![]() What was so exciting was the extraordinary sounds we got. Then Daniel Hart took the music back to America, mixed it again with the rest of the score. We recorded it in January 2020 over four days, then two days mixing at my home studio. Can you talk us through the recording process? ![]() You also have credits on A24’s recent The Green Knight – engineering, co-mixing, co-production. Then you’ve got to translate it into the paying public, what they’re expecting, what they like, what’s commercial, what’s necessary. If you can take a clarinet part and pass it to the flute and they love it, it’s the same piece of music, just a different timbre. There is that discussion where someone says they don’t like what they’re hearing, and my job is to translate that – is it something big or something small? Their ear might be taken to the balance of a certain instrument or it might be the timbre of a certain instrument. If you’re talking about producers or directors, sometimes they may not get involved in the music recording process as much. There’s the translation from the composer, which is generally straightforward because we’re talking musician to musician. You have to balance the requirements of that piece of music you just recorded against the amount of music that you still have to record and the amount of time left. During a recording session, there’s a balance between getting what you need versus time and budget. If you can make music sound balanced you’re halfway to getting a great mix. How important is balance to what you do?īalance is my key core value. The old phrase for at least part of your work was ‘balance engineer’. ![]() Even when she approved it we listened through and tweaked it. Then we’d spend a day or two per episode going through it together online, me playing, her tweaking. She’d give me notes, then we’d message backwards and forwards. I took the recordings and her material, working on it for a few days then giving her mixes. It was the most collaboration I’d done during lockdown, in terms of time spent together. What else can you tell us about working with Natalie Holt? She had a very clear idea of the balance of what she wanted in the sound, but I tried to push it as far as I could to bring my take on it, to blend the two worlds together, which I think worked really well. The greatest joy was fitting that into the other world Natalie Holt’s created with tape loops, theremin, and Hardanger fiddle, to combine that traditional Marvel world of orchestra and percussion with Natalie’s really cool interpretation of electronics. It’s always a bit tricky to work with material when you didn’t record it, just because it takes longer to understand what you’ve got in front of you. It’s the first time I’ve worked for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, although I recorded some of the theme tunes for WandaVision during the first lockdown. What are the challenges around working with material you didn’t record? You mixed the music for Loki but weren’t involved in the recording. “It’s a love affair with this art medium and I just want to make the music sound as good as I possibly can.” ![]() Jake played in brass bands until the age of 18, did a music degree, and was DJing weekly before starting at AIR Studios as a runner in the late 1990s. He grew up being taken to classical concerts by his grandfather from a young age and was surrounded by music before that – his dad was in progressive rock band Van Der Graaf Generator, often playing two saxophones at once in a style inspired by jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk and making the most of octave effect boxes. It goes without saying that he’s got a good ear. He’s been busy mixing and recording music for gaming too: he worked on all three of the 2021 Ivor Novello nominations for Best Original Video Game Score (recording half of Ghost of Tsushima and all of the music for Little Orpheus and Ori and Will of the Wisps ). The things he can reveal – on top of recent credits on The Green Knight and A Last Letter To Your Lover – are recording the music for Andrew Dominik’s new Marilyn Monroe film Blonde a new natural history show for the BBC and a new Shaun The Sheep for Aardman. There’s always a tantalisingly long list of things that this award-winning recording engineer, mix engineer, and producer for film, TV, and games can’t talk about. Jake Jackson has been working solidly since March, including a month on five hours of music for a computer game that he can’t talk about as well as recording some of the theme tunes for WandaVision and mixing the music for Loki. ![]()
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