Sound Mix: Joe Mendelson & The Road From Music to Gramercy Post

GRAMERCY, MANHATTAN: There’s an astrological phenomenon known as the Saturn Return, and it pulls especially hard on us creative types. The theory goes that as we hit age 27 – 30, we start to re-evaluate our path, looking ahead, and tend to recalibrate. Job and relationship changes often ensue.

And in music, one may rethink the path to greatness, if not the ‘greatness’ itself — rockstardom, for example, may seem incredibly less likely at age 29 than it did at age 20.

NYC-based audio post mixer and recording engineer Joe Mendelson had exactly this kind of experience in his late 20s. He’d been living out his musical dreams — playing in bands, engineering records, partnering in studios and even a club (The Living Room); he’d had a few record deals, toured, even been on MTV with his most successful band Rise Robots Rise.

It was the late 90s when, a few years after his last record deal and his 30^th birthday looming large, Mendelson began to think hard about the future. He was gigging, engineering and writing music, but he was struggling financially.

“I realized I had two choices,” says Mendelson. “Go back to school and learn a new trade, or take what I already knew — how to manipulate sound — and turn it into something profitable.”

These were the first inklings of what would eventually become Gramercy Post, Mendelson’s now Emmy-winning post-production studio for films and documentaries, television, commercials, music and aural branding. It’s been over 10 years since his transition to audio post-production, but Mendelson’s path and insights are incredibly relevant to those pondering any kind of audio career overhaul. He breaks it all down and then some here. Read up!

SonicScoop: How would you describe yourself and what you do?

Joe Mendelson: I’m an audiophile and I’ve dedicated my professional life to sound and making things sound better. It’s a tough time in our craft because I feel like a decreasing number of people care about these things. A lot of times you feel like you’re trying to uphold a beautiful art form and craft in an increasingly hostile environment — the modern world of MP3s, earbuds, YouTube and reality television.

So you feel that the mass acceptance of lower-quality audio, as experienced via MP3 and earbuds, has had an effect on the quality of audio on television?

I think we’re living in a great era of bifurcation and duality. We’re seeing some really great, amazing high-end work, but by its very nature it’s limited because it’s expensive. [This is] on the big blockbuster movies and premium cable channels where they’re spending a lot of money on every aspect of the production, from the visuals to the sound, every aspect of it is expensive.

And the people who get to work on the sound for these productions make a decent living doing some really great art. However, there’s not so much of that work to go around – there’s only so many Losts, and Mad Mens, etc.

Gramercy Post took home the Emmy for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Music & Sound" for its work on "WWII in HD."

But there’s also a lot of seemingly high-level documentary-style TV programming. Where does that fall?

There are a handful of these highly regarded scripted cable shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men or Damages – and the production value on those shows is very high. And then everything else on cable is almost a race to see who can spend the least. There’s a tremendous amount of reality television, which is premised on the point that it’s cheap to produce. That’s one of the reasons you see so much of it!

Then there’s a lot of this documentary-style programming you might see on Discovery and History Channel, Nat Geo, etc. and the audience is really fragmented for these programs. We’ve mixed for all these channels – Fuse, Science Channel, Spike, HGTV, Bravo, A&E – there are dozens of these channels doing the documentary style production. For some of these shows, getting 1 million people to watch is a huge audience.

The subscription channels like HBO and Showtime are in a class by themselves.  That’s the little bit of really high-end work up at the top for the rarefied few. And in that sense, it’s the same as the music business — if you’re working with Beyonce, you’re up there at the very top, and then there’s the indie level. And there’s very little in between – but there is what I refer to as “the quality middle,” really good but perhaps more specialized programming with a decent budget. And that’s a lot of the work we get.

So tell us a bit about how you built your audio post facility. You were coming from the music side – playing in bands and engineering records. When you decided to change course, how did you get started?

Well, this is one of the real challenges for a lot of artists — if you got to be any good at all as an artist, it’s partially because you dedicated yourself to that one thing, which by definition means that you don’t know how to do anything else! What do you do? I thought…OK, I know how to manipulate sound. What can I do with that?

I knew about places like Sound One and this thing called post-production. I knew that films got mixed, though I wasn’t sure how exactly that happened. I also heard about numbers, about how an hourly rate for a post studio could be higher than what the Hit Factory was charging at that time. That’s about all I knew though.

So I took out my credit card, and I bought a Pro Tools rig. I rented a tiny space in the Garment District – a room plus a tiny booth – and I bought a TV and a video capture card, and I set up shop. I had to do whatever I could do, so I was still making records, and writing for spots. I started telling everybody I was doing audio post now.

Sure enough… my filmmaker friends started showing up and even though they had no money, I was like bring it on! This is how I learned. I worked on as many projects as I could. If I’d done music for a spot and they were going to do a mix at a post house, I’d ask if I could go to the mix. I’d watch and ask the engineer questions. I read books. And I did project after project after project, and slowly, it started to evolve. It turned out I was good at this audio post thing!

What do you think it takes to be “good” at audio post?

If you’re coming to it from music, you have to be able to 100 percent put down this idea of having this fun, glamorous time in the studio. Let that go. This work is: make the project sound better, quickly. And it’s details. You have to meet technical specifications. It’s sound manipulation, but it’s another part of your brain. You have to work really fast, and be meticulous.

A lot of engineering of music is like that too, but here, there’s no occurrence of the happy accident. That mythology. There are no accidents (in post). You know what you’re trying to get. There’s a phenomenon in audio post where you add noise to things. The stuff that’s on there is noisy and when that goes away it’s noticeable, so we’re often adding room tone and ambience – things you’d be looking to remove in music. It’s a different calibration of your brain.

You also have to work with a different kind of client. And the clients are different from each other. Advertising producers are different than TV producers, etc.

Gramercy Post handles audio post for a number of Food Network programs, including "Next Food Network Star."

Did you find an area that you personally felt you really connected with? TV vs. advertising?

From the very beginning, my business model was to take any client that had money! There are some differences though – i.e. films can be the most interesting. You’re going to do the most sound design on a film. You’re ostensibly trying to make a work of art and have this real collaboration with the director. But unfortunately, they also have the least money. It’s such a long process that they don’t have the budget to pay you a great hourly rate.

Typically, you get a project fee for a film and if it takes longer, too bad. And guess what? It always takes longer! But you get to see your name in the credits, go to the film premier and festival, etc. be part of a team. It’s prestigious. But you could also go broke doing it.

TV people are realistic human beings, and I like those jobs the most. The budgets land somewhere in between advertising and film. We’ve done a lot of television shows. That’s been really strong for us. But we take it all — sometimes one sector’s not doing well, and another is going strong.

So you opened several years ago now – how has the business changed to accommodate different kinds of work that’s been in higher demand more recently?

We’ve gotten more into television since we started in this facility. I trained my staff engineers personally, and we have 10 or so freelancers. My philosophy has always been – if someone really has a specialty (they really want to do ads, or film, etc.) then they don’t belong here. I want to do everything – film, TV and advertising. I can improve the sound for any of those projects.

If you’re a good engineer, you’re a good engineer. You might have an affinity for a certain style of music, but the principles are the same. In audio post, you’re dealing with dialog, SFX and music. Those are the three things that every production has. If you’re good at working with these things, then you can mix a film, you can mix a commercial, etc. The equipment is essentially the same. You have to know about levels, and TV shows have delivery requirements that are very specific. You have to pass QC at each network. It involves levels and track layouts. There’s a lot of organizational work.

Gramercy Post handled stereo and surround sound mixing for Discovery's "Next World" series.

Does surround mixing come up a lot? And is that ever a creative process, or more technical.

Sure, I’ve been mixing surround projects for 10 years. Anything you mix for home theater (DVD release), is mixed for surround. For cinema, most things are mixed in surround, although some aren’t. And a certain percentage of the spots we mix get mixed in surround.  With tv, it depends on the networks, and the kind of show.  We’re probably about 50/50 for surround mixing on TV shows.

We’ve done a bunch of horror films, and kung-fu films where we got to play with the surround a lot. We did a lot of surround work for this show called Next World for Discovery Channel that was all about the future, and future technology. That had some cool, sci-fi kinda stuff where we were able to make some cool use of the surrounds.

And can you tell me about some of the recent projects you’ve been working on?

Well we won an Emmy this year for WWII in HD (History Channel). That was an interesting project and an enormous sound design job. The footage was found 16mm film so there was no audio, so all of the sound had to be created — huge battle scenes, airplanes, soldiers on the battle field, explosions, etc. We did all the audio for that, and mixed in stereo and surround.

Whoa, awesome. So how do you get the gigs. Or, how do you make a name in this world, and then maintain it?

This work is all about perfection. There’s a deadline and you have to meet it. Audio post is the very last part of the production and you’re often running right up against the deadline. So if you were to mess up on any level – by mislabeling a disc, or printing things on the wrong tracks – it can be seriously detrimental to your client because, often they have to hand it off to the network that day. And if there’s something wrong, it’s your fault and they’re screwed. They could get fired if they screw up a delivery of a TV show to a network. So you have to take that very seriously.

Gramercy Post has sound designed and mixed shows for A&E as well, including "Inked."

So there’s a big psychological component — you have to be cool under pressure…

Yes, and we definitely try to present a feeling of calm and oasis inside the studio because  a lot of people are stressed out when they come here –  the deadline is looming and there are still problems with other parts of the production. We definitely try to be pretty zen and calm, so we’re not contributing to the stress. And never mess up!

There are a lot of problems in any production, and a lot of the work in audio post is fixing these problems, i.e. something happened at the shoot and they didn’t record the part well, or something happened in the edit where they misplaced a line. And we end up fixing these problems that accumulate. We’re the last stop.

So yes, grace under pressure is a huge part of it. You have be able to work really fast, stay really cool and be creative. If you can work really quickly, you’ll buy yourself the time to be able to contribute more, be more creative. I have a saying: What’s the difference between a good engineer and a great engineer (in audio post)? A good engineer can make your show (or spot) sound better. A great engineer can make your actual show better.

Totally get that. You do more than just improve the sound quality.

Yes, and I mean obviously that is your job – this sounds distorted, I’m going to fix that. Or this needs to be cleaned up, or this music is too loud, etc. I’m going to clean that all up and make it sound really good.

But if you finish that in a short enough amount of time, you get to take a step back and listen to it as a piece, and watch it like the producer is going to watch it. Or stand in for the audience…think about the whole production. And that’s where you see what they’re trying to accomplish on a bigger picture level. Maybe there is something you can do with the sound to bring out the humor, or the isolation, or the sadness of the scene.

A great engineer is somebody who can do that – who can work fast enough to get to that point, and then have the sensibility to get inside the director’s head. You have to be the kind of person who gets the director/producer’s vision enough that you can help them get where they’re going. A great engineer is a creative partner to the client.

Of course the speed factor means nothing if it negatively affects the quality of the work. The work has to be done perfectly and fast in order to get to the point where you can be a true creative partner.

And technology wise, I imagine you have to have reliable tools to be able to work super fast, and be confident everything will run efficiently…

I bet my whole career on Pro Tools a long time ago. Ever since I’ve had a post facility, it’s been all Pro Tools, all the time. No control surface. Nowadays, Digidesign [Avid]’s stock plug-ins are pretty good, but I’ve used Waves, and I like the Sonnox plug-ins. But, really the most important thing is the platform and that has been Pro Tools on a Mac.

I have Mackie speakers – when you have to buy 20 speakers, you consider the cost. I have two 5.1 rooms and (4) additional (2.0) rooms. When you have multiple rooms, you have to stay consistent. I can’t have different speakers in one room over another. We mix a lot of TV shows through the TV speakers – it’s finalized and played back for the client through the TV speakers.

And we use Dangerous Monitor ST/SRs. The Dangerous guys make some of the best gear in the business, hands down. I was actually one of the guys who came to Bob (Muller) and Chris (Muth) years ago when I had a Soundcraft console (with the faders permanently at Unity Gain) and was doing all my mixing in Pro Tools. I had this giant piece of furniture that I basically never touched. I felt there had to be a better way to do this – what if we just had a summing box! I had one of the first Dangerous units and I’ve used them ever since.

And I see on the Gramercy Post website, you and your team are still working on music as well?

Sure, we have studios so we’ll do work here and there for friends. Like next week, I’m going to mix something for Regina Spektor who’s a good friend and I love her music. [Mendelson produced/engineered Spektor’s Songs released in ’02.] Most of us came to audio post from music, so of course we still have music in our lives. We’re just not relying on it to make our living!

For more on Gramercy Post and Joe Mendelson, visit http://www.gramercypost.com.

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