A star is born soundtrack artwork11/26/2022 ![]() I prepared for sixty-four tracks, our highest track count was sixty-one. ![]() At the cart, I worked off of the two Midas M32R’s recording to two Sound Devices 970’s. We would also route the singing and music to the band through earwigs for the concerts with live crowds since the music and singing were not amplified. The monitor mixer would control the reverb that was heard by Gaga and Cooper via Phonak Earwigs. We used the stage box to split the signal of all the feeds, one to me at the cart and the other to a monitor mixer at the side of stage. These days, we generally had a three-hour pre-call, to set up the wedges, mic all the instruments, and get everything patched to a Midas digital stage box. Each music day was like throwing a concert, and the whole team was needed to set up and break down the mics, cabling, stage snakes, in ears and earwigs. We were able to take a stereo feed from the digital piano to track her playing, record the vocals cleanly, and keep the music from being heard by the crowd.įor regular production days, we were a three-man crew: myself, Craig Dollinger (Boom Operator), and Michael Kaleta (Sound Utility.) On music days, we had Nick Baxter on our team as our Pro Tools music editor and monitor mixer Antoine Arvizu. Picturesįor the track “Always Remember Us This Way” (one of my favorites in this film), Gaga requested a digital grand piano so we could record the piano isolated from the vocals. We created a room mapping whenever possible by recording an impulse response for post to be able to take the original studio instrument recordings and balance them to sound like they were recorded live with the vocals in each venue. To help capture the atmosphere, we used a DPA 5100 surround sound mic in the crowd and two shotgun mics, one at stage left and right, aimed at the crowd for their reactions. We muted the musicians’ instruments through the amps but still recorded the feeds for post to use. I used two Midas M32R mixers with a digital stage snake, each mixer has thirty-two inputs and by combining them via Dante into the Sound Devices 970, I could record all the tracks needed. We had to be prepared to record absolutely everything live, which meant up to sixty-one tracks of audio at any given time. We shot performances all over, from Coachella and Stagecoach, to Glastonbury, the Shrine Auditorium, the Greek Theatre, the Orpheum, to the Palm Springs Convention Center, a few small nightclubs and a drag bar. There were some fun headlines at the time about technical difficulties causing the lack of amplification, but it was all a part of the plan to keep the music as secret as possible. The crowds were always so fantastic and excited even though they couldn’t hear much of anything. We had the festival’s monitor mixer put the instrument playback into Cooper’s wedge at a low level, and he sang live (unamplified) in front of one hundred thousand festival goers. We modified this system for Glastonbury where we had to be super mobile, we were a skeleton crew with only four minutes to set up and shoot. The performers could hear the music and the singing was recorded live, but the crowd couldn’t hear the vocals or music beyond the first couple of rows. To counter that, we came up with an earwig playback setup with no amplification. One of the biggest concerns to everyone was the potential of music being leaked while filming at these venues with live crowds. Moving only between their sets meant we got our gear up in the few minutes allotted before Johnson’s set and then filmed and broke down in the minutes before Nelson’s set. We shot between two concert acts, Jamie Johnson and Willie Nelson. The movie opens on Jackson Maine’s performance at Stagecoach, the entire scene was filmed live at Stagecoach in only eight minutes. Jason Ruder, Music Editor, and one of the re-recording mixers, did a quick mix of the prep mini-concert and with Warner Bros., Cooper, and Gaga happy it was clear that we had landed on the right method. We ultimately landed on having the band perform to playback with just the vocals being recorded live. To ensure that we had the best system in place, we set up a mini-concert during prep to run through and test the concepts. For me, this was a dream come true, recording a music-based film and capturing the performances live, with the production sound being the vocal track instead of a studio recording.įor the next few months, I ran through different concept setups to figure out exactly how to get the best vocals and tracks possible for the various scenarios we would be shooting in. ![]() Neither of them wanted the film to feel like a traditional musical and there would be no lip-syncing to playback. ![]() ![]() There was never any doubt that Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga would be singing live. ![]()
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