Recording - September 2021 - 25

THE ASCENDING SPIRAL
WITH CHARLIE CLOUSER
Of course, I print my composite mix and deliver it to the dub
stage just as a reference, and for most films and some TV, I'm
also providing stems as a 5.1 surround array. One thing I do
differently is, I do not use the center channel for music. I leave it
completely empty, so I am doing 4.1 instead of 5.1, basically a
front pair, a rear pair, and sometimes an LFE channel.
DAW of choice?
I compose, arrange and program everything in Logic. For
audio, I use a MOTU 112D interface with AVB, which has
MADI and goes over to a separate Pro Tools machine with an
Avid MADI interface. So, on a single $7 cable, I am printing
48 channels in a single pass-six channels for each of the
seven stems, and that eighth stem is the composite mix. Some
people have figured out how to do it all on a single computer,
but I prefer having a separate Pro Tools rig to print to.
What is the scoring process like? Do you
watch a rough cut or read the script?
I'll usually have a rough cut of the movie, and generally I will
spend anywhere from a week to a month at the beginning of a
project just making sounds. I'll put the rough cut on the TV, turn
the sound off and let it loop while I wander around the studio
recording sounds. I'll try to assemble a toolbox at the beginning
of the process of new sounds that were made just for that project.
What are some examples?
It could be bowed metal sheets or bow strikes on a Chinese
guzheng that I will sample map to a keyboard sampler,
or sitting behind the guitar pedalboard with lap steel creating
pitch-shifted drone scapes that I can pitch up and down in Logic.
I have a big concrete-and-glass living room that I record a lot of
percussion in at generic, easy to manipulate tempos.
So, what happens when the toolbox is stocked?
The next part of the process is spotting the movie with the directors
and producers, deciding in very precise terms where music
goes and where each piece of music starts and stops. Do we want
the drums to start when the bad guy pulls out his gun, or do we wait
for him to run down the hall and slam the door? Once I have those
notes and guidelines, I spend perhaps an inordinate amount of time
making very precise and often elaborate tempo and meter maps. I
will try to find the internal rhythm of the action, and I spend time just
listening to metronome clicks from Logic against the picture. Many
times, especially in a Saw movie, many of the cues are rhythmic,
and they'll gradually speed up to some horrible conclusion.
Even when a cue is going to be floaty ambient sounds with no
inherent rhythm per se, I'm still very precise about the tempo and
meter maps, so that if I'm just playing and holding a chord for four
bars and then going to a different chord for four bars, I'll want the
size and the length of those bars to match precisely to the scene
I'm scoring so that I don't run out of time and have the last chord
sound like it got cut off because I played it too slow.
22 RECORDING September 2021
Recording - September 2021

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