Pascal Wyse – Composer, Sound Designer, Mixer – PES 168

My awesome guest is Pascal Wyse! He does sound design, mixing and musical composition for Cautionary Tales (podcast). He wrote the theme tune for Folsom Untold – an Audible series about Johnny Cash’s prison gig, and also did sound design for that. And among many other credits, he also worked on Haunted for Panoply. Follow him on Twitter @PascalWyse.

Here’s a fraction of what we discussed:

• Keeps different cues in different DAW sessions. (Some folks write their music in Logic and then ProTools has the main session)
• Reaper sub-projects: Opens up as a tab – another working session, the same length as the Master session, when you save it renders and inserts it into the Master session. 
• For creating atmosphere/space: Alitverb convolution reverb
• Mixes on speakers, and for final pass he monitors on headphones. 
• Genelec 1029 with Genelec Subwoofer
• Headphones: Beyerdynamic DT990’s
• Microphones: Sennheiser MKH range mics, DPA Lavalier mics (tiny, can get them into extraordinary places)
• Double mid-side!!! 
• Parabolic mic, mounted inside a satellite dish thingy, the most isolated sound you can get!
• Field recorders: Sonosax (Swiss company, light, clean preamps), Aaton Cantar X2, used to use Sound Devices stuff.
• He’s very into field recording
• He uses Sonarworks
• Fabfilter plugins – EQ, compressor, 
• Waves Scheps 73 EQ
• iZotope RX
• Tim Harford’s voice processing for Cautionary Tales: No cleanup, Fabfilter Pro Q-3, Fabfilter C-2 (Pro Voice preset which uses parallel compression), Vocal Rider (He fed the sidechain with the background music! Stopped the feeling of a sound being crushed and not coming through.)
• For voice actors: AudioEase – “Indoor” plugin (sounds realistic, panned L&R a little bit), Speakerphone plugin
• Convolution reverb: Engineers have gone into a space and recorded the response of the actual space. 
• Parabolic mics: https://www.telinga.com
• Schoeps mics: https://schoeps.de/en.html
• DPA mics: https://www.dpamicrophones.com
• Mixing with Mike: https://www.mixingwithmike.com
• Amazing sound recordist Chris Watson: https://chriswatson.net

Production workflow for Cautionary Tales: 

• Table read
• Tim will record his parts, he will read in actor lines
• Receives files (REALLY likes it when they get CLEAN dialogue takes, so he doesn’t have to stress over that aspect of production)
• Brings files into DAW, makes markers where he might want to put things, 
• Put in theme music
• Some library sounds here and there
• What worlds are people in and do we need to hear that world? 
• Uses “mastering” effects
• Sends out the mix
• Gets feedback and makes changes

Thanks for being a great guest, Pascal!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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