AudioMedia - March 2009 - (Page 39) Dave Woolley at Thornquest Studios. Mix Engineer David Woolley’s now-home-sited post-production facility in West Sussex for the next stage in Stevie Wonder’s precious onstage to offstage audio journey. Summerhayes signs off: “Amazingly enough, we didn’t do a flat-to-tape recording; anyone can do that these days, but it’s quite nice to retain some of the early disciplines of recording something properly, and we had a long enough soundcheck and listen-through the night before to be able to tailor things to tape, so everything was in nice little packages – the EQ was slightly there, so David didn’t have to start totally from scratch.” Mix Engineer David Woolley, formally of Air Studios, Trillion, DoubleVision, and TeleCine Cell, before finally founding Thornquest in the mid’ s to provide audio and video post-production services to British and overseas clients, including high-profile music-to-picture jobs such as Elton John (Elton : Live At Madison Square Garden), Lionel Richie (Live In Paris), and now, of course, Stevie Wonder. Woolley: “Everything I do is about working to picture, but the work covers quite a large spectrum, really – from full-on music jobs like this one, to television documentary jobs.” For the Stevie Wonder project we’re technically talking a total running time of minutes of LPCM Stereo and DTS . Surround Sound on the Live At Last DVD and minutes of PLCM Stereo, DTS-HD Master Audio . , and Dolby Digital . on the Blu-ray version, including the complete two-and-a-half hour O arena-recorded main set. So, where to start, Mr Woolley? Home And Away Woolley effectively began working with Stevie Wonder the day he attended the October , , show at The O , therefore getting an advance feel for the music he was about to mix in the flesh, so-to-speak. Then, within a week, Tim Summerhayes’ -odd GB of time-coded BWAVs would be residing within Woolley’s beloved SADiE PCM-H multi-channel recorder/editor, ready for further mix massaging before mastering. “There were tracks,” says Woolley, “However, a few of those weren’t used, because the set list for the shows is really quite fluid. Stevie plays the songs he wants to play on any particular night; he sort of moves around, and the songs either get longer or shorter, with the band just following him – a bit like an old-fashioned bandleader, I think. “The timeframe was really geared towards hitting a stage approval date with the people at Motown, so we wanted to lock some audio delivery stages with the video offline stages, so rather than them sending the video with Tim Summerhayes’ live mix on it for the first picture approval stage, Living I n A B ox they wanted to have the first remix stage laid back onto that offline before they sent that over to America.” Approval achieved, Woolley mixed on: “I tended to mix it in degrees of polish, rather than, say, work forever on the first few songs. I move roughly through all of it, and then work through it all again a bit less roughly, and then a bit less roughly once more, for the third time. Coming from more of a broadcast background, where pretty much at any stage somebody could say, ‘Stop; this show’s going out now!’ it simply wouldn’t do to have finished the first half of the show and not even have looked at the second half, so that’s why I did it like that. “For the main part, all of my work was on the SADiE H , and I was really using that machine, if you like, to create the perfect multi-track. For example, when the guitars would double on this acoustic or that acoustic, or whatever, then you could switch off all the others and put the EQ on there. There was quite a lot of subtle patching up, because when these guys are following Stevie they’re not quite starting at the same time, though they were excellent musicians, so plenty of respect for them.” At no stage in these proceedings did Woolley resort to using a console or DAW controller, instead favouring a mixing in the box approach. “It’s not something that interests me greatly,” he claims. “I do have some of the hardware controllers, but maybe that’s a mixing style argument? I tend to think of mixing more as being clip-based, and I don’t particularly feel the need to grab four faders at once and do a live mix on a sequence. I’m much happier to just key in values to turn things up or down, working in a much more non-linear fashion, I suppose.” Woolley’s mix moved from one SADiE to… another: “That H was outputting -channel MADI to a SADiE LRX [Location Audio Workstation], and there were probably about inputs for that, which were, if you like, remixed stems, so I’d have half-a-dozen for drums, for example, and I’d have a few more for guitars, and a few more for mixed keyboards, and a few more for the audience – that kind of breakdown.” Having effectively delivered his mixes to London’s Metropolis on December , , ready for mastering, in the new year Woolley subsequently worked there alongside veteran Mastering Engineer Tim Young, effectively trading his own Dynaudio Acoustics AIR -based multichannel monitoring system for Young’s PMC BB -A counterpart, and superior room acoustics for further refinement during the mastering process itself. Woolley: “One of the things that marks out this project was going back – in the end – to a proper, full-on London room that’s got proper expensive acoustics to iron out any issues that crept in at the lower acoustic spec of the home studio. I like to diverge things as much as possible, but it wasn’t working that well, so when we got to Tim’s room, having as much of a wraparound of the music outside the three frontal speakers as possible was paramount. “The . mix and the stereo mix was actually done at Metropolis with the six discrete files being rendered by Tim through his mastering equipment, because it occurred to me that the thing you’re asking a mastering engineer to do is correct deficiencies in the remix – dig into the mix and bring out or bury an instrument by AUDIO MEDIA MARCH 2009 EQ, or whatever, so I thought, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be better if you actually did the mix at the mastering session?” As Woolley concludes, he can thank his lucky SADiE stars for that: “I was listening to the output of the LRX when I was mixing it, but then when I took that session to Metropolis and played the into six on Tim’s SADiE, I sort of carried on tweaking; when Tim was saying, ‘Well, the mix is fine, but overall I’d like to hear a bit more of this,’ or, ‘Those instruments are too far to the rear; can you bring them forward a bit?’ then that was easily achievable at the mastering session.” Where music and . meet, there is often a measure of negotiation to be done, and Metropolis’ Tim Young is no stranger to that: “The mix came in with no sub channel on it – that’s out of the ordinary, but I kind of preferred that David had completed his mix without a subwoofer, because it wasn’t an extra element that got in the way. We listened to it, and said, ‘Well, okay, we’re going to add a sub to this, so what are we going to do?’ The Final Cut Tim Young of Metropolis Mastering. “I’m of the opinion that when you go to friends’ houses and see their . setups in their lounges, it’s pretty obvious that the centre speaker – in the majority of domestic setups – isn’t really designed to handle a lot of bass. Since . was originally invented for cinema, the centre channel is for dialogue, and the sub channel is for effects for movies, so I think that you have to be very careful if you put too much bass in the centre channel. We spent quite a bit of time on that; we created the sub channel, but if you turn the sub off it still sounds great.” Young claims that the dynamic mixing and mastering duo “…nailed it in two days, really – about hours in total, maybe.” Admirably downplaying his own marvellous mastering contributions – again, mostly achieved digitally in the box, Young kindly credits Woolley with having “…done the lion’s share of work on this project; Tim [Summerhayes] obviously recorded it, and got it down on tape sounding very good, but the majority of the creative work was David on his own, so any kudos should go to him.” The truth of the matter is that both the Live At Last DVD and Blu-ray’s awesome audio content is down to the overlapping teamwork demonstrated by all three pivotal, professional individuals involved in this interlocking recording, mixing, and mastering chain; individuals who all have Stevie Wonder himself to thank for turning in such a memorable performance on the night, one we can now all enjoy in the comfort of our own living rooms. ∫
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