The other day, I met for coffee with Steven Johnson, owner, and audio engineer of Pulse Post Audio here in Nashville. He had a great deal of insight to share with me on the expansive world of post production audio. Before meeting with Steven, I was under the assumption that post production included sound design, aligning audio and video, and voice over work. Steven gave me some insight on these topics and elaborated on what else is included under the post production umbrella.
I’ve always had an interest in going into the post production world, specifically in cartoons and video games. Since being at the University of New Haven, I’ve collected an understanding and passion for Live Sound. Steven said his favorite part of his job combines the two. He spends time in the back of a big truck full of equipment, live mixing and sampling an event, later to be taken back to his studio for enhancement. This is a high stress job, nothing can go wrong.
I shared with Steven a concept of a project I’ve been working on using the audio reverb chamber in Blackbird Studios. I recorded myself using a field recorder performing various foley sounds with a box full of various kitchen utensils, balloons, and anything else I thought would sound interesting in that room. I explained how I used Audacity to cut the samples, and how I’m planning on EQing and aligning them into a drum track in ProTools. He shared insight on how to do this in Ableton. Steven uses this software to do both live sampling and post production mixing. He said when he records live studio audiences, he grabs samples of the crowd making various noises, edits them on the fly, and adds them to his MIDI controller. This allows him to do a process called “sweetening”, where he enhances the crowd’s noise live through the samples he just took. He saves all the samples marked with the location the event was at, thus making a large library of samples for different venues. These samples are then reused in the post production mixing process when he’s in his studio enhancing the live event.
We then talked about the differences between the post production world and the tracking world here in Nashville. Nashville is a tracking town, most post production might start here but gets shipped off to LA to be finished. We talked about how live sound relates to tracking, but how it seems to be less nit-picky, agreeing that it’s not our preferred environment in the industry. Whereas tracking and mastering involves zooming in to fractions of a second to make sure sounds are quantized and together, post production needs to align perfectly with the image, and live mixing needs to happen at the perfect time. All audio jobs share similar aspects to each other, but are entirely unique, offering hundreds of different experiences.
Meeting with Steven was a great opportunity to learn about live sampling, mixing, and post production that I’m extremely grateful to have had. It was inspiring to hear about his journey from intern at Seismic Sound to owner and audio engineer at Pulse, a journey I hope to replicate one day. Above everything else, Steven has an admirable knowledge of his craft, and he’s cool about it. I’d hope to have the pleasure to work with him someday.
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