um again like even string effects these little : yos I used a little bit in the smack attack just to give it a little bit more kind of front-end you know so I'm thinking about I you know a old pop mixer you know I I cut my teeth on R&B records in New York and on a lot of British pop bands like new order and Brian Surrey and you know I learned how to pretty quickly how to make a nice transient the aggressive drum sound so I think that what I've done through the years with some scores I've tried to bring some of those elements into film score so that they're not rude and and you know out of context but so to find places where I could sort of like maybe do a tiny little dot of a signature on certain sound so like things like that adding a little bit of transients to a to a short string thing that wouldn't necessarily pop through I get it to pop through a little bit more you know to my taste it's again these are just my things that I like and and not you know other people who go why would you do that you know I do it because to me it sounds good sure so I'm gonna be a little cheeky and getting my question in earlier and I asked Alan does he ever use distortion on orchestral instruments which typically would be like less so Alan's gonna tell us right so so in this case I showed you on the short strings I used the Renaissance ax and it was pretty gentle but you know on a really um you know aggressive action cue I'll use you know good amount good amount to compression but sometimes I'll get that compression by overdriving an la-2a a little bit than Chris Lord la-2a or stuff like that like I'll get it you know in the Fairchild turning up the input turning down the output and stuff like that it doesn't you know you can get nice harmonic content without using necessarily a distortion plug-in yeah I remember when I was a young assistant I used to work for this guy ed Sprague who unfortunately passed away and we did a glace lick album in the beginning there was this cello and they just wanted it to sound like a roar you know so yeah this guy changed my whole life in terms of how I saw how to make sound it took all the rules he said you know the rules now I'm like yep it was for our mouths okay now you know throw him out and he just took an la-2a and he just took the input went all the way up and this the thing was just just a massive distortion in I would and then he turned down the output to match the level and it was like what you can do that it's like you can do anything you want you know you just just do it don't be afraid of it it's not gonna bite you just don't erase anything that's I made that mistake a few times too but he definitely helped to learn to walk before you absolutely you know I I have a pretty good fundamental knowledge and my King and recording techniques I started you know an analog tape I started 1/16 track just when 24 tracker just replaced 16 track in 1978 and I feel like I bring those things in front of me but and if you don't and if you don't have that don't worry about it it doesn't matter if you ever used a real Le Toux way just know what this la-2a sounds like and that becomes your tool it's not so important you know as that's my set of things that I have you can be 22 years old and just a brilliant mixer and you have your own set of things and all of these things there's I think waste has a dbx 160 now which just sounds amazing on piano you know just you know it doesn't matter what the box sound if you'd never use the box you just you know you got a you know rule number one just take your own time stick on a set of headphones and just experiment just try stuff day in and day out just try stuff and find what you like and don't be afraid to like it and do you think that's why you have I mean one you need them for your career but do you have such a expansive plug in list so that you can try different things and you know maybe one EQ that you use last time it's not necessarily what you use this time yeah I mean I try everything i I literally every plugin that comes out I try you know when I find the ones I like and find the ones that I don't need and and but what I do a lot of projects as I said when I start a project I sort of decide that this is going to be an SSL mix or this is going to be an API mix or something like that and I just use I start with the fundamentals of one EQ and then I expand upon it as necessary for like if I want a bigger low-end I'll pull up the peak tech and if I want a more detailed mid-range cut I'll pull up the heq and stuff like that I'll just work on you know asking as necessary but I still might use the SS I might just put the SSL module you know in Pro Tools you can like have a preset so when I just hit the EQ button it pops up and I might make that an SSL for one day or am I try something completely different I might try the mani tone shaper which I love mani tone shape is awesome all right well let me see if there's any we're good we're at our our mark but the chat is blowing up everybody this is happy and says the sound is great so let's go with jason's question what is your approach to creating an LFE send for the orchestra these days and what care do you take to check its face coherency when folding down into your stereo mix oh I take a lot of care in it and to that end I tend not to use it in my stereo mix unless it's really adding something that's you know unique that I'm not getting out of my my main speakers in which case I will spend a lot of time worrying about there's even a plug in waves has a plug-in that sort of phase aligns LFE for you so you can do it that way like I said I tend to shy away from putting tonal stuff in the LFE only because the one weak link and it's much better now than it used to be but the we historically the one weak link was theatrical react Racal playback was subwoofers you know and so you were never really sure how your L if he was going to playback so my thought was always well if it doesn't play back my make sure it sound good and if it does play back my mixture it still sound good so I was always very careful so like you'll always whenever the orchestra has a grand Casa tour for for those a big bass drum grande casa big bass drum I always have a mic specifically going to the LFA a single night that goes to the LFA and it's always there and now you just put that in the LFE i process it a little bit I put the our bass on it at 42 and and that goes to the LFE every now and then if I like I feel like it's just an orchestral moment and I know I'm not going to be fighting big sound effects yes I'll put a little bit of the orcish a tiny bit of the bases or something or the orchestra and the LFE but I'm super careful with that stuff and just again I'm so scared I'm so gun shy with that stuff because I've heard mixes get destroyed because people rely too much on the yellow fever the bottom set of everything chair I did a mix once with with a with a composer and I won't mention him who did his own mix and then sent it to me and and sort of everything from 80 down just was in the LFA you know and I said to him you know I don't think this is gonna playback very well you know because you're listening on near-field speakers to big subwoofers in small other speakers and it's just a ton of energy down there and so we tried it on the theater and it was a mess so I redirected and I've done this before where I've helped with other mixes and I've redirected some of that energy back into the main speakers so that the élysée has a less important role and and so I'm super careful with the LFE nice alright so I'm gonna ask you a question that I asked you yesterday because I think it's really important which is we all answer to somebody right so you're answering to somebody who's your boss right so sometimes the boss will come in and say well that's Alan that's great but the strings need to be silkier can I get the strings silkier every max right so can you can you so I just had a project where we just no matter what I did he heard it he had this idea in his head that wasn't based in reality and but how would you translate silk well let me tell you the best story about the bad so years ago I'm doing I'm doing Black Hawk Down and I just finished doing a little movie called time machine with but it was a little tiny movie and it was a good movie it was nice and a beautiful score and everything like that and I'm literally I'm finished making time machine and I go to mix this big eight-minute suite in Black Hawk Down I spent two and a half days on a it sounds awesome and all the players you know hate are this Pereira is the guitar player and all these guys coming in they're listening to it and they're loving it and I'm like and I'm feeling like you know my bulging muscles and I mean Hans walks in he listens to about six bars and he hits top it he looks at me goes darling you're mixing the wrong movie and I'm like I thought about I was like he's right you know like turn off the reverb nice stop making things sound good you know just realize you're you're making music for a war right you know and I got it so sometimes that happens you know you just you you you you start from the wrong point of view and then you get lost so silky so so how do i define silky you know it's like I define silky because I start looking at you and I start silky for Rupak gregson-williams is different than silky for henry jackman right and I have to figure out what silky means for him for Henry it might mean harmonic content for Rupert it might be it might mean one DB of 6k you know and you start learning everyone's language you know you know everyone has their own way of expressing their needs as a composer or as a decision maker on a film and you just your job as a mixer is to interpret what they mean when they say silky or warmer or more dense or this or that you know and and sometimes you know it's convene to commit like one person can say I need it more expansive and they think that would mean they want more reverb another person could say I need a more expansive it means that they want less reverb and more room right so you just have to figure it out you just gotta you know one thing I think that someone who's been doing this for a while gets good at start learning how to how to decode people people yeah yeah and it's a service job I mean this is this is as much a service job as any other service job it's you know it's just you know cool I think this my experience is some people forget that right they think they can just keep their head in the desk and keep mixing and that is important but you have to be able to deal with large personalities and be able to translate that well and honestly my job is to is to diffuse my personality you know and say it's my I let my personality come through as much as it's necessary for the project when I'm in the right place you know and and you know sometimes I don't you know it's I'm not a hundred percent I don't nail that all the time but that's when I'm at when I'm the best at my job it should be seamless I can tell you one thing for sure if I get too attached if I get too emotionally attached to a mix it's gonna get thrown out you know and and if it gets thrown out I don't want to sit there and brood you know because then what job am i doing my job is to make the guy sitting next to me go that's amazing right you know or not go that's amazing or go that's my music yeah well let me just make sure I didn't miss anything it doesn't look like it um is there anything my peeps out there I well unfortunately they they get filtered before they get to me but I'm sure I'm sure they're out there so um I guess that's it for me I mean question why is it see yeah they're saying this about it so okay you good yeah I mean if I could just give you a message out there to young people in doing this and even you know older people doing this is is you know really just experiment and and let go of your let go of your preconceived notions of what things are supposed to be and just take a look at things from the other side and give yourself the opportunity to try things that you wouldn't try before and if you try a hundred things and 98 of them suck and you get two things out of it that later on in your career could become your signature of things you never know I mean it's just allow yourself the opportunity to experiment you know plugins this the world we live in today I love we were out today I mean I grew up in the analog world on an analog console and it was fantastic and I loved it but no and there's nothing back then that compared to the ability Robert Rodriguez great director once and came up with an expression to me he said working at the speed of thought mmm you know and today you can do that you can go I want to try a pitch down reverb with a tail that drops off yeah and I can do it in three clicks of a mouse you know all it's a matter of coming up with an idea and trying it and being willing to you know come up with a crappy idea you know and so that's my message to anyone that's trying to do this for the first time or that's experience data is it's don't limit yourself to what you think is the way to do it try things that that you think might be outside of the box and see what you come up with yeah you don't know you know what the plate for anyone exactly yeah or play for your best friend of your girl or guy you know and see what they say well Allen sometime I mean I'm Mike drop so I have to say I'm so grateful to be here because I know there's you know thousands of people watching that would love to be in my shoes so I'm very grateful to be here with the fact that there are thousands of people watching yeah we won't think about that we're done here Allen we made it so thank you very much for that taking time out of your schedule for me and waves and you know I wish you the best on the rest of your career man because it's been amazing thanks guys for your service so to wrap this up this has been a waves open session master class with mr. Allen Meyerson so please join us on Facebook join us on YouTube subscribe to all of those give us thumbs up tell Allen how great he's been tell him what you liked about it and we may have a part two to this you never know so I'm Cassidy I've been your moderator for waves open sessions thank you very much [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Waves Audio

Views: 128,666

Keywords: waves audio, alan meyerson, mixing wonder woman, mixing masterclass, waves open sessions, mixing, waves masterclass, mixing film music, mixing film score, film mixing, mixing film, film mixing masterclass, score mixing, film score mixing

Id: h9jZqn5lnw4

Length: 74min 49sec (4489 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 23 2018