Welcome back to Scoring for Films, in particular to our section "What lies Underneath". I am Vito Lo Re and here is Fabrizio Campanelli. If you enjoyed the last episode about Thomas Newman and American Beauty, especially this time we're going to dig very deeply. To see what lies under the piano of Thomas Newman in American Beauty and so... So, we had a lot of fun. In the last episode, we talked about the importance of the piano - and also about the surrounding synths - in American Beauty's theme.

Now let's recreate it, let's play the piano a bit, let's play the American Beauty's theme and then let's try to work on it with the sequencer, with the addition of effects, with the addition of the famous reverbs. Because in this score, the music as notes is very simple, but everything around it is a bit more complicated. Exactly, it seems simple, but it isn't, or maybe it is. Let me ask you a question. To approach the work you did today, you have three options: 1) you rely on your ears and your experience; 2) you rely on one of those software programs that maybe extract only the guitar or only the piano or only the voice, and thus having the possibility to listen to them individually, you understand more or 3) there are software programs that analyze... the sound spectrum.

So, what did you do? My ears. Okay, the good old ears. I sat here in the studio by the monitors, a nice play button and two ears to listen. But many, many times because with analytical listening we can realize many things that we don't realize with a superficial listening. Not wrong, in fact it must be superficial because many things, let's remember, reach us without us realizing it but when we listen again, we notice the sound details.

And we do a sort of "reverse engineering". We don't know precisely what instruments were used when Newman recorded the piano, but using these, we get closer to something credible that communicates what we want to communicate that is, what Thomas Newman wanted to communicate which is what we said last time: the void, the beauty, the absolute, the "elsewhere" and we go to see them. Well, here we are in the recording room, where Fabrizio will play on the piano the American Beauty's theme that we heard earlier. And let's also see how we placed the microphones, how we use the pedals, what piano pedals are, and all that system that we need to get that sound, towards which we will approach. And then we point our Neumann KM184s towards the high and low areas of the piano, pointing them very much towards the hammer felts to hear the mechanics; a soft and close sound and a microphone instead in the middle of the room that doesn't look at the piano, but picks up the room reflections. The right pedal lifts the dampers letting the sound circulate freely and the pianissimo pedal, the one on the left, moves the felts so they hit two out of three strings and one out of two in the low part.

This is the normal sound and now let's hear with the pianissimo pedal it's a much softer, more intimate sound and now let's record, indeed, with the pianissimo pedal pressed. In this case, the sound is the one picked up by the video camera, not the one from the microphones we positioned and that we'll hear shortly after Now let's see what we will do with piano recorded piano So Fabrizio, once we've acquired the material, what is the first step that you did? You listened many, many times maybe even with headphones, after which what is the first plugin you pull out of the box? We have first of all the two tracks. The first track is the Neumann KM184, the ones that we pointed towards the hammers and below we have the ambient one. Both go into the group I've called "Piano group", obviously.

Let's hear the starting sound of our main microphone and then let's hear the track from the soundtrack instead to be able to make a comparison. And understand what's missing to reach the final result. This is the pure and simple piano recording, only the spot microphones, the ones on the strings and hammers of the piano. The reverb we hear is the natural reverb of the piano. Now let's hear instead the material we started from and towards which we need to get closer. Well, besides the fact that below here there are the synths, rightly.

We hear the piano, as we said in the previous episode, that is very warm, very shifted to the mid-low area, very muffled in the higher parts as if it were a muted sound. Almost prepared. The famous "elsewhere" sound that we talked about in the previous episode. Let's work on our stuff and let's hear then our main track and start working on it. Forst of all let's start by inserting a filter that I consider fundamental to bring my piano, then naturally each piano will have its own needs due to its own timbre. So, I've enabled the filter, let's hear without.

So with this filter working in this way, I've dug out some of the mid-high frequencies, I've given some resonance peaks. I use this FilterFreak from Sound Toys, but obviously many others can be used. After which I've inserted a virtual preamplifier called Neold V76U73. And on: it has muffled it. Now let's see instead a plugin that I work on in the mid-low range. It's an emulation of the Puig Tech from Waves.

With this little trick, by increasing the boost more or less by the same intensity, the attenuation in the low area, I get a sort of emphasis in the mid-low range that in this case is the one that helps me give warmth. Then I open the Q3. The Q3 is an equalizer. Yours, because it's a Fabfilter! Let's see that to attenuate this resonant area I use a dynamic equalizer centered on that frequency that in the peaks is attenuated. I start to enhance the area from 900 to 2000 Hz.

So you're saying that we have a good piano, with different characteristics from the Steinway that Newman probably used. How do we make the sound of our piano resemble that one? Also this way. I obviously recommend listening with headphones. Or on monitors. Going forward we'll see that by removing everything, the difference will be highlighted very well.

Let's add another small preamplifier. In this case, it's a Manley from Universal Audio that we use with the aim of further warming that mid-low range that we want to make more and more muffled, soft but present. And the difference is remarkable. Yes, especially we hear it on the attacks, right? It highlights the warmth especially in the attacks. Now let's uniform the sound with a Manley compressor Then we use a plugin that is a beautiful emulation in my opinion of a compressor that has made the history of compression.

It's a compressor that is used for many purposes. For example, we remember the Decca Tree. The panorama often passes through the Teletronics, the LA2A that are compressors that have not only made the history of recording and mixing but that in this case also on the piano work very well. Here there's a gain. so you hear it louder when I activate it. "Piano group", obviously.

All these plugins - that are emulations of something that in many cases were the true pieces of history of recording - are now available at quite affordable prices. So there has been this great democratization: these are tools that everyone can use. We are not advertising anyone but we invite you to try them. Now, be careful, of course, everything has pros and cons. So in this case our plugins have sound characteristics that are always closer to those of hardware but with still some differences. I myself often when I have to process the sound in the mix go through my Avalon 737 which have an equalizer that works in an incredible way and so nowadays, even staying in the virtual realm, a very high quality has been reached but that does not negate that hardware has its own irreplaceable characteristics.

But it's also true that if we had to buy those LA2A electronics... To our main piano, we add the ambient. The ambient is mono because I need a centrality, a focus. What we hear is a very "middy" sound, it's the sound of the piano in the room and we add it to our main piano. We're almost there!... Off.

On. See how the presence increases, the focus increases exactly in that range that we need. It doesn't have the detail in the high, it doesn't have the detail in the low, it has that presence in the mid-range that further helps us to focus the sound and give that warmth, that "middyness" that we need. Let's keep in mind that C2 is the lowest note you played and so it's all in a fairly mid-range. So now we see that the two microphones go into the group and the group has its own series of plugins that we are going to analyze. Let's start from the beginning.

We see the compressor this time multi-band. It slightly mutes the mid-range. It's a Fabfilter, obviously. On the group we are going to work with fine equalization, that is, I go to attenuate in a final way those resonances that can result excessive in the attacks of the piano. So I have also highlighted the mid-range we were talking about earlier, that of the Steinway where however I start to control it again with the dynamic equalizer. The dynamic equalizer compresses in the center that frequency band and it also controls that frequency range on the piano attacks and I also start further to attenuate the high range.

What do we add now? It lacks a bit of "personality" that we give it with an additional preamplifier which is the Trident A. So you see that this muffled character, this almost soft character increases further. And it takes us towards the final goal. Now let's open a plugin that we saw in the fourth video: we spoked about the analog recorders. So I said to myself: why not use what we showed in one of the previous episodes?

And here this emulation, as we can hear, helps us to increase that vitality, that imperfection, that non-linearity. Because we said that the advantage of analog - and the reason why many loved and some still love analog - is precisely... the imperfection. Sure, it's not digital perfectly clean, but it's that communicative imperfection that gives life. Finally, what's missing? Let's add our reverb.

What reverb do we add if not the Lexicon? In this case, however, not the 480 that we often use on orchestral mixes but our 224. Between this and the 480 I would say that now many people use them. Well, the Lexicon has made history and will always remain in history with this identity character of the algorithmic reverb that over time has also reached a listening habit. And then it becomes recognizable. Let's hear without and with.

You know, we were talking about space, we were talking about distance: Here it is. I recommend you listen to this without and with, with your eyes closed and just perceive... Let's try this. In our journey, we have gotten closer. Let's see everything we have added by removing it. This is the group with all effects enabled.

This is the group with the effects off. Now we just have listen to the comparison with the original piano. So, we've gotten pretty close. We could obviously go on and further refine our process. But let's say that communicatively we have obtained that sound that goes in the direction that we talked about in the previous episode, that is, in that slightly metaphysical direction that makes us perceive the inner space and the contact with the elsewhere and therefore with the metaphysical space that we also described through the reverb, comparable to the light in paintings. Something is still missing...

Right, what were we hearing under the piano? The famous synths, the famous ghosts. We remember that the synths are played through the EWI, that is "Electronic Woodwind Instrument" by Steve Tavaglione. of whom we can also see the clip. Wonderful! A wind synth that almost seems a contradiction.

Because the synth should be fake by definition and the wind should be human by definition. It's a fantastic mix. So we begin to perceive already the importance of the synth in the relationship between background and foreground, between the piano and all those ghosts that symbolically represent the world of the characters that rotate in the scene. In this case not around a main character but right in the scene, what Thomas Newman calls the "landscape". Tavaglione uses the wind instrument as a matrix for the synthesization. What does this wind instrument give us?

It gives us that organicity, that feeling of not being alien to a world that is alien indeed, especially very reverberated like in this case, but that we perceive anyway as belonging to us. So it gives us this wind matrix, a human matrix. A sense of belonging. So we also feel like we belong to the world of the ghosts of the synthesization and therefore let's insert something similar quickly in our experiment. Let's isolate the group of synths and start to see that you used synths that have in their own nature the idea of something wind-like. So something that could go in that direction.

Then, with synths, obviously it's difficult to catch everytihng, unless it's really a standard and recognizable sound, they are combinations of so many sounds that are blends. We care about the effect. From Omnisphere we used "Wistful Oscillations", "Aqua Flute Pad", an "Afterglow Pad" from a Jun, This is also a fairly historic synth. And in the low part, this preset called "Memory of You" from Arturia's Analog Lab and a Kontakt synth called "Auras" which got some very organic sounds. Let's now add synths to piano This was our piano and here it is together with synths Here it'clear the importance of synths Here we have now that complex sonic system made by piano and synths that we had in the original score. Let's hear.

So we have not achieved a complete identity, that's not what we are interested in. We are interested in the final goal. In posing the problem, first of all. And then trying to get as close as possible to the intention. The process to get there definitely interests us for sure. The result allows us to use tools ranging from virtual sounds to plugins as a communicative arsenal in our composition phase itself.

I am sure that right now, if we were to take the film, removing the original music and put this piece, it would have the same function, the same message, the same communicative power. Maybe even with some different sounds, but the function of the sound would be absolutely the same. Well, I would say that many stimuli have been given, many suggestions, some advice, some tricks, a bit of hands-on experience, and something curious: doing reverse engineering of this type always benefits everyone. As we said last time, we believe that those who do this job should consider the problem of landscape or character. For the same exact reason, with other tools, it is important to consider the problem of sound. What sound do we want to achieve with our score?

It shouldn't just be simply a matter of aesthetics. "I like it better this way"... It should have a function. This functionality then turns out to be intimately linked to the composition process itself. A longer reverb sound, obviously will give us a much stronger importance to single notes. So we will have surely a rarefaction of notes that accompanies a very large reverb like this.

So in the act of composition itself, there is always the constant interaction with the sound that we are going to create. So A) Consider the problem. B) Try to solve it, also relying on professionals. I'm not saying the composer should do everything alone. No, but they shoud be aware of what they are doing. This is our goal.

Well, I would say we can also say goodbye. See you next time. Not before reminding you to subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell, please put a lot of likes and especially please comment if you liked today's video and what you think about it. So, bye, bye.