Pro Techniques from Asche & Spencer

If you can drive it, cook it, wear it, trade it, promote it, fly it, and ultimately own it, then these guys have likely scored it, sequenced it, tracked it, edited it, mixed, and mastered it for agencies in London, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Stockholm and Paris on one of their eight Pro Tools TDM systems.

One of Asche & Spencer's memorable commercials is a recent Ikea spot that owner Thad Spencer and engineer Bob DeMaa used as a jumping off point in sharing and explaining three favorite Pro Tools tips. Called "Heads," the spot uses a new animation technique that mates live action heads and dialog with puppet-like bodies to portray a man and a woman having a dinner date. When the guy's drivel about his inane job finally bores her enough the woman gets up and simply picks a more handsome, less talkative head out of a closet of desperate replacement heads and places it atop the puppet body. For Spencer and DeMaa, the musical background, puppet footsteps and overall mastering approach to producing this commercial came to mind when asked how Pro Tools was used in producing this funny, groundbreaking spot.

Pro Technique 1 —
Using Amp Farm to Lo-Fi Background Music
Asche & Spencer first composed a modern neo-classical piece to match the mood of the first date's dry conversation. Ikea loved the fit and wanted more, so Spencer bounced the music's original 22-track production down to a stereo pair for the final Pro Tools session and 'plugged' it into a Fender Twin model in Line 6's Amp Farm to enhance the detached, distant feel of the piece.

DeMaa rides Amp Farm's gain stage to create everything from a static-laden AM radio to a busted out car speaker vibe. The effect was not used for the upbeat funk piece that accompanies the luckier second date's arrival in the commercial, but the engineer also points out a secondary benefit to this fine tip.

"It's not only quicker to lo-fi something for a commercial this way, but it's also a great way to save on tracks and time with a client," says DeMaa. "We uncomplicated our session quite a bit by bouncing the music down to a two-mix and relying on Amp Farm to get the effect instead of bringing everything into the final session. It was way easier to do it this way than having to manage those 22 tracks through an aux bus and then effecting all of it in the final mix session."

Pro Technique 2 —
Providing Options & Saving Time during Client Approvals with SoundReplacer
Knowing he's about to be replaced, the first 'puppet date' in the Ikea spot starts nervously tapping his tiny puppet feet when the bored girl heads for the closet. Ikea was very specific and wanted as many foot tap sounds to choose from as possible, a time-consuming and meticulous process at best for Spencer when it came to aligning the new samples with each of the dozen or so foot taps. Spencer tapped Digidesign's SoundReplacer plug-in for the job to save time and work in tandem with the multiple Pro Tools playlists DeMaa created to give Ikea all the options needed.

"I found about ten different footstep sounds I liked and used SoundReplacer to mark the exact points at which each foot hits the ground to bring in each of the sounds with the client present," continues Spencer. "It took about five minutes to find the right sound with them there, as opposed to laying in each footstep track separately and building it over and over again from scratch for each sample bank before the client arrived. I created just one version with the steps hitting at the right spots and then simply used SoundReplacer and our duplicate playlists in Pro Tools to shuttle between each group of steps. Instead of it taking us an hour to build five or ten versions for the client to choose from with the different sounds in place, we did it all in less than five minutes using SoundReplacer."

Pro Technique 3 —
Make Louder Commercials with TDM
The Ikea spot sounds as unique as it looks thanks to this uncommon mastering plug-in scenario DeMaa and Spencer suggest for adding pop to on-air commercial music and sound design tracks. Two stages of multiband compression followed by a third mastering plug-in isn't a typical mastering setup, but read on.

"I wouldn't typically recommend this setup but it worked great for pumping up the ambient sounds without losing much overall depth," says DeMaa. "When the guy is using a fork and it hits his plate you hear that little scrapping sound," Spencer agrees. "It sounds very live and up front without being abrasive at all which you'd expect with this degree of compression going on with all the plug-ins, but all the effects sounds come through fine and remain quite warm. When you hear this spot on television everything is really sort of in your face but not in an overt way. All the little nuances are equally as recognizable as the dynamic music tracks are."

For most Asche & Spencer projects DeMaa typically masters using one McDSP MC2000 four-band compressor and posts after that with a Waves L1 plug-in to bump things up another +3dB or so. For the Ikea spot he used an additional MC2000 for stereo compression and used L1 to 'flatten out' things and satisfy every agency's demand of somehow making every commercial louder than the one before it. He typically sets L1's threshold to -3 and the output to .03 to avoid clipping. For music tracks like the ones created for both parts of the Ikea spot, he'll also do some pre-mastering with TC Works' MasterX TDM plug-in before mixing down to stereo for the final Pro Tools session.