A career-retrospective 360/VR project for Sir Elton John and part of the artist’s ongoing career-farewell projects, Elton John - Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Legacy (VR360) was mixed by Brian Yaskulka using Waves Nx – Virtual Mix Room on headphones.
‘The original plan was for me to do all the mixing for the Elton John project in the theatre room at Spinifex, but due to scheduling conflicts and timeline acceleration, it became necessary to work on the production at my own studio. However, I had just relocated to the Sound City facility in Van Nuys, California and was waiting for the new studio to be completed, so I was basically working out of boxes – without my usual 5.1 set-up available.’
‘I had heard good things about Waves Nx technology for 3D audio on headphones, so I thought I’d give it a try. I had no viable monitoring facility, so I went ahead and used a pair of AKG K702 reference headphones, with the Nx Virtual Mix Room plug-in and the Nx Head Tracker attached to the headphones. I ended up mixing 90 per cent of the project on headphones.
‘The remaining ten per cent was done in the Spinifex theatre, and I was amazed, as it sounded almost exactly the same in that acoustically magnificent theatre as it did on my headphones with Nx. Everything – the localisation, the spaciousness – matched, and I ended up just making a few tweaks here and there, mainly to be able to work with the producers, in order to dial in sound design elements.
‘The idea was for the viewer to experience inside, pivotal moments in Elton John’s career – his first show at Hollywood’s Troubadour Club in 1970 and the famous 1975 Dodgers Stadium concert – and place you right there on stage alongside Elton,’ he continues. ‘The creators at Spinifex Group recreated digital versions of a younger Elton using CGI, motion-capture technology tracking Elton’s face, and even a professional Elton impersonator to reproduce his ’70s dance moves. The point of the audio mix was to put you right there with Elton and feel the excitement of these events, as well as to create some moments of pure fantasy. So, for some scenes, I needed to create a feeling of total immersion in a live concert; for others, I needed an extra sense of space and depth.’
On using Waves plug-ins, he says: ‘This was a project aimed at celebrating Elton John’s music, not reinventing it, so I researched the original recording process of all these songs and what technology was used at that time, and I applied the right plug-ins to recreate the sounds I was looking for. For example, on the vocal for ‘Your Song’ I used the Waves C4 Multiband Compressor, the CLA-2A Compressor and the Waves DeEsser. On the piano, I used the Waves MV2, the Scheps 73 EQ and the PS22 Stereo Maker. For the vocals on ‘Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting)’ I used the SSL G-Equalizer and the CLA-76 Compressor. On the vocals of ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ I used the F6 Dynamic EQ to dynamically control the vocal track, and again the CLA-2A. Also, when we matched the audio and the visuals in the theatre room, everything worked flawlessly. But once the tech team did a run-through test with some of the VR headsets, they found they were having sync issues. That’s where the Waves SoundShifter plugin came in. It was a split-second fix that needed to be made on the spot: we had to time-stretch the first scene by 100ms. SoundShifter did it perfectly, no glitches, no artifacts. I used a set of Waves 5.1 surround plugins to pull off the balance and the spread in the surround sound design – the R360 Surround Reverb, the C360 Surround Compressor, the L360 Surround Limiter and the M360 Surround Manager & Mixdown.
‘I’m just glad Waves Nx was there to help me solve this particular one.’
More: www.waves.com
