Big Music For The Biggest Screen IMAX Film Showcases Rock
Legends, Today’s Superstars-Up Close and Live!
By Tom Kenny
First, the Music Mix
Renowned producer/engineer Elliot Scheiner was brought on
the project as an audio consultant and mixer for the entire ALL ACCESS
project. Producer Jon Shapiro was a fan of Scheiner’s work on many classic
albums over the years and learned that he was the reigning guru of surround sound.
"We wanted him as a part of the Dream Team we assembled for the film,
and he was equally interested in what we were doing," Shapiro says. Scheiner
mixed the tracks at Jon Russell and Kathleen Lombard’s Presence Studios in
Westport, Conn., in a room he’s come to call his 5.1 home, because he loves
its sound - its accuracy - and he loves the VR Legend console. But he
was also involved on location.
"You are very limited when you are on a
stage with what you can do in terms of 5.1," he says. "You can’t put
up a tree around the drums necessarily. Obviously, the 5.1 field was going to
come from the mix and not from the recording, except in terms of the
ambience. There had to be at least 30 ambient mics around the room. It was
pretty cool."
"It is contrary to the way the movie looks, but the
cameras are constantly moving, so I took a lot of creative license with how I
wanted to mix things," Scheiner continues. "In Santana’s band, the
horns are on the right, if you are looking at them, yet I put them in the center
rear. For me, the object wasn’t to re-create how it would look onstage, but
just to create a felling you would get if you were on the stage."
Scheiner elected to go after a "truly
aggressive surround sound mix," as opposed to what he described as a
"typical movie mix, where basically all you have in the surrounds are
reverbs and effects. I hard-panned things in the rear. If I had a mono piano,
it might be hard left rear. A guitar track might be hard right. Sometimes
horns got panned hard to the rear. This wasn’t a stereo mix with reverbs in
the rear or coming out from the front and having reverbs further back. This
band was totally surrounding you.
"I’ve always felt that, even in a home
situation with a home surround theater listening environment, you don’t have
tobe perfectly on-axis to hear the music," he continues. "With
stereo, how many times do we stand outside the speaker range and hear the music perfectly fine? It is
the same thingwith surround. You can stand outside the theater and still hear
the music perfectly well. You might not hear the placement of the panning,
but you hear the music fine. Once you get into the arena, if you walk over to
the left surround, it is like walking to that player, so you hear him a
little better. When you are in a rehearsal and you are standing in the
middle, you might walk over to a player to hear what he is playing. That is
basically what this is."
Though IMAX is a 6.0-channel format, Scheiner delivered
finished 5.1 mixes, as stems, to Mark Wright at CBC Toronto for the film mix.
"I went up to Canada to hear what they were doing and this guy was
really great," Scheiner says. "He remained so true to what I had
done, and he kept everything where I put it. He didn’t move a thing. I’ve sat
in the IMAX Theater and listened to it, and it is awesome to hear this thing
in a theater."
