Boston Duo in the Studio

Over the last year I’ve had some great sessions in the studio recording the acoustic guitar duo - Boston Duo, which is made up of Dave Boston and his daughter Naomi.
As anyone who has grown up in Hawke’s Bay knows, Dave is a bit of a legend of guitar, having performed and taught for decades in the area.
Dave and Naomi have played as a duo for many years too, and the first album we’ve released, ‘Guitar Sunrise’ is 100% original compositions. There are a few percussion touches throughout, added by Cameron Budge, but in general it’s the two acoustic guitars.
Mastered by Chris Chetland at Cog.

Since releasing the album above, we’ve gone on to record around 20 more cover songs, which will be released this year.

And alongside all of this, Naomi and I have also has recorded an album’s worth of original ‘Songs for Little Ones’, featuring her daughters, Dad and brother Sean - it’s a family affair for sure :) That album is also in the mixing stage and will also be available soon.

Massive thanks to Naomi and Dave :) Stay tuned for more!

VO with Benedict Cumberbatch for BBC Antarctica

Last year during the Covid 19 restrictions here in NZ I had the pleasure of working with the BBC to record the voiceover for their recent production BBC Earth - Antarctica.
As if this wasn’t cool enough, the voice talent was none other than Benedict Cumberbatch, who happened to be in New Zealand filming the upcoming Jane Campion film, The Power of the Dog.

The BBC sound team was gathered at Wounded Buffalo Sound Studios in Bristol, England, and we linked up using Source Connect, which allowed them to listen in and give direction - not that Benedict needed much! It was a real treat to experience working with an actor of that calibre, and also to be involved in a BBC Earth production.

Here’s us trying not to get too close (thanks covid) or look too awkward (I failed).

And here’s the trailer, featuring the voiceover we recorded right here in Napier:

Mega thanks to all involved!

Bandolier Music!

Some exciting collaborations have been happening here with my long time friend Tom Pierard. Tom’s also a local who I’ve known for ages - since growing up here in Napier, and I’ve always known h’e a bit of a musical monster :) So, the idea evolved between us, over the last year or so to start a music composition company that could cater for clients who need specific music made for film or any other kind of commercial musical branding.

This company has just been officially launched as Bandolier - our website is live over at www.bandolier.nz

We’ve already been busy completing a number of projects - one of which was creating the music bed for Big Save Furniture’s TV and Radio campaigns.
The piece needed to be emotive, warm and slightly nostalgic - a nod to Big Save’s long history as a NZ owned company. It also needed to reflect their recent branding change from a high energy hard sell, to a much more relaxed approachable style.

We produced a full 2:30 version, as well as cut downs for 90, 60 30 and 15 sec. There are also 2 different 15 sec versions, one for regular ads, the other a more upbeat from the top version for Big Sale ads.
Here are the 2 15 sec versions in context. Voiceover and mix were also recorded and produced in my studio.

Big Save | Regular 15 Sec Music Bed

Big Save | Sale 15 Sec Music Bed

Some Silent Inspiration...

Gordon Hempton is a famous sound recorder who travels the world searching for silence.  Not lack of sound, but places where humanity can't be heard.  
For me this is inspirational, and also a great example of 360 video, and binaural audio encoded to react to listening perspective.  Notice how the sound changes as you move your view around - very cool! (Best experienced using headphones)
This technique will be used in an upcoming project I'll be working on - I'll be sure to drop an update on this page when it's ready.
In the mean time, try to take time once in a while to just listen...

Ambisonic Audio

I used this project, created by Resonate Productions to demonstrate how an ambisonic mix creates a much more immersive and realistic soundscape than a static stereo mix for 360 and VR video content.

Basically what it means is you can lock sounds to specific positions in the 360 degree field so that when the viewer moves around so inversely do the sounds' positions - just like we expect in real life.

The best way to experience it is with headphones while looking at your phone - that way when you move your phone to look around you'll hear the sounds coming from specific places. Some of the sounds were recorded on location in Nepal but most I created in post, including ambience tracks and foley sounds.

This technique can be used in Facebook 360 content as well as Youtube 360, so if you are creating 360 video content and need three dimensional, immersive sound, let's talk!

Blending in, Thai Style...

I recently mentioned in a Facebook post this project that I worked on with film maker Tim Pierce.  This was a passion project, filmed while he was travelling through Thailand.  Early discussions led to the goal of creating a really textural, detailed sound mix that would give the whole piece an extra dimension, so my first approach was to work through each scene, creating atmos tracks and foley sounds for all the pictures.

Now... sometimes our initial ideas seem great at the time, but down the line things just don't feel right when we step back and look at the big picture.  It's a brutal thing to turn around and look at the piece objectively, and truly realise that the approach was just wrong for the feel of the piece.  In all productions, the emotion has to come first, and the truth was that the constant bombardment of sounds was actually distracting from the images and feel!

Dang! (bangs head on desk)

So there were 2 options - strip it all out and just go with images and music, or find some way to incorporate the effects without standing on the emotion's toes.  I wanted to try the second option (over killing my babies) so came up with some ideas...

The first was to try and push the effects BACK in the mix.  A good way to do this is using EQ to adjust frequency content.  Because in the real world things get more muffled, or lose high frequency content as they move further away from us (as well as losing low frequency content) we can roll off the highs to push things back in the mix.  I often do this to push things back, and bring things forward, kind of like a pan knob for depth.  Of course I didn't want all the effects to be far away, I wanted some to come out to the foreground (like the bird flaps and effects at 0:30) so I automated the frequency cutoff to give the effects that movement.
In general the EQ rolls off everything above about 2KHz, with some dips going down to 1KHz, and some peaks going up to about 5Khz.

View fullsize

Here's a screen shot of the FX bus EQ automation, showing how the frequency cut off moves around to push and pull effects.

I also used a big ol' reverb over the whole SFX bus to make the effects seem more dreamy, which is something I've never done before!

This is probably not the most exciting thing to read about, because it's not a case where sound jumps out and amazes you, but I found it a real challenge to come up with ways of making the effects LESS outstanding, yet still be there to add some value and depth to the images.  It just shows that it's not only about choosing the right effects and getting everything to sound perfect - sometimes you have to think outside the box to make the sound work well with the pictures.
Thanks Tim for challenging me on this one!