DRAMA | SOUNDTRACK
JUSTIN SHIRLEY- SMITH
“The process of reverse- engineering old mixes starts with investigating the studios, outboard gear and consoles used in the original mix. Then we find plug-in emulations of those consoles and outboards that we can open in Pro Tools. We use a lot of Universal Audio plug-ins, such as Neve 1081, Helios Type 69, Harrison 32C, Maag EQ4, Pultec EQP-1A, 1176, LA2A, DBX 160 and EMT 140. In addition, we often use Softube Trident A-Range, Waves SSL G-Channel plus Renaissance EQs and R-Bass, Eventide H3000 Factory, Relab LX480 Complete, Avid Fairchild 660 and 670, Audio Ease Altiverb, Massey TapeHead and Plug-in Alliance BX Console. Sometimes, we also do audio restoration with Cedar. With the depth of our archive, we have many of the original recall sheets and mix notes, so with some of the latter material we can even dial in reverb settings from the original recall sheets. On other occasions, getting a particular EQ, compression or reverb can be very frustrating, but we normally get there in the end.”
RIGHT Some of the first scenes shot for the movie were from the 1985 Live Aid concert
can be on the inhale or exhale... it’s actually very complicated.” SOUNDSCAPE
you’re working your sound with it. In terms of the vocals, you’ve got three elements: the picture, the music track and the vocal track. For the vocal track, I’d fit to the mouth and it’d be as in-sync as it could be. “But,” Hartstone explains, “it would no longer be musical. We can shift the picture a little bit to find the sweet spot for each shot, so it went back to John Ottman for the picture edit. And he’d say, ‘I don’t want to move the shot two frames, his arm is up in the air there!’ Going back and forth, we’d get everything as close as we could, then massage it.” Finally, Hartstone used what she describes as a “vocal toolbox”; recordings of Malek creating a variety of breath and mouth sounds, which were matched to his on-camera actions. “It sounds simple,” she reflects, “but it’s not. It’s out of the mouth, or the nose, the focus
“The difference between a record and a movie is that the perspective is changing all the time,” Shirley-Smith notes. “If you’re closing in on the drummer, you want to hear him, or if you’re in the back of the arena, or in a helicopter.” The production took advantage of a planned Queen performance during their collaboration with Adam Lambert at London’s O2 Arena. “The arena was filled with extra audience mics. We had some time on the second afternoon when the whole place was empty, so we remixed our stems without delay and reverb and recorded it all on the audience mics.” “On a normal film,” Hartstone says, “you have your dialogue premix time,
44 DEF I N I T ION | APR I L 20 1 9
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