Pro Techniques 1.2004

 

Blue Man Group

By Randy Alberts

The Blue Man character is not an alien. He looks different on the outside, that's for sure, but the key to the Blue Man is his inner life. The people who really connect with the Blue Man see past his unusual appearance and see something fundamentally human. Unlike the Blue Man, most of us are comfortable with pretense, we tend to our egos and our personas, and we routinely feel alone in crowds. The Blue Man is the opposite. He is naturally authentic, he is egoless, he is at home in the primal, he is never self-conscious and he easily connects with others.
— from the Blue Man Group website

    
 

The Blue Man Group
"We use Pro Tools for the everyday music production, the commercial music, voiceovers, effects, theater sound design, training tapes, and, of course, the secret Santa gifts. Yeah, I'd say the Blue Man Pro Tools rig gets a pretty intense variety of tasks," says music director/musician Todd Perlmutter of his work with Blue Man Group. He also records, produces, engineers, programs, and narrates live on the road and in-studio with this indescribably experimental troupe-turned-celebrity rock ‘n' roll band. It's very likely Todd has turned a bit Blue himself since joining up with BMG in 1999, and that's a good thing.

Co-founded by Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton in 1987 to stage regular performances in New York City's Central Park, Blue Man Group also appeared at hip East Village spots like Performance Space 122 and the Wooster Group's Performance Garage, and instantly became a fixture of the New York performance scene. If you were into live music, plays, sketch routines, sight gags, stunts, and being pelted with paint and food, you got all that and more from a BMG show.

The Theatrically Quirky and Rousingly Hypnotic Blue Man Group
    
 

Blue Man Group's latest album: The Complex
Calling themselves "a creative organization dedicated to creating exciting and innovative work in a wide variety of media," the Blue Man Group's music is best described by its Allmusic.com style keywords: "Energetic, Rousing, Hypnotic, Aggressive, Quirky, Theatrical." Equally respected for Audio, their Grammy-nominated 1999 instrumental CD featuring custom-built instruments and their ground-breaking theatrical productions in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Las Vegas, Blue Man released an entirely different sort of new album last spring, and are currently working on a stunning new live show debuting in Berlin this May. Both endeavors represent a sort of Version 2.0 of BMG.

The Complex is a full-blown rock ‘n' roll band concept album that features British, Canadian, and American mega pop-rock vocalists, a turntablist, a samplist, a programmer/art consultant and a spoken word lyricist. The Blue guys brought in Gavin Rossdale from Bush, Esthero, Dave Matthews, Tracy Bonham, Rob Swift, Kid Koala, Dan the Automator, and Spaulding Gray for the CD; Bonham also sings and plays violin as part of the Blue live show.

BMG's ultra-elaborate, award-winning live show. "The Complex Rock Tour," was conceived simultaneously with the recording of The Complex. So what role does Pro Tools|HD play in the show?

    

Todd Perlmutter at ProControl
 

Perlmutter has produced and performed on Audio, The Complex, and three BMG surround DVDs, as well as becoming music director and co-sound designer for the Las Vegas show. But he still gets his biggest kicks from playing drums and further evolving Blue Man music with Pro Tools|HD. The group's affinity for bringing people together with the power of drumming is well known — they had 22 people playing the same drum beat on one song — and whether he's performing, arranging, recording, editing, sequencing, or mixing those big Blue life-conduit beats, Pro Tools is indispensable.

"The founders of Blue Man are so into the large-group drumming experience, because it gets people together. There is something very Blue Man about having a room full of people experiencing the moment together, which is one of the goals of every BMG performance. There are actually 96 drums used on the song 'Time To Start,' spread out over more than 60 tracks in Pro Tools — and most of those had individual mics, too. We recorded a drum session with 15 drummers in New York, a drum dub session, and an entire new drum and percussion group session in Vegas; then it was back to New York for two more drum groups to dub parts in. It would've been an unbelievably daunting task if we weren't using the ‘Tools."

Pro Technique 1—
Preparing in advance for mega-star vocalist sessions
    
   
A lot of great talent showed up for The Complex CD sessions, and the same is true for Blue Man Group's "The Complex Rock Tour." Being in charge of everything for vocal sessions with the likes of Dave Matthews, Gavin Rossdale, Tracy Bonham, and others showing up under tight schedules would have been unnerving for Perlmutter had he not set up the sessions in advance with Pro Tools|HD and a couple of plug-in filters he prefers. The same goes for his live Blue vocal monitoring setup in Pro Tools.

"The best part about Pro Tools is that you can be completely set up ahead of time," he says. "The last thing you want to do with a guest singer is make them wait for you to figure anything out. You want them immediately comfortable and confident in your ability. Having everything happening and together when they arrive makes everyone feel confident in the process. It all helps to get the best performances."

    
   

Esthero is the vocalist half of a popular recording duo of the same name from Ontario, Canada. Before her session, Todd set up ten new tracks in his Pro Tools session, each with its input and output levels all set up and a few vocal track groups already formed. He then placed a McDSP Filterbank F2 plug-in on each of those tracks before the first note was sung.

"After recording Esthero, I got into the habit of putting a plug-in filter on the vocal tracks in advance, so I could quickly make monitoring adjustments. She likes to work very quickly, with a lot of layering. To keep up with her intense pace and still keep her monitoring happening, putting the F2 on her tracks allowed me to keep all of her vocal layers easily heard. I applied different levels of high-pass filter to each of her vocal takes, and always kept the current take as the one with the least amount of filtering. We detailed the takes later with EQ, once when we got the mix rolling, but the F2 plug-in helped me to keep that session rolling at breakneck speed."

Pro Technique 2 —
Using Pro Tools new fade feature when the clock is running out
    
   
Perlmutter is often called on to quickly make voiceovers for the group's television shows, commercials, and unique Blue Man Group performances, often while he's on tour. Sometimes he's adding new audio chunks to an existing production, or editing various text portions of the show, so he's usually working in a heavily "chopped up" audio environment. Following an energetic Pro Tools edit session, he's left with quite a ragged looking bunch of new and old audio regions. Here's how he quickly manages the files and gets the new voiceovers cleaned up at the end of a long day:

"The new Pro Tools software has a spectacular feature for the fade function," explains Perlmutter. "Basically, I can hack up all my edits on all my tracks and throw the bits together, and when I'm under the gun I can just select all of the audio regions together and use Command/Ctrl + F on those. That quickly creates in and out fades on all of the separate regions, essentially cleaning up all the work for me. When you're looking at 30 to 60 audio bits, this saves a ton of time. Before this new feature was added, I had to make all of the fades one at a time."


www.blueman.com


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