Sour Notes

A friend pointed me to an article in the New York Times, about new software that claims to change the pitch of just one string in a guitar chord. This isn’t a trivial task, since plucked strings don’t have just one frequency. There are harmonics extending up the band, mixing with harmonics of other notes. Anything that wants to adjust a single string has to sort them all out, first.

Required (Re)reading

What do Ratatouille, The Simpsons Movie, What Lies Beneath, Cast Away, and Forrest Gump have in common? You can add a couple of dozen other titles to the list, including Howard the Duck and some of the Harry Potter movies, if that’ll help. Give up?

Rolling Your Own

When I started, an audio room was a collection of tape recorders, rack-mount processors, and a console. (Software? You wore a cotton shirt so it would stay comfortable through an 18-hour session.)

On Artbeats.com: Article on Mixing Audio

As some of you know, both of us originally came from the music industry. Chris in particular still composes music and edits dialog for some of CyberMotion’s clients.

Every month, we write a Tips N Tricks article for our friends at Artbeats.com. This month we wrote about how mix audio effectively to ensure the listener can hear the dialog without becoming distracted by the music or sound effects. There’s only a few simple rules you need to learn to make a huge improvement in the quality of your soundtracks. Remember: Bad audio can really distract from good video!

Click here to download a PDF of “Clearly Mixed” from Artbeats.com. (This is an update of our classic 1995 article on mixing, On The Level.)

This month, Peas

There’s an hilarious tape that’s been making the rounds for decades*. Actor/director Orson Welles is reading voiceovers to picture for some food spots. The copy is bad, the agency direction is worse, and Welles is not suffering fools that day. The third script is so ludicrous he gives up, and storms out of the studio.

Wrong, wrong!

Olympics Researchers get their physics messed up, twice. Here’s why it matters to every filmmaker.

According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Olympic sprinters who are closer to the starting gun get better results. Researchers at the University of Alberta wondered why. They thought it might have something to do with the starting gun: obviously, the runners who are closer to the gun hear it louder than those farther away, and volume can affect neural response.

Make Her Sound Like I Love Her

I actually got that “Make her sound…” direction early in my career, while mixing a spot. The agency producer must have had something in mind - they usually do - but I had no idea what. Eventually he settled for a little extra mid-low boost. I could have also slid in a couple of extra, husky breaths… but the spot’s timing was tight already.

Dale Launer had a more creative solution in his 1992 comedy Love Potion No. 9...

Time Out of Joint

Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster was a guest on the Colbert Report about a week ago, talking about balanced diets. (A fake monster on a fake commentary show that spun off a fake news show… come to think on it, Cookie performed through a window that was directly above Colbert’s fake fireplace, where the chimney normally would be.)

Page 1 of 1 pages