Tonebenders Podcast

290 – A Complete Unknown

The new film A Complete Unknown follows the early life of Bob Dylan as he first arrives in New York City and meets the people that would define his musical journey. Director James Mangold's movie features live performances in small rooms, bars, as well as massive festivals and the sound team had to make each song feel real and unique. Supervising Sound Editor Don Sylvester, Re-recording Mixer Paul Massey, Supervising Music Editor Ted Caplan and Production Sound Mixer Tod Maitland tell us how they built the live scenes of musical history with the use of real vintage microphones, cleaver editing and many passes on the mix stage. This episode is sponsored by Sound Ideas new Golf Sound Effects library: https://www.sound-ideas.com/Product/2441/Golf-Sound-Effects Show Notes: https://tonebenderspodcast.com/290-a-complete-unknown/ Podcast Homepage: tonebenderspodcast.com This episode is hosted by Timothy Muirhead

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 14 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

Woody and I met a young man. He kind of just dropped in on us, and he sang a song. Well, it fairly struck us to the ground. And Woody and I felt that maybe we were getting a glimpse of a new road. This young man, he's been playing around town a bit, but I thought it was high time. He took the stage at Folk City. So I want you to give a warm welcome to Bob Dylan. [APPLAUSE] Thanks, Pete. Boy, that's a lot to live up to. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to ToneBenders Sound Design Podcast, presented by Sound Ideas. This is the show where we talk with the sonic artists behind our favorite films, games, and series. Check out Sound Ideas' latest library, Golf Sound Effects. Swing big with this collection of everything you need to build a perfect sounding game of golf, including 382 sounds from the whoosh of the club cutting through the air to the crack of contact. Give it a listen at sound-ideas.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome to ToneBenders Sound Design Podcast. My name is Tim Mearhead, and I will be your host today as we dive into the sound of the film, a complete unknown. Directed by James Mangold, this bio-pick is of the early years of Bob Dylan from his folk beginnings until he goes electric with a full band in 1965. The film features music and settings as small as tiny basement cafes all the way up to the massive Newport Folk Festival. The sound team had to make each play sound authentic from the nature of the sound system, or lack thereof, to the room acoustics, to the crowd reactions. This is no small task, and it's done with creativity and precision. So let's meet the team that made this all happen. It's wonderful to have Paul Massey back with us today, a complete unknowns re-recording mixer. I believe this is his fourth time on the show. He's always a favorite. Welcome back, Paul. It's great to talk to you. Thank you very much. Making his third appearance on Tone Menors, we have Don Sylvester, the film's supervising sound editor. Both Don and Paul were on together previously before to talk about Ford versus Ferrari back in 2019. That's one of my all-time favorite episodes, so you two have a lot to live up to today. Don is always fun to talk to. It's great to have you back, Don. Welcome. - Thank you, good. Nice to see you again. - Making his first stop on our show, we have Ted Kaplan, the supervising music editor on a complete unknown. Ted, it's great to meet you. Welcome. - Good to be here. - And finally, we have Todd Maitland, the production sound mixer on this film. Todd is a legend and someone that I've been hoping to have on the show for a long time. With great eagerness that I say, Todd, welcome to Tone Menors, it's great to meet you. - Thank you very much. I'm wondering why I haven't been on before. - It's a good question. It's a very good question. So let's start with you, Todd. You're on set today, so I think you might have to split to go do some production sound mixing. There are so many amazing vintage mics on screen in this film. I'm wondering were they just props or were you able to actually wire those up? - We actually did a very long search to try to find 45 period microphones, totally functional, that were perfect condition. Met a lot of time looking for all the mics. And we use different microphones in different venues to really try to create a tapestry of sound so that when you go from venue to venue, you have a different tonality, you have a different sound to it and a different feeling to it. And as time goes on, the early mics were a lot more mid-rangey and then as time goes on, they get fuller, they have a deeper sound to them as they develop microphone technology. So we were able to get and use, I think, 45 microphones, period microphones. - Wow, so were you just using those or did you have some modern labs hidden within them or how did that work? - Everything, everybody was wired all the time. I always had at least two booms going. We had multiple ambient mics going. We had microphones out for any kind of thing. For instance, when we were doing the Greenwich Village treats, we would have microphones out. My Terrence and Jerry who work with me, they're masters at putting microphones out for all different kinds of sound effects. So if there's cars going by over here, someone's playing a guitar over there, someone's opening their door and going in over here, walking down the street, whatever it is, we'll put microphones out for everything we possibly can and particularly for the audiences. There we would use probably like three, four, five microphones out into the audiences, just trying to capture different perspectives and different audience members throughout each of it. - So how big was the actual in-person audience for the folk festival scenes? I'm assuming it wasn't the size of the crowd we're actually seeing on screen? - No, and my partners here made it sound like it really was, thousands of people. It was 300 people, we had 300 people, but they were very vocal and Jim was very good about getting them to do what he really wanted them to do. He wanted them to be an absolute integral part, an interactive part of the music. So they react to Bob, to Timmy, and everybody else with Joan, they love Joan, and they would just kind of ooh and awe with her. And then the early Timmy days, they were just enthralled and then obviously at the end, when he went electric, everything went to this chaos. And so you have all these different sounds that go on from the background. And Jim just loved to have all that interactivity. We would shoot things with full audience interactivity. There was no separation out where on a lot of films, I'll try to capture things as individually as possible so I can send it to post. I kind of equate it to an artist having a palette. If you have perfect yellow and green and blue, you can create the great colors. But if they're all merged together, it's kind of just one being brown. So I always try to give many individual components as possible. And on this, it was really tricky because there were so many things going on at the same time. So my technique was really important to try to get Mike's as close to each of these individual sounds. And being able to have these period, Mike's was obviously wonderful for the performance pieces. And then with Timmy when he was playing without a microphone, like in the hospital and in the cabin, we figured that the only way we could capture him was by putting a microphone in his hair because the way he holds his guitar goes right up against his body. So there's no place for a wireless microphone. So any of the wider shots were all done with that microphone in his hair. And then as we'd move in, we'd have a boom overhead and a boom underneath capturing vocal up top, guitar below, and then a wider one just to capture a wider perspective on it, just to be able for post to be able to kind of dial in perspective on it all. - When he was singing live, I'm correct in saying that the majority of the time he was singing live not to pre-records, right? - All him. - Yeah. - Timmy never did any playback. - So what was the crowd reacting to? Was the music going over the PA system? Or was it just in years or? - Oh no, it was absolutely out to the audience. We created it as if it was a real concert. And as I said before, we did that last, the last scene in 1965, starting with the railroad gang going all the way through Timmy's performance to the final get together of all of the members from the festival on stage. We did that as one take. It was one 23 minute take from beginning to end. I think we had 40 microphones out for that because each element had to have its own microphones besides the crowd reaction. And then we had speakers. They had built us period speaker cases. So we had our own speakers inside of these period cases and we played to the audience all the time. So it was always a fine balance of trying to be able to keep Timmy as much isolated as he could be but give the audience the oomph that they needed to create that reality. - That's amazing. I didn't know about that ending. Let's bring in some of the other guys, Ted Kaplan as music supervisor. What did you think when you got all these tracks from production? - It's incredibly helpful to have all these mics as we're building these, obviously cutting together the music and having a mic inside the guitar, all the different vocal mics, we have perspectives and the crowds are amazing. And we were able to utilize them still that even though he's playing back through speakers, which could be problematic because you're using a take that isn't the exact take that Timmy's singing at the moment, you have different issues when you're cutting around from different shots. But because plug-in technology that's become more recently available, we were able to pull some of the music out of it and just keep some of the crowds. It allowed us to keep that authentic sound that Todd had got on set without flaming and causing all kinds of weird phase issues and whatnot. That was a huge benefit on this movie. - Paul, let's bring you into this conversation. You are kind of becoming the go-to mixer for these live performance things. You were on talking about "Moon Age Daydream" a couple years ago. Obviously you won your Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody. You've also done actual straight up musicals like "The Greatest Showman." When you come onto a project like this, are you feeling confident? Or are they all presenting brand new challenges that you don't know what to expect till you get there kind of thing? - Well, they all present definitely their own challenges. But yes, this is my favorite genre of film to mix. Above all, I come from my music background and recording live bands was part of that. So this is where I'm most comfortable, to be honest, just integrating music into film, trying to tell the story the way the director wants, but also bring some power to the mix as well. - So what were the big new challenges on this one for you on the faders? - It was wonderful that Todd had recorded with all of these mics and he gave us the opportunity to go between mics as we changed takes on songs to better match vocal performances, guitar performances as we segued from one to the next within a song. But that was pretty challenging, just trying to make sure everything matched in its tonality and its perspective. Obviously the biggest challenge I think musically was once we got to Newport 65 and Bob Goes Electric. There were three songs there where he's playing electric and we needed to start the first one with the power and the aggression that Jim and obviously the film audience wants, showing off Bob's rebellious nature there and how he didn't care that people weren't potentially enjoying what he was playing. But we also had to build through those three songs. So we couldn't start off too weak, we had to start off strong. And then the building through three songs involved me incorporating more of the PA as a character and the crowd as a character and reverbs and slaps and madness going on out in the audience as a character and also building the low end in the songs as the three songs progressed. And obviously some sort of level but not getting to a point where we were driving the film audience away screaming 'cause it was getting too loud. That was probably the biggest challenge because it also meant if we went into the second song and made a change which normally meant lifting an element and making something louder or more highlighted, we couldn't take the thunder away from the third song. So each one of those had to be a progression up so that Bob could ultimately walk off stage and it feels like we've reached a peak. (upbeat music) ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ - Dawn, we haven't heard from you yet. This film has some really interesting transitions between scenes because sound helps sell those a lot. There's one really cool transition where we cut from Bob playing live to the hospital and they're listening on the record. The transition doesn't happen on the picture cut. We still hear the crowd from the live performance until the record player is turned off. And then there's another awesome transition where we hear the footsteps of someone running before we see them actually run into the room and jump on a bed or a couch, I can't remember. Was that all kind of discovered as you were building the track? - I mean, these are trademarks of Jim Mangold. From the mind, Jim Mangold. We always try to sort of pre-lap or post-lap. We're always having things propel you into the next scene. We do ourselves automatically almost now when we're sort of addressing a scene. Like, how can we propel someone into the next scene? But it's basically Jim's idea. The record needle pickup was scripted that way. And Bob running up the stairs was also sort of scripted that way. But these are things that we do all the time with Jim's supervision. And I think you'll find most scenes have a little twist like that that takes you to the next scene. - It's fun to listen to because it gives the whole film just a pacing that picks everything up that I really enjoyed. - Most of us here work with Jim for a number of films and we kind of are used to pre-lapping something or doing something like clever like that in transition. There's always some goal in going from one scene to the next to sort of send you wanting more or into a new mystery. What are you hearing? What are you going to see? And it's just comes almost second nature. Almost second nature is of Jim's love for it. - So we spoke earlier about the crowds. I guess maybe before Todd leaves, maybe we can talk about this. There's a moment, I think it's at the Newport Folk Festival but not the last time we're at the Newport Folk Festival where Bob premieres the times they are changing. And the crowd kind of spontaneously sings the chorus with him and watching the film, it sounds like tens of thousands of people are singing along with him. How the hell did you pull that off? Were you able to record the extras on set there, Todd? - We recorded them live and then we also did it as the wild track section with them also to help fill that out. And then I think Ted kind of brought in about 10,000 other voices into it. (laughing) - Yeah, I mean, definitely Don. And also, we work with Nick Baxter, our music producer and Todd, all of us together created the body of it. I mean, the foundation is definitely the crowd on the day, hugely helpful. I mean, there is something inescapable about the authentic sound of a group of people singing outside. And I think that gave us a real head start on something that feels powerful and builds. And then the layers that I think Don, right? We got a bunch of group singing along with them too. - I knew the crowd would be singing because obviously it was in the tracks already. But my task was to make sure that they didn't or I'll have one mind. It's fun to look back on this and say, like, everybody was singing along. But in fact, somebody has to start the idea. So the first course, Bob sings it, nobody sings it. Second course, a couple people start singing along. And then by the third course, everybody's singing. That was the sort of transition I wanted to have from discovery to enjoyment. ♪ As the present now will it be past ♪ ♪ The order is rapidly fading ♪ ♪ And the first one now will it be last ♪ ♪ For the time they are reaching in ♪ (audience cheering) (audience cheering) - That really works because remember, people have not heard this song before. You know, we've heard it a million times. But in that audience, you know, that's the first time that they've heard this. So nobody would want it right away. It would be that natural progression. And one of the testaments that Timmy, besides the fact that he said, you know, in the very beginning of the film when we started that, I've worked six and a half years on this part. I am not going to playback, was the fact that he got the audience going. And he was out there even when we were filming shots not on him, he would be out there playing for the audience. He would be out there playing for the off-camera actors every single time. We never went to playback for it. It was tremendous to work with someone that had that kind of commitment to it and really cared about their fellow workers and the outcome of the film. - Interesting and enjoyable. And the problem was, sonically, you have people off the stage, the Newport stage, that are in the side wings or backstage that are having conversations at. And we're playing a concert 15 feet away. Doesn't surprise anybody that there's music bleed in all this dialogue. As you realize now, we have to take out that bleeding music so that we can cut these scenes together without the burden of having to match what's being played on the stage. And I don't think we could have done it a few years back. These new apps that allow us to actually remove music from tracks, we can isolate it or we could just remove it. But that's the testament to Jim's energy. He was making sure that this was a real concert all the time. So even if you weren't seeing the stage, there was a performance going on. - And I tried, you know, the normal production mixer approach is to try to get everything as clean as possible. I originally attempted to try to get those scenes that were happening in the wings without music over them. And Jim put the kabosh on that, I think, to take one. And he saw there was no one that he was like, forget it. Get the music going. - Well, we've talked a bit about using the crowd to build energy, which was done phenomenally in this movie. But I want to talk about using the crowd to go the other direction. Fairly early in the film, we meet Joan Baez for the first time. And she's performing in front of kind of a coffee house. She decides at one point to stop playing guitar and pushes the microphone away. Suddenly becomes this immensely intense kind of, like she's singing just to you. And the crowd in the room kind of disappears. And that makes it so much more intimate. Paul, maybe do you want to talk about mixing that scene and how it came together? - Sure, Joan was singing live and playing live. She, as I understand it, did intentionally just push that microphone away and be so intimate towards the end of the song. For me, I wanted just to exaggerate that moment. So at the beginning, I had her voice and a guitar also playing through a very, a small club PA. You sort of accentuated the delays on that slightly to the point where, well, actually got a couple of notes to reduce the PA reverb on the beginning of the song. But what I wanted to do was create a slightly heightened PA sense that really showed off the microphone and the system in this small club. And then when she pulled it away, that went completely dry. And I couldn't go actually completely dry on a voice 'cause it was too much of a contrast. But I just put it then into some very small room reverb that would just seem like a natural dialogue voice. ♪ But show on that house in New Orleans ♪ ♪ They call the rives in sunny ♪ ♪ And sunny ♪ ♪ I'm going back ♪ ♪ To New Orleans ♪ ♪ My race is almost right ♪ - And I think the contrast by overdoing the beginning and then underdoing the end in terms of reverbs and PA treatment that highlighted what she was doing. At least I hope we did. - That's one of the elements where you can hear the difference in these period mics. Also the period mics had a very different sound to them in the early '60s. They were much more mid-wearingy. So as she's singing into the microphone and we have a small speaker out there for the audience there, and when she kicks it to the side, then she's going on a, I don't know whether you use the boom or a wireless on her. - Top of the boom. - I think it was the boom, yeah. - So you go from this more mid-range performance sound to what we're all used to now hearing, is that really rich normal sound, a normal quote unquote normal sound for dialogue. So that transition helped tremendously also. - They don't notice, because it is a movie, that there's always the sound of the audience. In the beginning, it's just a normal sort of room with people. There's some plates and glasses and things like that. But none of that says what she pushes the microphone aside, all of that goes away, left exposed, which I think is very effective. - It's super effective because the point of that scene is obviously to introduce us to her, but it's also to kind of make us as the audience fall in love with her. And it becomes this like magical moment when her voice just gets focused in on, and it's just like singing right into your brain. It was a really, it set her character up for the rest of the movie, 'cause sometimes our hero character, Bob, is not the kindest person to her. It makes you side with her a little bit that maybe you wouldn't if you're just a huge Bob Dylan fan. I thought it was a really awesome way to go about that, and it was super effective. - Do you know, Monica didn't sing before this picture? They said, "Can you do some singing?" And she goes, "Well, I don't know." She said, "I sang in the shower, "but that's about the extent of my public singing." And she taught herself the guitar, and she turned out to be a real gem. I mean, she came from nowhere to do this. You would think that she's a professional singer. - I definitely did think that. I had no idea, that's amazing. Ted, after the film ended, I was sitting in my seat watching through the credits, and I noticed that in extra musicians, your name is listed, additional musicians. - That's right. - What did that entail? - At one point, you know, in the process, when it started, actually before this even started, Jim said to me, we were doing Indiana Jones and Jim said, "You know, next movie, we're not having any score. "We're just gonna use Bob Dylan stems. "We're just gonna use the stems from, you know, "anything we have, and we're gonna just, you know, "just do that." I said, "Okay, cool. "No composer on this movie." And then about midway through the process, he says, "You know, maybe we need something." It was right at the bar scene when he gets punched out. Jim wanted something. He said, "You know, Don, maybe there's a tone, "maybe there's some things that can get us "in his head a little bit." I made this thing for him, and he said, "Great, let's also put it here and here, "and let's, you know, maybe use this style throughout." And it just kind of expanded, you know, the initial idea of it was always to do something that kind of hinted at a guitar feedback. It has this kind of whaling kind of thing going on to it that we were gonna like hint at Timmy's disturbance, like there's something polling him forward and that it's gonna keep carrying him on every time he's challenged, every time someone tells him to do it this way or that way, we were gonna continue to kind of hit that and reprise that idea. And so it kind of just expanded to fill that void that Jim wanted. And it was really fun. And we did something for the Cuban Missile Crisis to do the similar thing. It wasn't so much about Timmy's musical career, but just to create the same edgy, almost it's like musical sound design that holds the whole thing together, gives it a bit of an edge, but doesn't feel like a big piece of score. You know, Jim didn't want this movie to ever feel like a big, you know, musical movie with a big orchestral score coming in. So we just found sonic textures that laid in with the movie without feeling like you were suddenly entering in some sort of, you know, traditional biopic sound. - Very cool. So it was mostly created with guitar? - It's some guitar pedal work that I recorded and it's some hybrid instruments that are played. So it's all kind of nebulous what it is, but it was all in this effort to kind of hint at not just play guitar feedback, which I did try do, which becomes too aggressive, but to do something that kind of reference that kind of swelling sound and something's kind of bugging you almost in a tinnitus way without doing that kind of a high pitch sound, which Don and I are very allergic to. - Me too. - I've been done it on many movies. - Yeah, it's a trope that might have been overdone. Yes, correct. - Yeah, and it will be done again. - Yeah. And then overdone again. - Yes. - Don and I and Paul worked together since Walk the Line. You know, I was a sound effects editor on Walk the Line. I did crowds with that and it's been fun to go full circle. We come to this movie and then Don and I are so used to working together that there's this great fluid relationship. So much of the movie is coming from Dailey's music. And so Don and I are collaborating with the Dailey's working out who's doing what. Is this music? Is this dialogue? Is this something that we're man? I mean, there's a lot of process that our relationship together really fostered an ease of figuring it out. And you know, I could handle one thing that maybe would not be done by the music editor sometimes and Don would be doing stuff that would not be done by the sound department, but it didn't matter 'cause we worked together so much that we trusted each other to manage all kinds of things. - Well, Todd, what was your favorite song that when you were watching on set that just kind of blew your hair back? - I think Masters of War, you know, I think just him alone by himself in the gas light there and the power of that moment and what was going on in everything around him, there were so many moments, you know? And it really felt like once Timothy said that, you know, I'm going live on this whole thing, every day felt like you were going in to record, you know, a historic album. You're like, this is, this movie is so driven by music and there's nothing else to take you away from it. You know, there's no other big thing to take you away. It is the music and Bob. I was so impressed with him and with the way that he and Jim worked together. But what Timmy did, I think, was just absolutely incredible to watch him develop, you know, 'cause he got better and better as the film went on and they had done pre-records a year ago and you compare the pre-records that they did to what we ended up doing live and it's two entirely different performances. You know, he really became the part. So, you know, watching his development and that was great and when, and just like that's one simple song with just him and the guitar, just the power of it, I thought it was really quite amazing. - Okay, on that note, we have to let Todd go. He's on set with his next project and has to go do some actual real work. Thanks a lot for joining us today, Todd. It was great talking with you. - All right, okay. - Okay, to follow up on what Todd was just saying, Paul, do you remember mixing the scene where Bob sings Masters of War? - I do, it was great. - That was a tricky one, wasn't it? Because we had to deal with it from outside to inside. It's a really complicated mix for Paul. - Yeah, that was coming off of the, of John walking down the streets with the Cuban Missile Crisis going on. So that was already a pretty hectic scenario for sound walking down the street with the sirens and the panic and the TV and the taxi that went by and ignored her and all of the rest. But then as she's walking down the street, we're drawn, she's drawn to the sound of Tim saying his a new one, his another song, and is playing from a speaker that's out on the street outside the club where he's playing the gas light. So we had to transition out of the chaos of outside to a speaker sound outside the club door to a stairwell as she descends into the basement into the club and then into the club itself. And Todd had liked the acoustic and also Bob's voice, Tim's voice, so well, it had so much power and intimacy that we could then go into a very sort of dry scenario of playing in front of us inside this club. There was a lot of transitions within that song, but it was well prepared and we got through it. I think it's a good scene. - That is something that I found really impressive about this movie. The songs are often coming from around the corner. There's a really impressive time where we hear Pete Seeger wearing the hallways down the hall at the hospital and we hear him singing, we don't know where it is and we get to watch Bob kind of follow the sound and find him. That's not easy to do. I hate having to mix stuff that is down the hall and around the corner. It never quite works. You did it multiple times in this in multiple different ways. As we were just talking about down in the basement, down the hall, how do you approach those scenes? - Well, the scene that you were just discussing where Bob first comes into the hospital and he goes down the wrong corridor, but then he hears Pete Seeger playing off into the distance. That's a very long corridor. So I really just went sort of literally and I thinned out the guitar, thinned out Pete's voice, took the top end out of it, compressed them, started off towards the surrounds, not totally in the surrounds, but it's all really a gradual progression of EQ opening up, panning opening up into the right direction and reverb changes as we find our way down the hallway. And it's mainly reverb changes, obviously level and everything, all of that. But once you then get close to the doorway, you can be sort of 70% of what you're gonna be inside the room where he's actually playing. Still needs some form of reverb there, but not as echo-y and distant as you had when he first discovered Pete. And then with panning, you just get to the doorway, you go through the doorway and mono or close to mono, and then open up when you come into the room where he's playing. ♪ It's good to know you're so long ♪ ♪ It's been good to know you're so long ♪ ♪ It's been good to know you're ♪ ♪ This dusty old dust, it's taken me home ♪ ♪ And I've gotta be drifting along ♪ - Hello? - It's a lot of fun. It takes a while because you have to sort of do a pass of level, you have to do a pass of panning, you have to do a pass of multiple reverbs and different EQ changes and filtering to begin and then undo it and get into full range once you get inside the room. Those things are challenging, but this could fun. What's that Ted? - The best part of it was the beginning of it, it's really quiet. Jim wanted it more quiet. He always wanted a little more quiet. And Paul was like, we can make it more quiet, but most of the theaters aren't gonna be able to make out this level. We had to convince him just to get it loud enough that we can make out Pete at the very first time, but it was this nice negotiation between it just being there and not audible and it being too audible. - How can Bob hear this if we can? Well, it's a supersonic hearing and he hears something before we do and we fix that. But I actually enjoyed the beginning of that scene because my idea of the hospital was it's vacant, it's empty, it's like an asylum. And how do you put not no sound in the place? How do you make a place not sound? We have like his feet and the guy mopping and the nurse at the distance. But basically there's a phone that rings that no one answers and there's a door that you don't see close. And it's just basically a very lonely, empty place. And so no wonder the music draws him. I think it's pretty special, I like it. - Like Ted was mentioning, you know, let's make it a small sound, a quiet sound, a quiet sound, a quiet sound. And Jim was like, make it more quiet. He's funny, I do remember on one mixed day, I was like, I'm always concerned that if you're in a badly calibrated theater, you're not gonna, the audience is not gonna catch that. I remember one time, and I knew it was coming too as soon as I mentioned to Jim. I think this is a little bit too quiet. He said, I know, I know, I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna tell me it's too quiet. We're not gonna hear it down at the, you know, the mum and pop theater down the road. Well, I mean, we've all worked together so much with Jim. It's wonderful to have those moments where he just basically cuts you off and goes, I know what you're gonna say. And he's smiling when he says it. It's not in the mean way. - And then it comes back to bite you in another scene where everything's really loud. And he's like, make it louder. And Paul's like, oh, it's a little too loud. He's like, but what about that terrible theater? And you know, in Calabasas, you're not gonna be able to hear it. So you make something too low here. You make it louder there. We're always, let's go too far. And then let's find, then let's step back to, right? So we're always pushing a little bit, you know, the electric guitar mix at Newport is like, we pushed it. We got it to ear bleed level. And then we're like, okay, how can we bring this back so that it feels impactful, that it's still aggressive, but it isn't an unpleasant listening experience for the audience. And Paul, genius that Paul brings to it is being able to find that frequency, that balance, to give you the storytelling without giving you the experience of pain. That sequence in particular is a masterclass in crowd management, band volume, you know, low end management, and just being able to go in and out of those things, give you a sense of power and scale and not make you go, oh, God, I have to leave the theater now. - Well, the genius for Paul is winning an argument with Jim. (laughing) Which doesn't always happen and it's definitely not guaranteed. But I do love mixing with Jim and I think we all do because, you know, we've done it so much. He does allow you to explore, he does allow you to create potentially a different suggestion for a scene or a transition. And then of course he'll decide whether he likes it or not, but you can, I always feel like collectively we have come up with something that none of us on our own would ever have come up with. And that includes Jim in that group. It's wonderful to be able to work that way and feel free to explore and try different ideas. - Yeah, he definitely wants you to take ownership of the movie and then also tell you you're wrong, but at least take ownership in the moment, right? I mean, that is always the thing. Like, he wants people to feel like they want to go beyond what you would normally do. This is, no, no, I'm pushing you a little bit, Jim, and he loves it because he wants to feel like you're that invested, that you want to try something beyond what would be expected. And then he's happy to tell you it's terrible. But initially he appreciates it and he appreciates it after too. There's nothing worth giving him what you basically think, you know, he would want. He always wants that extra effort put in. And that's what's so, it's a challenge and so fun to work with him. - I never feel like I'm just being told to push a fader there or pan something off there and just basically be a robot for a director behind me. It's always great to be able to come up with new ideas. He would, sometimes Jim will come up with an expression of what he's looking for in the scene. It's not, it's not literal of what's going on, on screen. He's looking for an idea or emotion. And oftentimes he'll throw out phrases and different ways of describing what he's looking for. And I swear, sometimes I look at him and I'm listening to what he's saying and I haven't got a clue where he's going. And then suddenly he'll say, "Waterfall." And I'm like, okay, got it. You don't need to say any more, I got it, waterfall, got it. That's not, of course, what he's talking about, but it's just an idea, a way, an expression of describing where he wants to get to. And I love working that way with Jim. It's a real nice comfortable sort of family environment working with him. - Ted, what's it like as a music editor being given Bob Dylan songs to Ed? Like I'm sure there's points in this film where you have to shorten a song or something that we've all heard a million times. - Oh my God. - How do you mess with something so ingrained in all of our brains? - Look, every movie has that part where you're kind of destroying something that everyone knows, you know. I mean, the key is to do the least on a harm because you also want to tell a story. I mean, the most important part of this is always telling a story. And so I would work with the picture editors. I'd go and sit with them and they'd go, "Okay, how about this?" We know we want to get to this shot. This was the biggest part of the music editing job of sitting with the music editor with the picture editors and trying to make sure we cut the songs 'cause everything's a picture. And they're all singing on camera. We got to make sure that if you're going to make a song cut, this suddenly Bob doesn't sound like he doesn't know how to play guitar, something's out of time. We've lost that verse that you know so well it's coming. You're going to sing along and then you've dropped it. And so we would constantly negotiate. I mean, this is an active negotiation with the picture department. Like, okay, can we have these four bars back? Okay, we can lose this verse. I think we can get away with it and nobody will be heartbroken. There's a huge responsibility to it, partly 'cause you want the fans to be happy. I mean, you want the people who go see this movie who love Bob Dylan to go, "Okay, you guys did it well." At the same time, one of the freeing factors is we're showing him coming up with stuff. We're showing initial performances. There were only a few studio moments and those studio moments, you know, where as authentic as we can, when you're doing something where he comes and sits down, across from Woody Guthrie and plays a song and he lays into a section, a long-gated section, if you remember the moment where he's just staying on this, hmm, and he keeps hitting the same note for an extended period of time. ♪ Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men ♪ ♪ It comes ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ With the dust and her dawn with the wind ♪ - That tells you this is real. This is Timmy doing it. This is an action, you're there in the room with him. You're not just watching a needle drop. And that was the stuff we wanted to make sure lived. We wanted to make sure you cared more that it felt like you were witnessing something than you were seeing some hallowed recreation of all the Bob Dylan, you know, performances. That didn't, Jim doesn't care about that. Timmy doesn't care about that. He wants you to, the way for this movie to work is that you feel like you're witnessing something go down. Not that you are watching a civil war reenactment, like a reenactment of famous events in history. Jim would hate that. He doesn't care about that. He only cares that you're emotionally invested in the moment that you're there with them and that you believe that these people are really doing this. That was the guiding principle on everything beyond not making sure that, you know, they were bad measures cut out or lyrics missing. And sometimes there are things that I go, oh, it doesn't matter. You're in the moment and you're gonna go with it too because you're so captivated by Timmy's performance. - I think what's talking about is the difference between Timmy, the one he was shooting the film and Timmy when he started the project because when Timmy started the project and they did pre-records, he was basically adhering to the sound that was Bob Dylan. But by the time he had worked this music into his soul, basically, and he shows up on set, he's a different person, he's a different person. He now actually personifies the spirit of what he's doing. And so he couldn't possibly sing to the playback because the playback is no longer valid. It's a different era of him, of his development. And that's why he lays into that moment in the hospital. It's so great because that's him, the spirit of Bob Dylan. That's the difference between singing the playback and singing live. - It's a stick with the spirit of Bob Dylan. You know, Bob Dylan is by no means somebody who looks at his back catalog as hallowed and don't change it. I mean, obviously he's gone through a million covers. The thing that Timmy wanted to bring out that Jim definitely wanted to bring out was the kind of weird idiosyncratic behavior that Bob had. And if you just try to replicate something, you're not gonna have any of it. So every time Timmy did something that was a little odd, that's the stuff you wanted to keep. That was the best part of the performance because you knew this is something that maybe Bob didn't do, but he could have done. And that's the spirit of what we were trying to achieve. - The Tombenders Podcast that you're on right now, we do meetups in various cities throughout the year. And two days ago was a meetup in Toronto, members of the Foley team that worked on this were there. And I was talking to the Foley recordist, Chelsea, and she said that for the guitar handling, they actually figured out the tuning of that guitar for that performance and where the capo was and tuned it up, put the capo in the right spot, and then handled the guitar to pick up some put downs so that it resonated in the right key all the time. And when I heard that, I was just like, okay, this is a whole 'nother level. These people are serious. And now that I've talked to you all, I know that that was not just the Foley team. It was handled like that across the board. - Oh my God. - This film, I left with a big smile on my face, which I don't always do to be honest with you, but I had a blast at this screening. So thank you very much for talking me about it today. - Thanks so much. - Thank you. - Glad you enjoyed it. Tim, bye, bye. (upbeat music) - Tombenders is presented by Sound Ideas. Check out their latest library, Golf Sound Effects. Swing big with this collection of everything you need to build a perfect sounding game of golf, including 382 sounds from the whoosh of the club cutting through the air to the crack of the contact of a perfect shot. Give it a listen at sound-ideas.com. My name is Tim Muirhead. Thanks for listening to Tone Bender's Sound Design podcast. - Tone Bender's is produced by Timothy Muirhead. - The theme music's by Jim Guthrie. You can reach me via email at info@tonebenderspodcast.com. Follow us on Instagram by @tonebenders. If you like this show, you can help us out by spreading the word to your friends and colleagues, or you can leave us a tip. Just go to tonebenderspodcast.com and click on support. Thanks for listening. - Ted, no, no, no. Why did we first start working together? - It was 1995. - Five. - We go back to more Rangers. It all starts with the Power Rangers. Everyone knows that.