\n<\/p>\n
In other words, the tone of the room is essentially applied like a filter to the raw sounds recorded from the artist onstage. This filter, known as impulse response, takes readings from actual physical places, then \u201csynthetically reproduces the sound of a real space like a club or stadium,\u201d said Jake Davis, the lead mix engineer at SeisMic Sound, an audio facility in Nashville that specializes in concert films.<\/p>\n
Mixers like Jake and his father, Tom Davis, the SeisMic founder, have a lot of control over the sound in a concert film, and making adjustments is a large part of their job. Some are minor refinements. Others are more like corrections: They make the concert film sound more like what the artist wanted than what necessarily occurred on the night it was filmed. \u201cWhen you lock something down for a DVD or for streaming or whatever it is, once it\u2019s done, it lives forever,\u201d Tom Davis said. \u201cIt never goes away. So you kind of want it to be as good as it can be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mixers can blend parts of a song recorded on one night with parts from another night to create the best combined version. They can fix an errant flat note in a guitar solo by manipulating it in postproduction, or they can ask an artist to rerecord a weak vocal in a studio, layering it into the mix so that it sounds as if it had been delivered live. \u201cWe copy, cut and paste, like you do on a word processor,\u201d Davis said. \u201cIf there was a little clam in the first chorus, but he did it fine in the second chorus in the same part, we can cut and paste that. We can do vocal maintenance. We can fix a little pitch issue, or bend a note a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although sound mixers record the crowd with a bevy of microphones hidden around the arena, it\u2019s possible \u2014 and indeed, common \u2014 to exaggerate the sound of that audience, to artificially give the cheering fans some extra kick. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a dirty secret,\u201d Davis said. \u201cBut the sound of the real audience is weak. It\u2019s not enough. You end up adding to it, pumping it up. There\u2019s something psychological to hearing other humans having a good time and reacting \u2014 it\u2019s like a sitcom and a laugh track.\u201d Jake Davis said that the ideal balance is to \u201cstart with the real reaction\u201d and then simply \u201cmake it bigger and more obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, part of the appeal of a live show, even on film, is the impression of reality, and a sense of truth is critical. \u201cThe goal of the mix is to enhance the energy of the performance that exists as it went down in the best way possible,\u201d Jake Davis said. \u201cYou maintain some element of rawness while taking out things that are distracting, the nuances of a wrong note or a background singer being a little bit off.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n