Or, you just like the sound of tape for some things and you’re “not” using it as a crutch.

Part of why I like the ITB world is that I can make it work as fast as my brain is working. In the big iron days, even the 15 seconds it would take to un-patch one thing and patch in another would make me lose focus or just lose interest. So I'd wind up just using SSL channel eq and comp for lots of stuff and wind up at the end of a mix with unused outboard, which is an unforgivable sin! So it's partly my own impatience at fault there.

But ITB I can duplicate a track, stick different plugin chains on each, and toggle between them to compare with one click. That kind of stuff makes it easier for my brain and hands to stay in sync and move forward with decision-making.

And I would sometimes struggle with how the 4k mix buss (and other hardware) would bend under pressure - I'd have to hit it just right to be in the goldilocks zone, which is maybe easier if you're CLA, doing rock records, and can mix from a template with kick on channel 1, lead vox on channel 33, etc. But when the track sheet has a wild smorgasbord of odd-ball elements, and things aren't so cut and dried, it gets harder to stay in the "bend zone". So for me it's easier to have a neutral environment and add bend and smoosh as needed. The precision, repeatability, and recall of ITB helps here too.

I don't even notice anymore that I'm "mixing with the mouse" (well, I use a trackball, but...). I've had tons of hardware control surfaces, starting with Radikal SAC-2, a big ProControl, EuCon and MCU stuff, etc. and eventually they always feel slower than just blasting around the screen with the trackball (and scroll-ring that acts like a knob helps).

Plus with OTB there's the cost. And the cabling. And the maintenance. And all that stuff that we all know about. The choice is easier for me because I'm only doing scoring, often with ridiculously short turnarounds, so that's my excuse for going all-in with ITB. "No time, no time! Get it good on the way in and make it better in the box!"

And in scoring, it's much less likely that someone's going to be A/B'ing your mix against a Green Day single and saying shit like, "You hear how their overheads sound crushed but the kick and toms are still clear? We need to get closer to that if we can..." So that's a relief. In fact, it has never happened that producers, directors, or dubbing mixers have had any comments like that on scores I've delivered. Tech questions maybe, like "Can you put the reverb for the drums on a separate stem?" but never "Can you try 4:1 ratio on the perc?" or anything like that. And I always interrogate the mixers after they've had a first play-through, like, "Are the strings too wet? Are the drums to crushed?" and for the most part they always say, "Nah dude, sounds great over here". Maybe they're just in too much of a hurry to open a can of worms? Or maybe they just don't give a crap?

Either way it's a relief to worry only about the ingredients and the sauce, and not the plate and the silverware, if that makes sense.

I have every filter plugin that I can find. Hundreds maybe? Lots of them sound meh but have interesting features like cool LFOs or step sequencers, but some sound really good. Even Logic's AutoFilter can sound great and can saturate a bit and still sound good. Usually you can't really overdrive the inputs ITB so you have to rely on whatever "drive" or "saturation" knobs they have. But I also have a big EuroRack setup with tons of filters and some are truly outstanding in a way that I haven't found in plugins, and this is probably due to analog saturation happening at their input. Of course, levels and metering in EuroRack is kind of a guessing game, so you never can tell what's going on. I do use a Vermona TAI-4 i/o module (which has transformers) to get in and out of EuroRack, and this probably helps the tone somewhat? I also have the Joranalogue input+output modules to get in and out without transformers, and I use them sometimes depending on... not sure why exactly. Those have level knobs though; the Vermona doesn't (just three-position switches).

Some of the EuroRack filters are great, lots are trash. The ancient Doepfer A-107 MultiType Morphing Filter has the Oberheim Xpander filter types in it, with a VCA at the output, and it can even morph between filter types! It overdrives very nicely and is often overlooked because it's so old, but I keep coming back to that one. I also love the standard Doepfer Xpander filter, their A-105 SSM, A-106-5 SEM, and A-124 Wasp filters, and any Polivoks filter clones as well. I've tried a lot of boutique filters but Doepfer stands proudly against any of them. I don't have any Arp clone filters in Euro but I have the 2600 clones if I want that flavor. There is an OBXa filter clone out there but I haven't tried it.

Besides the 500 rack and SSL Fusion I didn't pay much attention to what other stuff Rich had. It was basically some nice front end stuff and then all ITB mixing. He did have the new SSL UF-8 and UC-1 control surfaces, not sure about what amp modelers he might use, and can't remember if he still has a JMP-1.

I stupidly sold my JMP-1 a long time ago but now I want another one. It's not super versatile but it does sound great for what it does. Check out all the JMP-1's in ZZ Top's live rig:

https://youtu.be/1x_kg6pOvGU?t=1138

By the way, those Premier Guitar "Rig Rundown" videos are great, I've watched most of them. Fun to compare Billy Howerdel's three-rack setup to Angus's one-cable rig! In the Angus rig rundown I found out about the "secret" of the original Schaffer wireless rig, the companding circuit it had, and what that contributed to his sound.... and the current re-issue units that replicate the very subtle edge that it put on his tone. You can get that stuff from Solo Dallas:

https://solodallas.com/the-schaffer-replica

For a while I had a Dual Rectifier rack mount head, a Tri-Axis, a JMP-1, and some Palmer speaker sims and that was all great but guitars are a smaller portion of what I do these days, so Line6, my pedals, and plugins are fine for me now.

I have messed with resonators, and I have a few sort-of-resonators, like a pair of the Doepfer fixed filter banks, and the filter-bank mode on the JP-8080's vocoder page which I think sounds unique and great even though it's digital. I used that to filter some low sub booms on The Way Out Is Through and when they came off the backing tapes through the stadium PA it was god-like. So clear, so big. But I don't have anything like the 4ms Spectral or that kind of stuff. There was an old Cycling74 Pluggo thing that was like an infinite-band spectral kill filter and I used that to gradually reveal more and more of the signal of the acoustic guitar on my Star****ers remix and it was just great, but very "whistle-y" and very digital sounding, not warm, but it did things you just could not do in hardware. Not sure if I have a modern replacement but I remember it fondly.

My opinion on this is most mixers and even producers are not that discerning past the level of "very good." I mean lets look at it this way.

The original demo for Portrait of an American Family is great (pre Reznor). And TBH I actually like the red hot JCM800 on the demo more than the more often used Bandit they used more on the actual record. I think a 5150 was also used in the demo occasionally and certainly live. I think the demo album is what you'd get out of 95% of producers. Which is, that it would still be a great album. Who knows if it would have propelled Manson to where he went, probably would have regardless.

So the argument to me when I see all this stuff is something like the integrity of Portrait pre and post Reznor. For a lot of people, the differences between these two albums are really inconsequential if the original mix was fully mastered. Yet I think most people agree the album really wasn't fully realized either sonically or aesthetically without its now final mix.

The other 5% are people like you and Reznor. And that's who actually ended up finishing that album, a 5%er. So I think you're delivering at a level many are typically just not used to seeing.

On top of that, this "type" of music, the darker stuff, it's just not as easily understood by most people. So I think a lot of it is they only want to address something that is too harsh. As in, I would bet money if you delivered a Ministry album from Al to the 95% pool, a lot of them would "clean it up" and Al would shit on their desk. Sort of how Tool didn't really bond with their first producer beacause she just wasn't a rock guy like Evil Joe is.

I would think it's typical they get stuff delivered to them from people who have not taken years and thousands of hours to perfect sonics, and they have their ways to quickly get everything sounding good, and past that, they'd need to be a subject matter expert.

e.g. Ulrich Wild, Scott Humphrey

tldr; I don't think you are considering that you ARE an Ulrich, Scott, Reznor etc. Like who else you gonna bounce stuff off that is going to have much to contribute? Of Ulrich sent his mix to you, just the same, doubt you'd have much to say other than sounds great!

I've dug through a bunch of those and old Guitar World articles, Rig drawings etc. This all started with idea, somehow, foolishly, that the albums I adored were good "guitar" albums. I've learned over time, they were "guitar player" albums that have really high production.

But back to gear geekery, I adore great and modern Marshall tone. If you love the JMP1, the Engl preamps share similar topology. The JCM900s are closely related sort of head versions. Which are also closely related to early Bogners. I talked to some of the guys that do Randall synergy modules and those circuits are all actually also closely related to the Friedman Dirty Shirly module too. So you could consider all of these different but related circuits that share that really high gain sound that doesn't fall apart at full saturation that responds to highly saturated poweramps.

Ok, here's one you probably have responded to too much so feel free to copy paste. Droning guitars, what's the basic formula? I was able to kind of get that going by just standard double tracking then hitting it with rediculous amounts of reverb. I also read about the 12 e-strings guitar, sonic youth had one with like 20 strings too, so I got a cheap epiphone I'll be treating to that as well.

But overall my "guitar, but in the background" game is in its infancy. I'm mostly retiring guitar in the foreground because it's old people stuff. I hate to admit it, but it's true.

If true, then I was misinformed by Los Angeles’ Studer representative. I will reach out to Charlie Bolois for confirmation.

Regardless, the last shoot out that was done between various tape machines, the 827 measures the most linear of all machines involved. I wonder if that website still exists. I bought my machine new in 1995, still on it, and low end clarity has never been a problem at either speed, NAB or CCIR.

Signals routed multiple times through tl072 based stuff (back & forth to/from tape gens) are some of my favorite things.

In fact, does anyone do tl072-based mixers any more?

You’re putting too much emphasis on the word. I use a 251 on certain singers as a crutch. But I maintain that the 251 will have much more of a sonic impact that I cannot replicate or find important than tape does. For me throwing up a 251 impedes things a lot less than having to do drums and basics to tape.

Again, I make these points in the terms that I do to try to challenge what I see as conventional GS wisdom, and in particular, orthodoxy that I find counterproductive to the record making process. But that’s just me, and I like to create food for thought.

You're damn right about Uncle Al. He lives just down the hill from me now, with an SSL 4k and big Urei mains jammed into a converted garage, sounds insane in there! I did some overdubs on some of his stuff recently and even his raw tracks are absolutely smashed with insane levels of awesome. He prints dirt (the good kind). And who's going to try and tell Uncle Al the meaning of heavy? He's kind of in his own space now, after 40 years of bringing the pain - there's a whole family of sonics that only he is "allowed" to do, and he knows instinctively how to get there. Two H-3000's in series? Yup. I'm sure some metal purists will say, "But Ministry records sound like trash!" but one thing nobody can deny - Ministry records sound like Ministry.

It's great now that he's sober (ish) because he's such a smart guy - well-read, worldly beyond his 60-something years, a true student of politics, music, film, culture... (and hockey). For many years dealing with Al was... potentially hazardous... but now he's in great shape and great fun to hang out with. We go to the Rose Bowl flea market and other stupid stuff like that whenever we can, considering Covid. Top bloke. Also Ministry's keys+synth player, John Bechdel, is one of my oldest friends in the world, from college (in 1981!) so we go way back.

The raw tracks off the floor from Manson's first album, when I got ahold of them, weren't terrible at all... except for the drums maybe. I spent a few weeks with StudioVision and the S-1000's manually stacking samples on the live tracks until it passed the Trent Test™, and in the end sounded a good bit bigger than life, which was a good thing. It was really about getting the drums to have the same force, attitude, and sense of "exuberant outrage" that the guitars and vox had.

While I don't like to put myself on the same shelf as other respected individuals, I am definitely of the opinion that most people out there don't look at sonics the same way that I do. That's fine, different tastes and all. But guys like Terry Date, Evil Joe, Uncle Al, Scott Humphrey (we shared a house for a while), Ulrich, Moulder, Trent... we wind up agreeing on lots of things in terms of what sounds "good" and how to get there, and so I feel lucky to have worked with those guys. There's still lots of folks whose results I love but whose techniques wouldn't necessarily mesh with mine, and that's cool too.

In the end, I kind of feel like this stuff isn't rocket science. If you have good sonic memory, and a destination in mind, both old and new tools can get you there. It's really about being able to say, "My drums sound like ass compared to record X, and I need to sound BETTER than record X... gotta keep experimenting." but also being able to say, "THERE it is! This cheap-ass ART compressor I got for $199 on blowout at Banjo Center™ has the JUICE!". So being ready to accept that good sound might be coming from wherever, whether vintage Fairchild or $49 plugin, is pretty key.

That said, for the vocals on Helmet's Size Matters album we borrowed Jimmy Iovine's ELA-M 251, 1073's, and Fairchild and dang it make the job easy. Instant good with no fiddling, so no wonder that's a mono vocal chain that was insured for $60k! Surprisingly, we did a mic shootout for Helmet vocals and the 251 easily won, while the M-149 was second, but an Oktava 2500 that I got for $99 on blowout was a close third! So sometimes ya just never know. (My Oktava 2500's are pretty noisy though, and the cables and PSU's are fragile, so...)

I guess I'm pretty platform-agnostic when it comes to sonics, but maybe less so when it comes to workflow.

OK, so apparently I was NOT misinformed. Just got off the phone with Charlie, who looked up the schematics. He said there's two versions of the 820. One is transformerless on the output, which IS different, because it has 75 or so additional transistors, and as far as he's concerned is less good sounding. The second version, with the transformers, is basically identical to the 827, so no. My Studer guy was not incorrect, and I was not misinformed.

He also said that my assessment of the 827 as being the most linear would be correct, as he frequently gets complaints about the 827 and MM1000 "not sounding like anything."

Lol - ain’t that the truth !!!

You have the grace and timing of time honoured Swiss precision and handling of velvet gloves with a studer..

Versus the mojo and brute weight and iron of a Sherman tank of the Ampex, yet with less graceful handling of tape.

Apples and orange as both are awesome ! I’d start on an Ampex and finish on studer if I could and then mix on PT via my mothership.

That dude has lived a FULL ASS LIFE. If he died tomorrow he'd have lived 200 years of a mortal. Here's a curveball for you... accoustic guitar\piano chains?

Shit, for those sources I don't know or care really, don't do it often enough to have worked out a system. I'd just be throwing up mics that are quiet and clear with a path to match.

On my second-ever feature score I needed a lot of finger style acoustic guitar, just really sparse mini-riffs hanging in empty space and decaying into silence. So I got my high-school buddy who engineered a bunch of Greg Penny's records for k.d. and Elton, to bring his Taylor and his M-149 down. Sounded great, but ambient noise was an issue. We were in my living room, a big concrete and glass space with great natural reverb, but that M-149 picked up every bird and motorcycle within ten miles. So I built a cube out of these 2'x2' foam blocks I had and that killed the birds and motorcycles (and the reverb) but now I could hear him breathing. Freakin' M-149 let me hear every nose hair! We stuck a balaclava over his head, tried a painter's respirator mask, and even had him try to hold his breath until the notes were finished decaying - nothing worked.

You know what saved the day? A Line6 Variax Acoustic (which they don't make anymore). It's one of their modeling guitars that has every permutation of their acoustic models, and has balanced output and Cat5 direct connection to late-model Pods. DEAD SILENT. No outside noise whatsoever. The models sound just fine to my ears, and a bonus is that you can flip through 16 or so models of Dreadnought, Nylon, Django, 12-string, etc. to find one that sounds right for the part, like having a dozen guitars lying around. Also the action and neck are closer to an electric so it's easier to play too. Those little front-porch mini-riffs decayed into digital black, absolute zero. Clean and clear.

The Variax was great for this because I also recorded a bunch of chords decaying to silence, chopped off the attacks, duplicated and reversed the track, crossfaded the frontward+backwards versions, and made a set of samples shaped like this <> so I had these sweet crescendo-decrescendo acoustic swell samples. If they'd been acoustic recordings they'd have started and ended with noise, but with the Variax they started from absolute zero and ended at absolute zero. Like a super-human version of the real thing, came out perfect.

Another situation where the digital fake version of the real thing offers advantages not physically possible in the real world. Totally saved the day. I love Line6 Variax guitars, I have the acoustic, the bass, the original electric and one of the newer JT versions. They're fantastic.

On the next score I needed to mic a grand piano for string scrapes and other weird fx, and I tried the LDC mics but had similar issues, so I wound up using a pair of Earthworks SR30's and they were great. Still super-sensitive to outside noise though, but really clean and full. I'd like to get their piano-bar concealed mic system, but that wasn't out back then. For preamps I used the CraneSong. Crisp and clear.

Rightous! BTW I always loved how the Spitfire stuff, very often keeps a lot of the noise and irregularities in their libraries. Love when I hear chair and floor creaks!

On the next, Qs for Charlie : When you're looking for that eirie quiet orchestral sound, what libraries do you reach for? What are\have been your general strategies for "drone" guitars (in the background, dissonent)?

For weird, atonal, or dissonant orchestral fx samples I buy every library that claims to contain such material, but one of the most massive collections of that stuff is Spitfire's Albion IV Uist. It's got the big-room sound, so it's not quite as up-front and close as some others, but the selection of articulations and fx is absolutely massive, and unlike many similar libraries, contains a ton of stuff that's playable in-pitch and not just wild one-shots. Stuff like high fragile pitched notes that gradually dissolve into dissonant clusters, girthy low bass+cello rumbler drones, etc.

https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/albion-iv-uist/

Many other Spitfire libraries are in use over here, like their Tundra, Fragile Strings Evolutions, etc. - basically any that have their "Evo Grid" interface which lets you choose a different weird, evolving articulation for each three-key brick on the keyboard. So you can still play pitched parts but under each finger can be a different subtly evolving texture, some of which are like 30 seconds long. Absolutely unique and amazing, but still sounds like music and not just fx noises.

The 8dio CAGE and CASE series has a ton of cool stuff too, and of course the Symphobia series is a staple in that world, although Symphobia 1+2 are so widely used that I hear them on South Park! But their latest, Symphobia 4, is truly wild with a very flexible engine that allows for precise back-timing of risers etc. I scour KontaktHub and Samplism (now rebranded as Loot Audio) as well as corny old Big Fish Audio for anything claiming to be atonal orchestral fx - but beware, despite being expressly prohibited, many of those "orchestral" libraries are not original recordings but were made via MIDI from other existing libraries. But it's usually hard to tell unless you have the original library and can recognize the samples. Black Friday is brutal on my PayPal for sure.

I still have some ancient stuff in my template, like one-shots from old CD-ROM libraries from PreSonus, Symphonic Adventures, etc. Even though they're old and overused, their tone is great and if you toss those samples into a granular sampler like Granite or Pigments you're off to the races, I also have a bunch of wild-card strings fx I recorded when I was doing the live string quartets for the first SAW movie.

For drone-scape guitar textures, I almost always make that stuff from scratch, but I have a few cool Kontakt libraries - Sample Logic has tons of great libraries; their Cinematic Guitars Infinity is huge and great, but can take a while to weed through, and the new CineSamples Continuum Guitars saved my butt on my last project. I also quite like the libraries from PulseSetter - I have 'em all and Dystopian Guitars is killer, as is Audio Imperia's Trailer Guitars. Not specifically guitars, but everything from SampleTraxx is amazing sound design too. Come to think of it I have every library from all of those companies, not just their guitar stuff. Too many great samples out there!

The first SAW movie had a ton of drone textures that sound kind of like synths, but I used almost no synths at all on that score, just in a couple spots that sounded like bendy portamento analog stuff. The drone-scapes were made with an ancient Gibson double-neck sit-down steel guitar (not a pedal steel) with ten strings per neck. Set up a cool open/unison tuning, set a pair of eBows on the strings, and then lay a heavy slide on the strings and let it roll around a little. Ran it through a hum eliminator, then Red Whammy down an octave or two, then mass compression - no distortion or drive - and drench it in Line6 green delay on the Lo-Fi algo. Wicked.

I also use the Line6 Variax guitars with their old Workshop software which allows you to edit the models (!!!) and change the tuning for each string by up to +/- 24 semitones. So amazing, but I think Workshop is discontinued so I keep an old Mac Mini just to run that. Take the Dobro or Sitar model, tune it down by two octaves, get the eBow on it, and it's totally evil. Not sure if there's a modern replacement though.

I got so much use out of that stuff that I dove in deeper - first I got a Parker Adrian Belew signature model, which is a Parker Fly with the normal Parker pickup and bridge piezo, plus a Sustainiac pickup, AND a Line6 Variax engine built-in, AND a Roland hex pickup with 13-pin output. I always wanted a Parker because Trent used the piezo output for a lot of those "clean but very stressed" guitar tones on The Fragile, so when I saw the Adrian Belew model with Sustainiac and Variax I was all in even though it was like $6k (ouch indeed).

When I was buying it from Sweetwater, I asked the dude, "What is there that's worth a shit that can take the 13-pin output?" because I'd played with old-school Roland guitar synths and they were just JX-8p's that you play from a guitar, so... not interested. But he told me about Roland's "new" (this was 15 years ago or whatever) VG-99, which is a modeling brain that models BOTH the guitar AND the amp+fx chain - so it's like a Variax type deal that works with any guitar that has a 13-pin output, AND it's a Pod-type amp+fx modeler - AND it's a complete dual-path, dual-engine setup, so you can layer two guitar types (with +/- 12 semitones of per-string tuning) through two complete amp+fx chains. And it has a D-beam and touch strip, S/PDIF digital out, full MIDI in and out (including decent guitar-to-MIDI), and emulations of just about every Boss effect ever made, plus a "freeze" effect that you can trigger by waving the guitar into the D-Beam field. Absolutely bonkers. So I had 'em send that as well and holy crap it's a drone creation station on another level. I got tons of use out of that thing.

Then I started wondering, "What else can I throw a Roland 13-pin pickup on?" and around that time Moog came out with the Paul Vo Moog Guitar, so I ordered one of those with the Roland pickup pre-installed and that is just nuts as well. The Paul Vo engine is like a Sustainiac but it's per-string, so you don't have to be as careful to mute unused strings to prevent them from starting to roar. It can also operate in reverse, where it will remove energy from strings to create staccato sounds (but I never use that). It's also got per-string Moog lowpass filters and a foot pedal that can control the sustain engine and/or the filter sweeps. Totally nuts, and plugged into the VG-99 it's just wild. (But the Moog filters are only on the mono 1/4" output and not on the 13-pin out).

Then I spotted an announcement of a limited-edition Moog Lap Steel, so I got one and had them put the 13-pin pickup into that as well. So... lap steel, with Paul Vo sustain engine, into the VG-99 with dual-path guitar + amp + fx modeling... stupid good textures for days.

Roland make more modern, more compact, and cheaper guitar synths descended from the lineage of the VG-99, but the original is the only one with the full set of features. All of them will work with a normal mono 1/4" input as well, but in order to do the per-string tuning and precise guitar modeling you need a 13-pin pickup. I think they also made a VB-99 Bass Modeler at one point but I don't have that.

I also have a Fernandes Sustainor (not Sustainiac) jammed into one of Trent's old Les Pauls that was snapped in half on stage and glued back together and it sounds wicked.

Besides the eBows (I have a bunch), the TC Electronic version called AEON, and all the Moog / Parker / Sustainiac / Sustainor toys, I have a Hammer Jammer (very cool for under $100) and a couple of the re-issue Gizmotrons.

For a long time the Gizmotron was the holy grail of unobtainium guitar toys. Designed by Lol Creme and Kevin Godley of 10cc, it's a mechanical bowing device for guitar that uses little rubber wheels with teeth, one for each string, and you press little keys to force them against the strings - kind of like a separate hurdy-gurdy mechanism for each string. Back in the seventies they made them and sold them, but they were rare, expensive, and fragile and so very few survived for very long. A while back some maniacs figured out that with modern material technology they could make a new version that wouldn't break after two hours of use, and I ran into them downstairs in Hall E at NAMM one year and immediately ordered one. You attach it to your guitar with double-sided tape and it works great. Very unusual, and they even make one for bass!

https://www.gizmotron.com

Like every other "film composer" I also have a Togaman GuitarViol (the semi-acoustic version) which is a six-string half-guitar, half-cello type instrument with an arched bridge like a cello, so you can use a violin bow on it and get access to one string at a time, as you would on a violin or cello. But I can't play for shit so I mostly use it for screechy bowed fx and the occasional melody line or chugging 16th-note pattern.

I also have a ghuzheng that I bought for $800 from SoundOfAsia.com and I use picks or bows on that which sounds great. They have a ton of inexpensive asian string instruments, like Dan Bau that you can get fantastic tones out of.

https://www.soundofasia.com

So with all of these guitar-ish instruments, and a huge pedalboard, is it any wonder that I use very few synths in my scores? I kind of wore the synth stuff out and it all started to sound corny to me. Whenever I hear an all-synth score it starts to sound like retro-synthwave, which is fine if you're going for a John Carpenter throwback, but that ain't my thing. The exception of course is Trent+Atticus but that's their thing, not mine. I'm vastly more interested and intrigued by heavily processed sounds that originated from an acoustic (or electric, but not electronic) source.

Plus, I had one experience on my first tv series where I had all these bad-ass synth parts, band-pass filters with step-sequencing, very Prodigy-esque, and when he heard it the show runner said, "What's all that R2D2 stuff? Can we get rid of that?" Those wild sounds were drawing too much attention to themselves and risked distracting the viewers. So I re-did the cues with processed guitars, pianos, and other organic sources and it worked way better. Something about a familiar, non-outer-space sound source was less distracting but could still be cool.

That experience, coupled with my love of the Bartok, Penderecki, and Ligeti music used in The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey pushed me more in the direction of wild acoustic sounds and away from wild filter automation. Now I save the synth stuff for one or two sounds per cue, not carrying the heavy load, or for boring stuff like adding a fundamental sine wave below the low strings or whatever.

I still use a lot of bandpass-filtered whistling noise for simulated string textures, and my good old samples of NYC subway car brake screeches from my cassette walkman in 1983 get used all the time.... but that's "Fairlight style" sound design and not specifically "synth style". So it's okay.

Ok this begs a question... What are... or WILL be the corny and overused libraries and plugins?

Will Boom be the Big Fish of the future? What comes to mind for libraries that you don't want to touch exactly for that reason. I mean everyone feels that way about Kontakt libraries unless you're processing it through a bunch of stuff, so who cares... but wondering which libraries or plugins give you pause on originality.

I buy tons of libraries that never get used, cause I never know until the day what's going to work. So I keep 'em on hand and audition them in context and if I get a hit, then... great. If not, no harm no foul. I figure the money "wasted" on libraries that don't get used is more than made up for by how much use I get out of things like Malmsjo Piano. It all evens out in the end.

Even though I have Damage 1+2, I haven't used them on a cue except for one time I used some low booms when I was in a hurry. But never the loops.

I did use a couple of loops from Master Sessions Metal+Wood on a cue once, but even though I warped the hell out of them I felt guilty!

What's Boom? You mean these guys?

https://www.boomlibrary.com

I only have one title from them, some cinematic metal hits thing that was just a grab-bag of WAV one-shots. As I usually do, I dropped it into AudioFinder and rolled through it hammering on the delete key, then took the 5-10% that remained and dropped them into the correct 88-key menu patch of similar one-shots from other sources. Just more clanks in the banks.

The only ones I really steer clear of are Symphobia 1+2, because I hear their one-shots on everything from South Park to The Amazing World of Gumball. That''s no surprise because those libraries are going on 20 years old. But there's still some great sustained strings, tutti whomps, and other stuff in there that's not as recognizable as their swell+hit one-shots, so they can stay.... for now.

Omnisphere is another tough one. The factory and most third-party libraries sound reaaaalllly plastic, predictable, and "workstation-y" to me, and I've spend way too much time culling libraries for as much use as it sees over here. So many cheesy arpeggiator patches! But the engine is quite good, and I have some bespoke sounds from a friend that I do use (with original sample content, not factory ROM stuff), so I can't really talk smack on Omnisphere. It is legitimately a monster, and Eric Persing is an O.G. so..... respect. But it can be a time suck to weed through libraries.

Making sounds on Omni is quick-n-easy though, so I still do like it and it gets a sound or two on most of my scores. My favorite third-party libraries for Omni are from String Audio. Really good textural stuff, reminds me of Johann's score for Prisoners sometimes. And of course with Omni it's easy to tweak a preset and get really far away from the starting point very quickly.

Big Fish is great for some purpose-specific stuff, like when you're in a pinch and need fifties jazz construction kits so you can build a drum bed for a comedy cue in 10 minutes in Ableton or whatever. And I've gotten a few fun libraries from there like Tarantino-style seventies blaxploitation strings or whatever, so I keep my eye out and always give them a scan on Black Friday. But really only for those oddball things that I'll only use once but might save my butt on the day.

Ok here's something that is probably out of your wheelhouse but maybe you have an opinion. There's always the FOH vs on stage debate when it comes to metal band stuff. e.g. At some point you have to mic the drum kit because you're outside or stadium etc. Same with guitar, at some point you make the decision to do a wall of amps vs mic'ing a cab and going FOH.

You mentioned the PA bass. Is there anything you thought at that level the sound systems did really well vs struggled with? And what things did you wish that you could have heard, for instance out of a wall of 4x12s or ampeg 8x10 fridges?

I guess what I'm asking is did you feel the stadium PAs always made everything better, because at a smaller level, say bar or even big club, the PA is not your friend for certain sound design, being as there's a lot of semi questionable mixing gear involved that usually does an A\D conversion before going D\A again, and usually with pretty low level chipsets and poor summing. I suspect a lot of that is present even at the stadium level too, but the hardware is just so king kong that it doesn't matter.

I guess the best way to put this question is, if you were thinking about a giant PA system and a stage full of gear while you're making something, what limitations and or benefits would you be playing to while you design your compositions and sounds, if your output was a live audience instead of a TV audience\CD format? I suppose this is sort of thinking within the box of Spitfire esc sound design.

A big PA always makes things sound better! The most satisfying moment is line check, when you get to hear the kick and toms being hit one at a time through the full PA in an empty arena! So juicy, so satisfying.

Back in my day we ran all-analog PA - no Avid Venue or any other digital crap in the path other than outboard fx like an Eventide or whatever.

The PA was usually a TurboSound Flashlight system, amps probably Crown (but not sure) and FOH console was always Midas. With Sean Beavan doing FOH mix it sounded AMAZING. Huge and loud but never harsh. Remember, I was on tour with NIN for months during Self Destruct before I took over as the keyboard player (I was setting up the portable studio for days off), so during the shows I had nothing better to do than loiter and listen. It always sounded just killer.

A couple of years after I left I saw NIN at Hollywood Bowl with an Avid Venue console and it did not sound the way I remembered the analog rig sounding. Of course, the Bowl is maybe not a good venue for that type of music, but we had played similar venues back in my day and it never sounded like that, it was never harsh and clanky like I heard at the Bowl. I've seen them a few times since at places like Palladium and it was loads better than the Bowl but still not quite like I remember in the all-analog days.

Now this could be due to Sean Beavan being at the controls back then - he is one of the most talented mixers I know, with great taste and great ears, but I have to suspect that the all-analog Flashlight rig may have had something to do with it. Dynamic range = infinite, not 24 or 32 bits or whatever. But I am no authority on digital PA rigs, which seem to have completely taken over these days. And I actually like my studio monitors with digital inputs, so...

However, on stage there were no mic'd cabs. All guitars were DI splits off the back of the Tri-Axis, JMP-1, Palmer speaker emus or power soaks, etc. and the on-stage cabs were just for stage volume and feedback, with these little RockTron single-space power amps driving them, so no tone was coming from the power amps or cabs, it all came upstream of that and appeared as a finished sound at the DI. This was partly due to the level of mayhem - if a cab got knocked over (which happened on pretty much every show) the guitar would still sound the same at FOH and in the monitors, and only stage volume was affected until a tech could stand it back up or swap in a new cab. We did build little triangular supports on the back of the cabs so when they got knocked over the rear jacks were protected, but they'd still get soaked with water or dragged around by their cable, so we had lots of spares. No live stacks for us, just a single straight 4x12 each for Danny and Robin and a pair for Trent. I think they were Mesa cabs but not sure. I think Robin had one of his wedges as a feedback cab but not sure.

Later, on Fragility tours, Trent switched to an all-Pod setup so he could have a wider variety of tones and fx and the tech could do program changes for him during songs. No manual foot-pedal tap-dancing for TR! That rig had two kidney-bean Pods, a few pedals, and some generic power amp driving a pair of Yamaha (I think) PA speakers, tall ones that looked like "W bins", one on each side of the central aisle between the drum + keys risers. Plus he was in all the side fills and top fills as well.

Bass was always D.I. no matter who was playing. Likewise keys. Not even stage cabs, so that stuff was only in monitors, although maybe Danny's bass came through his 4x12, not sure. But we had massive side fills plus a pretty serious top fill, and everyone but TR had at least three wedges - he had four or five I think. Plus he was in every side and top fill so he could wander around.

Other than the drummer, we didn't use in-ears until Fragility, and only on a few songs so we could have clicks coming from tape even when there weren't any drums (like on La Mer). But sometimes even those would bleed to open mics so our techs built these little flashing metronomes into MXR pedal enclosures, which were really slick. You'd hit the foot switch to enable/disable the flashing LED that was driven from an audio input fed by click from tape. So on a few of the quiet songs that still had tape we could stay in sync, but you could turn them off as needed, and we built little shades for them (like a sun shade for a video monitor) so we could see them but the audience couldn't. Now you can buy flashing metronome boxes like that but back then our guys had to figure out how to build them from scratch.

A lot of the songs had backing tapes, but there was never anything on the tapes that someone on stage was pretending to play - NEVER. And never any vocals on tape. The only stuff on tape was things like the pre-show intro build going into the clanky loop bits at the start of Terrible Lie, the sequenced synth bass on Head Like A Hole or March Of The Pigs, etc. Plus there were a lot of songs with no tape, like Dead Souls or Starf*ckers (which you'd thing was coming off tape but was totally live, punk-rock style). So we had little bricks of 3 or 4 songs that all segued together, and we'd play a brick, then a no-tape song, then another brick, etc. That let us swap around the order of the bricks and no-tape songs to make a new set list every night if we wanted, but still kept a tight and predictable gap between songs. The drum tech was also the tape tech, and he'd cue up tapes beforehand and DJ them on a pair of DA-88's to match the set list.

We never had a tape disaster, but in one hot-n-steamy club in Dusseldorf (with Florian from Kraftwerk in the audience!) there was so much fog juice and steam in the place that the "dew" indicators were flashing like crazy and the tech thought it was all going to shut down (the rotating head mechanism in the DA-88 is basically an 8mm video transport, so it's really sensitive to moisture). He grabbed a hair dryer from the wardrobe room and was blowing hot air into the tape slot and crossing his fingers! This actually worked, but from there on out he built a plexiglass enclosure for the decks and got a portable AC/dehumidifier unit that could cycle dry air through the rack. This was reassuring on outdoor festival gigs etc.

We also had big industrial UPS units for the whole backline, so if venue power went down the samplers would all stay loaded, etc. This did happen a couple of times and it was great to be able to start playing immediately when venue power came back.

Drums almost always had samples layered on top of the mic signals. We used d-drum triggers on kick and snare (but not toms) which would fire off samples in an S-1000 (although later we used Alesis DM-Pro modules which let you import your own samples and had trigger inputs right on the back, so that was a little simpler - no MIDI lag). Each song had the unique and recognizable kick and snare from the record layered with the mic'd signal, so Reptile had the Reptile kick+snare, Piggy had the Piggy kick+snare, etc. The drum tech would switch programs on the sampler for each song. There were also a few drum pads and a second kick-pedal trigger, so for situations like the intro beat on Closer he could trigger samples by themselves, without hitting the acoustic drums - then he'd switch to acoustic kick+snare on the chorus. This all worked great, since you'd have the characteristic samples for each song, but you always had the satisfying thwack and punch of the acoustic drums too. Samples by themselves never really sound right, unless it's the intro to Closer or whatever...

There was no MIDI sync on stage. Just the DA-88s with a stereo pair of whatever, a mono track for synth bass, and click, so only three channels of audio going out into the world. Delay times were pre-programmed or tapped-in, no clock sync. On Fragility we did add timecode to the tapes, but it only went to drive video projections, all of the lighting cues were fully manual. Even the 35mm film projector on Self Destruct was just started manually by listening to a count-in from tape. After Self Destruct I built new click tracks and live tapes, and last year Robin told me that they still hear my voice on tape doing the count-ins! So my legacy lives on I guess....

I always thought the live stuff was like an evolution, it's own thing which to me at least was special. I know live sound is obviously always different in a way, but these approaches with the layered plus just seems to be so well done. Finck's adlibs, if they were, also great additions.

I didn't want to keep firing questions unless I thought they were real Charlie Qs. So here's one, if you're still here!

Tips for the "swarm of bees" sound?

Some of the "swarm of bees" sounds were literally samples of swarms of bees from a nature documentary or something. I have a bunch that I've collected over the years and it's not too hard to find chunks of audio with a stable-ish pitch that can be looped. Of course with modern tools you can throw an short piece through Clouds or GrainSpace or just a reverb with a "freeze" function to get longer textures.

Oh god looper with hunting pitch, that's brilliant

Do you have any resources to link to or experiance to share about how you draw the line in your business and professional dealings? I think it's interesting and inspiring that you manage to have the SAW soundtracks as a part of your musical identity, complete with bandcamp.

I guess I wonder how that came to be, if it was a struggle or something that came naturally to the arrangement. Is that something you see starting to become more common Ala Stranger Things?

Do you find yourself saying no more than you say yes to work? How do you think the pipeline works from someone reading a script to a message coming into your inbox? I guess is there anything you do besides just being a skilled craftsman you do to keep your phone ringing?

Well, I didn't even know I was on BandCamp! I sure as hell didn't put anything up there. Thing is, if we're talking about remixes I did back in the day, those masters are controlled by the artist and their record label, so they're the ones who distribute them on various platforms. If we're talking about film scores, I do control the masters of some of them, while others of them are controlled by the studio that produced the movie. In either case, I do release a lot of my scores through Lakeshore Records, and they're the ones getting them up on Spotify + BandCamp + Apple Music etc. So in either case, I don't put in any work to publicizing or distributing anything. I print the mixes, hand 'em in, and move on.

I don't really draw any lines. I just work on any project that seems interesting (which is not many). I haven't been involved in making records in a long time, except for little bits and pieces here and there, like doing some string overdubs on a Ministry track or whatever.

I did have pretty extensive experience with scoring right at the start of my career. Long before I ever got involved with NIN, I was the un-credited co-pilot working under an Australian composer named Cameron Allan, who hired me right out of the only real job I ever had, working as the computer guru at the old Sam Ash music store on 48th st. in Manhattan back in the 1980s. I only lasted a couple of years there before Cameron rescued me, and we did a big CBS tv series and a bunch of "movie of the week" type things, so before I spent a 15 years goofing around in the record industry, I already had some time behind the wheel at scoring. That made the transition much easier / possible.


I don't have to say no to very much work, because what I do is so niche that it's not like they'll want me for every random movie or series.

My agents bring most projects to me, and filter out the low-budget cheese or other sketchy-seeming stuff. The notable exception was the first SAW movie which came to me via my lawyer, who I've been with since we were both little fish in the early 1990s. Around 2002 he was representing the director + writer of SAW, trying to get them a production deal for that movie based on a short they had filmed. All the studios turned them down! So that first movie was independently financed and my lawyer had helped get that together. After they had a locked cut, they had made a temp score with a bunch of industrial music, and no John Williams-style orchestral music at all. Knowing that I had some experience in scoring and a background in industrial music, he put us in the room together and the rest is history.

But these days I rely entirely on my agents to keep their finger on the pulse of upcoming productions, get a feel for the people involved and the style of the film or series, and pitch me for the gig. They usually know the people involved or at least something about how they do business and what they might be looking for, so they won't bother to pitch me for stuff I wouldn't be right for, like a Marvel movie or whatever. By the time civilians hear about a new series coming down the pike, the composer has already been chosen and the work has begun. So it's a full-time job building and maintaining those contacts to even be able to find out about upcoming opportunities - way more time and effort than I'd be able to devote to it. It's my agents who are hanging out at Sundance or Director's Guild events or whatever, seeing people they've worked with in the past, seeing what they're working on next, and figuring out which of their composers they could pitch for the gig.

Of course, if someone wants "the guy who did the music for SAW" it's not hard to find my agents and inquire. Hit up IMDBpro and the info is all there, or just Google "Charlie Clouser agent" and it's the first hit. But none of that is my doing, that's the agent's job.

Getting signed on to the agency wasn't a done deal either. Even though they represented the composer I had worked for, and even though I had all the records and NIN stuff on my resume, I had no film or tv credits of my own - and without that they knew they wouldn't be able to do much. But then they got a network series for that composer, and he wanted me to co-pilot, and I said I'd do it as long as I got my name on the credits at the front of the show. Then I got the SAW film through my lawyer. Once I had those, the agents could take me on as a client and knew they wouldn't have to tell some jive-ass story about how "even though he has no credits, he's good, trust me!". So then we were off to the races.

Incredibly helpful, thank you. I had long suspected that the agents were really worth it and you framed the whole process of getting your foot in the door in a very easy to understand way.