robegian
31-08-2007, 19:09
La colonna sonora di "Constantine" (http://wwws.warnerbros.it/movies/constantine/) è stata realizzata interamente su Logic da Klaus Badelt, tedesco naturalizzato californiano co-autore delle musiche del film insieme a Brian Tyler.
Vi cito un estratto di una sua intervista pubblicata nel 2005 da Virtual Instrument Magazine (bellissima rivista che consiglio a tutti: http://www.virtualinstrumentsmag.com/index.html), sperando di non fare troppi casini col copyright ;)
One day Emagic came by, we were working on “Pirates of the Carribbean,” and they said, “What do you think of our EXS sampler?”
And I was laughing at them! I had 14 GigaStudios, each of them had four MIDI ports. They said, “You can load 64 samplers.” That’s not even one Giga! But after they were gone, we thought about it and analyzed our tracks a little bit, and found out that the average cue has 40 tracks maximum. So the actual used instruments at one time are not that many.
I think “Catwoman” was the first project that was done completely in Logic, including mixing the orchestra and delivering the final master.
VI: What sorts of things were you requesting from Emagic [as Logic’s developer was known prior to being purchased by Apple] before they showed you EXS?
Badelt: The funny thing was when they came, I remember we said, “Come have a look what we’re doing here,” and they came to the mixing room and saw us working there with a few Logic Controls [MIDI hardware control surfaces] and mixing the orchestra.
You could see in their faces: whoa! “You guys are really doing this, right?!” And so they looked at each other and said, “Oh ****!” because we were pushing the envelope so much that it would reach the limits.
But it worked.
VI: What was missing?
Badelt: For instance loading up complete track set-ups—channel strips and data. You couldn’t really copy and paste between two Logic Songs. These things were put in since then. They’re still working on being able to copy parts of Environments.
They’ve now put in the Apple Loops capability. For our purposes it’s better to have it all integrated in one. Now loops are just another audio track.
“Constantine” was to a certain degree based on Apple Loop tracks. We recorded an electric cello player, and we made lots of loops that could go in other cues.
VI: How are you able to get by with so many fewer sounds loaded than you had available in Giga?
Badelt: The Giga revolution was great.
Sounds were unlimited, and the company was very collaborative—developer Jim Van Buskirk put in a lot of work. We had maybe 100 GigaStudios at our place altogether, and I was using maybe 14.
But still we had the issue that I couldn’t recall cues; you can’t load 14 samplers, it would take too long. So after we realized we only used 40 tracks in a cue, we gave EXS a try.
You never learn if you don’t use it on a project. So I wrote a small film—there was not that much orchestra, not a big action adventure, and I tried to do it with everything coming from a dual G5. I kept a few Gigas running in the back just in case, but it turned out that it worked amazingly well.
It’s very efficient and integrated with Logic. For example, when you use the same sounds in five cues, EXS doesn’t load the sounds five times, it loads them once. They in memory.
We converted our whole library into EXS— with all our hundreds of thousands of samples. It’s not done yet! But most of it is.
It’s just amazing how your work will change this way. Okay, I have an idea, next track I need…let’s try this guitar. You open a track, plug in the guitar—which can be very fast now. No, let’s try a different instrument, a synth sound. Let’s add some ambience. Then the next time you use electric guitar with some ambience simulation.
And you could do that between each cue, with full recall. And the mixing is in the writing now. So the fader you have when you write is the channel strip of the mix.
VI: Do you have a separate person mixing now?
Badelt: Yes.
VI: You give him or her the Logic file.
Badelt: That’s what we do, right. We have the same Logic set-up in the mixing room. He opens the sounds.
And that’s another big key: you don’t start the mix from scratch, you open what I did. And of course I’ve spent some time with the mix already at that point. He can do what an engineer does well—eq and so on—but it’s based on what I did. It used to take a long time just to get it the point where I had it.
VI: You normally use about 40 tracks, but you must have way more than that in your template loaded up and ready to play.
Badelt: Oh, hundreds. The palette in Logic (in the Environment) is by definition external instruments. But now I’m using internal instruments and I only load the ones I need. The Arrange page before was hundreds of tracks, and only some of them were used.
The cool thing in Logic is that you can configure it any way you want. No two Logic users set it up the same way—if I go to someone who uses it, they constantly surprise me with what they’re doing with it.
So I defined all the sounds I used in all the GigaStudios on one graphical Environment page. They were wonderfully sorted in layers like stings, brass, guitars, orchestral percussion, such and such.
So if you had an idea, you didn’t know which sound would be perfect, you just look at it graphically. So you command/click [which assigns the instrument to the currently selected track]—this one? Maybe. This one? No. And you really had your whole pallet at your fingertips.
VI: But you can’t do that now the way you’re working with EXS.
Badelt: They are about to change that too. Right now my pallet is not that graphic, but still it’s quite a well organized hierarchy of sounds. It gives me a hierarchical view of what I can do, which is quite inspiring too.
What they’re doing, the idea is that a channel strip setting is represented like a Favorite object, so basically by double-clicking on it you select it and it loads a track. And then you can create a pallet again.
Logic loads so fast. I can load the biggest sounds in just a few seconds. It’s very optimized how they do it. We have sounds with so many layers, we reach the limits of the EXS constantly.
Now they have to make it a really good sampler. It’s a sample playback engine. I’m sure it can not keep up with the flexibility of Kontakt, MachFive, and Halion. But I prefer it integrated.
VI: Are you using using other virtual instruments than the ones in Logic?
Badelt: The Logic ones are so good. Just look at the ES2—you can spend weeks with the ES2. Now with the different modeling synths, I haven’t gotten to the ground floor. It’s amazing.
But I use the Spectrasonics stuff a lot. It’s great. Albino. I love these synths—the weirder they are, the better. To find a tiny little sound in one cue, now you can. To get us all these high and supernatural sounds, the bread and butter sounds are actually great. I use synths a lot in the template.
And I use Kontakt a lot too, actually. I use Impakt quite a bit too, which is Kontakt, just a different GUI.
VI: Do you use any of the commercially available orchestral libraries, or just your own custom sounds?
Badelt: Basically not the commercial libraries. Maybe to augment a sound here and there, but you won’t even hear it. We just had the opportunity to record in a really good hall, most of the people I now use when I go to London, the same engineer. It’s about the recording, about the right recording engineer who does film work all the time and the right hall. The real thing.
But I have lots of it—CD-ROMs of drums and loops. But mostly we create new sounds in a project.
VI: Do you spend a lot of time programming sounds for each project?
Badelt: Well, I have special people for that.
We have at least one sound programmer in a project. It’s a full-time job.
VI: You still have Pro Tools in your rig, even though you’re not using it for mixing anymore.
Badelt: I use Pro Tools as a video player, playing back effects and dialog and picture. That’s the one thing I don’t do inside Logic yet. I like video at such a high quality for projection that it’s just taxing the computer too much. I’m waiting for the quadruple 7GHz!
We’re writing music for films now just like the Avid guys cut: you need one more editor, you add one more Avid, connected by a fibre channel drive in another room. It’s scaleable, just another room opens up.
That’s what we’re doing now. If you have two weeks or three weeks to write “Constantine,” you need three or four “outlet” composers—arrangers, whatever you call them. Open another room, put another G5 in there, clone our library, and you’re ready to go.
Before it would mean build another studio. Not much more to it anymore.
It doesn’t help you writing a good tune! You still have to do that, unfortunately.
Maybe one day! I’ll ask them to put a preference or two: good cue, bad cue…
______________________________
Roberto Giannotta
iMac G5/2,1GHz 20" 1,5GB RAM, MacBook 2,0GHz 2GB RAM, OS X 10.4.10, Logic Pro 7.2.3, Focusrite Saffire Pro,...
Vi cito un estratto di una sua intervista pubblicata nel 2005 da Virtual Instrument Magazine (bellissima rivista che consiglio a tutti: http://www.virtualinstrumentsmag.com/index.html), sperando di non fare troppi casini col copyright ;)
One day Emagic came by, we were working on “Pirates of the Carribbean,” and they said, “What do you think of our EXS sampler?”
And I was laughing at them! I had 14 GigaStudios, each of them had four MIDI ports. They said, “You can load 64 samplers.” That’s not even one Giga! But after they were gone, we thought about it and analyzed our tracks a little bit, and found out that the average cue has 40 tracks maximum. So the actual used instruments at one time are not that many.
I think “Catwoman” was the first project that was done completely in Logic, including mixing the orchestra and delivering the final master.
VI: What sorts of things were you requesting from Emagic [as Logic’s developer was known prior to being purchased by Apple] before they showed you EXS?
Badelt: The funny thing was when they came, I remember we said, “Come have a look what we’re doing here,” and they came to the mixing room and saw us working there with a few Logic Controls [MIDI hardware control surfaces] and mixing the orchestra.
You could see in their faces: whoa! “You guys are really doing this, right?!” And so they looked at each other and said, “Oh ****!” because we were pushing the envelope so much that it would reach the limits.
But it worked.
VI: What was missing?
Badelt: For instance loading up complete track set-ups—channel strips and data. You couldn’t really copy and paste between two Logic Songs. These things were put in since then. They’re still working on being able to copy parts of Environments.
They’ve now put in the Apple Loops capability. For our purposes it’s better to have it all integrated in one. Now loops are just another audio track.
“Constantine” was to a certain degree based on Apple Loop tracks. We recorded an electric cello player, and we made lots of loops that could go in other cues.
VI: How are you able to get by with so many fewer sounds loaded than you had available in Giga?
Badelt: The Giga revolution was great.
Sounds were unlimited, and the company was very collaborative—developer Jim Van Buskirk put in a lot of work. We had maybe 100 GigaStudios at our place altogether, and I was using maybe 14.
But still we had the issue that I couldn’t recall cues; you can’t load 14 samplers, it would take too long. So after we realized we only used 40 tracks in a cue, we gave EXS a try.
You never learn if you don’t use it on a project. So I wrote a small film—there was not that much orchestra, not a big action adventure, and I tried to do it with everything coming from a dual G5. I kept a few Gigas running in the back just in case, but it turned out that it worked amazingly well.
It’s very efficient and integrated with Logic. For example, when you use the same sounds in five cues, EXS doesn’t load the sounds five times, it loads them once. They in memory.
We converted our whole library into EXS— with all our hundreds of thousands of samples. It’s not done yet! But most of it is.
It’s just amazing how your work will change this way. Okay, I have an idea, next track I need…let’s try this guitar. You open a track, plug in the guitar—which can be very fast now. No, let’s try a different instrument, a synth sound. Let’s add some ambience. Then the next time you use electric guitar with some ambience simulation.
And you could do that between each cue, with full recall. And the mixing is in the writing now. So the fader you have when you write is the channel strip of the mix.
VI: Do you have a separate person mixing now?
Badelt: Yes.
VI: You give him or her the Logic file.
Badelt: That’s what we do, right. We have the same Logic set-up in the mixing room. He opens the sounds.
And that’s another big key: you don’t start the mix from scratch, you open what I did. And of course I’ve spent some time with the mix already at that point. He can do what an engineer does well—eq and so on—but it’s based on what I did. It used to take a long time just to get it the point where I had it.
VI: You normally use about 40 tracks, but you must have way more than that in your template loaded up and ready to play.
Badelt: Oh, hundreds. The palette in Logic (in the Environment) is by definition external instruments. But now I’m using internal instruments and I only load the ones I need. The Arrange page before was hundreds of tracks, and only some of them were used.
The cool thing in Logic is that you can configure it any way you want. No two Logic users set it up the same way—if I go to someone who uses it, they constantly surprise me with what they’re doing with it.
So I defined all the sounds I used in all the GigaStudios on one graphical Environment page. They were wonderfully sorted in layers like stings, brass, guitars, orchestral percussion, such and such.
So if you had an idea, you didn’t know which sound would be perfect, you just look at it graphically. So you command/click [which assigns the instrument to the currently selected track]—this one? Maybe. This one? No. And you really had your whole pallet at your fingertips.
VI: But you can’t do that now the way you’re working with EXS.
Badelt: They are about to change that too. Right now my pallet is not that graphic, but still it’s quite a well organized hierarchy of sounds. It gives me a hierarchical view of what I can do, which is quite inspiring too.
What they’re doing, the idea is that a channel strip setting is represented like a Favorite object, so basically by double-clicking on it you select it and it loads a track. And then you can create a pallet again.
Logic loads so fast. I can load the biggest sounds in just a few seconds. It’s very optimized how they do it. We have sounds with so many layers, we reach the limits of the EXS constantly.
Now they have to make it a really good sampler. It’s a sample playback engine. I’m sure it can not keep up with the flexibility of Kontakt, MachFive, and Halion. But I prefer it integrated.
VI: Are you using using other virtual instruments than the ones in Logic?
Badelt: The Logic ones are so good. Just look at the ES2—you can spend weeks with the ES2. Now with the different modeling synths, I haven’t gotten to the ground floor. It’s amazing.
But I use the Spectrasonics stuff a lot. It’s great. Albino. I love these synths—the weirder they are, the better. To find a tiny little sound in one cue, now you can. To get us all these high and supernatural sounds, the bread and butter sounds are actually great. I use synths a lot in the template.
And I use Kontakt a lot too, actually. I use Impakt quite a bit too, which is Kontakt, just a different GUI.
VI: Do you use any of the commercially available orchestral libraries, or just your own custom sounds?
Badelt: Basically not the commercial libraries. Maybe to augment a sound here and there, but you won’t even hear it. We just had the opportunity to record in a really good hall, most of the people I now use when I go to London, the same engineer. It’s about the recording, about the right recording engineer who does film work all the time and the right hall. The real thing.
But I have lots of it—CD-ROMs of drums and loops. But mostly we create new sounds in a project.
VI: Do you spend a lot of time programming sounds for each project?
Badelt: Well, I have special people for that.
We have at least one sound programmer in a project. It’s a full-time job.
VI: You still have Pro Tools in your rig, even though you’re not using it for mixing anymore.
Badelt: I use Pro Tools as a video player, playing back effects and dialog and picture. That’s the one thing I don’t do inside Logic yet. I like video at such a high quality for projection that it’s just taxing the computer too much. I’m waiting for the quadruple 7GHz!
We’re writing music for films now just like the Avid guys cut: you need one more editor, you add one more Avid, connected by a fibre channel drive in another room. It’s scaleable, just another room opens up.
That’s what we’re doing now. If you have two weeks or three weeks to write “Constantine,” you need three or four “outlet” composers—arrangers, whatever you call them. Open another room, put another G5 in there, clone our library, and you’re ready to go.
Before it would mean build another studio. Not much more to it anymore.
It doesn’t help you writing a good tune! You still have to do that, unfortunately.
Maybe one day! I’ll ask them to put a preference or two: good cue, bad cue…
______________________________
Roberto Giannotta
iMac G5/2,1GHz 20" 1,5GB RAM, MacBook 2,0GHz 2GB RAM, OS X 10.4.10, Logic Pro 7.2.3, Focusrite Saffire Pro,...