Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music
Page 24
As Liza later said:
“Bob Fosse told me, ‘Oh, I don’t know if we can do this.’ So we did a test: when Phil signaled me from the back, I would stop singing and my prerecorded voice would come on but my mouth would keep moving. Phil figured out how it went from playback to real voice and back again without the audience ever knowing it, and they were sitting right there. It had never been done before. Bob Fosse couldn’t tell the difference. It was a time in our lives when Phil and I were both starting out, and were in top form.”
Liza with a “Z” won four Emmys and a Peabody Award, but for years remained a cult classic—the kind of show that cabaret fans raved about but the mainstream audience forgot.
Then, in 2000, Liza’s friend Michael Arick—a film editor and restoration expert—located the original film and multitrack audio tapes, and digitally restored them to reflect the vibrancy of the performance we saw in the theater on the night of May 31, 1972. Cleaned up and remixed for 5.1 surround, Liza with a “Z” looks and sounds more brilliant than ever.
Another close friend who I’ve worked frequently with on television productions is Elton John.
Original tape box and reel for Elton’s WABC Radio concert of 11-17-70 Phil Ramone Collection
Elton and I met when I engineered and produced his first live broadcast in America, which aired on New York’s WABC-FM (WPLJ) on November 17, 1970. The concert—hosted by Dave Herman—was part of a series that included performances by B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Procol Harum, Don McLean, and the Allman Brothers.
We broadcast the shows from A&R Studio A1 on Seventh Avenue, in front of a small, invited audience. The concerts were informal, and I tried to create a casual atmosphere by putting up stage lights with colored gels, scattering overstuffed throw pillows on the floor, and passing around some wine. It was cozy, and the audience loved being part of it.
Stereo radio was in its infancy in 1970, but there was a small contingency of rock-and-roll loyalists who routinely taped FM stereo simulcasts at home on sophisticated reel-to-reel equipment. When bootleg albums of the Elton John show appeared shortly after the concert aired, Elton’s record company (MCA) decided to release it officially as 11-17-70.
While he admits to being impatient with recording live for broadcast, Elton understands the imperfection of taping a radio or television show:
With Elton John Phil Ramone Collection
“There’s a hell of a lot to do behind the scenes when you’re recording live,” he explains. “You’re conscious of the fact that you’re being recorded. It’s complicated enough doing a studio album, but getting everyone to sound good—and getting everything to come up through the [mixing] board for a live show—is a miracle. There are so many things that can go wrong at a live gig, but I don’t have to worry about the recording, because I know that Phil has all of the technical problems under control.”
I didn’t think we’d ever get past the dress rehearsal for Elton’s One Night Only concert, recorded at Madison Square Garden in 2000.
There was a lot of movement in the lights, and Elton wasn’t pleased with the set design. But the lights and other details that Elton complained about were things he could see. What he couldn’t see was the chaos unfolding in the recording truck: The computer on the mixing board had frozen in the middle of a song.
Once the computer crashed, we were unable to change anything in the mix. Fortunately, our mix—especially Elton’s vocal—was in great shape, and the frozen board was still passing the audio signal through to the recorders. Because of the crew’s quick response, nothing was lost—and a catastrophe was avoided.
No one expected what came next.
Halfway through the show, Elton made an announcement: “This will be my last performance.”
We were stunned.
After completing the concert Elton went backstage, packed up, and left the Garden. I was in the recording truck, so I didn’t get the chance to speak to him after the show. When I saw him later, I didn’t mention my concern.
Moments like this create drama, and the crew was anxious.
“Are we here tomorrow?” they asked.
“Are you booked for tomorrow?” I sputtered. “You’ll be here! And trust me: if Elton’s not here, the show will be quite dull.”
The next day, the lighting and set were redesigned, the tempos adjusted, and the audio problems corrected. Elton was placated, and the show went on without incident.
Somewhere in the middle of the concert—at roughly the same point as the night before—Elton again addressed the audience. “Last night I said I wasn’t going to do this anymore,” he said. “I was full of shit!”
Everyone was nervous because we had committed to delivering One Night Only within a week of the concert’s recording. We did the run-through on Friday, taped on Saturday night, began mixing at eight o’clock Sunday morning, and did all of the editing and mastering between Monday and Thursday. We delivered the album at the end of the week; by the following Tuesday, it was in the stores.
If One Night Only tested our skill, we were pushed to the limit when we recorded Elton’s shows at Radio City Music Hall in June 2004.
The Radio City gig wasn’t a typical Elton John event.
Instead of a hits-packed concert, Elton tailored the engagement to include early songs that he rarely performed live. It was refreshing and indicative of the uncanny knack Elton has for reinventing his live shows.
The concerts had four separate musical components for our engineers to deal with: Elton (piano and vocals), his band, a sixty-voice gospel choir, and an eighty-piece symphony orchestra. Leakage is one thing; having all of these disparate musical groupings on one stage with Nigel Olsson and the band playing right next to them is quite another!
In all we had 104 channels of audio being fed via fiber-optic line from the stage to the two recording trucks parked near the stage door on Fifty-first Street. In one truck, engineer John Harris was receiving and mixing the choir and strings (each violin, viola, and cello was miked individually, under the instrument’s tailpiece), and feeding his mix to the second truck.
Back in the second truck (the control center), Frank Filipetti was mixing Elton and the band, while adding in John Harris’s orchestra and choir mix from the first truck. Balancing the strings with piano and vocals—and a rock band on top of it all—was monumental. If Audio-Technica hadn’t generously sent over all the extra microphones, we might not have heard the strings at all.
The beauty of mixing a show like Elton’s Radio City concert in 5.1 surround sound is that it allows us to purposefully design the mix to make the listener feel as though they’re sitting in a certain spot in the venue. I think it’s cool to bring the listener onto the stage, giving them the sense that he or she is standing right next to Elton and his piano. There’s something about that close proximity that allows for a lot of detail to be heard—detail that you would never hear if you were watching the concert in a big arena.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the satisfaction I’ve gotten from working on the annual Grammy Awards telecast.
What began in the late 1950s as a small industry-only affair held at a Los Angeles hotel has become a grand production enjoyed by millions of people the world over.
Grammy producers Pierre Cossette, John Cossette, Ken Ehrlich, and director/producer Walter Miller consistently produce a program that’s both entertaining and reflective of the Academy’s commitment to the musical arts and sciences, and I’m especially proud of the Recording Academy’s contribution to television sound production. We were the first awards show to broadcast in high-definition, and to present a 5.1 surround-sound program on network television.
When we began broadcasting the Grammys in 5.1, the response was very positive. We’ve gotten to the point where we can receive e-mails from viewers while the show is in progress. “The left side sounds like it’s a bit lower than the right. Should it be that way?” and “The applause is coming from behind me—should it be that way?”
It was thrilling to communicate with viewers who are mindful of the technical feat behind what we’ve done. “Yes—the soundstage is correct,” I explain as they send in their questions. “We’ve set your listening position at tenth row center, about fifty feet in the air. But you’ll notice that we sometimes bring you closer to the stage, too.”
We’ve come a long way from the mono sound of my youth, and it’s hard to believe that while I’m standing amidst a full orchestra onstage at the Staples Center or Radio City that the multidimensional sound I’m enjoying is also being experienced by millions of people listening in the comfort of their homes.
When I began my career as a recording engineer, mixing in surround for television was considered space-age technology—and light-years ahead of its time. I’m ecstatic that it’s become a reality, and that it’s affordable for the average consumer. More than this, I’m thrilled to be using it to produce music programming that allows everyone—regardless of time, place, or financial means—to hear it in all of its full-dimensional glory.
Phil Ramone Collection
TRACK 23
What’s New?
I’ll do anything to make a record sound better.
As a young engineer, I vowed to fight the limits of the existing technology and break the recording traditions that everyone had gotten to know. My mind-set hasn’t changed.
I’m still excited when I have the chance to test-drive an experimental format, or put a new piece of equipment through its paces. But the truth is that the equipment used to make a record isn’t nearly as important as how the engineer and producer use it.
Today, we can do miraculous things digitally, with the click of a mouse—things that were difficult (if not impossible) to do in analog. I saw the potential in digital recording and embraced it from the start.
The earliest digital recordings I made were in 1980 for Billy Joel’s Songs in the Attic, a collection of live recordings. The idea was to present a handful of tunes from Billy’s first four albums—records that while less than perfect in their production contained some of his most expressive songs.
We recorded Billy in a variety of settings—from clubs to arenas—on an early 32-track 3M digital machine that I dubbed “the DC-10” (a notoriously unreliable airplane). We mixed some of the album at RPM Studios, and the rest in a mobile recording truck rented from Le Mobile, parked in the driveway of my home in Pound Ridge, New York.
It was only a matter of time before Hollywood went digital, and the format won a starring role when I supervised the final mixes for Barbra Streisand’s Yentl in 1983.
The story (based on Yentl, The Yeshiva Boy by Isaac Bashevis Singer) is about a young Jewish girl in nineteenth-century Poland who has but one purpose: to attend religious school—a privilege that at the time was afforded only to Orthodox males.
The property couldn’t have been better suited to Barbra’s many talents, not the least of which were producing and directing. As lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman explain, “Barbra brings to anything she sings passion, intelligence, and vocal brilliance. In the case of Yentl, she performed with a total understanding of and immersion in the character.”
The recording truck used to mix Songs in the Attic, “Camp Ramone,” 1981. The Necam computer mainframe was run from the truck to the garage, where it could be kept cool in the summer heat. Courtesy of Larry Franke
The complete score—instrumentals and vocals—was prerecorded on analog tape at Olympic Studios in London, with Michel Legrand conducting. Once the picture was shot, Barbra lip-synched to the tracks that had been prerecorded in London.
But after the film was edited, Barbra heard about the new twenty-four-track digital recorder (model PCM 3324) that Sony had manufactured, and she wanted to try it.
Since the movie was finished (and had been shot to Barbra’s analog vocal prerecordings), it was decided that Michel Legrand would go back to Olympic Studios and rerecord the instrumental score on digital tape, conducting to Barbra’s existing analog vocal track. Remember: Vocals for film are usually sung to a prerecorded music track, if not live with the orchestra. What Michel was asked to do was very unusual—and difficult.
The rerecordings were made on an empty soundstage with only the musicians and technicians in the room; the digital rerecording of the orchestra was glorious. There was none of the noise of the previous version, and no analog tape hiss. But when Barbra listened to the new mix—a combination of her original analog vocals and Michel’s new digital instrumental tracks—she wasn’t pleased. “That’s not how the orchestra phrased the score the first time,” she said.
We put up the analog instrumental tracks from the first sessions, and compared them to the digital rerecordings. Barbra was right: at some points, the tempos in the digital rerecordings were slightly different than on the original analog recording, and I understood why.
Just as Barbra phrases differently from take to take, Michel Legrand feels a piece of music differently each time he conducts it. While his new score matched Barbra’s vocal, the small (but perceptible) variations in tempo upset her.
“I want the exact orchestral note that we hear on the original analog recording to land in the exact same spot on the digital rerecording,” she said.
When the session masters were delivered to me at M-G-M in Culver City, I received three different sources with which to make our mix: the twenty-four-track analog recording of the score, the twenty-four-track digital rerecording of the score, and the analog recording of Barbra’s voice.
Accomplishing this in Pro Tools today would be a snap; we can easily move one section of the recording (a vocal) forward or backward until it precisely matches another (the orchestra).
But creating a hybrid mix from analog and digital sources at the beginning of the digital age was tedious.
We could edit the analog tape with a razor blade and splicing tape, but cutting digital tape could get you into deep trouble. The only way to accomplish digital editing was to use the same technique used for videotape editing, which involved making a copy of a copy to edit.
Integrating individual bars of music from the digital tape into the new analog master was time-consuming: It took nearly two hours to edit and capture sixteen bars of music. The master film for one particular song was shot at the incorrect frame rate, which affected the pitch of Barbra’s vocal, and it took me a week to get that one song into acceptable shape.
The engineer who had done the original recordings at Olympic in London came to Los Angeles to assist us, but quit after two weeks. I don’t think he anticipated the insanity of what we wanted him to do. “I can’t do this,” he complained. “I already did the job in London—I won’t do it again.”
I called Jim Boyer and asked him to fly in from New York.
As Jim remembers:
“Phil called, and said, ‘I need you to come out here—now.’ I went directly to the studio as soon as I arrived. We had a system: Phil worked in Culver City with Barbra, while I synchronized and edited the tapes at Lion Share Studio in Los Angeles.
“Engineering-wise I’d never seen anything like it,” Boyer continues. “We were distilling both analog and digital media to a single analog master—for film and record. There was no time-code (the industry standard for linking multiple tracks together so they line up exactly), so we substituted a sixty-cycle tone to help synchronize the vocals to the music tracks.
“One of the pitfalls of the early digital technology was editing; they hadn’t yet developed computerized digital editing, so we used a razor blade to make the edit. But you couldn’t cut the tape or take it apart more than twice or it became unusable. We were constantly making safeties and backups so we could edit the digital tapes.
“I was blown away by Barbra’s memory; we had dozens of tapes, and she could remember specific words and phrases that she wanted from each in the final take. It was awesome—scary, really. When we matched the vocals to the printed music score, the unfolded vocal take sheet was the size of t
he console. This was before automation—if you didn’t write it down, it didn’t get remembered. It was the beginning of the digital age and Barbra, Phil, and Columbia Records wanted to be in on it.”
Here’s how a typical Yentl day unfolded:
Barbra and I would work on remixing the film soundtrack at M-G-M in Culver City from eight a.m. to six p.m. We worked straight through with very few breaks. Then, we’d get in the car and drive to Lion Share Studio in Hollywood, where we’d meet Jim Boyer and the Bergmans to mix the songs for the soundtrack album.
Marilyn and Alan Bergman were our guardian angels—they practically lived at Lion Share from the beginning to the end. They’d written the songs for the film, but the reasons for their presence ran much deeper: They were two of Barbra’s closest friends. She trusted them implicitly, and they were coproducers on the picture.
The mixing sessions at Lion Share ran until two a.m., and afterward I’d drive Barbra home. She’d unfailingly chide me for driving too slow. “C’mon, c’mon—you can drive faster than this!” she’d urge as the car wound its way toward Beverly Hills.
After dropping her off, I’d head back to my hotel, knowing that in a precious few hours we’d be off to Culver City and another eighteen-hour workday.
Once the mixes for the picture and album were done, we went to A&M to record studio versions of “The Way He Makes Me Feel” and “No Matter What Happens,” which were arranged and conducted by Dave Grusin.
Yentl is as strong—theatrically, cinematically, and musically—as anyone could wish a movie to be. I won’t soon forget the thrill of hearing Barbra hit and sustain a high D at the end of “A Piece of Sky” (the finale), or the elation I felt when she and I cut it to picture and watched it together.