GRAMMY®-winning Frank Filipetti is one of the music industry’s most accomplished engineers and producers and was recently nominated for a 2012 GRAMMY for “Best Surround Sound” for the 5.1 mix of An Evening With: Dave Grusin. Filipetti began his career in the 1980s and has worked with top artists including Foreigner, KISS, Luciano Pavarotti, James Taylor, Andrea Bocelli, Billy Joel, Liza Minnelli, Elton John, Korn, Barbra Streisand and dozens of others. One thing stays constant through Filipetti’s variety of prestigious projects: his HARMAN JBL LSR6300 Series studio monitors.
An Evening With: Dave Grusin is a live recording that captured a 75-piece orchestra performing a collection of 12 songs by Grusin, Gershwin, Bernstein and other composers, with guest artists including Jon Secada, Patti Austin, Gary Burton and others. “Producer Phil Ramone and engineer Eric Schilling recorded the concert and I did the mixing and mastering,” Filipetti said, ”and here the challenge was to take this large ensemble of instruments and performers and bring clarity and focus to all those open mics in a 5.1 sound field. Trashing a prime directive of recording, I knew from the start that I was going to need to pan the instruments in a way totally at odds with the stage setup. But to do that and keep things from smearing, I needed to be absolutely sure I heard every element of the mix accurately. Accurate monitors are even more important in mixing for 5.1 than they are in stereo—any inaccuracy is now tripled! And the JBL LSR6300 monitors deliver accuracy in spades.”
To achieve greater accuracy and better imaging in a broad range of rooms, JBL studio monitors are developed using JBL’s stringent Linear Spatial Reference design criteria, which ensures not just the direct sound but also the reflected sound arriving at the mix position is neutral. JBL RMC™ Room Mode Correction technology in the LSR6300 Series speakers also compensates for low-frequency inaccuracies caused by rooms that can dramatically affect the impression of low-frequency content in the mix.
“You can’t record, engineer, produce or mix anything well without an accurate sonic reference,” Filipetti continued. “If you can’t trust what your monitors are giving you, you’re always going to be working against yourself and everything you do will be a crap shoot. I know I can depend on the JBL LSR6300 Series studio monitors. They’ve proven themselves to me time and time again.”
Recently, Filipetti recorded and mixed the original cast album for The Book of Mormon, one of Broadway’s hottest attractions. “Recording The Book of Mormon was very challenging because of the number of open microphones in close quarters [especially the singers], which magnified phase issues and other sonic difficulties,” Filipetti said. “In a situation like this, having accurate, high-resolution monitors like the LSR6300’s was absolutely critical. We needed to be able to hear every nuance of what the mics were picking up both on and off axis before ever hitting ‘record,’ as there would be no time to fix it in the mix.”
Recording an outdoor concert can be one of the most daunting tasks in live production – especially when it’s Concerto, One Night In Central Park by Andrea Bocelli. “We were recording this in 5.1 and stereo for Blu-ray, and it was a one-off performance—so we had to get the entire concert in one evening, no second chance,” Filipetti noted. “Talk about high stakes—we had Alan Gilbert and The New York Philharmonic, along with Andrea; guest artists including Celine Dion, Tony Bennett, Bryn Terfel and Chris Botti. The program consisted of opera, pop, jazz, movie soundtracks and even traditional Americana. There were as many as four opera singers onstage at one time, along with a full orchestra, a pop rhythm section, assorted soloists, a 100-voice choir, and 10 audience mics for a total of 160 mics traveling through nearly a quarter-mile of fiber optic cable into our truck. On top of it all, it was raining.”
The recording crew also had constraints on where the microphones could be placed, since they needed to be kept out of camera range. “Out of the 160 mics we used, about 140 wound up being placed a foot or two from where they should have been because of the cameras,” Filipetti said. “We also had to minimize wind and rain noise, while keeping away from the lighting, which was also generating noise.”
The post-production was as massive an undertaking as the recording. “We had two rooms doing the editing, audio processing and general track cleanup at Sync Sound, and two more rooms here at the ‘Living Room’ in West Nyack running full-tilt, mixing the audio in Studio A, and processing the hell out of the overhead mics for noise reduction in Studio B, both using JBL LSR monitors,” Filipetti added. “Even though we were working in two very different environments, we were able to achieve, in my honest opinion, exceptional-sounding 5.1 and stereo mixes because of the consistency of the sound the LSR monitors provided.”
In 2011, George Michael presented his Symphonica tour, traveling Europe with a full orchestra and performing more than two hours of songs each night. “The tour features a number of Michael’s hits as well as rock and pop classics, and it is a massive and amazing concert,” Filipetti enthused. “We’ve been recording all of the shows and we’re mixing everything as it comes in with producer Phil Ramone, who is selecting the takes for future release. The sonic consistency of the JBL LSR6300 monitors and the ability of the Room Mode Correction feature to smooth out the bass response in any listening room are critically important here, as the recordings come in from dozens of different venues all over Europe and my job is to make them all sound as if from one performance.”
“I’ve used the JBL LSR6300 monitors in hundreds of situations over nearly 10 years now,” Filipetti concluded. “With other studio monitors I find that I’m always wondering how things are going to sound on other systems, and mentally compensating. I don’t have to make those mental adjustments with the LSR6300s, and having that confidence gives me the ability to do what I feel is best because I know my productions are going to sound the way I heard them. What you hear is what you get! If you don’t like the way my mixes sound, I can’t blame the monitors!”
