Matt Blake Audio

A few years ago, whilst studying for my A Levels, I was plagued with an electronics course. As you can most likely tell by my less than enthusiastic tone, it wasn’t my favourite subject. I loathed electronics lessons and my teacher knew it, sorry Tim! (Tim was my tutor)

While my distaste for the subject was clear at school, I have to say it does come in handy in my live and studio work. Every single session I do something isn’t working, and having a detailed knowledge of circuits and the physics of electronics allows me to approach the problems from a different angle than most of my peers and get the problem fixed quickly. Recently I was working at a show where the band had travelled over from the USA, when they arrived I noticed a case labelled “PEDAL BOARD A” that was genuinely larger than most of the amps for that evening, and a box filled with plug adaptors. I knew that this was going to cause problems as the different frequencies for the AC power (50Hz in the USA and 60Hz in the UK) may have created a magnetic hum field, coupled with the fact that enormous pedal boards run from power leads never work first time and almost always encounter noise, batteries don’t hum kids. 

I didn’t wait around to find out if there was a “pedal board B”, I proceeded to test the pedals with an amplifier. Naturally there was a buzz on the signal that was far too intrusive and that wouldn’t do at all, as the musician rather aggressively pointed out. Another problem, which was brought to our attention with a very loud profanity from the stage, was a grounding issue somewhere in the pedal chain or in the guitar... OR in the amplifier, we still don’t know. This grounding issue meant that there was a broken circuit made up of the singer, the singers guitar, PEDAL BOARD A and a Fender blues jr. When the singer bridged the circuit, with the large earth connection that was the microphone in front of them, they were shocked... hence the swearing. We haven’t been sued yet. 

Live music necessitates a special breed of engineer. The ability to communicate, work quickly and under pressure and deal with any number of issues with almost no information are day to day tasks for a live mix engineer. Especially as a freelance practitioner or as a resident for a venue, where the acts change every night. I have a great deal of respect for live engineers.

I shadow an engineer at a venue named Factory251 in the centre of Manchester. Factory is primarily a night club but used to be home to Factory Records, which had such bands to its name as Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays. Because of this; when the building was up for demolition after the record labels closing in 1992, a group of investors bought the site with the intention of turning it into a touring venue, with a night club function to keep the revenue flowing. Unfortunately in my opinion, the night club side of the business somewhat overshadows the live music part, but we’re making slow progress in dragging people to see bands actually play, and furthermore stay for the entire bill (which they’ve most likely payed upwards of £5 to see) instead of just their friends band... ranting over I promise.

I love the fast paced nature of live engineering, it’s my favourite part of my work at factory. I treat it as a test of my abilities to problem solve at speed, but I still feel myself holding back from some issues that I could be fixing. For example I was working at a show in a HMV store for an artist called “Shura”. The guitarist unveiled an enormous pedal board with endless delay effects and all manor of cool gadgets that I couldn’t wait to hear. Naturally none of it worked, as is the norm with large, complicated pedal boards. After a brief investigation period we discovered that the problem was with his tuner, and upon removing said tuner we had signal to the amp and everyone was happy, if a little dissonant. At this stage I was ready to leave the endless train of pedals alone, but this wasn’t enough for my boss. He proceeded to open up the pedal, identify the problem, fix in and reassemble the pedal in 10 minutes, ultimately making me look very defeatist and feel as such. 

Recently me and a colleague of mine have been working with a group of animators on a short film project. We have been hired as “Audio” and have naturally split the jobs up among ourselves. I have taken on the roles of Composer, foley artist and a general recording/mix engineer, as my colleague wanted to focus on being a Re-recording Mixer. As I haven’t done many long length compositions since the long lost days of A level music, I began my process by watching a number of animated shorts and full length films to see how the music was used and what I found was somewhat shocking.

I noticed that, in the animated shorts, the music was often the only part in the soundtrack, bar some minimal stock sound effects for beeping or explosions. I quickly asked the animation team leader what she was expecting from the audio department and she seemed to think that music was the only thing that we would be doing. This gave me two immediate reactions, one of panic - knowing that my music now had a great deal more importance, and one of excitement - in the knowledge that when we delivered our full sound mix (foley, SFX, music and dialogue) that the team would be far more impressed as it wasn’t what they were expecting.

This brings me to my point, if music for film is so powerful - as I have often discussed in my previous posts - then why is a sound mix not regarded in the same light? This is particularly apparent with background or ambient sound effects, as their subliminal nature is very similar to the way music effects the emotion of a scene. My goal with this project therefore is to make the music as beautiful as I can whilst still complimenting the scenes and fitting perfectly with the rest of the sound mix - in order to highlight our work in both of these areas.

The more I work in audio, the more I realise that the skills of any practitioner are far less important to a client than two things; your professional image, and your professional persona. In other words, if you “look like an engineer” and if you treat your clients nicely and create a positive work environment, your client will be far happier than if you arrive in your pyjamas and act rude all day, even if you deliver the best album anyone has ever heard. No one wants to work with anyone who is rude and negative during a project, therefore an engineer’s people skills are paramount to the success of their career.

I find that if you smile and shake hands with a potential client upon first meeting them, then they are far more likely to agree to participate in a project, and will work harder in that first session where you and your client are trying to get into the flow of working with one another. The first impression will linger at this stage and will make building an ongoing working relationship much easier. I was recently working in a venue in the centre of Manchester named Factory251 (it’s a nightclub that puts on shows before they open and I shadow the resident engineer there) and a local band named SunDown were playing. I was impressed with their line check and their set so after the mad 15 minute pack down at the end of the night, a very out of breath and scruffy looking me went to talk to them. Had I gone on to moan about how long it took to pack the gear down, even ironically, their first impression of me would have been “LAZY” and I would not currently be waiting for their new EP to copy over to my hard drive.

However, a professional relationship works both ways. For example, it is counterproductive and a waste of your time/money if you find yourself sat with a rude client that you end up running around after. Again in Factory251, I met a band, who I won’t name (because I want to maintain my professional image), who were verbally abusive to the engineers and staff at the venue during their load in and sound check and then offered to “hook me up with an EP next month, for free right?” Needless to say, I politely declined their kind offer. And that isn’t to say that they weren’t fantastic musicians with great songs because they were, in fact looking back it would have been a very smart career move to at least try to work with them. However I decided that I would be unable to deliver a product up to my standards if I worked with them, and my decision was made entirely based on my first impression and how I imagined they would have acted when we were working together. 

With the arrival of summer, I think it is time that I broaden my work focus to my career instead of only my university modules. I have always been a musician, today in fact I will be recording drums for a folk artist that a good producer friend and colleague of mine (Callum Benson) is working with, so I would like to continue with my session music work. I also enjoy recording engineering in any form, I already work so much in studios with music so I would like to also experiment with recording foley and recording samples, as well as looking into production sound recording and some field recording wherever I can. I would love to get more involved with post production sound and mix engineering in general also.

This evening my colleagues and I will be completing the set tasks of the module MU2402 and collating our work ready for submission. In the actual industry, the process of delivery may well be very similar to the circumstances under which we have to submit. For example, the process of test screening will be done in order to ascertain whether or not our work has had it’s desired effect, there will most likely be multiple versions of the delivery such as an M&E track (”music and effects” or just a version of the final mix without any dialogue, usually used when the piece will be released internationally and requires an overdub with a new language), and simply the fact that we have had to work to a strict deadline in order to make sure that the work has been finished on time - or rather finished at all (referring to my previous post about how deadlines can be seen as creative tools).  

So tonight we say goodbye to retribution. We will bounce a final stereo mix and some stems before writing them all to a hard drive and keeping it extra safe until tomorrows deadline date. I must say that, however challenging this task has been, I have thoroughly enjoyed contributing and working with my colleagues on this project, it has opened my eyes to an enormous area of the audio industry, inspired me to explore career options in the field of post production audio and has permanently changed the way I view films and television programs.

Once me and my colleagues had listened to the video a number of times in our brand new mix session file, we identified some areas that needed to be automated further and referred to our pre mix criticism notes for other areas that we could improve on. A great deal of the work that we needed to do was working with the low end frequency content of one character’s (Viktor) voice. we used audiosuite EQ to shape some of his lines and quickly fixed the problem, however the decrease in low end in the dialogue brought out some of the low end in the music, this was rectified by changing the level of the music instead of working with the EQ. 

After all of the sounds are implemented and in sync, the attention of a re-recording engineer working on a film turns to balancing. This means that the engineer will edit the levels and EQ of the dialogue, FX and music throughout the short film to make sure that the audience’s focus is in the right place at the right time. For me and my colleagues, this meant that we were about to use a great deal of automation.

I knew that the foley FX that I had contributed to the mix had been mixed relatively to each other, however these did not fit with the other elements, for example the backgrounds were in my opinion too loud to begin with (in comparison with the foley and dialogue). We had set up the mix session so that each audio track was routed through a bus depending on it’s category. These “sub” tracks included backgrounds, footsteps, moves, props, guns, punches and miscellaneous - which were routed through another bus names “FX SUM” - dialogue production, dialogue ADR - which were routed through a “DX SUM” and the soundtrack which went through an “MX SUM”. This allowed us to scale down the session into something that was manageable whilst still having a great deal of control. 

We then began to automate the levels and plug-in functions on the sub tracks before producing what is known as a “pre mix”, which is then used for external constructive criticism and overall helps to improve the quality of the final product. We also used this pre mix to reference external sources of playback - watching the film with our pre mix on a television. Once we were happy with our pre mix, we bounced each of the sub tracks into new stereo files that we named “background stem”, “footsteps stem” etc. these were then imported into a new session ready for additional mixing.

Before we start pre production, my colleagues an I needed to implement and edit all of the sounds. When it came to looking at the production sound recordings, we noticed a great deal of reverb and room ambience, which clearly didn’t match with the ADR recordings. There were also some issues with distortion and general noise. Thankfully we have had a lecture recently on a piece of software that can be used as a tool to fix these issues.

The RX5 noise reduction plugins from Izotope are installed in the D-command and D-control studios at futureworks and it is some of the most impressive software I have worked with. We mostly use the De-Reverb and De-click processes for the dialogue clean ups. We use it separately to our DAW and render our processing to the clips using audiosuite. 

Me and my colleagues brought together our different areas of work into one humongous “mix session” file a few nights ago. This turned out to be an ordeal with synchronisation issues at every stage. However we overcame these issues and I will admit that our mix is starting to come together.

Our first task during the collation stage was to reduce our individual sessions into “Stem” files. I did this in my foley session by first making a selection over all of the clips in a track and using the “Consolidate Clip” function in pro tools to render a new whole file clip. I did this with all of the tracks in my session. I also included a sync beep two seconds before the first frame of action (timecode: 00:59:58:00) to use when trying to line up all of the different tracks. I then selected all of the newly made clips in my edit window and referred to the clip list, as all of my edit window selections were highlighted. In the clip list’s drop down menu, I selected the “export clips as files” function and sent out my stems into a file in order to move the files over. 

The next stage was to build our mix session. As we had been using an organised track layout in the individual sessions, I simply imported the audio and the video onto new tracks to start with and I proceeded to sync the video with the timecode in the session. Then I set up “submaster” tracks for all of the different elements in the session (submasters are busses that you route only the footsteps through for example, in order for greater control and collective automation) and sum tracks for MX, DX and FX (music, dialogue and effects) before bringing everything through one master fader. 

Yesterday, a group of colleagues and I had the pleasure of talking to the director of the short film that we are designing sound for. In a normal post production for film scenario I can only assume that the director would have been present and providing insight into the creative direction of the audio from the beginning, however as this is a part of a module the director must not have had time to visit us until now. Despite this I found the conversation invaluable to the project and several of my queries about the story were cleared up.

The director talked to us about how he visualised the characters and gave insight into the details of the scenes. For example, he confirmed that the setting was in fact on the outskirts of a large city during the day time (as we had thought) but also mentioned that, despite the room that they are in being empty, the rest of the building may not be. Saying that the characters may be “hiding in plain sight” as it were.

Ben Burtt, of skywalker sound with such films to his name as Super 8, WALL-E and the Star Wars series, describes sound as a way to “give life” to a film. Him being the extremely renowned and acclaimed sound designer that he is and after watching a number of the films that he has worked with, I am inclined to agree with him. 

The Sound designers job sometimes blends with that of the foley artist, in that a foley effect, while extremely close, may not be exactly what the artist nor the director are looking for, and would benefit from some more electronic manipulation or from layering several sounds, which is where the elements of sound design come in. However a sound designer is often tasked with creating sounds that can not be recorded, or that have never even been heard. This requires immense creative foresight and the ability to break up elements of an effect in their imagination in order to build it in the reality of a recording studio or a DAW.

One of my favourite areas of sound for film is Foley effects. Foley is normally defined as the replacement of sounds such as footsteps or clothes moving or even the sounds of props that the characters use. I enjoy it so much because of how creative it can be. For example, foley artists are often required to layer sounds and recreate things using props in their studios (or “foley stages”).

My lecturer for MU2402 described the role of a dialogue editor as that of an “unsung hero” in the sound department of a major production. By this I can infer that he meant that their job goes unnoticed, and to an extent I agree with him. On the rather rare occasion that a viewer will notice the dialogue recording or the quality of the dialogue sound (as opposed to just what the characters are saying), I doubt that the train of thought will extend far past the idea of re-recording or ADR. However, a dialogue editor’s job is much more than that.

It is the responsibility of the dialogue editor to search through all of the on location recordings (usually in a stereo mix from the on location production mixer but can be split into “Iso tracks”), to oversee the ADR recording and to again sift through them to find the best, or most appropriate takes. They are then required to edit, sync and mix the dialogue that will be used in the final mix. The editing stage can involve a great deal of noise reduction, using software such as the Isotope RX5 range of plug ins (which I have recently been using and are truly remarkable). 

It is also quite common for the dialogue editor to be in charge of “session setup”, meaning that because their job is the first to be started in the audio department the rest of the team will use the same workflow and therefore will use the same track layout as the dialogue editor, who will set these sessions up for them.

We can thank a long walk through the rain into university for this post.

I think that deadlines are essential for the creative process. Mostly because, as any creative will tell you, if there was no deadline for a piece of work then it would never be completed because it would never quite be perfect. A deadline (or any limitation) helps an artist to make creative decisions and allows them to deliver their work once it is up to the standard of the client. The problem comes when you ask the artist how they feel about their work once it has been delivered.

In my field, ninety percent of the time, there will be what’s known as a ‘revision’ of the work before delivery. At this time you must separate yourself from any “precious-ness” about your work and receive the constructive criticism given to you in a professional manner, and the changes that your client has suggested to you must be completed before they hear it again. However, even if the changes made the piece better, I personally will not be totally happy with the product when I deliver it. This is in part to do with the pride I had in my first delivery but mostly is to do with something that a friend of mine expertly, but rather dramatically, phrased as “the artists curse”. 

By this, he meant that because it could be said that an artist “gets better” over the course of every project that they do, they will feel as if they could have done better by the end, or by delivery. And here in lies the necessity for a deadline, because without the specific time frame an artist will keep working and working on the same project and will never be ready to hand it over to the client.

I am adamant that audio, not just music, is a creative field. I think that it is an art form. So I am glad that I have deadlines to work to that force me to deliver my work on time, because I am afraid no one would hear it otherwise. 

Due to a particularly thought provoking lecture and a morning of waiting for files to copy from one hard drive to another, I have been thinking a lot about background sound design in cinema (BGs) lately and how it helps the story along. The lecture called us to a studio with a 5.1 system and an Icon D-Control console which has the ability to separate the speaker array into individual monitors using muting, giving us an insight into what parts of the sound design were panned into each monitor. We then watched the opening sequence to the movie ‘Flight’, starring Denzel Washington, and began to mute the center speaker for example (C in LCRLsRs). This was where the majority of the hard effects were panned and all of the dialogue, as far as I could tell. When I queried the lecturer as to why these effects are panned to where they are, he said “to avoid a tennis match” referring to the motion of the audiences heads whilst a tennis match (or this movie) is going on, which I rather liked.

We found that the BGs in Flight were mostly panned away from the canter speaker. The majority of them were placed in the surrounds in fact. I inferred that this was because they were not meant to be in focus (and therefore directly in the viewer’s gaze), considering how little focus they are designed to pull however, the backgrounds carried a great deal of implied information to the audience, helping to build tension or set the viewer on edge, and then in a calmer scene helping the audience to relax for example. 

So this morning as I was waiting half an hour for a session to copy onto my back up drive I suggested to my colleagues a possible way that we could use this effect in our sound design for the short film that we’re working on (Retribution), in that as the story progresses and the plot thickens, the backgrounds fade from general room tone, to traffic noise to industrial sounds, to loud construction noises until finally, as the character “Rigby” finds his retribution, the backgrounds drop into natural sounds. Possibly wind through trees or bird song. This will convey to the viewer a significant amount of stress and will help them to empathise with the character, especially with the relief at the end because their ears will physically be getting a well needed rest. 

As a part of my degree, I am working with a team to implement and mix the audio for a short film. The Post Production team will be tackling areas such as: Dialogue Editing, Backgrounds, ADR, Foley, Music and the mixing stages all at once. I must say that I am glad to be working with two other colleagues, as professional post production teams will have a department for each of the aforementioned parts of the final sound design. So naturally, in order to turn around a high quality product on time, our teams workflow is extremely important and will have to be perfect. 

A useful way to organise your workflow is to use the different “sessions”. For example, one of us (or the ‘sound effects department’) can work on SFX and foley in different pro tools sessions, simulating the professional workflow. Other areas for us to split among the group include Dialogue editing and backrounds.