Recording the Score on One Night With a King

Recording, Mixing and Editing an Orchestral Score in a Month

After post production had been halted for nearly a year on One Night With the King it suddenly ramped up, leaving Fred Paragono, chief engineer/owner for Paragon Studios under a month to fly to Moscow to record the score written by acclaimed composer J.A.C. Redford, return to his studio in Franklin, Tenn. To mix it and then fly out to LA to oversee aid the final mix of the film in time for its Oct. 13 release date.

Describe the experience recording in Moscow?
It was basically just me, J.A.C. and the musicians in the Moscow Symphony Orchestra in The Great Hall at the Moscow Conservatoire. We had a 96-piece orchestra for three days, two days with a smaller group of musicians and a sixth day with a 48-person choir.

What was the microphone setup?
A Decca tree for three microphones for left center right about 6-8 feet about the conductors’ head, a little in back of him. On the Decca tree we also had two stereo mics pointed towards the rear of the hall at 45-degre angles to capture the rear of the hall. There where two outriggers on the left and right of the stage and then two hall mics in the rear of the hall. Then in each section wherever possible I was spotting with close mics. The reason for that is not only to provide balance for later but also to be able to provide those stems that they are asking for. If they want to turn up the brass a little more or turn down the flute, whatever it is, it allows me to bring things out of the orchestra to keep the melody increments in tack.

I received a photo (right) of you with an odd microphone configuration, what was the purpose of that?
It was just to test the seven new Neumann mics I’d got. I set up a speaker next to the mics and listened to them on the console to hear what they really sounded like, what are the differences, which are closely matched, which ones will I use for different things based on how they sound. Even though they are identical mics that doesn’t mean they sound the same so I was listening to the tiny little differences in each mic. This way when you go out there you know that these two sound more alike than any others so these two will be my left and right channel and I’ll use another on for my center channel so you don’t have inconsistencies on the back end.

You mixed on the new Solid State Logic C300 console, why do you use that for mixing music?
I bought the C300 last May. It is a true film console. It is basically huge routing matrix than has a console attached to it. All the console features are excellent and the console is well thought out.

It was the third mix I’ve done on the C300, which is our new console here. It was probably the most intense mix we’ve done on it so far. It utilized probably all the capabilities of it to put it together. The fact that it is not a dedicated music console, it can be used for music, but it’s really a postproduction console. The bussing structure, the way it is set up is completely different from the way a dedicated music console is. For the mix I need to provide stem elements — split out the choir, all the orchestra element s and effects elements — so to be able to in one pass be able to print 48-track wide stems without having to go through separate passes. It was 108 minutes of total music and I had two weeks to mix it so that’s a very, very short period of time to be able to do all that. Simultaneously I was doing down-mixes and stems all in one single pass. So that’s a pretty cool thing to be able to do without going through separate passes with separate monitoring systems. It was all managed within the console.

They didn’t want to get too intricate with the stems so it was fairly limited. When I was printing I was printing a 5.1 master, a stereo master, a 5.1 string stems, 5.1 ethnic stems, choir, effects, percussion stems all simultaneously with stereo mixes as well. It allows them the freedom to do some things on the back end say if the choir or percussion is too loud near a piece of dialogue. Instead of bringing the entire music track down usually you can just pull back one element and you’ll be able to hear the dialogue.