Sonic Grading, Part 2: Relocating the Orchestra

In Part 1, a director's note sent me looking for a different sound for an orchestral cue. The music felt too modern, and the image I kept coming back to was a dusty chapel.

That gave me a direction, but I still had to get there with the instruments and recordings I had. I worked on the room around the ensemble, the voices in the choir, and the overall tonal balance.

Choosing the room

I could hear the libraries' original recording spaces in the cue. That was part of what made them sound so good, but it also made it harder to imagine the ensemble in the smaller, less polished setting I wanted.

I pulled back the built-in room sound and used a stone-chapel impulse response in a convolution reverb. An impulse response, or IR, captures how a space responds to sound; a convolution reverb uses that response to add the space's reverberant character to another recording (Sound On Sound).

I was choosing the reverb for the place it suggested. “Dusty chapel” was a more useful guide for this cue than simply asking whether the reverb sounded rich or impressive.

I thought of this as relocating the orchestra. The chapel was the setting I wanted to suggest, and the reverb gave me a way to work toward it.

Building the choir

The choir needed a similar adjustment. I started with the Eric Whitacre Choir library, which gave me a warm, substantial low end, but the upper register felt too pristine for the scene.

I rolled off some of that high end and blended in voices from Hearth & Hollow. To my ears, those voices were rawer and folksier, with less of the polished choral quality I was trying to move away from.

The combination let me keep the weight I liked in the Eric Whitacre Choir while adding a rougher, more intimate upper texture. Neither library on its own gave me quite what I wanted.

This is where the color-grading comparison felt especially useful. I could choose the qualities I needed from each source and work them into the same scene. A library's most beautiful sound wasn't automatically its most useful sound for this cue.

I still wanted the choir to carry the weight of the moment. I just didn't want every part of it to sound immaculate.

Shaping the tone

I also narrowed the frequency range, reducing the low end and rolling off the top. I brought forward some of the nasal, reedy quality in the upper mids that I associated with the sound I was after.

At the time, I thought these choices were helping me reproduce an older recording. That was an assumption, and one I needed to question.

The filtering reflected my idea of the film's 1960s aesthetic. It wasn't a measured reconstruction of a period microphone, playback system, or chapel. The room choice, choir blend, and EQ were all serving an imagined sound that had developed from the picture and the temp.

That distinction matters to me now. I can explain why I wanted a darker or rougher texture without claiming that a particular decade or type of building must have sounded that way.

I was making mixing decisions while I was still working out what the cue needed to be. It helped to have a setting in mind rather than judging each library or effect on its own.

I had a clearer idea of what I wanted from my cue by this point. My understanding of where the temp track's sound came from was another matter.

Next: In Part 3, I look into the temp recording and find out how much I had assumed.