Studio One - Control Room
“The control room has changed a lot over the years. In the 1930s it was a different small room, as they were cutting straight to disc. This was before tape was invented, so you had two options: stop and start! So if anyone messed anything up, you had to do the whole thing again, and you couldn’t edit anything. A guy in a white lab coat standing there; no seats!
“As sessions got more complicated, they needed a bigger space – especially for film jobs where you’ve got surround sound, a 100-oddpiece orchestra… you need a large console to capture that orchestra. This [console] is the Neve 88R, with 7.1 surround sound, three or four different Pro Tools rigs, a record rig, a playbacks rig, prerecord rig, then a video rig… there’s a lot going on, and it all needs to be in sync.
“72 channels sounds crazy, but it gets eaten up pretty quickly! Everyone needs separate headphone feeds, you’ve got to pipe out the dialogue, sound effects, and often you do playbacks with music, dialogue and effects, and the director wants to hear how the music’s balancing against it all – we don’t want to lose the dialogue, so there’s a lot of checking that the music’s not overwhelming everything else. It’s a lot to consider.”
Know the score
“It’s so important to get that balance right at the recording stage. So much so that a lot of film stuff is now done in stems or layers; so you might do the strings first of all, then the brass, then the percussion separately. When the director is in the final dub, let’s say the brass is completely overwhelming the dialogue, he can just push it back, or get rid of it entirely if needed. It’s that thing about decisions being made– if you’ve got so much going on in a film soundtrack, you need that control, as the story’s so important. The score has to enhance, not block anything.
“I remember working with Alan Parker who did Midnight Express in Studio Three. When he mixed that, he had three faders: mono dialogue, mono music and mono sound FX, and that was it! You had more, or less – those were your two options! Now you have hundreds of channels! It’s funny how things have changed.
“A lot of important clients for us are video game clients. Their budgets are almost as impressive as film budgets these days. Long gone are the days of 8-bit sounds coming out of a ZX Spectrum! It’s phenomenal – they’re essentially movie scores, but a lot longer, due to the amount of music that needs to be recorded. That kicked off around 1998 for us with Tomb Raider. Actually, the first game recordings we did here were football commentators doing voiceovers for Pro Evolution Soccer!”