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Pro Sound News "For Hancock, the Future Is Surround" MARIN COUNTY, CA - When composer, keymaster and jazz legend Herbie Hancock thought up his latest release, figuring in audio technology and talent, he not only wanted to capture his live concert, but sonically create an "audio experience" for listeners. Hancock's surround mixer Dave Hampton was already creating an audio experience in the live concert forum. In fact, Hancock's Future 2 Future tour was mixed live in 4.0 surround by the engineer, with some live DJ panning so that audiences, whether they knew it or not, were sitting (or standing) in a surround atmosphere during the show. When Hancock decided to release a full-length concert DVD, recorded at the Knitting Factory in Los Angeles (part of Future 2 Future) by Guy Charbonneau and Le Mobile Recording, he enlisted the talents of Hampton and Leslie Ann Jones, director of music recording and scoring at Skywalker Sound, and the technology and environment of Skywalker's Scoring Stage. According to Jones, the team worked on a promo giveaway DVD of Hancock's song, "Chameleon," recorded from a concert in Hamburg, Germany, as the first step in the project. Hancock wanted something for his audiences to receive free at concerts, as a taste for the full-length concert DVD to come. Mixing "Chameleon" served as a rehearsal for Jones, Hancock and Hampton, as to what the full-length was going to be, in terms of what methods and elements worked and what didn't. Jones, Hampton and Hancock worked as a team to mix the concert in 5.1, with Jones twisting knobs and the others deciding on placement, panning, etc. The full-length concert DVD, released at the end of June, runs around one hour and 40 minutes long. Hampton points out, "This project takes the best of what we had learned when we started doing the early resourcing of mixes in traditional surround. When we used Herbie's adaptive process and took what we had learned from discussions with Tom Homan, we mixed it with what we know about live performance." The project was one of the first to take advantage of the new 5.1 speaker system installed a couple months ago at Skywalker. "We have many 5.1 speaker systems, but the one we're using the most right now is made by B&W, and the speakers are 802 Nautilus with ASW 4000 subwoofers," explains Jones. "In our studio, we use the subwoofers as bass extensions for the speakers. The B&W subwoofers allow two inputs, so the middle one has a dual purpose - it's a bass extension for the center speaker but it's also a sub. So whenever we need a sub, we just send to that speaker. We have five identical speakers, but the surrounds do not have the bass extension on them. The left, center and right have the 4000 subs as their bass extension, and the entire system is powered by Chord amplifiers, with custom MIT cables." Jones used a combination of Skywalker's Neve VXS 72-input console with Flying Faders automation, and a Digidesign Pro Control to mix the concert. The 5-piece band, which consists of Hancock, a DJ, and drums, bass and trumpet, was spread out in a wide surround mix. Jones reveals, "Dave, because he does panning for the live show, tries to emulate some of the same panning on the DVD. For the full-length DVD, we ended up using a Pro Control, because it has joysticks on it. We just sent whatever sounds we wanted to move around, such as the DJ and a couple of bass things that got moved around, to the Pro Control and Dave could move those around as he wanted and then the Pro Control automation would just remember the pans." To Hancock and Hampton, the project combines their own version of "surround sound" with the 5.1 mix later applied by Jones. "We do the live concert in Quad - our version of surround - which differs because traditionally in Quad, you have all the program material coming out of four stacks all around," explains Hampton. "We have a regular main concert system, and a separate sound system that is sometimes four, six or eight speakers. That second system is only for surround events, so we basically combine two fields - a regular stereo field and surround field. We wanted listeners to experience on the album some portions of what we were trying to do live." With the video element to work with, Jones says the mixing process took on a different effect. The challenge wasn't so much in mixing the actual sounds being created by the band, as it was in figuring out, in terms of the camera shots, how to make each song interesting. Jones, who admits to using the center channel "a lot," decided on this project that she "wasn't going to worry about anybody that wasn't of audio experience Herbie intended on." Instead of considering the average consumer's speaker setup, Jones place the project in a somewhat audiophile category, with a client and audience interested in "hearing" the album. "I put the normal elements you would put in the center, like bass and kick and snare," she says. "I was also able to put some effects in the center, and if we wanted to spread things out, sometimes I would pan it from center-to-left or center-to-right. And, sometimes I would pan from left-front to left-back, like in the case of the keyboards. A lot of Herbie's keyboards came from the back, so it wasn't just effects in the surrounds, there was some actual source stuff back there." Working with such an organic recording, Jones tried to retain the sounds captured in the recording, to maintain the integrity of the live experience. Without a lot of processing or compression, Jones did employ the TC Electronic System 6000 for reverb as well as Lexicon 224. GML and Millennium Media EQs were used, in addition to some minor compression for drums and bass. The DVD was mixed in 24/96 to Tascam MX2424 with Benchmark converters. |
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