Pro Techniques from Gizmo Post

by Randy Alberts

"Not only is this the last show of the tour, but it's the last show we'll ever do." — Ziggy Stardust, 1973

Roy Thomas Baker was there at Hammersmith Odeon Theatre with a 16-track machine. It turned out to be the final performance of Ziggy Stardust fronting the Spiders from Mars, a shock to the latter, Baker, and a devoted audience when David Bowie surprisingly announced it on July 3, 1973, before launching into the last song, "Rock 'N' Roll Suicide." Just as he'd predicted not two years earlier in "Ziggy Stardust," Bowie "had to break up the band" and Baker's recording and D.A. Pennebaker's film of the show have preserved that famous rock moment forever — until now.

Co-founder Brian Mackewich and chief production officer Rich Tozzoli of 333 Entertainment were principal in bringing that moment back to life at Gizmo. Ziggy Stardust Live is a devoted 5.1 recreation of the band carving through "Space Oddity," "Jean Genie," "Andy Warhol" and other Spiders classics one last time. Mackewich, Tozzoli, and all at Gizmo, a bustling audio and video post production facility in New York City with clients and credits including Cadillac and MTV, thoroughly enjoyed their experience using Avid Media Composers and a Pro Tools TDM system to bring Zig and the Spiders back to life. Originally filmed and recorded for release as a double live album in 1974, the performance was eventually released as a soundtrack album, film and video in 1983 called Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture.

"Thank God they printed the 50 Hz pilot tone back then," laughs Mackewich thinking of the concert itself, which in 1973 was followed by an elite after-party attended by Paul McCartney, Keith Moon, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Jeff Beck, Lou Reed, Barbra Streisand, Sonny Bono, and other Hollywood royalty. "I just did the surround remix with Tony Visconti and it is being posted and sent to Abbey Road next week. Especially since it was the last night that Bowie performed "Ziggy Stardust" with the Spiders from Mars band, that's why we wanted to really work at keeping the DVD as authentic as possible because it really is a piece of rock history."

Mackewich and Tozzoli took a few moments to share with DigiZine a couple of tips they came up with in bringing Ziggy Stardust Live up to 2002 surround standards and wanted to pass it along here.

Pro Technique 1 —
A quick team effort authoring daily mix reference DVD-Rs
Burning mix reference CD-R discs after a stereo session is a commonplace and easy process, but doing the same to create a DVD-R disc after a long day's 5.1 surround session isn't quite as simple. When Ziggy Stardust Live producer Tony Visconti put forth a challenge that he wanted to be able to walk away with a reference surround mix disc after the team's second day of remixing, the Gizmo team starting thinking things out.

"Surround mixing requires a somewhat more complicated, but not impossible, solution," says Mackewich. "The basic issue is that DVD discs aren't simply burned but need to be authored with a little bit of programming, navigation, audio and video assets, some menu design before they pop out."

Monitoring in surround in the control room from Pro Tools directly into a ProControl desk and out to some Genelec 1031s and a 1092, Mackewich further explains Gizmo's DVD-R chain as including a coveted consumer surround playback system in Studio B's adjacent record room to hear what most end-listeners will hear.

"We fed the AES outputs of Pro Tools into our AC-3 hardware encoders and then into our consumer surround setup," Mackewich continues. "The encoder output fed an Onkyo receiver via a S/PDIF connector, which was very helpful in terms of getting a sense of how our various 5.1 mixes were decoding in an average home theater. Tony found it very helpful for his mix approval process."

On the Gizmo Ziggy team's third day of mixing, the team had to prep some elements to make the "dailies" DVD-R, which included pulling a few frames of video from the film to create a temporary DVD menu and video track that matched the audio's length perfectly. Using a still frame from each of four song's to be remixed that day as the video track display, Tozzoli then bounced those songs when finished and Mackewich imported those into separate new 6-channel Pro Tools sessions. Using Kind of Loud's Dolby AC-3 software encoder to make the necessary file for importing to Gizmo's DVD authoring software, the staff's authoring guru Sean McAuliffe then compiled all the video and audio assets and tweaked the menus and photos one more time before making a quick reference DVD-R for producer Visconti to drive away with.

"It takes a bit more effort than just burning a CD-R," Mackewich admits, "but it’s just as handy for checking surround mixes in different places. For the Ziggy project, Tony was always taking DVD-Rs with him to listen on several systems and coming in the next morning to make the changes and move forward. You've got to love it! [It takes] a major team effort, but it's a great technology chain nonetheless thanks to Pro Tools."

Pro Technique 2 —
Moving a lead vocal off-center to make room and to create depth
Rich Tozzoli had a lot of previous sound experience with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Al DiMeola, Foghat, and a fair amount of sound design work for film and television commercials before coming to Gizmo and 333 Entertainment. He's currently the Senior Editor for Surround Professional magazine and a contributing editor to EQ, as well, and his tip has to do with working with multi-channel vocals like those found on many live recordings such as Ziggy Stardust's in 1973. He suggests hard-patching Waves' SuperTap DDL plug-in to the left and right surround channels and then feeding a lead vocal into it to make the vocal move out of the center of the room image and create space to spotlight something else in a mix, even if just for a moment.

"If you apply a SuperTap DDL to the vocal with the returns of SuperTap patched into the back, the vocal will move off the center speaker," says Tozzoli. "It’s good for moving the vocal out of the way if there's something else you want to bring up, but it's really best for creating depth behind the image. It’s an old image trick that sounds amazing. Like anyone, I've put SuperTap on vocals in stereo a lot before and experimented with the tap, whether it is in time with the song tempo or not; but for here I just use the two-tap mode. I also darken the returns, meaning I apply the filter to the return taps and darken them at like 2.5 kHz, all within SuperTap to make it sound like a nice, old-sounding delay. Actually, most of the time you can't tell SuperTap is being used the way I apply it because I like to make the tap so short that you actually don't hear DDL, you just hear depth. This tip also works in stereo, too."

Tozzoli went on to explain he turns off all but two of the visual tap displays in the main SuperTap window, then spreads the remaining taps out hard left and right and hard patches each to the back left and right surround channel outputs. He further explains that he uses the number 3 and 4 outputs as his left/right surrounds with an auxiliary return coming back in with SuperTap on it that generally goes out 1 and 2 as a stereo mix. He generally assigns the output of SuperTap to hard patch the left/right surrounds by assigning it to the 3 and 4 outputs, his left/right surrounds.