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| Britney
Spears ’In the Zone’ on DVD-Audio. |
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High Fidelity Review recently got a sneak peek behind the
remixing of 'In The
Zone’, the new album by Britney Spears, as it was being prepared for a 5.1-channel
release on DVD-Audio. The project came to 5.1 Entertainment through the BMG
label, marking their fifth collaboration: the first three being 5.1-channel
remixes of albums by The Foo Fighters, Outkast and Usher; followed by Britney
and R. Kelly titles. "Our contact at BMG requested I handle
the Britney remix" said
Chris Haynes, chief engineer at 5.1 Entertainment.
The first thing Haynes did is listen to the 2-channel CD until
he knew it well.
"I usually start a remix project by taking the work home
and listening to it for a week or two," said Haynes, adding "living
with the record lets me get familiar with the music itself. I don’t even
think about the remix until I start working on it." He has often found that listening to the album in its
entirety helps him 'get it’, understanding what the artist and producers were
attempting to get across to the audience. "You can get
familiar with each track, one at a time when doing the remix, but sometimes
when you’re working on the
last song you’ll say 'Oh, that’s what they were trying to do’, but by then it’s
too late to go back and re-do the other songs. Each song is different, but they’re
still part of a whole. And the mix should reflect that."
As with most multi-channel mixes done by 5.1 Entertainment,
the emotions of the song dictated the mix. However, this didn’t
mean that Haynes had open license to do whatever he was moved
to. "We had a blueprint to match, not
a fresh slate," he
explained, "volume relationships had to match the stereo
mix. Steve Lunt, Britney’s
A&R rep from Jive Records asked for 'the CD sound’ but in surround." It
would be Lunt, not Britney, that would eventually be signing off on the final
multi-channel mix. "Steve’s a genius! He’s great at picking material and production
that’s a perfect match for Britney’s talents. He knows these songs inside and
out. If I’m missing a note or two someplace, he’ll find it. It’s
important to him that when people hear the DVD-A, they right away recognize
the sound of the CD."
The working parameters that Haynes was given were multiple
yet simple: "I had
to strike a balance between boring - just re-doing the CD mix - and being too
gimmicky. It had to sound like the album, but be fun; the way pop music can
be when mixed for surround. And since it is pop music, I had to avoid being
boring or conservative. But one thing I definitely had to avoid was turning
this into some sort of high school science experiment in weirdness." Steve Lunt
had been particularly emphatic about that last point. As an example of "weirdness",
Haynes played a Neil Young DVD-A for me where all the lead vocals imaged from
over my left shoulder. While Haynes considered it daring and interesting (even
amusing), I found the gimmick wore off literally after a few seconds; after
which the prospect of listening to the entire album this way became intolerable.
Haynes must have noticed the expression on my face because he laughed, repeating
Lunt’s edict for the Britney re-mix: "Fun, but not
weird." After that demonstration,
I understood exactly what Lunt had meant!
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| Chris
Haynes, chief engineer, 5.1 Entertainment. |
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To
demonstrate what we had been discussing, Haynes fired up his
ProTools utility and played some cuts from 'In
The Zone’.
Tracks included: 'Me Against The Music’
(Britney Spears’ duet with Madonna), 'Toxic’ (her Top
40 follow-up), 'Early
Mornin’’
(from writer/producer Moby), 'Outragous’ (by R. Kelly), 'Touch
Of My Hand’ (Ms.
Spears’ tribute to master... well, think of the Divinyls’ 'I
Touch Myself’).
It was immediately noticeable that all the songs came from the same album. As
expected, style and production varied with each song, but the multi-channel
mix remained consistent without sounding the same from track to track. Most
obvious from the re-mix was the impression that this was definitely a pop album:
the sense of "fun" that Haynes talked about earlier permeated every track. The
soundstage was exciting, with the surrounds coming alive in a way that couldn’t
be achieved with matrix decoding of 2-channel material; certainly more exciting
(and appropriate) than the conservative multi-channel mixes I’ve heard
on many pop-music SACDs.
Since we’d already touched on his mixing philosophy,
I asked Haynes about the logistics of the mix. "I
look for interplay between the speakers, not just putting different
sounds at different places but actually moving the sound around
the listener." He added, smiling "with
this kind of music you can definitely take some risks, though
I don’t know if it’ll
win the 'Most Adventurous Mix’ at the next Surround Music
Awards." One
of the first things Haynes used in creating the surround mix
is TC Unwrap. "It’s a great way to automatically generate a
quad mix. I can vary the effect, so I’ll do a couple
of passes to get different amounts of material in the surrounds.
And that gives me more tracks that I can later use when I want
to move some sounds to the rear speakers."
When it came to source material, Haynes considered himself
fortunate with the Britney Spears project, "this
record proved to be particularly open to multi-channel. Not
just because of the music itself, but because of the flexibility
I had with the original material." He explained further, "some
of the songs had so many tracks, even for the vocals, that
I could isolate particular sounds and have an easier time with
placement. For example: some lead vocal elements were actually
on separate tracks from their own reverb elements. Things like that really helped." How
many tracks is "so many" tracks? "Well, the production - I’m talking
about the 2-channel CD - was 256 tracks. Now keep in mind that some of these
contained just a single element, something that would show up once or maybe
twice in the entire album. But there it was, isolated on its own track. Of course,
not everything was that way, but a lot of stuff was." By the time Haynes
got the material, it had been mixed down from 256 tracks to a more manageable
100.
Being a modern production, all the material was in the form
of digital files. Sampling rate for everything was at 44.1kHz,
but resolution varied from 24-bits down to 16. "The
first thing we did was upsample all of it to 88.2kHz. We didn’t go to 96kHz
because we wanted to avoid the possibility of interpolation
artefacts, like aliasing. All the mixing, everything, was done
at 88.2 and that’s exactly how it ends up on the final release.
And yeah, there are some tracks (certain
elements, not whole songs) on the DVD-A that started off at 44.1/16. That’s
what we were working with."
To drive home his original point about the emotions of the
song dictating the surround mix, Haynes contrasted his re-mix
for 'In The Zone’ to the work
being done on the Vanguard series of classical music DVD-Audio titles being
released by 5.1 Entertainment’s Silverline Classics music label. "I’ll mix very
differently when doing classical. By the nature of the genre, it’s performance
driven. I mean, unlike a pop album which is a studio creation, classical music
uses a live performance in a concert hall as its reference. So the mix tends
to be front heavy, with subtle surrounds - not much more than hall ambience
there. Just because it’s a surround mix doesn’t mean you want to wrap the orchestra
around the listener’s head." While we were discussing this, he played a multi-channel
mix of Mahler’s 1st symphony to demonstrate the mixing style used for the Vanguard
series. While there was a little more
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| Chris
Haynes, chief engineer, 5.1 Entertainment at work
on ’In the Zone’. |
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in
the surrounds than I’d been expecting, the mix was as Haynes
had described: the performance up front, mostly ambience in
the surrounds. "By the way, for the Vanguard
stuff we were really careful with the transfers, going straight
from the original analog tapes to 192kHz PCM. We also got a
bunch of the best SACDs out there to compare the sound quality.
Everyone here preferred the PCM. We listened and compared; some of those discs
were direct to DSD and sounded great, but the PCM at 192kHz just sounded better."
I couldn’t conclude the interview without bringing up certain
aspects of home theatre, such as bass management and centre
channel usage, and how they affected Haynes’ mixing. After
all, most of the people who end up listening to the 'In
The Zone’ DVD-A won’t be hearing it on a dedicated multi-channel music set-up
but rather in the same home theatre where they usually watch movies.
Looking at the ProTools display, the traces for the front
left and right channels were thickest, closely followed by
the surrounds; the centre channel trace looked positively thin
by comparison. "I’ve seen living room home theatres and surround
set-ups at friends’ places: they usually have two good speakers up front
and a really small centre speaker and even smaller surrounds." I could guess what
was coming next: no vocals in the centre channel. "It’s not just the vocals
but anything that’s important, I can’t put it in just one speaker. Even with
something like a guitar solo, I’ve tried putting it in the centre speaker only
and it never sounded as good as when I have it in two speakers. It still images
in the centre, but you have more headroom, more dynamic range and you’re
not relying on a single speaker for something as important as lead vocals or
an instrumental solo." Still, Haynes at least has given it a try "but
usually I’ll
use the centre channel mostly for specific effects, like if I want a certain
sound to trail off in the centre instead of the surrounds."
His technique for mixing bass was arrived at using the same
trial and error approach. "When the JBL
rep was installing the monitors in this studio, he suggested
I do all my mixing with bass management turned on. I have an
M&K box that
can switch the bass management on and off instantly, and I use it periodically
to check my mixes. But I don’t mix with it on all the time because I prefer
to hear the sound full range in the monitors. It gives me a better idea of how
the mix will sound on home speakers." Still, Haynes does use an M&K sub
to reinforce the low frequencies and monitor the LFE channel. "I
won’t put anything
much higher than 60Hz in the LFE channel because it starts to become localizable,
when what I’m trying to do is make the bass more enveloping." To get good
low frequency spread and less of that mono-sounding bass, it was suggested to
Haynes that he mix the bass equally into all three front channels. As usual,
he experimented: "I did mixes where the bass was in all
three front speakers versus the bass mostly in the left and right speakers.
When I compared the two, there was hardly any difference. I found out that I
didn’t need to spread it
to all three speakers; the main two speakers were enough to get stereo bass."
With 'In The Zone’ already being a hit on CD, the DVD-Audio
release should get some of Britney’s young fans to give the
multi-channel version a try. Multiple listenings seemed to
have already made a fan out of Haynes. "The
album had great writers and producers working on it, and such
a rich variety of styles: dance, hip-hop, R&B, old fashioned pop, even some Bollywood samples. And that’s
just in the song 'Toxic’" he laughed, adding "Seriously
though, it’s really
a lot of fun to listen to."
Finally, thanks to Jacqui Chazen, Vice President of Public
Relations, for setting up the interview; and a very special
thanks to Chris Haynes for his time and patience.
Sanjay Durani - 06/06/2004
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