Story: Joshua Craig

BRINGING RIO TO OZ

This is Riofern, where some of our Sydney crew called home for a couple of weeks. The mobile broadcast truck was technically located at Seven/NEP in Eveleigh, right next door to Redfern, but Rioleigh just didn’t quite have the same ring to it.

This was the first setup day, soon technicians Aaron Hull and Ryan Unwin would install the setup prepared at the lab in Ultimo. The truck would eventually take host broadcaster feeds — supplied by the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) in Rio and transmitted back to Australia by Seven for its TV coverage — of various venues so our commentators could call them. This approach to calling international games ‘off tube’ is becoming more common and even the monsters of broadcast like NBC use this technique. It obviously saves money, keeps the broadcasters more alert and comfortable, and allows for instant ‘travel’ between venues.

FAVELA HIGHWAY

After close to 30 hours of travelling I was keen to get to the Media Village. It was my first time in Brazil, and the number of shanty towns/favelas we passed was an eye opener. Despite the country’s best efforts to hide them, all you could see out the window of the bus were mud, brick and wood houses built on any surface available.

On the way to the Media Village we passed the IBC and the Barra de Tijuca Olympic Park. Originally another favela, the residents were kicked out to build the Olympic park, though some fought back and retained their land holdings on the site. The city begrudgingly built them some new little houses to live in on the edge of the park.

After about a 90-minute trip through Rio, Barra and most of Recreio we finally arrived at the Media Village. It was (and still was at the end of the regular games) a work in progress — the rooms were unfinished and initially we didn’t have hot water — unwelcome news when you’ve just spent 30 hours in transit.

GET SET!

After a couple of days, Aaron and Ryan had the Riofern truck set up. Field testing started towards the end of the day once I had my rig set up in Rio — I was 13 hours behind in Rio, so they easily beat me to it.

At my end, gear setup was far from the hardest part; most of the services the ABC had ordered from the Olympics providers were not working or had limited functionality. I spent most of the day trying to figure out how to log faults with OBS. It really hit me that the language barrier was going to make things a lot harder to get done. This day could have been reduced to one phrase, ‘não está funcionando’.

GET SET!

After a couple of days, Aaron and Ryan had the Riofern truck set up. Field testing started towards the end of the day once I had my rig set up in Rio — I was 13 hours behind in Rio, so they easily beat me to it.

At my end, gear setup was far from the hardest part; most of the services the ABC had ordered from the Olympics providers were not working or had limited functionality. I spent most of the day trying to figure out how to log faults with OBS. It really hit me that the language barrier was going to make things a lot harder to get done. This day could have been reduced to one phrase, ‘não está funcionando’.

TEMPORARY DASH

The off tube positions in the NEP truck were nearing completion and testing had begun to ensure everything was working at that site. My focus was finding my IBC ‘land legs’. It was a very unusual place. The building was a temporary structure; its only use was to host broadcasters during the games, after which, it would be demolished. Many parts of the construction were reusable, including cabling (data, fibre, electrical), air con units, and some of the modular walls. The building consisted of two double-height levels divided into six sections each. The combined Seven/ABC section only took up about 1/3 of one of the sections on Level 2. NBC took up two entire sections and the BBC occupied just shy of one section. OBS also commandeered a couple of sections. Being the host broadcaster, it was responsible for providing all of the AV elements to all other broadcasters.

INSIDE THE BBC

I was still soldiering through IP issues. We were using several IP connections in the IBC, one of which was not working. This particular service was meant to receive incoming audio from our local outside broadcasts — ie. the audio from the venues in Rio. Without this working, I couldn’t get audio contribution into the IBC to forward to Sydney. Game over! It was time to go see the telcos and see if anyone could fix it.

I got to go downstairs and meet my BBC colleagues at both Radio 5 Live and the World Service. We were popping a Tieline Merlin into their system so we could share broadcast assets such as staff, venues and other tidbits. These lines also functioned as further redundancy in case all of the ABC redundancies failed; we could put the BBC coverage to air in Australia if we had serious issues. 

The BBC section was amazing. The crew brought full radio and TV capabilities with them including news, research, audio booths, master controls, AV routing setups and much more. An expensive endeavour, I’m sure. It was one of the biggest broadcasters at the games, with approximately 500 people on the ground. 

COPACABANA BOYS 

After more setup at the IBC, in the evening I was invited to ride along with the Seven crew to shoot some cutaway footage down at Copacabana. One of my Tieline rigs was going to be set up at the hotel opposite the beach volleyball arena, so it was a good chance to scope out the location.

Dan Sweetapple from ABC TV was the tech looking after the site. We’d worked together quite a bit in the lead up to the games to ensure ABC staff had technical assets, where possible, in each of the precincts. The rig down there was mostly used for radio crosses for NewsRadio and Current Affairs (AM, The World Today, PM). It was also a hardline redundancy in case our mobile broadcasting methods didn’t work correctly or failed.

After getting back to the hotel, I was due to meet the sports broadcasters Quentin Hull and Alister Nicholson arriving the next morning… at 2a.m.

RIO TRANSIT

I couldn’t believe someone thought it would be a good idea to spread out the venues that much! Travel times were massive. It took about one hour to get from Copacabana to the IBC in Barra, about the same to the Olympic stadium, 30 minutes from the IBC to the media village — it killed my setup times! I knew it was going to be an issue before we went, but I didn’t think it would be that bad.

FIRST LIVE BROADCAST

I went back to the Village to chase the previous day’s problems. There was no sign of a solution yet — the IP address I had set on the unit was correct — and I didn’t have time to return to it. Thankfully I was able to access it remotely once we were underway the next day.

That night we did our first broadcast — olympic football commentated by Ned Hall back in Riofern. It went well, with no major issues other than the ones I knew about; a good test run pre-games.

THE OPENING CEREMONY

First thing in the morning I went down to the Aquatics Centre to make sure the problems down there were fixed — both ISDN and IP hadn’t been working. Back onto the support people. IP was working! Yes! However, ISDN was still out… No! I had a closer look and discovered the Cat 5 cable hadn’t been terminated properly. Nipping that off and re-terminating it did the trick and ISDN was finally working!

The opening ceremony went without a hitch. It was long, and the parade of nations was particularly tedious. We had a couple of reporters on the ground filing pieces wirelessly from in and around the stadium. Surprisingly, the 3G/4G data network was pretty good in Rio, meaning VOIP calls via Facebook, Whatsapp or Apple worked much better than standard calls. 

That night, as one of the radio reporters was heading back to their vehicle, they stumbled upon a young boy who had recently been shot dead. It was only one kilometre down the road from the stadium. Maracana — where the stadium is — is in the North Zone, and apparently shootings are a regular occurrence.

FIRST SESSION: IP IN THE DRINK

Day 1 had finally arrived. It was almost a relief after the setup period. We still had issues with IP, but I reconfigured the codecs to handle the unreliable network — more redundancy, less bandwidth. I was originally running 24-bit/48k at 128kbps with an additional redundant packet stream (twice the data). To help reduce network loss I increased the compression to 96kbps (reducing the bandwidth) and lifted the redundant packet streams to two (three times the data). It was technically 13% more total bandwidth taking into account the redundant streams, but that additional redundancy gave the system far greater stability. It still sounded good, and considering most of our listeners are on AM radio, it was fine.

Good thing I was close by the first session at the swimming, because about an hour out from going to air the IP dropped off — gone, with no ability to connect even though I could still see the address. After about 10 minutes of putting in my details with the support staff they finally took it seriously and said they were sending someone down to the venue who spoke reasonable English.

By the time I walked into the venue, sports broadcaster Gerard Whateley still hadn’t seen anyone. On the phone the support staff assured me someone was there, but when I got to our broadcast position there was no sign of anyone with only 25 minutes until we went to air. As I was calling them again, someone from the Brazilian telco — Embratel — turned up, but he didn’t speak any English. Using Google Translate, we sorted out a new IP address, made the hookup and got to air.

HOLY MERDE!: FRENCH DIPLOMACY

Gerard called me around noon telling me to get down to the Aquatic Centre because they were having a problem with the French broadcasters. He said that one of them was looking to start a fight!

At the time I was monitoring a minor IP issue and needed it to solve itself before I left. It finished in a timely fashion and I headed out. When I got there, two of the French broadcasters were hysterical. They were claiming we had stolen their ISDN line, which we hadn’t. Time pressure is normal in this game, and we were again only about 30 minutes out from broadcast. I defused the situation by proving to them we hadn’t stolen their ISDN line. They were right to think someone had, as part of the test showed our ABC Ultimo Master Control Room was able to dial their ISDN number — it connected, just not to any of our gear. I stuck around for a bit (Quentin was monitoring everything back at the IBC) to help communicate with the support staff who wouldn’t run another line until after the current session. Luckily, the French were able to get a 4G connection up, which sorted them for that session. 

NBC — THE BIG TIME

While I was helping a colleague at NBC fix a small problem with his Tieline device I got to see their facilities in the IBC. NBC is the ‘royal’ broadcaster for the games. It programs six or seven US networks during the Games period and has a lot of pull all over the world. NBC runs a broadcast system considered second to none. In fact, the IBC is built around NBC’s gear, and its systems are built to fit into containers. It is an amazing place: several full TV broadcast studios, sound studios, 4K rooms, massive Master Control Room, catering, news offices, it’s all there. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Al Craig (a Sydney resident and AT contributor) runs NBC’s commentary system, with Australia’s very own Tieline forming its backbone. I was running four iMix consoles in Rio for the ABC, Al was running over 20 at the IBC, the Rio venues and at some studios in the US. While it seems remote off tube commentary is the future of broadcast, NBC has already been doing it for 10 years. With Al’s system, a broadcaster can have three locations simultaneously contributing to the same commentary as if they were in the same room/venue, even across continents. I could talk about this for hours.

THE ‘BOMB’ IN THE IBC

Towards the end of the night, the IBC was evacuated because of a device found in the men’s bathroom just around the corner from our broadcast position. It was found by a member of the Channel 7 crew. Judging by the photo, it looked pretty suspicious. However, the security forces performed a controlled detonation on it (the third such activity performed during the games) and later released a statement stating that ‘no explosives were found’.

POWER STRUGGLES

Finally, after six days of trying various fixes, we bypassed the extreme noise issue we’d been having at Riofern with the Studer console. The night before we had isolated it to the internal analogue input card, but it had been hard to track down as the symptom was happening intermittently. I sourced an Audient eight-channel preamp to bypass all our on air inputs and routed them into the AES. Still, it shouldn’t have happened.

The day started well but just after our first cross, Riofern lost all power, knocking both Seven and our site off the air. It was a major power outage that took out both main backups at the Seven/NEP building, the UPS and generator were offline. We had our own UPS backup which we could have used to go to air via ISDN (as network services also went down with the power), but instead chose to use staff at other sites in the next hour of updates.

Not long after power was restored at the site, sports broadcaster, Jim Maxwell had a medical emergency and was rushed to hospital suffering from a suspected stroke. All the team at Riofern handled the situation very well, and we chose to move broadcasting away from that site again while the team composed themselves.

CALLING IT IN

Alister called the women’s triathlon action from the IBC — just like the marathon, walks, and cycling road race. Often the courses for those races cover very large areas and it’s logistically easier to call the action from a single location on the finish line or at the IBC using host broadcaster feeds.

CLOSING DOWN

The final event was the closing ceremony, which was being commentated on from Australia. The only element required from me was FX, so I could basically dismantle the majority of my system in the IBC. One of my favourite parts of the games occurred in the closing ceremony when the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, popped out as Mario during the handover to Tokyo. Here’s hoping Japan’s infrastructure will be a little more reliable.

Photography: Ryan Schude

GREY AREA

Probably the biggest misconception about Burton — perhaps because he’s American, has an afro, and The Grey Album was necessarily stylistically skewed towards Jay Z’s raps — is that he was always purely a hip hop producer and DJ, and somehow stumbled into rock music. Really it was the other way around.

The DJ ‘thing’ “is kind of a misconception,” said Burton. “What really happened was when I was 19 in college, I decided to try music out. I never really thought music was art, I just thought it was entertainment. But I never wanted to be an entertainer, I just wanted to be an artist and thought more about making films or being a comic book artist. Then I realised you could make music in an ‘art’ way.

“So I started getting equipment. I bought a cheap keyboard, a cheap four-track off a friend, a guitar and a sampler. And I hooked all those up in my dorm room and started playing stuff in and making loops. I didn’t play any live drums, it was all samples, keyboards and guitars.

“I had no training. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just fumbled around with it. I made my own soundtrack-sounding instrumental albums — basically, things I could make on my own because I was afraid to work with other people and embarrass myself. Every once in a while I would get someone who could play guitar better than me to help out.”

A stint DJing for his college radio station and seeing friends making good money on the club DJ circuit led Burton to get some equipment of his own. But it was strictly party DJing — no tricks, nothing fancy. “I just played records that made people dance and that was it,” said Burton. “I wasn’t a very skilled DJ, I can mix a record and had good taste, but I just liked being able to pick what people would want to hear next. I DJ’d to make money so I could make my music at home.

“So that’s how I started, making rudimentary versions of the Rome album. Except that I didn’t have nearly the amount of great musicians and didn’t know how to write songs so much back then either.”

NOT VERY PC

It wasn’t until a few years later that Burton really started to make headway with his music. And it was all due to the one thing he’d always avoided — a computer.

Burton: “I never wanted to use computers. For years, I refused to use them. Even though I was using a digital eight-track, I still didn’t use a computer. I didn’t use one until I was probably 23 or 24. I thought it was cheating, I didn’t think it was pure… I didn’t know what I was talking about.

“When I was in London, a friend of mine saw how I was working and suggested I try it. He gave me a copy of Acid and showed me how to use it for a day or two. The first things I ever did on a computer were three hip-hoppy instrumental pieces, despite never having done hip hop before. I put them on a CD and I sent them to this record label guy I’d just met, and he signed it right away. Oh man!

“The way my head works with music, the computer allows me to react very quickly to things, to mistakes. And if I’m getting on something, I can hear the end of it in my head and figure a way to get there a lot quicker when using a computer program. So I was able to do a lot more and not fatigue from listening to stuff over and over again until I got it right.”

The label he signed to was Lex Records, an imprint of the cult label Warp Records. Before The Grey Album, Burton had already released Ghetto Pop Life with rapper Jemini the Gifted One on Lex, and had started working on Gnarls Barkley with Cee-Lo. But when The Grey Album landed Burton started receiving offers to produce, which he was bemused by. “I was like, ‘Why would you offer me this?’” said Burton. “The Grey Album was really just a remix record. I mean it was intricate, took me a long time to do, and I was proud of it. But why would you want me to do that, just because I did this? It didn’t even make any sense.”

BLUR OF INSPIRATION

There are some offers you just can’t refuse though. And while The Grey Album propelled him into the popular consciousness, when Damon Albarn from Blur came knocking, he provided Burton with the necessary stepping stone to become one of the defining producers of the generation.

“After The Grey Album came out, Damon got in touch and I met with him for a week in England,” said Burton. “At first, it didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t know what he saw. But I think it was much less about what I’d done and much more about the week we spent together making stuff. He tried me out.

“It was the first thing I ever produced. The idea of producing and what producing was, means different things to different people. For me I thought producing was making all the music, and that’s what I was doing. In hip hop music, the guy who makes all the music, and doesn’t rap, he produces it. Whereas in rock music, the producer doesn’t even need to make any music, he can just give his opinion or tell people to play faster or slower, or a new chorus, how to record and what sounds to use. Those are different approaches and I never knew about the other side. I just made my own music in my bedroom. That’s how I pretty much did all the music up until Gorillaz. But I didn’t tell Damon how inexperienced I was. You just go do it.”

So, what did that dynamic look like for a producer who didn’t have the usual wealth of experience under his belt? Luckily, Albarn didn’t need a lot of hand holding.

Burton: “I did make a lot of beats and play some music, but he already had demos for a lot of it. It was more about how we interpreted a low quality demo into a whole song. He knew how to do that, I didn’t really. I’d never gone through that process before, but when we would start the song over I would just get into my thing and run with it.

“It worked out well mainly because Damon did it with me. He really empowered me, but he also had his own opinions. I learned how to work with him and get what I was looking to get out of it. It was a fun process. It could have gone a lot of different ways, but luckily for me, the first thing I produced went really well because of Damon.

“I hadn’t been in a big studio working before and even that to be honest was pretty humbling. Up to that point, I’d only been in home and bedroom studios. It wasn’t really big, his original ’13’ studio [set up for Blur’s album of the same name — Ed], but it had a lot of stuff all over the place and was a very creative environment that was easy to work in.

“Day one, I thought I was going to meet him to see if we got along as people. But he said, ‘Hey, let’s go to the studio tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ But I’d never worked on anything but my own equipment, so I had no idea how to use any of the stuff they had. I didn’t bring any of my equipment with me.

“I didn’t know how to use any of the drum machines or keyboards he had there, so I had to just try and figure it out. He had these great engineers, Tom Girling and James Cox, who engineered the record. They helped out, but I didn’t know how to use a mixing board or any of that stuff. I was in there fumbling around, trying to figure it out. I didn’t want him to know that. I was only 26.”

A HIT ON ACID

Burton has made a habit of developing artistic relationships on a try-it-and-see basis. Just getting together with artists to see how the relationship feels. No expectations, no contracts, just start working.

In 2007, when he showed up to Beck’s house to dry run a potential musical partnership for what ended up being Modern Guilt, Acid played a big role in helping Burton’s visions translate into production. His proficiency with Acid became his greatest asset, and he began to use it as just another instrument. In fact, it was the only instrument he took.

Burton: “I showed up to Beck’s house without a guitar or keyboard, just my laptop that had Acid on it. Anything we made, I could put into Acid and turn it into something. Or if I had beats or something else I wanted to start messing with, I had them there as well, so Acid was my instrument in a lot of ways at that time.”

And it shows. The record is an amalgamation of live recording and samples intertwining Beck’s eclecticism with an ear for retro rock. Case in point, lead single Gamma Ray kicks off with an Acid drum loop combined with a simple guitar progression. But you’d be hard pressed to put it anywhere but in the alt rock genre.

These days, he rarely uses the program, preferring to sit down at a piano or with a guitar when he’s figuring out a song. But he’s thinking of a way to go back and use Acid a little bit more, considering how useful it’s been for him. “I haven’t sampled a lot in the last four or five years,” said Burton. “Since the last Gnarls record really. I’m thinking about getting back into it more.”

KRAFTING INFLUENCES

Much has been made of Burton’s affinity for The Beatles. But, he says, most of his early influences were ’60s and ’70s soul and R’n’B, and ’80s pop. He got into classic rock a bit later in his musical life, and if he had to pick his biggest influence, it would actually be Kraftwerk.

Burton’s ability to fuse soulful styles with the efficiency of German minimalism is undoubtedly a big part of what attracts musicians to his services. But he still considers himself “a song person more than a sound person, for better or worse.”

Burton: “It’s more how a song makes me feel. Does it break my heart a little bit? Does it have that melancholy quality to it? Does it do something to me in that way? I gravitate towards the darker side of music. Unique is great, but sometimes I don’t mind if I’ve heard something similar before if I can get a new feeling from it. That’s good too.”

It’s here where Burton differs from a lot of producers. Many producers see their role as paving the way for the artist to deliver their best performance; for them to showcase not only their talent, but their vision for the song. For Burton, he’d rather you not know who played it at all.

“The main thing for me is what you visualise,” he explained. “It’s always been important for the project I’m working on to not sound like musicians playing instruments, because I don’t want people to visualise someone playing guitar and drums and bass. Even if it’s obviously guitar, drums or bass. Whatever the part is, and how it sounds, should make somebody think of something else — a place, a dream — not the people who made the music.

“It’s hard for me to put my finger on, but I know when I hear it, and I know when it’s not there.

“Sometimes if you blow out some drums and you overly push, distress and distort them, then you hear chaos and a certain kind of pace or urgency. You’re not hearing the way it was put together. You start to think of something else. You don’t think of a drummer, you hear some kind of anger or madness and you mix that with something really lush and really beautiful like a xylophone and then you’re thinking of something else, but you’re not thinking of somebody playing the drums.”

It’s this idea of the gradual accumulation of parts influencing the outcome that Burton is most interested in. In the same way an engineer crafts space in the spectrum or paints elements with width and depth in the soundstage, Burton as a producer is working with the sum of parts.

Burton: “I can’t tell you what it’s supposed to look like, but I know it’s not supposed to look like people playing instruments and recording them.”

THE HIDDEN PLAYERS

Burton is the first to admit the genesis of this philosophy was more to do with his lack of playing ability. “I didn’t want to depend on my musicianship to impress anybody,” he said. “That’s probably why I started out doing it that way. I just wanted to make people feel something and if you’re not a really amazing player, you have to find an interesting way of doing it.”

Having now worked with a lot of talented musicians, he’s not blind to their strengths either. The biggest exception to Burton’s ‘rule’ occurred the second time he worked with Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney from The Black Keys. His philosophies became jumbled up with the duo’s acuity for great performances.

Burton: “El Camino was all from scratch. We’d just go in and flesh out ideas together. Ultimately though, no matter who had whatever idea, the two of them would usually go in and start playing it.

“I had never done that before. Even working with other people, when I write things it’s not about the performance, it’s just about what you actually come up with. It wasn’t about going into the room and starting over or rehearsing it together. But watching how they did it, that made it even more different from the way I’ve written with people in the past.

“That’s what made it more of a special record, because it had melodies, and a lot of catchy things going on, yet it still sounded like the two guys for the most part. That was a new experience for me, writing something that way and watching them flesh out what was written in their own Black Keys way.”

The sessions for Rome took a similar turn. While Daniel Luppi and Burton provided transcribed scores to follow, arguing against the intuition of the Italian musicians who’d played on the original Spaghetti western scores seemed unwise.

Burton: “I’d have my own drum pattern, bass line, chord sequence and melodies on top, and then get them transcribed. A lot of stuff was written on paper in front of them while they were playing. But the key guys would remember the chords or the way it goes and just start figuring it out in their own way. Sometimes those songs would come to light in a way I had never heard, because they were interpreting them in a way they felt it should go, or what their style was.”

The Good, The Bad & The Queen project, which featured Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, The Clash bassist Paul Simonon, and The Verve guitarist Simon Tong alongside Albarn, tested Burton’s resolve.

“Everybody in the band was really great at what they did. Overall though, it was a dream-like record for me. Even though there were elements of live playing, it would come in and out of that dream.

“It was weird because you have all these great individual musicians and I didn’t know if I was doing it wrong or not, to make it so dream-like. Will people just want to hear a band play? But I didn’t want to hear that for a whole record. I wanted to hear the fantasy of the whole thing.”

ENGINEERING A DREAM

When Burton thinks back to those sessions though, he couldn’t imagine them without the creative engineering of Jason Cox helping drive that dream.

Burton: “He’s an amazing engineer. At the time, I hadn’t really had much experience with engineers to know how really good he was. But looking back, I can see that now.

“I can’t think about The Good, the Bad & the Queen without him. A big part of the sound of that record comes from what Jason was doing as an engineer. He’s amazing with spring reverbs and bouncing around delays. It developed the sound of the record.

“Work with a really good engineer, that’s the main thing. I engineered my own records up until a point, but I don’t think I did really well at it, and I didn’t do anything in a professional way or in a professional studio. The whole trick is to make people think it’s not in the bedroom. Looking back now, I can tell it was in the bedroom, but I thought I was fooling people.”

These days, Burton’s partner in crime is Kennie Takahashi, who Burton describes as his “ultimate engineer”. If you were sticking to the Danger Mouse characterisation, Takahashi would be Ernest Penfold — the bespectacled hamster sidekick who always finds himself in need of rescue. But in this saga, Takahashi is the one solving all the tricky problems.

The pair met when Burton was working with Martina Topley-Bird in 2007: “I was getting ready to do her record in Los Angeles and we used a service to find a studio that would give us a good deal, because it was an independent record. We wound up at Glenwood Place, which is a really nice studio off Burbank, and they matched me up with Kennie. He was the house engineer and we got along amazingly. We worked together on that album and after that he’s come with me on everything.

“We have very similar qualities, but I can’t do anything like he can do on ProTools. He’s so, so fast.

“I think about what would have happened if he wasn’t around back then. I know what I do wouldn’t be where it is. I shudder to think about that. He’s one of the people that’s been a huge part of what I do.”

And for Takahashi, it’s been a boon. He’s not only engineered pretty much everything Burton has worked on since Topley-Bird, he’s also mixed Modern Guilt and assisted with the mixing on a lot of the records too.

THE MOUSE THAT ROARED

Burton’s preferred mode of working is somewhat bullish. But it’s a big part of what makes him a sought-after producer. He has vision. And he had it even way back in his bedroom. It’s what Albarn saw, and it’s what continues to come through in each production.

The way he eases into musical partnerships is as much about the artist feeling him out as he them. He’s only interested in working with someone if they’re willing to budge, or at least meet him some of the way.

Burton: “Sometimes I hear an artist and go, ‘Okay, this how I’d do it, this is the record I’d like to hear from them.’ And if they want to know what that record would be then they should hire me. But the record I want to hear from them isn’t necessarily going to be the biggest selling record. It might be their best record or their worst one, I don’t know. But when I hear someone’s voice and what they can do, it makes me think this is what I’d love to do, these are the things I’d like to feel from them.”

These days, you won’t find him in his bedroom nearly as much. 

The die was cast: the new room would be a Meyer Sound room.

It would also be a Harrison room. Roger has been a Harrison Consoles man for some time. The new Trion is a version of the company’s MPC5. It’s a disarmingly unadorned console. It’s like the company had spent 90% of its budget on the best/brightest coders in the land, and then designed the aesthetics/GUI in an afternoon at the company BBQ. That said, the Trion is a sound-for-picture thoroughbred:

Chris Goodes: “I’m a big fan of using the EQ and processing on the console. It’s so quick to call it up on the console. It’s all in line: compression, EQ, 16 aux and panning plus your bus outputs, which are all automatable — something ProTools still can’t do is automate your outputs. The automation is rock solid, fast and simple; very easy to edit then reconform the automation.

“Also, Harrison is now releasing an Atmos-specific panning ‘plug-in’ that allows you to hit a button on the relevant channel which then auto reassigns that channel input on the router — takes it out of the main mix and automatically turns it into an Object for panning. That info gets stored as the metadata for that Object. It’ll make workflow so much simpler.”

Roger spec’ed his Trion to include an impressive complement of faders and allow the room to accommodate two or even three operators:

Roger Savage: “You can have a sweetspot over 16 faders, and pull in any input across those faders. So if there aren’t two operators you can do that. The truth is, we have more faders than we need. But someone used to mixing in Hollywood will want two mix engineers, sometimes three. And if money is no object, naturally, that’s a good thing.”

Wedged between the two halves of Trion is a Smart AV Tango controller. Roger uses his Tango to dig into ’Tools and make tweaks or write automation within stems. Roger calls it a ‘hybrid’ approach. You can have your ProTools sessions coming up as many or as little of the Trion’s input channels as you like, with the Tango bringing its motorised faders and touchscreen to bear on what’s ‘in the box’. Mind you, Tango uses the now-venerable HUI protocol to control ProTools.

THE ATMOS SPHERE

Atmos is new and a pain in the bottom line to install into an existing movie theatre. Not so hard for new builds. Which goes to explain why there are so many Atmos-equipped theatres springing up in the land of the new build: China.

As it happens, Soundfirm is big in the People’s Republic. It has a Beijing branch office, in fact. Saying that, Soundfirm Melbourne houses the studio chain’s only Atmos room. So when the final mix of Filmko Entertainment’s big-budget, CGI-heavy blockbuster, The Monkey King, arrived in the inbox, it headed south.

Chris Goodes: “We got the bed tracks premixed in 9.1. We ran a ProTools HDX2 rig that was full: 512 voices coming into the console on 112 inputs. We had another ProTools system loaded with another 256 voices and other FX.

“We mixed natively in Atmos from the beginning, which meant there was no need to undo the original surround sound mix. It also allowed us to have fun separating out elements such as the music. For example, we placed the choir in the ceiling at one point making more space on screen.

“So the final mix was mostly 9.1 with the occasional Object movement. But those moments really pop when they’re happening.”

They sure do. Fight scenes — of which there are plenty — are dynamic beyond anything you’ve heard in conventional surround. And loud. With nearly 50 full-range loudspeakers coming atcha full throttle, it makes for some intense sonic moments.

Before the final cinema mixes were due, the film studio needed a 5.1 version ready for Chinese new year. With time of the essence, Chris hit the ‘5.1 Fold Down’ button on the Dolby RMU and was pleasantly surprised.

Chris Goodes: “The 5.1 auto fold down worked very well. We played through the whole film and it sounded great. Dolby had done a lot of work in the coding. Even perceptively, they’re doing some clever things with height — pychoacoustically it’s approximating some of the height information from the Atmos mix.”

FUTURE READY?

Like any big generational change, it’ll take time for the Atmos juggernaut to truly gain momentum. Cinema take up in this part of the world is slow, and as a result local producers aren’t jumping out of their skin to pony-up for an Atmos mix. But as a sound professional or, indeed, as a film director, once you’ve heard what an Atmos mix is capable of, there’s no way of unhearing it. The creative possibilities are endless. Only time will tell just how much audiences will demand it.

Roger Savage clearly sees it as a big part of his future: “We’re building an Atmos room in Soundfirm Beijing at the moment. It’s hard to find a room big enough in downtown Beijing. But that’s now happening. We believe in Atmos and are excited by its future.”

MIXING AS YOU GO

Craig Berkey and Chris Scarabosio mixed the movie. Chris was in charge of the music and dialogue, while Craig mixed all the effects, Foley, ambiences etc. Craig is based in Vancouver along with Neil Blomkamp and worked closely with the director throughout. I asked Craig about his approach to mixing a movie.

Craig Berkey: I work with a filmmaker from day one. We work in a linear fashion from beginning to end. Whatever tool we use doesn’t matter to me — I build a soundtrack and they’re involved the whole way. Every time I add a new sound, I can pan it, EQ it, and mix it. That’s the beauty of this approach. By ‘building as you go’, when you get to the final mix you have more creative freedom – you’re thinking about the big picture rather than scrambling to ensure you’ve got everything in place. When I get to the final mix stage I can hit Play on my ProTools session and every track plays with its automation… but every element also remains separate. I’ve not committed to stems that can’t be pulled apart.

AT: So you’re not under quite so much crushing pressure in the couple of weeks you have to produce the final mix.

CB: Right. On the first day of the final mix on this film, Neil Blomkamp had already heard the mix. Which means that rather than focussing on ‘why is that footstep so loud?’, we have the luxury of stepping back a bit and thinking: ‘do we really need that music cue?’ etc. We can look at the big picture rather than trouble shooting.

AT: And I guess it means you’re less likely to be thrown any curve balls from the director at the 11th hour if he’s already comfortable with the mix?

CB: Exactly. He likes what we have. It’s not like he’s not heard anything for the first time. If you hear a director say ‘What’s that?!’ in a final mix; if I have to explain to a director what something is, we’re in trouble!

AT: Given all your pan automation is within your ProTools session you must had a few misgivings about having to do it all again for an Atmos and Auro mix?

CB: The kind man from Dolby copied my pan information from the ProTools panner to their plug-in. Even though the two panners don’t match, you can Copy and ‘Force’ Paste in ProTools. The upshot is that all my panning automation showed up on their Dolby panner. And what it meant was that I could make a track an Atmos Object and my original panning would dynamically pan in the Atmos space, rather than just simply showing up in the surrounds.

Ah, yes, mixing for Auro and Atmos. That’s almost a story in itself…

WORKING IN NEW FORMATS

Elysium wasn’t originally mixed in the new surround formats: Dolby Atmos and Barco Auro. Rather, about a month after the ‘final’ mix, Craig Berkey and Chris Scarabosio got the call-up to head to Skywalker Ranch where they would ‘remix’ the movie on a Neve DFC console. Saying that, Chris was quick to point out that their intention wasn’t to ‘remix’ the movie but simply to take advantage of the extra surround dimensions afforded by the new formats.

As outlined in the ‘Larger Canvas’ box item, both new formats provide extra surround channels for a great degree of immersion. Auro tackles this more conventionally, with an 11.1 panner that provides a ‘height’ dimension to push sounds vertically. It takes a little more time to understand Atmos.

To come to grips with Atmos you have to understand that there are two ways of addressing the speakers within the new format: Bed tracks or Objects. Bed tracks are panned in the room like a regular 7.1 setup, only you also have two extra channels overhead, so they call it 9.1. Objects on the other hand can address individual speakers.

Craig Berkey: “For example with a shuttle sound. In a 7.1 mix when I panned it from the front to the left side and then to the left rear it would go to the whole wall of the left side and the whole left hand side of the back wall. When we did the Atmos mix, I could take the same sound and put it in the object track and the same panning made it travel down the wall and along the back. There was a greater sense of motion.”

AT: Placing sounds discretely in an individual speaker sounds wonderful, but movie theatres come in different shapes and sizes. How can you be sure the precise speaker to which you’re panning actually exists in every movie theatre?

CB: Good point. If someone on screen is responding to a sound in the left surrounds in my mix room, we can lock the sound to the fourth speaker in the left surround wall. But if I go to a theatre with a different number of speakers — if the source is locked to the fourth surround — it’s not going to be lined up to where this actor is looking. Depending on the size of the room, Dolby can allow you to lock the sound to that location in the room, rather than that speaker channel. There’s a mode on the panner that allows you to do that.

MIXING TO NEW HEIGHTS

Both new formats explore the vertical domain. Auro has three levels of speakers: an entire additional layer higher up the wall and a smaller complement (one channel) on the ceiling, while Atmos adds two ceiling channels to its 7.1 setup.

AT: What did you think about the extra height offered by both formats?

Craig Berkey: The overhead channels are tricky to deal with. The danger with Atmos, especially, is it can take away some of the width of your mix when you pan things up there — it feels like you’re mono’ing things up. I used them for specific FX. Like when Max [Matt Damon’s character] gets locked in the radiation cell. I have those FX sounds up the top and those extra channels are really effective for things like that. But when we placed other, less specific, components up there, we found it could sound cloudy or muddy. We just had to be careful.

Auro doesn’t have the Object mode; it has channels. It’s got an upper and lower surround mode and a couple on the ceiling. Auro was good for creative ambiences because the upper level wasn’t too far overhead — it didn’t pull the sound up to mono. Auro also has three additional channels behind the screen above the normal LCR channels. I used those for spaceships and other elements that were placed up-screen high. I could pan up there and that would help provide some separation for the dialogue — it would provide extra clarity. Atmos has height channels on the ceiling, they’re not on screen, so it doesn’t work as well in that regard.

MIXING MUSIC IN AURO/ATMOS

AT: Chris, How did you attack your music mixing in the new formats?

Chris Scarabosio: I had my music on 12 stems. I started with the bed tracks — such as strings and horns — by putting them in the middle height position (there are height panners in Auro). In Atmos, the speakers just off the screen, not behind the screen — what we liked to call the ‘band shell’ channels — served as a really good place to put the orchestration (I created Objects out of those orchestration stems), and opened up the front three speakers quite a bit for dialogue.

Most of the time I would keep the big drums and percussion across the front, occasionally move it into the room but then bring it straight back.

AT: No doubt it will be interesting to mix in Auro and Atmos from scratch.

CS: That’s right. I think I would take an approach that was more dimensional. Elysium’s music track is quite dense and you could see how the additional channels would allow you to spread elements out in such a way that it still feels completely cohesive, but with a little more room to breathe. Saying that, I think the original 7.1 mix came out pretty good!

AT: Were you concerned that the extra channels of the new formats made it feel like the fabric of the music mix was getting stretched too far?

CS: That was the danger. And pulling it apart really does change how the music plays. There were times when I had to check myself: ‘Okay, now this feels like a different mix; it feels like a bunch of different stems’. It was a matter of having the time to carefully place the instruments then apply some reverb in between to glue it all together.

AT: So reverb was an answer?

CS: Reverb on specific channels, and using reverb not to create more ambience but to localise the ambience to begin to transform the entire room into one big speaker. I think that’s ultimately the goal: to utilise the whole theatre to make it sound like one big living entity. But it’s more involved than just panning some stuff around.

I never wanted to use the system as some kind of gimmick or novelty. I just want everything that’s happening on the screen to be more dramatic, so you truly experience it. It’s not like, ‘oh, I see what they’re doing there’. It’s more like: ‘I dunno what’s happening, but I’m totally involved in what’s going on’.

IF YOU HAD TO CHOOSE

AT: Auro or Atmos?

Chris Scarabosio: In some ways Auro was pretty satisfying because, especially for the music, you can spread it out quickly — it’s easy and it sounds wider and bigger. It’s immediately a case of: ‘oh that’s great’. But it doesn’t give you the range and complexity of Atmos. So I think Atmos definitely would have an edge over Auro in the long run.

Craig Berkey: I liked different aspects of both. But I’d like to have something neither new format provides: more speakers horizontally across the front, so we can pan dialogue more easily — it would anchor the dialogue and sound better. I’d sacrifice the extra speakers around the theatre for that. I’ve never thought to myself, ‘I wish I had speakers on the ceiling’. I’ve never said that. Maybe others have.

AT: It’s not like you’ll be given more time to mix movies now there’s Auro and Atmos?

CS: You’d like to think you might, but you’re probably right! But I think Dolby is talking about ways to approximate the array systems in a smaller room so that even without all the speakers you can get close in a premix.

AT: What did Neil Blomkamp think?

CS: He liked the extra clarity and definition; the dialogue seemed clearer; and it felt like the room had become bigger.