How to shoot a film for free

For a blog whose blurb claims to be about a "Mastering engineer and DVD Author" there's been very little about DVD and films here! Here's a post to redress that balance slightly.

One of my favourite DVD projects of recent years is Greg Hall's magnificent cult triumph "The Plague". SRT created a new 5.1 upmix and re-master of the original stereo soundtrack, plus a new upscaled master tape for the film's digital cinema debut in Covent Garden, and later the authoring of the DVD, all under the watchful eye of Tom Swanston from WYSIWYG Films.

Originally shot on mini-DV for only £3500 (!!!), "The Plague" is a fantastic mix of black humour, social commentary and improvised drama, and has won awards and garnered praise from all corners, not least none other than Mike Leigh, who said

"It's anarchic, crazy, kind of rough-edged and raw, but it's got an amazing energy, and it embraces white kids, black kids, Asian kids, kids up to no good, boys and girls out on the street. It's a full length film, made low budget, so it's absolutely a gang of people getting together with great imagination and wit, and a bunch of talented actors. It pulsates with energy."

We were all proud to be involved with it (and had a great time at the premier!)  Meanwhile Greg went on to direct "Kapital" for the Man

chester International Film Festival, a bold collaboration with composer Steve Martland, and is currently working on "Bash The Rich", an autobiography of Ian Bone, as well as numerous smaller projects. I highly recommend his blog, Broke But Making Films as a great, inspiring read for any would-be indie film producer, but his latest venture will be particularly exciting to follow, I think.

After his "naive" success making the Plague for such a tiny budget, Greg has decided to make his third feature film for no money at all. No, I don't know how this is supposed to work, either! As he says it's a "slightly mad" idea, but if anyone can do it, Greg can - he has "the equipment, the crew, the actors, the determination and the mad glare in my eyes to be able to do this" - and my bet is that the results will be inspirational.

Best of all, he will be blogging it for our education and enjoyment. As he says in his latest post:

I will blog and keep a video diary of the whole journey. We will show the improvisation period that is often kept secretive, the madness of shooting on no money, the turbulent editing process and the possible festival circuit and uk cinematic release of the film. Everything you need to know on how to - or possibly how not to - make a no-budget feature film.

As anyone who has checked out the fantastic extras on the DVD of The Plague will know, coming from Greg this is no idle claim. I for one will be keeping a sharp eye on his RSS feed in the coming weeks and months, I hope you will too.

And you could do worse than rent or buy a copy of "The Plague", while you're at it, too!

Rock Music And Gynaecology

An aspect of the mastering engineer's job that is often overlooked is the "people skills" it demands. Often sessions involve meeting artists for the first time, making them feel at ease, gaining their trust, listening and learning about what they want from the session, and then navigating the delicate process of explaining what you're doing with their music and why. All within only a few hours.

As a mastering engineer who is also a musician, recording and mixing engineer, I have a great deal of empathy with both artists and engineers - trying to make a great record can be a demanding, grueling and sometimes emotional process. People often express insecurities about what they've achieved, be it in the performance, recording or mix, and I always try to focus on the positives in what they've achieved, even where there may problems that need addressing. And I hope that I come across as friendly and supportive in the process.

Recently though, the importance of all this was brought home to me even more strongly than usual. Last month I did a really enjoyable session for an unsigned band called the millionstars - gorgeous, quirky, ethereal british acoustic pop with mild electronica influences - cellos, bassoons, beats, breathy vocals and bass clarinet - how could I not love this stuff ?

The session went well and I felt it had been a great success - the recordings and mixes were excellent to begin with, the material was catchy, clever and varied, and in the mastering I was able to add a whole extra dimension of "width" and "gloss" as Rose and Malcolm had hoped I would. We found we had a lot in common as far as our musical tastes were concerned, we had a good laugh, and at the end of the day we all agreed the album sounded great. Job done, and I went home a happy man.

So, imagine my surprise when I was absentmindedly surfing a few days ago and found themillionstars blog, where on 03/07/08 Rose said:

"we went to get our album of songs "mastered" this week. It is a Dark Art... 

...our good friend Mark compared it to calling out to a total stranger in the street to babysit your children. There you go. Perfect. all those tiny fragments of song in your head, the strands of experience, the homespun, uncomfortably, possibly-inappropriately heartfelt lyrics, brought out and recorded and melded together, and then letting them be played VERY LOUDLY to a complete stranger in a room full of boxes and lights. (One word, girls: Gynaecologist...)

anyway!... we have an album. and it feels like us."

Initially I was amused by this, but then I started to feel a bit uncomfortable - Rose was saying I made her feel as if she was visiting a gynaecologist !?!  I'd hoped my "bedside manner" was better than that... so I sent her a slightly worried message, and thankfully she reassured me that I'd misunderstood.

"oh no... it's just the process, letting someone else hear each strand of a song... [a bit] like doing my music exam grades all over again"

And then she added a comment to her blog:

"[Ian] made me feel as comfortable about my voice, bassoon-playing, glockenspiel-mangling and general flouncing-about-on-the-piano as anyone has ever made me feel.

if you're ever considering mastering anything, look him up...  He'll make it sound beautiful, and soothe your soul."

- which has to be one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me professionally ! So, all was well with the world again. But it reinforces the point of this post:

Mastering engineers need to be sensitive. 

Not only to people's musical intentions and the genre they are working in; not only to their possible insecurities on a technical level as far as the recording goes, but also about the music itself. Even though people often ask me if I like their music, it had never really hit home in quite this way - until I read Rose's comment - that my customers might feel judged by a mastering engineer on an artistic level as well as a technical one. But of course they do ! Often the mastering studio is the first place musicians have their art listened to by someone other than close friends and family or long-term fans - it's natural they might feel uncomfortable, and it's important to be aware of that. Especially since the critical listening environment and constant repetition puts everything under the microscope even more than ever before.

And finally, we need to realise that the mastering session is actually the first step of a new phase for the artist - all their hard work is about to be released for scrutiny, review and criticism by the world at large, and we represent the first concrete example of that. It's up to us to make sure that transition is as comfortable as possible, as well as ensuring that the music sounds the best it possibly can when it arrives "out there".

It's a big responsibility, I hope I can continue to live up to it.

Mastering The Orb - Complete BBC Sessions

Please forgive me a self-indulgent nostalgia post:

I love my job !

I vividly remember hearing "Little Fluffy Clouds" by The Orb for the first time - it was in 1991, and coincided with the beginning of one of my favourite times in UK music. I was in my second year at university, and it was the same time that Orbital's Brown Album came out, U2 released Achtung Baby, Screamadelica by Primal Scream was huge, Resevoir Dogs and the Director's Cut of Blade Runner were released, I was listening to "Copper Blue" by Sugar, Bowie's "Hunky Dory" and ""Mixed Up" by the Cure, and They Might Be Giants released "Flood". My friend Dan (nowadays I master his albums) introduced me to "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" by Byrne and Eno - and with hindsight, it was the year I started mastering.

That's not strictly true of course - I actually started work as a trainee tape-op at SRT roughly two years later, and mastered my first album for paying customers a few months after that. But I was mastering, nonetheless - or rather, re-mastering - in my own fashion. Bootlegs, to be exact - purely for my own listening - of Prince, no less, at various gigs on the Lovesexy tour and numerous after-show parties. I bought these in dodgy indie record shops for a pittance, on analogue cassette (remember those?) and then discovered I couldn't listen to them, because they were usually dull, distorted, off-azimuth and copied at such a ridiculously low level with no noise reduction that they were bathed in hiss as a result !

So, I would borrow a friend's ghetto blaster and use it's primitive 3-band graphic equaliser to copy the crappy transparent plastic TDK D90 original (remember them?!) across to a lovely new silver SAX90, making improvements as I went. Boosting bass, correcting L/R balance, probably rolling out the top end during quiet sections to hide the hiss and boosting it again in the loud bits to counter the inevitable distorted mush that came with them...

Those were the days. And in fact, nowadays I do pretty much the same things, but with gear I could never even have dreamt of back then. Samplers were the new big thing - I remember tearing my hair out my with best friend Ben (I master his albums now, too) trying to get a multi-patch set up in the cutting-edge Yamaha ____ - and it would always crash solid after about two hours work. I recorded albums for friends on a Tascam 8-track cassette machine, and thought myself lucky to actually have access to a DAT machine to mix down to.

"Little Fluffly Clouds" conjures up all of that for me, in a heartbeat.

Anyway, here I am, nearly twenty years later, actually mastering The Orb for real - listening to a version of "Little Fluffy Clouds" from the the 1998 Steve Lamacq sessions - and even better, "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld" from the original 1989 Peel Sessions (and everything in between) for a new double-album release. It's not distorted, it's not bathed in hiss, it doesn't need much bass and it's certainly not on analogue cassette, but it's still benefitting from some TLC from me. Which feels good.

Perhaps it's a sign of the times (hah!) that although I still remaster Prince bootlegs at home - purely for my own listening - nowadays it's with with ProTools running on a MacBook Pro, from where they go directly to iPod Touch and sound fantastic - but oddly enough, it's a CD of the same gig.

I love my job.

Christine Tobin - The Secret Life of a Girl

An excellent (and well-deserved) review of Christine's new album which we mastered back in March, as I mentioned in my first post. It's always good to see one of your artists doing well - I love this record, and I wish Christine every success with it. Maybe this will be the breakthrough she deserves !

And while I think of it, Phil got a great review too !

Christine Tobin, Secret Life of a Girl

 (Babel) 

John L Walters
Friday May 16, 2008
The Guardian

Dublin-born singer Christine Tobin is a jewel of the London jazz scene, streets ahead of the pack, but she deserves better. She should be on a global stage, rubbing shoulders with fellow troubadours like Cave, Mitchell and Cohen. And while her current 15-date tour should help broaden her UK fan base, this is an album that could break through to a bigger, international audience. Tobin's eloquent songs are framed by masterful arrangements and beautifully recorded to make the most of the content. There's no self-indulgence: it's all about the songs. Dave Whitford's sonorous bass and Phil Robson's self-effacing guitar are the perfect match for Tobin's rich, dark-hued vocals.

Highlights include the swampy Bye Bye; the Corner of an Eye, with its archaic "spring reverb"; and a delicious cover of Cohen and Robinson's Everybody Knows. Yet it's a tribute to the quality of Tobin's writing that there are no weak spots in this excellent collection.

Mastering The Split Knee Loons with John McCoy

It's not every day in your career you have the chance to say you've worked on truly legendary material - Wednesday 19th was one of those days.

It was a session which has been on, then off, then on again - one I've been looking forward to ever since I supervised the copying of the original reels over a year ago - mastering the unparalleled Split Knee Loons ( "The best live band EVER!" ) album "Loon Knee Tunes".

Supervised by the almost-equally legendary John McCoy ( Gillan, Mammoth, GMT ), the CD includes the entire, previously unreleased album, plus several astonishing bonus tracks, perhaps most notably their epic live performance of "(She's A Real) Eggtimer" at the hallowed Liverpool Empire. Previously only available in it's restored form from the original sh***y brown vinyl (now a much sort-after collector's item) this one really benefited from the new analogue reel transfer. It was also a particular pleasure to hear more of the work of Blind Frank Mellonhead, who guested on "Norwegian Wood" on Eat This's album, which I mastered last year.

It's always a pleasure to work with John, and it was great that Stix was able to drop in - 'ello Mate ! Now it's finally going to be released after 27 years, I'm confidente that the hordes of eager fans won't be disappointed with this album - truly, they don't make them like this any more.

Galactic Symphonies - Kaoss Pads and Poetry

So, Richard's session proved to be even more fun than I expected ! The project was a collaboration with unique 60's poet-lyricist Stephen Kalinich, and comprised a fascinating improvised mixture of Kaoss Pad manipulated soundscapes, gentle acoustic guitar numbers and full-on almost-rap sections. Where things got really interesting is that the release is to be a double-sided disc - CD on one side and DVD on the other, so we had a studio recording to master, plus a live performance for the DVD.

Initially Richard had thought of the live version as more of a bonus to the CD release, and anticipated spending less time on a "rough cut" master. However since the recordings were made he had started to enjoy the live performances more and more, and decided to spend more time on them. At the end of mastering the studio version I gave him a brief demo of how the live performance would sound if we converted it to surround-sound using the System 6000's "unwrap" capabilities, and he was hooked. The processing he uses on the live guitars, especially the Kaoss Pad (*), worked fantastically well with the unwrap, creating a really convincing 3D soundscape. So an extra day was booked and now there will be 3 versions on the disc - studio stereo on the CD, and live stereo and surround-sound on the DVD.

(*) Richard uses two of these while performing - "playing" them with his toes !