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Music Editing on 'Return to Me' |
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Score & Vintage Songs Presented Unusual Technical Challenges |
by Michael Jay
''Return to Me', the recently released film directed and co-written by actress/comedienne Bonnie Hunt, is notable for a soundtrack that included some ambitious music editing which drew on my previous experience as an engineer and synthesist. My work on the film began in
the spring of 1999 with the preparation of pre-record music tracks for several big-band songs, which are featured in the film’s early ballroom scene. To help the band really swing, composer Nicholas Pike had purposefully conducted several of these songs without a click track. But they would require a click for use in the film shoot, where, in the form of an inaudible low-frequency pulse, it would guide the dancers while foreground dialog was recorded. My first task was to generate a perfectly synchronized click.
I began by importing the completed recordings into Digital Performer. I routed the bass drum’s audio into my Emulator sampler, set it on trigger mode, and patched the sampler’s resulting MIDI data back into Performer. After further editing of this MIDI data, the file then triggered an audio sample of the click from a digital metronome and its audio was recorded in the computer. I could then look at the waveform of that click and visually align it with the waves of the song’s bass drum in order to offset the lag from the triggering process. For slower songs, I played the click signal by hand, and afterwards aligned the beats visually in the same way. The resulting click tracks flow as if the band had initially played to them.
Once the picture was into the director’s cut period, Nicholas and I met with Bonnie for our music spotting session. The first order of business was her wish to score the opening of the film with the song ''Return to Me', as performed by Dean Martin. However, she explained that although Dean had done numerous recordings of it during the late ’50s, every arrangement had included a choir, which she felt made the song unusable for the scene. I suggested that we try to track down the song’s various original master tapes to see if one of the versions had been recorded with the vocal on its own track. I explained that 2- and 4-track machines were sometimes used in that era, and that if so, Dean’s vocal would likely have been isolated. Of course this would mean that we would have to record and synchronize a new orchestral arrangement around the vocal – an ambitious and expensive proposition. But I noted that it was just such a process that had allowed Natalie Cole to sing with her father Nat on the late ‘90’s hit Unforgettable.
Initial calls to Capitol Records located some stereo recordings, but these had the vocal mixed with the band across two tracks. Nor were there any mono recordings with the elements separated on a 2-track deck. Finally, however, the archives turned up a 4-track tape dating from 1961, with the band in stereo, and Dean’s vocal on its own track.
I went to Capitol Studios on Vine to transfer the vocal to digital tape for later import to the computer programs we would use. To digitize the 40 year old tape, I brought my Aardsync clock generator and an Apogee outboard analog-to-digital converter to use in conjunction with the studio’s gear. The Aardsync allowed us to derive the lowest possible jitter-free word clock signals for the digital recorder, and let us set the project rate to 47,952 samples/second (48k, pulled down). The Apogee provided much better A-to-D conversions than can be had with normal, built-in converters. Bypassing the studio patch bay, a short, high quality audio cable was connected directly from the output of the analog tape deck to the Apogee, which fed the 24-bit DAT machine used in my rig.
Nicholas had already imported a scratch version of the vocal into the program Digital Performer to begin work on the new arrangement, and had begun by moving the spaces in between Dean’s vocal phrases to achieve a more consistent tempo over the course of the song. After transferring the master vocal from the 24-bit DAT to a Pro Tools session, I imported the material from Nicholas’ 16 bit Performer session, and conformed the pristine 24-bit master recording of the vocal to his edited version.
A recording session was soon booked for Warner’s Burbank scoring stage, with a full band, plus thirty strings. It was conducted to a click, playing back from a guide DA-88 tape. During each take this click was transferred to its own track on the session’s multitrack master. The strings sat out until the desired brass take was achieved, and then they were overdubbed.
This new arrangement was well received, and the director chose to continue work on this new version of the song, with further revisions, including a slightly faster tempo. It was decided to record this next, faster, version when the entire film score was completed – but to count on salvaging the strings from the first Warner’s session. And so a new brass performance was recorded at Ocean Way Studios in Hollywood, and mixed directly into a 24-bit Pro Tools session. Now we had to sync up the earlier, slower version’s strings.
I imported into Pro Tools both the strings and, on a separate track, the click to which they had been performed. We then imported into the same file the new band performance, and its click track. I then worked through the song, several bars at a time, to match the tempos, which varied by differing amounts in various regions of the song.
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The illustration shows the session after sync adjustments have been made. Clicks from each session are in adjacent tracks. Strings are on top, brass below. |
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After visually syncing up these two click tracks at the beginning of a section of music, the amount of tempo change needed was derived by measuring how far apart the clicks were by the end of the section. This offset, in milliseconds, was converted to a percentage of the length of the entire phrase, and this number was entered into the time compression/expansion program as the amount to adjust the tempo of the strings. (The software, of course, adjusts the speed of the audio files while preserving their original pitch). This process was repeated every few bars until the guide clicks, and the various performances, matched from beginning to end.
At the final music mixes, the newly adjusted strings were output to Ocean Way’s digital Sony Oxford console and mixed in with the rest of the brass. Then this mix of the entire band was bussed back into Pro Tools to become the six-track instrumental music stripe used in the final dub . Dean’s vocal went to its own 5-track stripe in Pro Tools. In the final dub at Todd AO we used a digital AMS/Neve console. The result was that from the transfer off the vintage tape at Capitol to the film’s final music mix stem, Dean’s vocal had remained in the 24 bit digital domain.
One final noteworthy element employed for the original score material was the use of a Yamaha Diskclavier grand piano, capable of recording and playing back a MIDI performance. This allowed the composer to record and perfect the desired piano parts himself in his own studio for later playback during the recording sessions. I played back the cues’ Performer files from my Powerbook on the scoring stage, providing both the guide click for the orchestra, as well as the piano file. The piano was played from the Diskclavier for the orchestra during rehearsals, but was turned off during the takes and then overdubbed after the orchestra had gone home. This enabled us to use many of the orchestra’s distant microphones as part of the piano sound, while allowing for complete isolation of the piano in the final mix.
In a film with a large number of source songs, and a lush, romantic original score, these techniques helped me support the director’s goal of creating what the LA Times called "a big romantic movie like the ones Hollywood used to make".
Michael Jay is a music editor who has worked with
Nicholas Pike for over twenty years. His other credits include
Michael Jackson’s Ghosts, the TV miniseries of Stephen King’s
'The Shining', and 'Starkid'. He can be reached via email
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine
Vol. 21, No. 3 - MayJune 2000
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