As a mixer of a lot of Disney content, I have years of experience mixing musical numbers (or songs, as we call them). As someone who came into post-production sound mixing from a classical music and music engineering and mixing background, this is one of my favorite parts of the job. It brings me so much joy to have the privilege to integrate amazing Broadway-style musical numbers and carefully crafted pop songs of all genres into the stories that kids consume. A great song can be a wonderful extension of the story–not just adding a little pizzazz, but bringing the entire story to new depths.
The first mix of any project, especially long-term projects like a television series, is always the hardest. Everyone involved in the sound package has done their best to put creative high-quality sound into the session. The mixing team have put in the effort to create a mix that they believe is of a quality that could air on television right out of the box. But, then the clients step into the room.
As a mixer, I try my best to do justice to the content. I use all of my tools to achieve balance and clarity. But the clients always have their own unique agenda of what’s important to the story for them, which plot-points need a little extra clarity from the sound, or which emotional beats are essential for the music to carry. There is no knowing these priorities and sensibilities until you’ve sat down in a room with the clients and gone through their notes one by one.
Do you remember watching TV or listening to the radio and it drove you crazy that the audio levels were extremely different whenever something different came on or if you changed the channel? We no longer have this issue. Here is why!
If you missed Jeff’s big announcement in his blog post Introducing Boom Box Post Verdugo, we are currently building a new facility that will be all our own! We are in the home stretch of construction of our new studio which will feature three Atmos-ready mix stages. We are hoping to complete construction in about a month, and then we will move on to fabric, wiring, and gear installation on the stages. Because this process has been fascinating to us as first-time mix stage builders, I thought I would share our progress thus far with all of you.
We’ve reached out to our blog readership several times to ask for blog post suggestions. And surprisingly, this blog suggestions has come up every single time. It seems that there’s a lot of confusion about who should be processing what. So, I’m going to attempt to break it down for you. Keep in mind that these are my thoughts on the subject as someone with 12 years of experience as a sound effects editor and supervising sound editor. In writing this, I'm hoping to clarify the general though process behind making the distinction between who should process what. However, if you ever have a specific question on this topic, I would highly encourage you to reach out to your mixer.
