- Hello, I'm Ashley Shepherd with Dynaudio and we're here at the NAMM Show 2018. You can hear all the noise in the background and we're here with Jason Larocca Or Larocca, we could say it either way obviously we know his work from The Accountant and many numerous other shows and movies and whatnot. So we're just here to talk to you and see what you've been up to. - This is great, yeah. - What's going on right now? What are you doing? - I'm working on, gosh... (laughing) I did uh, what did I do recently? Oh, there was the, I think it was the Murder of Versace it was a TV show that's on FX right now. - Oh yeah, and who plays Donatella? - That's a good question, I don't know who's playing Donatella. - It's somebody, I just saw the ad the other day... - Yeah, it looks really good. - Preview on it, so yeah. - I mean, I worked on the first episode so I don't know what the rest of the show is like... - Gotcha. - But that first episode... - First one's good. - Is quite good. And let's see, Once Upon a Time for ABC... - Mhmm. - I've worked on Supergirl, movies like Paddington, Life, Joy... - Gotta get your Paddington bear in there. (laughing) - Ya know. Yeah, all kinds of stuff. Fans too. - Well so, taking something like The Accountant, on camera... - Yeah. - Lots of real action, bigger than life and then going to something like Paddington where everything's sort of in its own world, how do you approach something like that? I mean, you know, from a mix standpoint? - From a mix standpoint? Well, my process, it depends on who I'm working with. 'Cause some artists and talent like to bring me on very early on... - Right. - And some have me just on sort of the post side where they've already written the score, they just need someone to make it sound really great. - Gotcha. - And they have an engineer like myself, come in and record the orchestra and then mix it. So, like on Paddington for instance, I came in kind of at the early stages helping mix cues as they were being developed and written for the film. And you know, of course the picture it looks funny because... - Because there's nothin' there. - There's not much to see, you know, you've got green screen and you've got, you know, sort of these blobs moving around on the screen... - Right, kind of hard to get a vibe. - So you're trying to get inspired by it and you know, it's not all there yet. So, you know, with animated films or partially animated hybrid type films like Paddington, you have to... The music does a lot, obviously, to help bring the things to life. - Well, you're kind of drivin' the bus, really. - Yeah, absolutely. - I mean, we gotta lay all the dialogue for - Exactly. - I mean, I've done some animation myself... - Yeah. - And it always finds, I always find we're editing stuff together and the animators are like, "Thank you, now we can..." In some cases, I guess it depends... - 'Cause you're putting a lot of it there. Sometimes you're even putting some of the sound effects there... - Sure. - With the music and stuff like that because literally none of it's there. - It's gotta make sense. - You have to provide all of it. And I jockey a lot of those worlds 'cause I'm sometimes I'm doing sound design, sometimes I'm producing scores, so I'm helping develop the sound or add things to it that I think might help... - Right. - You know, elevate it. - Sure. - And so, and some of my clients have done audio speakers too. - Yeah. - So I'll be at their studio and we'll be mixing on Dynaudios and then they come to my studio and we're on the same speakers, so... - Makes it easier. - We have that cool kind of like, you know, we always feel like we're in a familiar environment... - That's a nice place to be. - And you know, we all kinda get that reference as it were to, oh we just came from here, we got the same speakers and we know what we're listening to. - Sure. - So.... - Well it's interesting, so you go mostly between sound design and score producing, mixing... - I mean, for me it's always music and it's always score, but there's sound design that I do as part of what I work on in score... - Right. - So sometimes I'll take score elements and I'll process them through modular synthesizers... - Sure. - Or add instruments and play guitar to them or add textures, so, by sound design I mean music sound design... - Yeah. - Usually, but sometimes that can be a gray area. - Well that was gonna be my point. It's nice when those marry well... - Yeah. - Together and the score supplements sound design, sound design supplements score. Especially... - It usually always has notes in it. - Yeah, I was about to say. (laughing) Especially all these subwoofer movies, you know - My sound design. - Where it's like... WHOAAAAA!!! You know like, is that a sound effect or is that the score, what the hell's goin... - And that's another thing I like to do is I'll add boofties and, we call em boofties or whatever... - Boofties? - But ya know, stuff with like low sub stuff... - Mark that one down, boofties. (laughing) Boofties. - I'll add some boofties sometimes and get a couple of little... I've got my library of like, sub harmonics, you know, punches and hits and whatever... - Right. - That I'll add to whatever has come in to mix. You know, sometimes it's not... - It's just not there. - Enough, it needs more or whatever, so, by sound design I mean music sound design. But again, it crosses over. - So do you find yourself in big rooms? Getting, you know, more like dub theaters to put this stuff together or what kind of studio are you working in for a lot of this? - Usually the music production ends up in small studios. You know, we'll go to big studios to score and record the orchestra. - Right. - So we'll go to Fox, we'll go to Warner Brothers or Sony or the Bridge or something like that, you know, usually an L.A. studio. Sometimes I'll go to London or Seattle, I have gone to other places. But we usually just stay in the big rooms for just the scoring. And so, recording in other words... - Sure. - Of the orchestra. - Sure. - And then we go to either my studio which is, you know, a fairly modest size mix room or some of my clients have their own studios and sometimes like to work there. But they're usually smaller rooms, you know? - Mhmm. - Your average, whatever, 15 by 20 or whatever sort of music mix room. - Yeah. - Not usually a dub stage, but... - Good Nashville control room kind of thing. - Yes, sometimes... We've gone... On a couple of films we have gone to dub stages just to mix the music. - Interesting. - And so we'll just be mixing the music but we'll be on a dub stage so that we know we're getting that translation to... - You're delivering to the stage something that's gonna make sense. - Yeah, but usually it's... We're mixing music in music rooms, usually. - Do you find that your mixing music or how many channels, what are you doing in pre dubbing and setting it up? - Yeah, well the whole music side is basically one massive pre dub. So depending on the type of score or complexity of it, it could be literally thousands of tracks or we whittle it down to a couple hundred. And often times on the average score, especially the TV stuff, it's not a lot. Like, it's usually 50 or so electronic tracks of like drum loops and synthesizers and stuff like that and then the orchestra with just maybe 50 microphones or something like that. So, couple hundred tracks and then maybe another 32 to 48 tracks of printing, which is basically a 5:1 stem of the orchestra, a 5:1 stem of the percussion, a 5:1 stem of whatever. So, you know, maybe a couple hundred tracks, usually. - That's what I was trying to get at... - Yeah. - The stage delivery, you're in 5:1, typically... - Always. - And that's what you're delivering to the stage. Even if they're doing an atmost thing or whatever... - Yeah, usually that's what they want for music delivery. They will either... - They don't wanna put the violins on the ceiling? - Sometimes and sometimes they ask for just a violin mic... - Right. - Or something like that. - Well that's your breakout... - Yeah. - You say maybe 40... - They maybe want like a spot mic or something of one thing they might wanna move or... Like if it's a solo instrument. - Sure, makes sense. - Or, like we were doing the music for A Series of Unfortunate Events for Netflix... - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Which has got a lot of music in it... - Yeah. - Then music that's sung on screen. So there's like... - They gotta be able to move it around. - Yeah, there's scenes where the actors are singing and so I'll deliver just single tracks of the vocal or certain elements that they want on its own so they can actually move it around the screen depending on where the characters are in the shot because I don't know where the final cut's necessarily gonna be. It might change after I mix the music. So sometimes they want certain elements just as mono things. But a lot of the times it's a 5:1 or a 7:1 group element. So, percussion and high percussion and pads, bases, - So they can... - So they... - Blend it out. - I mean, a lot of the times it's not even really to balance it it's to... If they need to cut it or add something or maybe drop one little thing out that is now interfering with dialogue, they can just quickly mute the high percussion stem for like one second. - Prolly one of the first ones to go. - Always, you know. (laughing) Whatever little cymbal or crash cymbal... - Dialogue is king. - Always king, you know. It'll go and rather than pull the whole music back they'll just cut that one little element out. - Do you, when you're previewing with directors, just a 5:1, I mean do you actually do any of that motion stuff to picture for them to preview before you hit the stage? - Yeah, not the motion stuff but I'll always have, whenever a director comes into my studio, we're usually pretty far along. So we've got everything in 5:1, we've usually recorded the orchestra by then, and all the you know, final vocals and stuff like that. So yeah, they'll come in, they'll listen in 5:1. The panning stuff I'll do is usually just musical stuff that doesn't necessarily matter... - Would happen anyhow. Right, right, right. - In terms of what is moving around onstage but I just wanna make some things kind of move around musically. And it's usually general. So if things are moving around, that's already kind of usually in the dialogue and effects tracks if they're really, really well mixed and they come to us as almost like a final pre dub of the effects and the dialogue, that stuff's already kind of moving around... - So you can see what you... - I just put it up at unity and it's already moving around... - Right, right, right. - I don't have to do much to it. - That makes it easy. - Sometimes you get it like that, sometimes it's just a mono track and it doesn't sound that great so it's, you know (laughing) you get both worlds. - Oh dear me, a mono track. Well, hey, you know more room for music, right? - I just put it right in the center speaker and then I just let the music do its job. - So, just maybe to wrap up, over the last year what's something that say, I wanna listen to the Larocca sound, and I wanna see something that you're very proud of or something that you really dug into and was like, you know, that was awesome. What should we watch of your work that you would really highlight? - I mean, I think... I mean I'm proud of a lot of the films I work on. I mean, they're all very different, too. - Sure. - I don't tend to stick into one particular genre. But, The Accountant, I think as a film is just an incredible film... - Great film, big fan. - And Paddington too, just because I like the books and my son's a big fan of the story too, so... - And now daddy's cool, right? - Now I'm kinda cool like for two seconds I was cool, barely, you know because he likes to see those things. So I like have another reason to, you know, have get a lot of joy out of films like that because it's great for my son... - Sure. - And great for kids, so you know, things like that I'm really proud of as well. And you know, Joy I thought was a great film, great performance by Jennifer Lawrence and the music was really great. David Campbell and, oh I forget the other composer... Oh, West Thordson was the other composer on the film... - Okay, yeah I've heard... - Who's a young composer... - I've heard his name. - He's done a couple things. But you know, really great, I mean really emotional music written for the film. And yeah I mean, TV wise, Feud I think is a great show. And I mixed the main title for that show. Which Matt Quayle, the composer, was nominated for an Emmy for. And Once Upon a Time, it's a great show, it's been running for seven years on NBC... - Gosh I know, that thing's been on for a while. - And a really long time... - You've been on it since the beginning? - Yeah, yeah. - Wow. - And we record orchestra for it every week. - Wow. - So it's, you know it's one of those cool things where we have a really great, almost like a family at this point... - Yeah 'cause you've done it for so long. - We all know each other. - Sure. - The whole team and so, it's just a really fun almost like a party in a way, I mean we just get together on the scoring stage and listen to this great music played by these wonderful musicians and we just like, cool, well, there you go. - Awesome. - Another week down. (laughing) - Now, just one last thing. - Yeah? - Do you mix any of the albums of the score music is that a part of what your process is? - Oh yeah... - Pumpin' to stereo and... (clicking) - Oh yeah, absolutely yeah. - Is it true, as far as stereo can get, to your 5:1 mix? - Yeah, absolutely. And if it's not, we'll do little tweaks. And it's usually things that we wanna change specifically for the album because we felt that we did certain things film wise that don't necessarily play... - Or we don't know why it's happening. - Yeah, like... - Yeah, I know what you mean. - We want certain things to play louder or certain solo instruments so we'll... - Which you'd be like, "Why did they turn that off?" If you didn't see the picture. - Yeah, yeah. So we'll go in... - I see what you're sayin'. - And we'll do that as a soundtrack change but a lot of the times the soundtrack plays pretty well without having to do much to it. But whenever it's getting released for soundtrack, we'll always go through it, we'll spend a day making little tweaks, little finesse things that we... Or sometimes we extend things. - Ahh. - Like certain things are broken up into pieces in the film but we wanna bring them together and make them one long piece... - Original piece. - For the soundtrack. So sometimes we have to do a little bit of that too. And weaving in and out, and getting rid of things that may be drawn on too long because... - Finish the scene out or whatever. - Because of the scene going on for longer than it needs to. So you know, it's little things like that. But mix wise, it's usually pretty close. - Mhhm. - You know. To how we want it to be. - Well you're doubt and you've lived with it... - Yeah we always check everything in stereo and 5:1 and 7:1 so whenever we're mixing in surround we're always checking it in stereo too, to make sure. Which is another reason why the Dynaudios are so amazing because I have my stereo nearfields and I'll go back and forth. So I'll have a 5:1 set up, sometimes it's the Dynaudios in 5:1 or sometimes it's just the Dynaudios in stereo. - Okay. - But I've always got, always have the BM15s as like my stereo reference. - Okay. - So whenever we're going back and forth between different formats I kind of have that as like my soundtrack reference, essentially. - Gotcha. - So whenever we're mixing soundtrack stuff we're always doing it on the BM15s and checking in stereo. - Well we'll have to get you a set of 48s. Mid range driver, for a new, you know, the new version, shall we say. - Mmmmm. (giggling) - Well hey, it's really an honor... - Dude, of course. - It's a pleasure to meet you. - Of course, yeah really exciting... - And great to hear about the work. I hope y'all learned something about what Mr. Larocca does with the Dynaudio speakers and with all the wonderful music in films and stuff, so... - Play loud! Play loud! (laughing)